Desperate Housewives
In Netflix and chill like a boss: How to learn languages the lazy way, Aleksandra Stępień describes how she had used various versions of Desperate Housewives as a tool for learning several languages. In the course of doing this, she noted that, while most editions of the popular television program were created by inserting dubbed dialogue into the sound track, a few used footage that was entirely new. While using different actors and slightly modified scripts, she added, three of these remakes were shot-by-shot copies of the English-language original.
Inspired by Miss Stępień’s presentation, I went looking for the aforementioned remakes. After a bit of digging, I found four separate reproductions of the first season of Desperate Housewives.1 In one of these, the players spoke Brazilian Portuguese. In each of the others, they recited their lines in a regional variety of Spanish.
Watching the first few scenes of the first episodes of each these programs confirmed the claim, made in various Wikipedia articles, that all four had been filmed on the same set. (This, it turns out, was located in a suburb of Buenos Aires.) That experience also suggested the possibility of using the three Spanish-language programs as a tool for learning a little about the the regional varieties showcased in each series. (These are, by the way, Argentine Spanish, Columbian Spanish, and the “neutralized Spanish” promoted by hispanophone broadcasters in the United States.)
Recent reflection on the work of Robert and Elizabeth Björk suggested a second use for the three parallel Spanish-language programs. If the theories of those two psychologists are correct, the engagement of a series of similar experiences will result in more learning than the repetition of a single experience. Thus, people who watch each episode of each series once will learn more Spanish than those who sit through three runnings of a single episode.
I later found Umutsuz Ev Kadınları, the remake of Desperate Housewives filmed in Turkish, and Desperate Housewives Africa.