American TV series on DVDs in French?

May 24, 2010 9:41 AM

What addictive TV series are available on DVD dubbed in French, with French subtitles?

I'm about to do a 7-week French immersion course, and I'd love to bring DVDs of an addictive TV series like Lost or House or 24 or what-have-you, but I need it dubbed into French and ideally with French subtitles. Anyone know whether any of the good TV series of the past, say, 5 years exist in this format? Anyone know if they can be found on Netflix?

Qualities I'm looking for are addictive quality and the language features mentioned above. Assume I've missed the last 5 years of good TV.

posted by sdis to Education (9 answers total)

Peut-être A la Maison Blanche?
posted by Nothing... and like it at 9:54 AM on May 24, 2010

Deadwood and man will you learn some choice phrases.
posted by chrisulonic at 10:01 AM on May 24, 2010 [1 favorite]

A lot of french dubs w/French subtitles don't correlate, it gets annoying, fast. They'll just be done by different companies.

It's better to watch French films w/English (and moving quickly, no) subtitles.

Does the immersion course have a video library ?
posted by alex_skazat at 10:02 AM on May 24, 2010

Response by poster: I'm pretty opposed to English subtitles, so I'm looking for the french dubs that ideally DO correlate to the subtitles :) Thanks for the heads up; I could see that getting really irritating.
posted by sdis at 10:31 AM on May 24, 2010

Response by poster: They probably do have a video library, but it's probably French films :) When I did this in German, that's what they had, and while I did watch several German films, one can watch only so many depressing horrible stories about death and torture and how terrible life is.

I'd like something relatively painless to watch for an hour every day to practice my listening, and ideally something I looked forward to every evening.
posted by sdis at 10:39 AM on May 24, 2010

I watched "Friends" in French with French subtitles. I don't know if that's 'good TV' to you, but it was fun. Unfortunately this was a friend's DVD collection, so I don't know where you could get them.
posted by jacalata at 11:13 AM on May 24, 2010

Engrenages or "Spirals" is often called the French Wire. So it's not dubbed, it's actually french. I got totally sucked into it, a 2-3 episode a night thing with season 1, and I'm not normally that type of TV watcher.
posted by handee at 12:23 PM on May 24, 2010

You might check out the Canadian section of an online retailer (ie: Amazon.ca) for these types of shows, as they may turn up both dubbing in French as well as subtitles in French for the hearing impaired. Lots (or maybe most, I'd have to check) of DVDs in Canada are bilingual and different versions than the US market (which is typically English and Spanish). In other cases, a special version is created for Québec with those options available.

At any rate, the descriptions on Amazon will often tell you what language of dubbing and subtitles the shows will have, though this is not always the case.
posted by urbanlenny at 8:23 AM on May 25, 2010

Have you ever watched M*A*S*H? I had a phase where I went through several MASH DVDs with the French dubbing.

I also watched Futurama with french dubbing but be carefuly because not all of the seasons have it.
posted by amethysts at 9:49 AM on June 10, 2010