Last week, I saw the show Prison Break for the first time. I had assiduously tried to avoid this, as I have so far done with 24 and, amazingly as I think about it, with the entire run of Friends but, for my final exams, I allowed each testing group to pick its own discussion topic and one of them chose “Why I Like Prison Break”, with the pilot episode as a common sample for us to use.

An extremely popular show here in China – at least with university students – I’ve been hearing about Prison Break since it first aired in the United States, so it was easy to find a DVD in one of the local shops. Watching it the night before these students’ exams, it was everything that I thought it would be: intricate in plot, occasionally violent in deed and always violent in feel, gray in appearance and acting, and more unbelievable than one of the Brothers Grimm’s wildest fairy tales. And yet…I damned near watched Episode 2 right after Episode 1 had finished. I stopped myself – I’d had some things to do – but, like a bad drug, the show had done its best to hook me.

My burning question for my students was whether or not they found this show to be at all believable. To varying degrees, they both had.

In the United States, when the majority of adult TV viewers (at least I hope to God it’s the majority of adult TV viewers, but I don’t know…I’m just trying to be optimistic here) tune in to a show, we do so with a set of societal information that enables us to separate the plausible from the implausible from the laughably implausible. We can still suspend belief, but then, when the show’s over, it’s back to reality for everyone. The problem here in China is that these viewers don’t have this same societal information: they don’t know what reality is in the United States and this stuff fills the void.

Honestly, I haven’t seen or heard of any ugly instances resulting from this – no Fox inspired examples of misguided gung-hoism from Chinese ex-pats in the States – but it still can’t be good to be that far-off in your image of something. Or maybe it doesn’t really matter. Before I came to China, I thought, aside from Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, there wasn’t much. So when I first visited Hangzhou and saw that it had a nice public bus system, I was quite taken aback. But I survived this shock…and others.

Still, this lack of information sometimes makes me uneasy. When The DaVinci Code was all the rage here, I ended up watching it and thought that it was terrible and slightly worrying; there was one particular character, some scary, vacant looking albino monk who goes around doing some pretty nutty things and, in one scene, strips naked and beats himself bloody with some sort of cat o’ nine tails after tightening some barbed wire leg garter into his thigh. China is not that Christian and, according to the small number of local Christians that I’ve spoken to, Catholics aren’t either. Watching this film, I thought that this might be further bad news for the cause. I mean, a self-flagellating religious fanatic psycho paleface as some sort of reference point? I don’t know. And the thing about China is that, in most cases like this, I never will: judgment passed here is usually quick, silent, and final. Right or wrong? Well, that’s of secondary importance, if any.