Category: Analysis & Commentary

On this week’s Going Dutch, Denis Leary tries to fire one of the show’s only so-called Dutch characters but runs into Dutch labour laws. No B-plot, it’s just this nonsense.

On Animal Control, a double bisexual reach-around break-up, and a secret party.

Let’s get on with it. Continue reading “Dutch Notes #8: “Going Dutch” 1×08: “The Trial of Jan””

Another week, another Going Dutch. This week, they celebrate Christmas in the Spring for stupid reasons. Let’s just get into it. But first, on Animal Control this week, Frank and Shred catch a penguin and Victoria and Patel drive a dog to Canada.

I actually watch Animal Control as a way to detox after watching Going Dutch. I can believe that Joel McHale is weirdly intense, animal control is just a kind of cop I don’t have to feel conflicted about watching on TV. It’s not like it’s a particularly good show or anything, it’s fine most weeks, but it’s at least a show that exists in a world that makes sense to me. I like that it cares about animal welfare, it can be funny to watch people chase after CGI animals.

Anyway. Here’s well over 2000 words on this week’s Going Dutch.

Dutch Notes

• Denis Leary is woken up by an entire Christmas situation outside his bedroom window, having apparently not noticed it setting up in the night. There’s live animals involved. You slept through this?
• Carolers walk past his window, singing: “Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle door de nacht. Oh wat fijn het is te zijn,” and then something Leary talks over. This is nonsense. It just about scans but it’s a weirdly literal translation. We mostly don’t sing this song in Dutch, though there is a widely shared Dutch version easily available online.¹Which probably doesn’t clear legal, but still.
• Walking into work, Leary finds people blowing weird Swiss horns again, always with the horns, we don’t do horns, and Jan dressed like Sinterklaas, holding a big bag full of oranges. We never really associated oranges with Sinterklaas or Christmas where I’m from, more with Sint Maarten, but I know that’s a thing, a very regional thing, and that me being from Friesland paints my understanding of this country.
  • The oranges are a thing but they… should be mandarin oranges, they should be mandarijntjes,
• So it’s a weird combination of Sinterklaas and Christmas, on the Third Tuesday of Spring, got it.
• Jan explains why this is happening: “During Second World War, Stroopsdorf couldn’t celebrate Christmas because we were under enemy occupation. And after we got liberated, we decided to celebrate in spring instead. So now we celebrate Christmas twice a year. Twice Christmas.”
  • The Netherlands has no meaningful Christmas tradition before WW2. Sure, people probably celebrated it to some extent, but we had Sinterklaas, and life in pre-War Netherlands would not have had space for a second major gift-giving holiday only twenty days later. It’s only English and American influence AFTER WW2 that gets us to celebrate Christmas.
  • Sinterklaas as a celebration was not banned by the Nazis, the Nazis Nazified it, involving soldiers and the Jeugdstorm in things like the national intocht, the parade when Sinterklaas’ boat arrives in the country. The Nazis would’ve wanted you to celebrate Sinterklaas.
  • Americans often refer to Sinterklaas as “Dutch Christmas,” and though, sure, that’s an easy way to explain it through comparison, it’s not. It’s its own fucking thing. (Its own problematic thing.)
• When asked why he’s dressed “like a pope,” Jan explains he’s “Dutch Father Christmas, known as Sinterklaas.” Again, though, yes, they’re comparable, it’s its own thing. Jan, being a Dutch person, would either not refer to this as Christmas or be dressed as Santa Claus.
• Jan continues to explain that Sinterklaas distributes oranges and puts candy in children’s shoes, which Leary automatically extrapolates to “so you’re a fruit peddler, who’s got a foot fetish, is that the idea?”
  • One, your own Santa breaks into people’s houses and his reindeer discrimination is openly celebrated, throw no stones, American.
    • Jan adds “At least it’s not as idiotic as your Santa Claus, that grinning mascot for your country’s obesity and the whore to your corporations, yes, I said it, whore.” I agree on the corporate thing, though it’s not like we don’t use Sinterklaas in commercials, but come the fuck on, now we’re fatshaming Santa? Find better stones to throw.
  • Two, Americans have this sickening habit of automatically sexualising anything and everything they can associate with sex. You can’t post a picture or video that happens to include your feet any more without Americans and those melted by their brainrot cracking jokes about Onlyfans and Wikifeet. Your profoundly backwards prudishness is a disease, it’s destroying you, and it’s hurting the rest of us. Perish.
• Leary’s reaction to the explanation he asked for is to threaten to physically assault Jan with oranges. Great safe workplace you’ve got here. Captain Daughter explains to Jan that this happens because Leary hates Christmas. Sinterklaas is not Christmas.
• This is gonna be a problem with the entire episode, so I’m just gonna end it at this bullet point: The intermingling of Sinterklaas with Christmas iconography drives me fucking insane. These things mean things. I don’t mind a winter-themed sweater or two, but candy canes? Reindeer? A Christmas Carol? Tell me where exactly Dickens mentions the steamboat, motherfucker.
• Captain Daughter tells us Leary will try to cancel Christmas, so Jan says Leary “will take away Christmas, like the fuzzy green grump of legend.” I don’t think we really care about the Grinch outside of one or two movies. I saw Grinch merch at the Primark this year, not seen a single one of those sweaters out in the wild.
• Joe Morton is back, he loves Christmas, and will be portraying Santa at some point soon.
• Meanwhile, Denis Leary surprises Captain Daughter by… not actively hating Christmas, but wearing a cheap Santa hat and greeting her with a “ho ho ho.” Captain Daughter is confused, asking if there’s a gun pointing at him right now, but then Catherine Tate walks in — clearly he’s doing this because the local head of the Chamber of Commerce / owner of the local brothel / Leary’s girlfriend wants him to.
  • Once again, the Chamber of Commerce does not have that kind of position here, and though we are indeed more open to sex work than many other places, in reality, the Catherine Tate character would be considered the owner of something other local business owners would consider an unpleasant nuisance.
• There are now two locals, Jan and Catherine Tate²Neither are played by Dutch actors, of course., actively condoning this absolute buffoonery with their presence.
• Captain Daughter expresses typical American discomfort at the mention of her father’s sex life, which is followed by the following exchange between Leary and Tate: “She’s so repressed.” “I know. It’s her mom.” The fucking audacity.
• Real Dutch license plates in the parking garage.
• Tate’s accent work, a lot of weird S sounds, really bugging me this week.
• I’ve written over a thousand words and I’m only seven minutes in. Oy oy oy.
• Captain Daughter goes to Catherine Tate’s house, which you can tell is in the Netherlands because it looks like an Irish style of architecture with hastily planted tulips in the backyard.
• Missed opportunity for a Samson en Gert joke.
• “I rang the doorbell but you weren’t answering.” “So you decided to surprise me through the back door.” “Hm.” You are your father’s daughter.” Awful joke, truly dogshit joke, which I’m only typing here because, one, it’s not the back door, it’s the backyard, and two, god-fucking-damnit, it’s so normal here to just walk into someone’s house or backyard if you know them. I don’t like it, either, but this is not a weird thing for Captain Daughter to do, and it’s profoundly weird for Catherine Tate to be annoyed by it.
  • Tate doesn’t get on with Captain Daughter, which she reiterates repeatedly, because this show fully believes every Dutch person is either direct to the point of obscene rudeness or a flamboyant homosexual.
• Captain Daughter gets Tate a gift for Twice Christmas and tells her exactly what it is before she can open it. Is it a Dutch thing to thing gift spoilers are rude and weird? Because I think that’s rude and weird.
• Captain Daughter is trying to get to know Catherine Tate in that weird, overly-polite people-pleasing American way. This would land poorly on us, but we would try to be polite to you about it. We would think what Tate says to Captain Daughter, sure, but we’d also offer you coffee or tea and put out some cheese cubes.
• “We are making venison.” Deer meat signals to me mostly that a person is posher than this Catherine Tate character is, but okay. I think she’d say deer meat, though.
  • Please follow me on a journey.
    • Oh my god, the deer is still currently alive.
    • She’s asked Captain Daughter to kill it and handed her a knife.
    • Absolutely not a thing this Tate character would do.
    • We have butcher shops, the supermarket carries this stuff.
    • I think I have this meat knife. From IKEA, though.
    • Oh, good god, she stops Captain Daughter before she can.
    • She absolutely would have, because she’s an insane American people-pleaser.
    • This character would not do this prank, pranks are the opposite of the directness she’s supposed to practice, it’s utterly insincere, and I do actually hate pranks.
    • But I did, I did go on a journey here for a second.
• More nonsense Christmas song lyrics, this time for Deck the Halls: “Zie het huis met dennentakken / fa-la la-la la-la la-la.” Way too literal.
• Joe Morton makes a decent Santa.
• Hanging out on the base even though in a previous episode he was accused of being a spy is “little Dutch boy” Geert, who has asked Santa for “a body pillow for humping,” in Santa’s words. I’ve met enough little dudes who, yeah, they would ask for that. Fair enough. Don’t like Joe Morton telling him “if you were dog they’d have neutered you for less.” It’s already weird enough that there’s a randy 12-year old running around on this base, don’t tell him you’d have him neutered.
• Captain Daughter crashes Tate’s Twice Christmas party with no gift, which she brings up because she’s desperate to prove she’s not a people-pleaser, but then still hands her a gift. She then just walks in.
  • Not a Dutch thing, more a me thing, but if I’d communicated my distaste for a person’s presence in my life as thoroughly as Tate had done to Captain Daughter, and they refused to take no for an answer, I would not allow her entry into my house and would remove her if she took it anyway, which nobody would think was unreasonable.
  • Everyone at Tate’s party looks Irish.
• Dana was invited to the party, and we hear some Dutch from her conversation, “dat is super leuk,” pronounced as poorly as may be possible, to the extent that it’s the only subtitled Dutch in the episode — the subtitlers have gone for “That’s super look,” because they thought she was speaking English. Her next line, “Oh, hoe gaat het!” is left unsubtitled.
• Dinner at Tate’s house is gourmetten, which she pronounces like she has several entire bricks in her mouth. Y’all know about gourmetten? Little pieces of meat on either a plate or little pans? This is something they get right on paper, this is a thing we do. Like, we did this in December, like we do most years.
  • The plate she puts down is insane, though, it’s huge slabs of meat all in a pile. Just get twenty little packages from the Albert Heijn, what the fuck is this.
• Captain Daughter: “Are we guests at this dinner or are we working it?” Surely there are contexts Americans know about where you cook the food at the table. Maybe Captain Daughter has never been to Korean barbecue.
• Captain Daughter: “The whole spread is… Bad. Yuck.” Actively hateful. Worse than her dad. You force your way into somebody’s home and start hating on their culture’s holiday dinner tradition? It’s not even that fucking weird?? Captain Daughter, you are from the home of the turducken.
• One of the party guests is called Beatrix, a name she shares with former Queen Beatrix. I’m sure it happens, but I feel like we don’t really name our kids after the royal family, whose names are far too posh for most people. Beatrix apparently “makes chairs that are uncomfortable for people to sit in,” because “human comfort is not the reason for an object to exist.” I might’ve gone to art school with Beatrix, I think I might-a sat in one of her chairs once. Not really a mindset the Dutch have, though.
• “When I place my butt on one of Beatrix’s chairs,” says another mysteriously-accented guest, “the beating life of its creator’s enters me.” Tate’s guests are just art weirdoes, maybe. Now she’s in the art scene, too? Why is this one character instead of seven?
• Here’s the actual gourmet setup, and, okay, fine, I would accept this if it were in, like, a commercial.
• Captain Daughter naturally slams her hands into the burning hot pan-less gourmetstel, which is a different model than the ones in the middle of the table, weirdly positioned on the corner of the table where only Tate would really be able to reach it, and clearly just there for Captain Daughter to hurt herself with. This is just hacky.
• Danny Pudi’s B-plot is about using all the resources of the American army to spy on his ex-wife’s new boyfriend, which is just pathetic and sucks, but I don’t gotta cover it, so.
• Miserable.
• You know, they never bring up Zwarte Piet.

• 1
  Which probably doesn’t clear legal, but still.
• 2
  Neither are played by Dutch actors, of course.

This week on Going Dutch, a general gets promoted, Denis Leary wants to get promoted, and Major Shah attempts to get back in the dating pool. You could write this in a fever dream and do a better job.

Meanwhile, on Animal Control, there’s some Super Bowl nonsense, and a prank war escalates. Elsbeth is about a murder witnessed only by the 2005 Reed Richards from across the pond on one of those international camera-based art installations. Haven’t seen it yet, but this week’s Severance is probably another really good one. Oh, and Yellowjackets is back.

Anyway, none of this week’s Going Dutch involves anything Dutch, so no Dutch Notes this week. Huzzah.

Non-Dutch Notes

• If you were interested in this show because Danny Pudi is on it, but were then put off by my notes, first of all, two of you have thanked me for my service, thank you, but also, this show massively underserves him. Even when he gets a spotlight B-plot, what little he gets to do is not playing to his strengths at all, our boy can go so much weirder than he gets to do here. Not to whitewash him, but this part should really be played by a Griffin Newman type.
• Multiple people in this one express modern sexual attitudes — Jan talks about his kinks, Major Shah’s date turns out to have a boyfriend and they’re into cuckolding — but it always feels like it’s being written by 47-year olds from Ohio who heard young people talk about sex once and thought that was great fodder for making fun of. Every main character is always a huge, American prude about everything.

I’d like to see this through to the end of the season, but I gotta admit, this is rough. I actively dread new episodes of this show. Do I keep going? What is the value of life if this is what I’m doing with it? Is television dead and is Going Dutch dancing on its grave?

This week on Going Dutch, the base puts on its quarterly war games so Leary can pretend he’s a Real Man and that any war America engages in is still about doing the right thing instead of protecting the financial interests of the ruling class. At the end of the war games, they notice a drone flying over them and decide to hassle a local to make sure he’s not a spy.

Meanwhile, on Animal Control, everyone is very passionate about trivia night, and Patel realises he’s hot as a bartender. I… do watch better TV than this, I promise. Check out Severance if you haven’t. Paradise has a good reveal at the end of its pilot. I probably like Elsbeth more than you do, but still, that’s good TV.

Dutch Notes

• To be fair, this does look flat enough to be the Netherlands.
• Leary is a big WW2-head because it’s, quote, “the greatest war fought by the greatest generation, against the greatest enemy that we have ever crushed like a bug.” Look, every country does this, but America regularly overstates its role in WW2. I don’t know how it would’ve shaken out without them, but it was very much a team effort that they waited a long time to get in on. Please read a history book.
• You may recall the previous time Going Dutch engaged with WW2: Leary referring to the Netherlands as “the country that ratted out Anne Frank.” Nuance! Not spotted in the area!
• “When I was a kid, there were Nazis everywhere, okay?” As somebody living in 2025, this is the first time I’ve found Leary relatable.
• “When I was a kid, I’d go to the Oktoberfest every year, just to see if I could see one of these drunk German bastards slip a sieg heil.” First of all, don’t have him say “when I was a kid” twice so soon after each other, find a different way to put it. Second, though I do also relate to this sense of paranoia, here it just comes out as violently xenophobic. It’s giving “Liam Neeson with a bat at night” more than anything.
• Captain Daughter: “In the Netherlands? The biggest threat to the United States is how much better their Kit Kat is.” Okay, look, we dooooooo actually have Nazis. Same as you, same as anywhere. Have you looked at the news? Your shadow president is one, remember? We have ’em like that, too. They are friendly, though, so not much of a threat to the almighty United States, no. (I’ll take the thing about the Kit Kat. She’s right.)
• Upon learning the base organises war games on a quarterly basis, Leary decides to run one, completely impromptu, the next day, because apparently American army bases run completely and exclusively on the whims of the loudest jackass in camo they can find. This seems inefficient, and thus, very American.
• Unfortunately Danny Pudi’s Major Shah playing “the unpredictability of the enemy” does not touch upon anything Dutch and so I won’t really cover it here.
• The pilot of the drone that flies over the base is a known entity to the base — he’s “a little Dutch boy” called Geert. They pronounce it badly, but that is a normal Dutch name. The base is very pleasantly friendly about his drone’s presence, and so naturally Leary declares him an enemy spy.
• We finally get something to work with re: placing Stroopsdorf — Leary says the Battle of Otterlo happened “right down the road,” which means that, even though I’d twigged them as further down south, they’re in Gelderland. Sure.
• The person who opens the door at Geert’s house is a Russian-accented adult man who claims to be his chess teacher. This is never elaborated upon any further, it’s just there to feed Leary’s paranoia — the next person to come to the door is indeed a little boy. Doesn’t sound Dutch, though, and dresses like a slightly posh English lad.
• “Hey, Geert, where are your parents?” “The dentist.” “Parents are at a joint dental appointment in a country with socialised medicine? Yeah, likely story, pal.” Truly don’t even understand this one.
• On the verge of making yet another child cry, his primary personality trait, Leary finally gets a confession out of Geert — he’s secretly been collecting fashion magazines, because “Zendaya makes me feel things in my body.” Just a baffling turn for the child spy plot to take — the boy is horny.
• “Geert, what’s going on?” “Parents are here!” Why would his parents’ first line to him be in English? I know we have a reputation for all switching to English the moment we detect a foreigner, but to your kid?
• “Who are you?” “We’re the US Navy,” Leary lies. These people live next to an army base, these strangers are in army camo with patches that say “US ARMY” on them, and previous episodes gave me the impression life in Stroopsdorf revolves around this army base. I feel like you could get a good three minutes on the news out of them hassling your boy and lying to you about it.
• “Maybe it’s time to admit that here in the Netherlands, we’re not surrounded by enemies.” “Okay, well, you’re just lucky you weren’t here in the early 1930s when an apparently harmless, failed Austrian painter…” This whole man just sucks.
• This is a bad sign for an antique store. Bad signs exist in the world, I guess. I don’t think we have combination antique stores / WW2 museums, though. Why would that be a thing? And since 1944? Did they just open a store for military things and never restock? The whole thing plays exclusively as a museum.
• Leary’s been wanting to go to the antique store all episode to see a gun a “General Patton” once owned.
• Obviously, because the episode needs a win for the show’s loudest jackass, the building full of WW2 things turns out to have a Nazi memorabilia room, because it’s owned by a fucking Nazi. Upon discovery, the location card rebrands from “Antique store / WWII museum” to “Antique store / Secret Nazi shrine.” It’s… kind of still a WW2 museum, though. Incompetent.
• Leary has a moment of growth where he embraces that his constant need for an Enemy to pursue exists mostly inside himself and not entirely within reason, which is then immediately undercut by Captain Daughter’s reveal that the museum has a Nazi shrine.
• The man who owns the museum is apparently “Helmut von Fursterburg,” “the Butcher of Baden.” Of course he’s called Helmut.
• Leary is excited he gets to “fight the final battle of World War II,” and “punch a Nazi.” Look, I’m always on board with punching Nazis, but if this geriatric is the “Butcher of Baden,” he needs to be tried in a court of law and sentenced to whatever we’ve internationally established he deserves for his sins. Also, the final battle of World War II is getting everyone to remember why the Nazis were bad after it slips out of living memory.
• “Probably the final Nazi. I’m gonna be in the history books! Wow!” There are several Nazis still alive, and though I, again, agree they should be dead, I also think this man is an absolute fucknuts American-brained idiot.
• Here’s how this ends: He changes into an aesthetically more WW2-inspired uniform, they all walk into the museum, look for him, and remember he’s a very, very old man. Captain Daughter gives him his Iron Cross keychain bathroom key back and announces she’s pissed on his Nazi stuff. Faced with six soldiers and Leary about to punch him, the man promptly collapses from a heart attack, which means he’s wounded and they need to save his life. Trying to resuscitate him, Leary shatters every rib he has, caving in the chest of an old dead man. At least prove he’s a Nazi first.
• At the end, Papadakis summarises what he perceives as Leary’s take on what it means to be a soldier: “All these things you’ve been teaching me. Stealing tanks, punching old Germans, prostitution, never datin’ ’em. That’s what it means to be a soldier, right?” Leary demands he covers this up.
• There are a lot of Nazis in the world around us. They are everywhere, and anyone can be one. But in the real world, in my 2025, the ones who have an effect on my life, the ones I’m scared of? They look and behave a lot more like Denis Leary than like geriatric seniors.
• How do you fuck up “the episode where they kill a Nazi” this bad.

This week’s Going Dutch actually engages with its setting again — the base, who are used to playing basketball, invite themselves to play a game of korfbal against the Dutch. Korfbal, we are told by the local effeminate homosexual, isn’t, as Leary and Pudi believe, “basketball without everything that makes basketball good,” but “a real man’s game.” In the B-story, Captain Daughter reconnects with her high-school sports alter ego “The Rocket.”

Meanwhile, on this week’s Animal Control, the ongoing story about them having sex for profit honestly pleasantly bisexual turn, a raccoon turns out to be a very charming squatter, and a fundraiser for Animal Control accidentally turns into a roast.

Dutch Notes

• They consistently spell it “korfball” with two L’s instead of “korfbal.” They pronounce it that way, too. Come on, man.
• The game involves a “korfboy” who blows “this big midwinter horn” after every point. And during the breaks, we’re told, he plays jazz on the horn. Look, I’m aware of korfbal, but I don’t go to sports. This isn’t a thing, right? This feels like we’re getting mixed up with far more Germanic cultures again.
• Euthanasia joke. Apparently we’re a country “so full of quitters,” and you can extrapolate the rest of the crude shit he says from there.
• Corporal Papadakis, the heavier-set soldier whose weight Leary insists on making fun of constantly, says to Catherine Tate that he believes “age is nothing but a number.” Her reply to this is “Age is a number, and that fact is not in dispute.” I get that Dutch directness comes across a certain way, we’ve been over this, but are they just writing her like she’s a Vulcan now? Mindboggling.
• Apparently “everyone in town” is talking about the korfbal game, because they’re excited to see Leary lose. I’ve never lived in a small town that has something like this nearby, and I understand that life in, say, a factory town does tend to orbit around the factory — but this really feels like an American writer incapable of understanding that life in their proximity somehow does not revolve around the Americans. There are other ways to get here.
• The Catherine Tate character continues to not make sense to me. The “head of the Chamber of Commerce” generally isn’t a thing, but I also don’t get why she’s spending so much time on the base. A lot of this would work better if she was the mayor, or on the gemeenteraad.
• Colonel Papadakis turns out to be good at the kinds of moves the Americans are struggling with, which is surprising to Captain Daughter because Colonel Papadakis is a heavier-set fellow.
• I swear he used to pronounce it correctly: Jan can’t pronounce his own name this week.
• The korfboy — korfjongen? I don’t know what they imagine we call this kid — yells “Korf!!” and then blows his Swiss horn. His pronunciation of “korf” is alright. At halftime, Captain Daughter tells the korfboy “blow that thing one more time and I’m gonna shove it down your throat.” She apparently thinks shit talking is an acceptable thing to do to a 10-year old boy who is part of the local ceremony of this game, and is then apologetic when he starts crying, which, come on, this kid would just tell the American to fuck off. His horn jazz is alright, but not a thing that exists at all.
• The audience at the game is full of people holding Dutch flags, faces covered in Dutch flag makeup. Several of them are upside down or weird in some other way. This also isn’t really a thing we do outside of, like, major sports events, and wouldn’t be happening at this extremely minor America vs the Dutch match in a local gym. I appreciate how turned off they are by Team Base’s chant of “Kill the Dutch,” though. Way too intense. Calm down. Go touch grass.
• “Hup, hup, hup, Holland!” Incorrect. It’s two hups.
• By halftime, Team Base have scored 13 times, which I don’t think is how korfbal works? There has, at this point, been a lot of talk about how they don’t have any way of learning a foreign sport in an hour, and now they’re mostly just playing basketball?
• Catherine Tate indicates that she doesn’t appreciate Team Base’s American approach to korfbal, explaining, quote, “the violence, the woman running in circles, unequal to the men on her team. This is not korfbal.” The American approach really isn’t meeting the game where it’s at — they’re treating a friendly game with the local community like it’s the fucking Super Bowl. Do you have to be this intense? What do they put in the water over there, jeezus.
• Like, this game is so casual and friendly that there’s a pregnant woman on the absolute brink of labour on the team. What are we even doing here.
• In the end they take a dive because I guess Denis Leary is dating the Catherine Tate character and they’d break up if he continued playing it American-style. They bench Papadakis, who switches teams. Even as somebody who’s not a sportso, I would find that unacceptable.
• At the same time she’s apparently dating Denis Leary, Catherine Tate is “having sex with” Bram the baker. Leary finds this out on the field. This isn’t even a Dutch note, it’s an healthy personal and sexual relationships note: People you’re having sex with should for the sake of their own health probably know you’re having sex with other people. She’s apparently having sex with eleven people. Not in the context of the brothel she runs, I don’t think, she’s just poly. Extremely bad business to not be upfront with him about that. Sus behaviour.
• “So you’re a baker.” “Puff pastries and profiteroles.” No real baker can afford to limit themselves to just two types of pastry. What are we, French?
• This article in the picture is machine translated. We don’t use phrases like “ugly American aggression” or “local heroes” that literally translated.
• Look, real, actual comedy could be derived from this premise. The Americans are really intense, and go way too far, they should face literally any kind of pushback for this, and then have to adjust to local expectations. But the only pushback is a woman threatens to withhold sex from the biggest, loudest man, and Team Base’s reaction, to half-heartedly play “poorly,” is immediately undercut by Papadakis switching teams and just beating them in the American style. The moral of the story is “yeah, America is the best.” Sucks shit, man.
• Showrunner Joel Church-Cooper, please just reach out. You need a Dutch consultant. I could be that person. I’ll work for whatever you legally have to pay me.

Yesterday was Friday, which means the day before was Thursday, which means another evening of Fox’s dreary Thursday comedy line-up has aired. Animal Control had an A-plot about Joel McHale being kindly asked not to bone a rich lady but doing it anyway, and a B-plot about Ravi Patel getting asked to throw the first pitch at a baseball game but getting upstaged by his lady coworker.

And then, this week’s Going Dutch. Joe Morton visits the base to insult Denis Leary by tasking him with guiding traffic during a tank exercise. To prove he can still get his dick hard he’s still in his prime, Denis Leary decides to steal one of the tanks. In the B-plot, to prove she’s better than him, so does the base’s other commander, his daughter.

Dutch Notes

• The tank exercise is in “rural Germany,” to see which tanks need to be replaced. Which means this episode is almost entirely set in unspecific fields, because it’s only episode two and I guess we’ve already run out of material on half the premise.
• And yet.
• “I met this Dutch weirdo named Baas smoking hookah at a art gallery showing.” I’m gonna blame the subtitles for this one, but “Baas” means “Boss,” it’s not a normal Dutch name, you’re thinking of “Bas,” which is usually short for “Sebastiaan.” Not everyone smokes weed, which is what I assume she means when she says “hookah,” not an actual hookah pipe, because that would be ridiculous, and we’re actually pretty strict about not fucking smoking indoors. Yes, even weed. Later, there are “Baas Baby” jokes.
• In exchange for helping The Daughter with her own tank heist, “Baas” wants “an immersive experience of American excess.” This, to The Daughter, means throwing a party Danny Pudi describes as “an eighth-grade graduation party at Mar-a-Lago.” Solid joke about how corny the American aesthetic defaults to. This includes the following things:
  • Many American flags and stars, red, white, and blue balloons.
  • A popcorn stand.
  • A statue of a cowboy wearing American flag shades.
  • A statue of an astronaut wearing an American flag top hat. Behind him, a Warhol-style print of four Statues of Liberty.
  • An arcade-style basketball hoop game.
  • Towers of hot dogs and hamburgers.
  • A statue of the Statue of Liberty.
  • A mid Hulk Hogan impersonator.
    • The celebrity impersonator, a classic symbol of the American disease. They crave proximity to fame and fortune, but finding themselves unable to access these things, surround themselves with cheap, bad, frequently tasteless copies of them.
  • Jan doing “improv comedy,” a mean-spirited mime-adjacent act.
• “Baas” is played by American actor Lolu Ajayi, who is actually based in the Netherlands, shows up in actual Dutch things sometimes, and does, apparently, actually speak Dutch. He never does here, though. His accent speaking English is more Anglo.
• There’s Catherine Tate again, dressed in a more sensible velvet purple jacket this time. An exchange with Leary. Him: “You’re more blunt than I remember.” Her: “Not blunt. Just Dutch. We believe politeness is deceit.” This idea that we’re… direct to the point of coming across as rude is… Hm. A few layers to this.
  • One, Americans, a lot of Dutch people are just being rude to you. A lot of us are dicks.
  • Two, we are totally capable of being direct and no-nonsense without being or sounding rude.
  • Three, many American cultures are so much about being polite, because you care so much more about how you’re perceived than you do about being useful. This makes some of you fucking impossible to communicate with. Compared to some of your Nice cultures, your Polite cultures, just saying something straight up sounds direct and rude to you only because your culture has driven you incapable of being fucking normal about anything.
    • I had an American teacher once, and this man, you could have shit on your face for the entire class and at the end he might politely tell the whole room we should all consider washing our faces some more going forward, but not in a million years would this man tell you you had shit on your face.
• Tate: “When I was studying for my PhD, I took a job as a long hauler.” She’d say “trucker,” I think. “I’d listen to the required reading on audiobook.” I feel like Dutch textbooks are not as easily accessible as audiobooks as American ones might be, but maybe I’m just looking for nits to pick.
• Tate: “Most of the soldiers in Stroopsdorf are flapdrols.” She will never pronounce a Dutch word correctly. “It best translates as useless turds.” I guess.
• More jokes about sex work. See last week’s post.
• You can tell this Irish street is a Dutch street because of the inaccurate parking sign, the illegally covered sign below it, the bakfiets, and the building that says… something “PRESS” on it.
• The house depicted there is what Leary thinks is Tate’s brothel, but is actually, quote, “a charity office offering social and immigration services to sex workers.” Does that exist? I confess I’m out of my depth on that one.
  • Inside: We hear the first actual spoken Dutch, fragments of “even een afspraak met je maken,” en “fijne avond.”
  • Some signage: Most of it hard to make out, but what I can read tracks fine. Machine translation is pretty okay now. “031 099 989 7200” is not a Dutch phone number at all, though.

Sigh. Okay. (Begging this show to hire me as its Dutch consultant.)

Bonus section:

• One thing I didn’t mention last time: The grounds of the base feature a prominent windmill. Not a real one, a decorative one, not unlike something you’d see at a miniature golf course. I sigh every time I see it.

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.

• 1
  For a definition of “unique” that covers just under 18 million people.