Shogun was a big winner at the 76th Emmy Awards on Sunday night. She won a whopping 18 Emmy Awards, making history several times.
In addition to becoming the first Japanese actors to win an award for Outstanding Performance in a Drama Series, the FX series about feudal Japan in the 1600s also became the first winner of the Emmy Award for Outstanding Foreign Language Drama Series.
Seventy percent of the ten-episode series, based on the 1975 novel of the same name by James Clavell, featured subtitled Japanese dialogue.
That language barrier didn’t stop American audiences from tuning in en masse. The critically acclaimed series became FX’s most-watched show ever in its first nine weeks, based on hours streamed worldwide.
ShogunThe unprecedented win, coupled with its overwhelming popularity — a success that has led to the series being upgraded from a limited series to a drama series with at least two more seasons to come — is the latest example of American audiences’ growing embrace of subtitles.
A 2022 study by online language platform Preply, which surveyed 1,265 Americans, found that 50% of viewers watch content with subtitles most of the time. That number jumped to 70% for Gen Z. Another 2021 study said four in five viewers aged 18-25 said they use subtitles “all or some of the time.”
The greater — if reluctant — acceptance of those on-screen captions for uses beyond pure accessibility is fairly new. It was just four years ago, at the 2020 Golden Globes, when Bong Joon Ho, director of Best Foreign Language Film Parasite told the audience: “Once you get over the one-inch-high subtitle barrier, you’ll be introduced to many more great movies.”
Parasite won the Oscar for Best Picture that year, the first non-English language film to do so.
That wasn’t the only factor that made American audiences less positive about subtitles at the time.
Amid a global pandemic that kept people indoors and fueled a surge in streaming content and social media use, TikTok became the most downloaded app of the year. The short-form video platform brought everything from music to comedy to activism to millions of handheld screens. Many of those millions started watching with the sound muted and captions on.
The pandemic also ushered in a streaming boom, and one show from South Korea — Squid game — became the most popular series of all time on Netflix.
Milton Liu, executive director of the Asian American Media Alliance, told Yahoo Entertainment that it’s not just Squid game which American viewers flocked to.
“We’ve had shows like Warrior and movies like Everything, everywhere, all at once And The farewell. Even going back to shows like Fresh from the boat“, he said. “As we see America become more diverse, we see the public [wants] to understand exactly what’s going on, because that’s the culture of America right now.”
After ShogunOn winning the Emmy, he said, “A good story tells more than just subtitles.”
Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, who helped create Squid game to the streamer and doubled down on other so-called K-dramas from Korea, telling the New York Times that “great stories can come from almost anywhere in the world.”
“They can very easily sit on the shelf – I’m putting quotation marks now – next to your favorite series, and you’ll discover an incredible story from Korea or an incredible story from Italy or an incredible story from Spain that you would otherwise never have access to and that you might not have known about,” he said.
Help with accents and dialects
The embrace of subtitles and captions by Americans is not just for foreign languages. Many American viewers have turned on subtitles or captions, which also describe the sound on the screen, historically for the hearing impaired, in addition to showing or translating the words, for English-language series.
“With streaming, you have access to a lot of different content, including content that is linguistically different than what you’re used to,” Melissa Baese-Berk, a professor of linguistics at the University of Chicago, told Yahoo Entertainment.
Peaky Blindersthe British Netflix series set in post-World War I England, and Derry girlsanother series available on Netflix set in Northern Ireland in the 1990s are two examples of English-language series that often require subtitles.
“Derry girls is in a variety of English that is very different from what the average American viewer is used to hearing or seeing on screen,” Baese-Berk explained. “One dimension that we don’t often think about when we think about different dimensions of diversity is linguistic diversity. And so we just see a lot more of that. And that could be different accents that we’re not used to seeing on screen, or even different languages.”
How is the sound quality?
Viewers are also turning on subtitles to compensate for the poor sound quality and sound mix on their TVs, laptops, tablets and phones.
According to Preply’s survey results, nearly three-quarters of respondents cited “confusing audio” as a reason for turning on subtitles.
“When you’re watching movies that are specifically made for the theater and you bring them home to watch, you’re talking about movies and shows that may not be compressed for a home theater,” Liu explains, adding that he also uses subtitles at home if the audio isn’t great.
Since viewers often complain about louder commercials or because they don’t want to disturb their housemates or sleeping children, subtitles are a great alternative to keep the volume down.
Can subtitles and captions help with concentration?
The answer is short and sweet: yes.
“Getting the same information through two different modes is very useful in interpreting that information,” Baese-Berk said.
Research shows that closed captioning “benefits everyone,” including deaf and non-deaf viewers, by improving “comprehension, attention, and memory of the video.”
According to Cognition Today, “research consistently shows that subtitles reduce the mental load of watching a movie and, counterintuitively, actually make watching a movie easier.”
Baese-Berk recalled the popular TV series from the 2000s The West Wing as an example of a program she now uses subtitles on while watching reruns.
“To look West Wing “In reruns later in my life, there are things that I just missed when I was watching it in real time, because it’s a very talk show,” she said. “So there are little jokes that I just can’t remember, and it could be that my memory is bad, but I also think that there are things that go by so quickly. And when you see it on the screen too [with captions]can you recognize the funny thing that happens or the important thing that you just missed.”
With shows like Shogun And Squid game The viewing figures are high and the attention for awards is great, but that one-inch barrier is getting smaller and smaller.
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