Hotel Cæsar has also built its brand around its willingness to confront controversial topics like racism, rape, abortion, trafficking, drugs and more. The meandering plot includes fun storylines, such as the family patriarch’s romance with an escort, his daughter’s alcoholism, and an accidental romance between two half-siblings who didn’t know they were related. The plot revolves around a fictional hotel in Oslo, the people who work there and the Anker-Hansen family. This show was created by two Swedes, and it ended up becoming the longest-running television drama in Scandinavia.
The plot is punctuated by more than one “sad demise,” but what will come of fly-woman? Only one way to find out. At one point, Simar even gets cursed and turns into a fly, and the special effects are breathtaking (watch it all go down above). One of India’s best melodramas is Sasural Simar Ka, a show that serves up a revolving cast of supernatural creatures and evil people for the main family to defeat. Hindi: Sasural Simar Ka (Simar’s In-Laws) Germany adapted the show into its own version, called Gute Zeiten, schlechte Zeiten, which takes place in a fictional area in central Berlin. They also fight dirty, as depicted above. People break up and they make up, and they also get kidnapped, try to figure out who committed murder, uncover paternity surprises and smuggle drugs to Singapore. GTST follows the lives of five different families in the fictional town of Meerdijk.
Inspired by Australia’s The Restless Years, this series is the longest-running Dutch soap opera and was actually the first daily soap in the Netherlands. Dutch: Goede Tijden, Slechte Tijden (Good Times, Bad Times) But don’t worry - she gets to fall in love again later. However, cabbage comes with baggage, and Yoo Ha-eun spends the show swatting away her ex, as well as a business rival.
You may know this show for its most iconic scene (see above), otherwise known as “the kimchi slap heard around the world.” Everybody, Kimchi! is a TV drama about a woman named Yoo Ha-eun who starts her own kimchi business after her ex-husband betrays her. Featuring national heartthrob Kıvanç Tatlıtuğ, who plays a young man in love with his uncle’s young wife, Aşk-ı Memnu serves up intrigue, drama and lots of crying. Case in point: Aşk-ı Memnu, a show about forbidden fruit and its associated perils. Turkish: Aşk-ı Memnu (Forbidden Love)ĭid you know that Turkish soap operas are very much a thing, internationally speaking? Turkey is actually the world’s second-biggest TV drama exporter after the United States. Whether they’re for a good cause or just for a good laugh, here are the 9 best foreign TV shows to watch if you want to feel more worldly. You can hear the characters speaking a blend of various languages (including English), which is a testament to South Africa’s multilingual society (and 11 official languages). Skeem Saam, a South African drama included below, won an award for being the nation’s most multilingual soap opera (or soapie, as they’re called in South Africa). To this end, the online media company Viki teamed up with the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages to promote endangered languages through television (namely, by crowdsourcing translations of shows like The Heirs, a popular Korean soap opera). And as it turns out, just about every culture in the world has its own version of cheesy daytime television.įoreign soap operas can be highly educational (and entertaining) for language learners, but what’s even more unexpected is that they can sometimes serve as tools to advance the causes of multilingualism and endangered language preservation. You know the drill: start learning a new language, label everything in your house with post-it notes, become the cool cultured person who listens to hip foreign-language podcasts on their commute, become the go-to source for the best foreign TV shows.īut few genres are as overlooked in language learning as the melodramatic soap opera.