If you’re a British Netflix subscriber, there’s probably a 50-50 chance that you’ve heard of Spanish crime drama Money Heist (in Spanish, La Casa De Papel), which is low, considering it is one of the streaming service’s biggest global hits. In April, its fourth series drew more viewers around the globe than Tiger King (65 million to 64m). For comparison, Ozark was watched by 29m people in the same time period. Yet, Money Heist has never cracked the UK’s top ten most-watched list.
Those stats – undoubtedly affected by the ferocity with which certain shows are marketed from region to region and their placement on the Netflix home page – suggest that there is still some resistance to foreign language dramas in Britain. But Netflix has a solution.
Money Heist creator Álex Pina’s latest crime drama, White Lines, is in both English and Spanish (at a 70-30 split in favour of English). It’s a thrilling series – about a girl from Manchester who goes to Ibiza to investigate the death of her DJ brother – shot in beautiful bold colours under the scorching Spanish sun, which has the same chaotic energy and stylistic notes as Money Heist, except this time British and American audiences will be able to watch (most of it) without reading subtitles. It’s the latest in a line of international co-productions blending two languages in an effort to bring international stories to wider audiences, as creators seek to take advantage of the globalisation of the TV industry.
Pina was approached by Andy Harries, executive producer of The Crown and cofounder of Left Bank Pictures, with the basic idea of doing a series in English and Spanish – following in the footsteps of Narcos, which set a precedent for this kind of thing – set in Ibiza. Speaking to GQ through a translator, Pina refers to the series as an “experiment” to test the limitations of a bilingual production. He wrote the show entirely in Spanish with a group of writers (four Spanish, one bilingual English speaker) and filmed it with a bilingual Spanish camera crew.
“It does make the process much longer,” Pina says, “and of course there are things lost in translation.” But for the most part, he says the experiment worked. Most importantly of all, the authenticity of both British and Spanish cultures – and the inevitable clash – remains intact.
The setting is perfect for that, because Spanish and English people have been grinding against one another in Ibiza for decades (in more ways than one). White Lines, while about murder and cocaine (as the title suggests), also probes the house music scene and the English invasion of the Balearic Islands in the 1990s, what Pina refers to as the “golden age” of Ibiza as a cultural hotspot. “Both cultures are obviously different but they found that they had the same idea about the black comedy in the series, the same idea about the emotion, so it wasn’t really a problem.”
By making the show palatable to Britons in this way, while maintaining its Spanish heart, he’s opening the audience up to an entire continent of ideas. “For 100 years fiction has been British, basically, and American, and now Spanish fiction is setting its own rules: it’s more Mediterranean, more Latino and the DNA is different,” he says. “That’s what makes [Spanish series such as Money Heist] more popular with people, because you tell different stories differently and that telling differently is the value.”
White Lines owes a debt not only to Narcos, but Scandinavian dramas such as The Bridge and Borgen too, which became surprise hits on BBC4 in the first half of the last decade, proving that quite a lot of Britons are actually willing to sit through subtitles for the right show. In 2018, the final series of The Bridge moved to a coveted 9pm slot on BBC2 and the first episode was watched by over 2m people – previously unthinkable for a show broadcast in Danish and Swedish with English subtitles.
“The whole Scandi thing made a massive difference,” Ben Richards, who adapted The Bridge for French broadcaster Canal Plus and Sky, says. Where the original series saw detectives from Denmark and Sweden collaborating on an investigation into a murder on the bridge that connects the two countries, Richards' version, The Tunnel, brought the action to the Euro Tunnel.
His adaptation was conceived before The Bridge took off in Britain, which did the show no favours, he says. “I never thought for a moment [The Bridge] was going to become as big as it did,” he says. “I remember getting a real shock when I saw the cover of the Radio Times one day and it was like, ‘This is the next big great Scandi drama.’ I thought, ‘Oh, this is just great...’”
Richards faced many of the same issues as Pina, though the show, which probed the fundamental differences between the British and the French (predominantly through the leads, played by Stephen Dillane and Clémence Poesy), played on certain stereotypes, making everyone’s lives a little easier. None of the English actors or crew members spoke French, while all the French cast and crew had at least passable English (and most were fluent).
“The other stereotype that I think is true about the English, which is that they are absolutely useless and arrogant about languages,” Richards says. “There’s that old Charles Dickens joke that speaking very slowly and loudly in English will make foreigners understand you – that still holds true.”
Like White Lines, it uses the culture clash as a plot point. “One of the things that was fun to do with it was the English characters' slight bafflement at the French never quite getting them,” he says. “It was quite fun to mess about with those stereotypes and preconceptions and have the English and the French padding suspiciously around each other.”
The main roadblock in the process was casting. “There was a very limited pool of completely bilingual French-English actors who could be convincing in both languages, but we were fortunate enough to get Clémence [Poesy]”, he says. And he echoed Pina’s sentiments about the writing process, which was “probably one of the biggest ones that slowed things down the most”. But he says the reaction to the show – it was a ratings hit for both Sky and Canal Plus and ran for a further two series – proves that the appetite for mixed-language dramas is growing.
“I think overall, especially with these big [co-productions] and these bigger streaming shows, people are much more open to subtitles,” he says. “It’s interesting because when it screened in France, it wasn’t subtitled, it was dubbed entirely in French, because French audiences, according to Canal Plus, were very resistant to subtitles.” English audiences taking intellectual points over French audiences must be a first.
One of the biggest driving forces behind this globalisation of TV is Netflix. When a Netflix original series launches, it immediately becomes available in 190 countries in a wide variety of different languages. The streamer is increasingly trying to find ways to make shows for multiple markets, which is likely the reason they signed up to co-produce Giri/Haji, a gripping police drama centred around a fish-out-of-water Japanese detective in London, with the BBC (it aired on BBC2 in October 2019 and has since gone all around the world via Netflix).
The series was filmed in Tokyo and London and the dialogue is a near-even split between Japanese and English.
“Channel 4 turned it down because it was too Japanese,” Giri/Haji creator Joe Barton says. “I think for them it was just, there was too much in Japan, too many subtitles and that sort of stuff.”
Barton faced lots of logistical problems as a result of the language barriers: “I have about five words of Japanese,” he says. The writing process was long and tedious, going through a series of translators before making its way to the actors – Japanese stars Takehiro Hira and Yōsuke Kubozuka led the series as brothers on opposite sides of the law – who did some tweaking too. There were further difficulties in the fundamental differences between the two languages, which meant some turns of phrase just couldn’t be translated directly.
“The thing about Japanese and English, they don’t really mesh together that well. Sometimes if the translation is too direct it just sounds wrong. We wanted the audience to relate to the characters more, so we wanted the translation to make sense to Japanese and English audiences at the same time, so if there was a slight difference in the subtitles to what was actually being said that was OK, as long as we were getting the gist across – as long as the jokes were landing and the characters felt real to both British and Japanese audiences.”
Some things had to be changed in order to suit the different audiences. “There’s things that’ll trip you up,” Barton says, “like swearing. I wrote a lot of swearing into the initial script and then we talked to the translators and the researchers and they were like, ‘People don’t really swear that much in Japanese; there aren’t that many curse words,’ which was just really weird, so suddenly we had to go through the whole script and be like, ‘Well, do we keep ’em in, do we take ’em out…’”
The strangest thing, though, is that Barton still doesn’t really know how his show was received in Japan. Netflix hasn’t given him audience figures and he hasn’t got the language skills to translate reviews on the internet.
“I’ve looked it up on Twitter. There’s tweets from Japanese people and you can put them through Google Translate and try and work out if they’re positive or not, which can be tricky,” he says. “It’ll seem like it’s a positive tweet and then there’ll be some random word like ‘devastated’.”
The show was a ratings hit in the UK, though, proving that running a half-hour of Japanese subtitles in a prime-time slot is not as risky as it sounds on paper.
“I think people are getting less resistant to [subtitles] nowadays,” Barton says. “I think it is partly because of shows such as Money Heist and movies such as Parasite and because Netflix and Amazon are bringing us so much content from around the world and it’s really good stuff. But I think it always will be a barrier – for some people you can’t get away with that.”
And with White Lines in with a real chance of becoming a true global hit, we could see this kind of international production become the norm.
“The narrative has changed in recent years, so people are tired of seeing the same stories told the same way,” Pina says. “People right now spend so many hours in front of the TV that they want to watch different ideas, different stories, different plots, different ways of telling.”
White Lines launches on Netflix globally on Friday 15 May.
Why Zach Braff and Donald Faison are currently rewatching every episode of Scrubs
