As others have said, WTR is very well-known in France while most people have never heard of Seinfeld.

Same with Dallas and The Dukes of Hazzard.

Assuming this sort of phenomenon extends further than France, this quite well explains many of the misconceptions Europeans have about the US.

Thinking WTR, Dallas, or TDoH are representative of American culture is... hilarious.

But I guess shows that hit the big American cultural stereotypes hard are maybe the ones that do better abroad?

From my memory from the 90s: Baywatch, X-Files, that speaking car one, Beverly Hills 90210, Ninja Turtles. Some dumb sitcom named Step by Step? edit: oh and ALF

Oh and Married with Children, but it was always very late night and I was not allowed to watch it.

And our teacher always played us ET on VHS. (and that dog playing basketball.)

that's america for me when I was a kid

If you like MwC, look up episodes of Unhappily Ever After on Youtube, it's sort of the second-generation MwC. Same sort of humour but taken even further, I can easily re-watch Unhappily but MwC is sort of a once-you've-seen-it...

> that speaking car one

Knight Rider.

> that dog playing basketball

Air Bud.

I think Hazard didn't sound stereotype at all, like, nobody had a clue why the car was called General Lee, or what the confederate flag meant.

It was just a fun show. Magnum PI, Different Strokes, McGiver.. were just as popular.

> Thinking WTR, Dallas, or TDoH are representative of American culture is... hilarious.

I’m not aware of a single person who thinks that, and neither was that the claim of your parent comment.

People understand TV shows are fiction.

dallas was huge in dubai in the 80s. like to the extent that people would plan to sit home on the evening it was on.

(I didn't watch it; my parents believed soap operas were unsuitable for kids)

I've got the impression that the big US exports are ones that play into big American stereotypes, e.g WTR, Baywatch, Friends. Not even that they see these shows and get programmed with these stereotypes, but that they have these stereotypes (Texas, California, NYC) and shows like this feed their imaginations and give them detail.

Exported media is weird. Like the huge proportion of British/BBC output (usually period, but also often detective in a way redolent of Christie) that is made primarily for export to foreign consumers who think of British upper-class culture as aspirational.

Walker, Texas Ranger and Baywatch were both created by non-network studios as syndicated shows, they weren’t prime time network shows. The budgets for syndicated content is a lot lower than network produced content.

The rights to air these sorts of shows are dirt cheap compared to Friends or Seinfeld, so it makes sense that cheap syndicated garbage like Walker, Texas Ranger and Baywatch were popular internationally, the rights were cheap.

There is US exported media that just randomly becomes popular in a specific demographic. Case in point: Adventures of Ford Fairlane, a flick with Andrew Dice Clay that got a razzie the year it came out. IIRC it got a cult following in Norway because the voice over was done by a popular radio DJ.

It was a syndicated show, the goal is to license it to as many companies as possible. It was never a network TV show like Seinfeld, those syndication rights are way more expensive than created for syndication shows like WTR.

Yeah. As an American I would’ve absolutely never guessed it was that popular.

The show was also incredibly popular in Germany in the 90s.