Day: January 7, 2025

I’m about to describe to you a real American sitcom. It’s not made up, it’s not a bit. It’s a real show that airs on FOX on the same day as Animal Control, another show you don’t watch.

In Going Dutch, Denis Leary plays an American Army colonel who gets reassigned not, as he expected, to a prestigious posting as head of an American military base in Germany, but to the much worse base in “Stroopsdorf” in the Netherlands. Danny Pudi plays his assistant.

Classic fish out of water stuff, off the top of your head I’m sure you could come up with a pitch for an episode based just on that description and I’m sure it’s already on showrunner Joel Church-Cooper’s whiteboard somewhere.

Here’s the problem: American media never gets the Netherlands right. But: I am Dutch and thus uniquely¹For a definition of “unique” that covers just under 18 million people. qualified to provide some notes on what they did and did not get right in their depiction of my country.

Let’s just get into it.

• “Stroopsdorf” is nonsense. “Stroop” they just got from the one Dutch word Americans know (“stroopwafel,”) and “-dorf” is a German suffix that means village that does not exist in this country at all. I would’ve accepted “Stroopdorp,” but it’s still lazy.
• This base doesn’t feel like Dutch architecture. It feels, I wanna say, Irish? I bet that’s where they filmed it, a real US Army base in Ireland.
• The Leary character is very against bikes for some reason. He lumps it in with the base’s general sort of, slacker vibe, I think, but it’s genuinely baffling to me what he has against the bikes specifically. You can just be normal about a sensible way to get about, you don’t have to be an American about it.
• This base has a “fromagerie,” where they make all sorts of cheese. You’ll note that “fromagerie” is a French word. “Cheese is what Stroopsdorf is known for,” the woman giving them the tour tells them. We learn from a sign they make ricotta, chevre, pecorino, burrata, and feta cheese, amongst other things. No Dutch cheese is ever named, though large wheels of cheese are littered about the place. I don’t think ricotta comes in wheels, fellas.
• “Sir, why would we need an Apple Store… when we have a Teen Center!” Solid joke about how dumb America is, how ineffective its bureaucracy. People occupying the Teen Center include about dozen adult soldiers and a man identified as “a small-time gigolo” who turns out have an incredibly thick fake German accent. Sounds nothing like a Dutch person speaking English.
• We are simply not this into bowling.
• The Teen Center has some posters that read, “Learn how to speak Dutch, for beginners.” This show will fail the test these posters establish.
• “Keep those knees high! High! Higher than you heathens get on a 48-hour leave to Amsterdam.” Mandatory drugs joke about Amsterdam specifically. Cannabis and related products are relatively easily accessible around the country, not just in Amsterdam, and maybe 1% of the country consumes any on the regular.
• The military operation Leary is here just in time to interrupt is, his daughter has organised a bunch of the soldiers to march in, you guessed it, the local Tulip Festival parade. We are simply not this into tulips. The average American thinks of us and thinks tulips, but the average Dutch person simply does not spend this much time thinking about tulips.
• This fucking tulip festival. I’ll concede that I don’t know yet where Stroopsdorf is meant to be, so this could plausibly be Limburg or somewhere else down south, but this town does not feel in any way like the Netherlands I know.
  • “Mann Licht” night club. Should be “Maanlicht,” but also, the Stroopsdorf Hotel just looks like a little Irish village hotel, how is there a nightclub in there.
  • Far too much orange. Orange doesn’t really come up as much as you’d think, outside of Koningsdag and soccer games.
  • Flower-based events do exist, but they’re mostly pretty no-nonsense things about buying flowers. You go into the town square and you buy flowers. That’s really the extent of it. Why the fuck would there be an American-style parade with any kind of military involved.
  • Why would there be a big speech from an American colonel who just got here. There might be a little speech from like the mayor? This is nonsense.
• Catherine Tate is here to play another Dutch person, a Katja Vanderhoff. A more plausible name than “Stroopsdorf,” but still clearly written by an American. Her accent is slightly better, but implausibly she’s the town’s head of the Chamber of Commerce. Look, we do have something that literally translates to that, the Kamer van Koophandel, but as far as I know they don’t really get involved in the day-to-day operations of business or organising parades that involve the American military for some reason, the KvK is just a legal body in charge of registering companies and providing them with information and mostly legal services. To present her as something on the level of, say, a Mayor is an American idea. She’s dressed like a 1980s American’s idea of a traditionally-dressed German person.
• She also owns the local brothel. I’ll let that one just sit here.
  • Actually, I won’t. Sex work is legitimate work, and the Netherlands has more protections for performing that work than a lot of places, but the practice of it is still considered by mainstream politics and general national values somewhat of a nuisance. The “head of the Chamber of Commerce,” if that was a real thing it made sense for this character to be, or, like, the Mayor, would not “own the local brothel.” That would be an insane thing to happen. (Also, brothels do exist here, but most sex workers are freelancers who rent individual rooms, I don’t think you really have “the owner of the local brothel” in that way here, again, a very American idea.)
• The “gigolo” from earlier returns as Jan, the translator for the colonel’s big speech. “Doesn’t everyone speak English?” “Sure, but I also translate social cues.” Not a thing at all. Everyone speaks English. Jan, too, is dressed like an American cartoon of a German man from the Middle Ages. One imagines he yodels. (He never translates a fucking thing.)
• People here would not cheer for this random American man who thinks he’s so important. There would be a patient, reluctant withholding of reaction until he actually does something worth applauding.
• I get the soldiers carry the wheels of cheese because the base has the fromagerie. But visually this is complete nonsense.
• Also why do they do the parade in this narrow Irish side passage.
• Why is their laundry service there to breakdance.
• Why is their bowling thing here.
• Why is this the start of the parade.
• Some of the extras they sort of get right, but as soon as somebody has a line, they look… Swiss.
• “It’s better than being from a country that legalised drugs and ratted out Anne Frank.” First of all, sigh, Anne Frank joke, second, though there are a few plausible theories for who actually “ratted them out,” it was probably an individual acting out of either malice or self-preservation — to blame the country as a whole when we were in the middle of an active occupation by Germany is, frankly, fucking insulting. The scene does go on to have the crowd also react negatively to this statement, but this show does not actually seem to understand exactly why we might feel insulted by this.
  • He’s throwing a tantrum, yes, but this is how this character talks about everything.
• At a restaurant, the table is covered in Delfts blauw, and there are bitterballen on the table before anyone’s even ordered anything. The Leary character throws another tantrum and yells a slur a few times.
• The credits confirm they filmed this in Ireland.

In conclusion: I’m in Hell. This nonsense was created to torture me. Some of the most singularly American-brained nonsense I’ve ever seen.

Bonus sections:

• Tulip counter: ∞
  • One in the show’s logo.
  • At least four big plastic ones in the grounds of the base.
  • Pudi calls a man “tulips.”
  • I had this at 6, and then the Tulip Festival overloaded the counter. Ding ding ding.
• Bike counter: 13, plus loads in the background.
  • One soldier cycles past Leary and Pudi and waves at them. This is considered weird.
  • Seconds later, another soldier walks past them with his bike. He is described as a “fat hippie on a bike.” When he returns later in the scene, the mere act of approaching Leary on his bicycle is portrayed as an act of aggression.
  • When informing the soldiers the base has won an award for “installation excellence,” which, sure, that’s probably a thing, they are also told the base has used the award money, which, sure, that’s probably a thing, to “purchase state-of-the-art equipment to improve our cardiovascular health and emotional wellbeing.” A cyclist rolls past as this is announced.
  • After the first act commercial break, the establishing shot for the next scene features a soldier riding past on a bike.
  • Another establishing shot features bike racks with eight regular bikes and one bakfiets visible.

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  For a definition of “unique” that covers just under 18 million people.