Addictive Foreign Soap Opera

You've seen this somewhere before in an American sitcom: A character is portrayed raptly watching an undubbed and unsubtitled foreign-language Soap Opera with a box of tissues and some popcorn even though they don't understand the plot. Then, cue the canned laughs. Telenovelas are most often used, but this trope definition covers any foreign-language melodramatic series. Invariably, these soap operas are excessively caricatured, with scenes of fights between jealous lovers and adulterous couples.

This is fundamentally a twist on Daytime Drama Queen, with the enhanced humor arising out of the perceived over-emotionality of such soaps and the incomprehensibility (both cultural and linguistic): foreigners are just funny and unintelligible languages can be exploited for their comic value.

The characters' own reactions and responses — which can mostly be typified as "humorously bemused" — to foreign-language soap operas have a lot to do with the American audiences' relationship to them in real life. Exploiting the comic potential of Americans' superficial familiarity with Spanish-language soaps, David Letterman spoofed one (in Spanish) on his Late Night show as early as 1990, and has also featured clips of South Korean soap operas starting in 2003. The trope has shown surprising resiliency in sitcoms from the early '90s until 2011 and in American animation series from that time to the present day.

The trope is mostly Played for Laughs, but sometimes it can be used to add to the characterization of the figures or used as a plot device.

The underlying structure is of a Show Within a Show. Necessarily, in this trope, Reality Has No Subtitles and the character's perceived unfamiliarity with the language portrayed in the soap opera are prerequisites. Oftentimes, Explaining the Soap compounds the humor.

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Examples

Literature

• During the events leading up to Captain Vorpatril's Alliance, Rish gets hooked on several Komarrian Holo Dramas while in hiding in her apartment.
• Bill Bryson had this reaction to British soap operas, particularly Coronation Street, when he immigrated to the UK as a young man in The '70s. It ended up helping him assimilate into his new home once he'd got the hang of the accents and unique slang, because British soaps trend more Slice of Life than was common in his homeland.

Live-Action Television

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: "Reptile Boy" opens with the Scoobies raptly watching a Hindi soap opera and braiding Willow's hair, utterly unable to understand it. Well, Willow understands it and explains.
• In an episode of Chicago Fire, one of the firefighters gets the rest of the station hooked on a telenovela as a roundabout way of getting everyone to finally learn some Spanish.
• Friends:
  • The pilot episode finds the gang intently watching, attempting to understand and providing commentary on Tres destinos, a Spanish-language soap, which seems to show that the group enjoys a good laugh together about pop-culture.
  • Another episode had Ross' monkey Marcel change the language on Monica's TV, so they are forced to see all their shows in Spanish.
• Have You Been Paying Attention? introduced a new one-on-one round in 2020 called "Binge This!". In it, contestants are shown an untranslated clip from a foreign language show currently streaming on Netflix, and asks to guess what happens next. The show has included soap operas and dramas from South Korea, India, the Philippines, Mexico and South America. What happens next is usually fascinating and almost never what the contestant has guessed. Events have included a massacre by bandits, ghostly possession, and multiple characters being hit with foodstuffs (usually on a Korean soap opera).
• On Modern Family, Jay and Gloria watch a Colombian telenovela called Fuego y hielo ("Fire and Ice"; or according to Jay, "Big Hair and Loud Yelling"). While Gloria does speak Spanish, Jay does not; she is making him watch. Jay eventually gets into it.
• In The Nanny (5/9) Niles and C.C. watch a telenovela together without their being able to fully understand the plot, which is played for laughs.
  C.C.: Why the hell are you watching a Spanish soap opera?
  Niles: Quiet! Something big just happened.
  C.C.: What?
  Niles: I have no idea. [Audience laughter]
• Northern Exposure: In the first episode of the flanderized second season, Shelly receives a satellite dish from her husband and becomes addicted to a telenovela, which is both Played for Laughs and used to help set up her realization that she has become disconnected from reality and the things she cares about.
• A variant crops up in Power Rangers: Dino Thunder that doubles as a fourth-wall joke when the three primary Rangers discover a dubbed version of Bakuryuu Sentai Abaranger, the Sentai this series adapted. They're confused, Conner borderline offended by the much wackier shenanigans, but eventually even he gets into it.
• Psych: "Lights, Camera... Homicidio" features a telenovela that's watched by pretty much everyone in Santa Barbara, even characters who do not speak Spanish (and it isn't shown with subtitles). Shawn ends up with a role as "Chad the mailman."
• Red Dwarf: Kryten is addicted to the soap opera Androids, which is a clear parody of what was then cult Australian import soap Neighbours.
• Supernatural: In the opening of "", Dean, who is sidelined with a broken leg, is shown raptly watching an unidentified telenovela.
• In the Warehouse 13 episode "Savage Seduction", Pete, who speaks no Spanish, gets drawn into his ex-girlfriend's grandmother's favorite telenovela Seducción Salvaje first figuratively then literally due to an artifact.
• In Will & Grace (8/13) Jack alludes to the fact that he watches "Spanish soap operas."

Western Animation

• The Amazing World of Gumball: In "The Remote", Richard wants the TV remote so he can see the Grand Finale of La Casa de las Lagrimas. ^Translation  The House of Tears. He even camped out in front of the TV all night to make sure he'd keep it.
• Amphibia: More of an Interspecies Soap Opera, Anne manages to get the entire Plantar family hooked on her favorite show, Suspicion Island. This is despite them being frogs in a medieval society who see humans as bizarre monsters. Grime is revealed in "Toadcatcher" to have also gotten hooked on it, presumably from Sasha introducing it to him.
• In an episode of As Told by Ginger, Hoodsie and Carl clean a house. Hoodsie is shown watching a telenovela, which Carla turns off.
• Family Guy: In "Candy, Quahog, Marshmallow", Quagmire shows Peter, Cleveland and Joe episodes of the Korean soap Winter Summer, in which he played the character American Johnny when he was younger. The others become completely addicted, and when they find out that Quagmire doesn't have a tape of the series finale, they travel to South Korea to find one.
• The chickens in Hey Duggee are occasionally shown watching a Spanish medical drama.
  Nurse: Oh, Antonio!
• In King of the Hill, there is a recurring Spanish-language Show Within a Show, "Los Dias y las noches de monsignor Martinez," which is sometimes watched by the central characters.
• In The Looney Tunes Show, Cecil Turtle, who works at the cable company, tampers with Bugs Bunny's cable plan, so he's only able to get a Spanish speaking network. Speedy Gonzales initially scoffs at how ridiculous the telenovelas are, but he ends up getting caught up in it. It helps that he can actually speak Spanish so he understands what's going on.
• Happens in The Loud House episode "No Show With the Casagrandes", where Ronnie Anne and her family get hooked on a telenovela, but Ronnie Anne is too proud to admit she likes such melodramatic stuff and tries to watch it in secret. It's a bit justified since the Casagrandes are a family of Mexican immigrants, so the work is culturally geared to them, but most people in the city seem to be into it anyway.
• Phineas and Ferb:
  • In the episode "The Great Indoors", Dr. Doofenshmirtz attempts to rain out a soccer game that is scheduled to preempt his favorite telenovela.
  • In the episode "Oil on Candace", Linda wonders what Perry the Platypus does when they leave him at home. Cut to Perry watching a soap opera — not with anthropomorphic platypuses speaking to each other in Animal Talk, just a normal soap opera — and crying and blowing his nose.
• Rocko's Modern Life, Really Really Big Man is watching a telenovela when he gets a call that a monster is terrorizing the city (really just a 300-foot-tall Rocko). Before he leaves, Big Man laments, "This always happens when the good shows are on."
• The Simpsons throughout its history has shown the characters watching Bumblebee Man in particularly over-the-top, Spanish-language television shows. There are examples of him in telenovela parodies that appear as shows within a show that are viewed by other characters in-universe.
• Star vs. the Forces of Evil: In "Bam Ui Pati!", Pony Head drowns her sorrows over losing her horn in a fight with Miss Heinous/Meteora by binge-watching Bam Ui Pati ("Party of the Night"), a Korean soap opera about a pop singer and her vampire lover. Unlike most examples, the show does include subtitles.
• Steven Universe: In "Log Date 7 15 2", Peridot is introduced to a Canadian soap opera called Camp Pining Hearts, which she quickly dismisses as drivel. She then spends 78 hours straight re-watching and over-analyzing the same episode. Later episodes show that she has since seen the entire series, and even gotten Lapis Lazuli hooked on it, too.
• In one The Wild Thornberrys episode where they're in Russia, Debbie becomes addicted to a Russian soap, explaining "the language of soap opera is universal."

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