Hello and welcome to this podcast brought to you by That´s English!, the Spanish Ministry of Education´s official distance learning English course. To find out more about That´s English! go to www.thatsenglish.com or contact your local Official School of Languages.

“What are you watching at the moment?” is a common question among friends nowadays, but they aren´t referring to regular TV broadcasting in which you have to wait a week for the next episode – the new trend in recent years is streaming series, thanks to Netflix and similar platforms, where you have thousands of series that you can watch, wherever and whenever you want, on a variety of devices. You can even make a profile for each member of your household where your preferences are saved and you can also see suggestions for shows similar to those you´ve already seen.

Netflix has more than 150 million global subscribers and has original series, such as the comedy Grace and Frankie or the teen drama Thirteen Reasons Why. You can see advertisements for series on bus stops, in the tube stations and on huge billboards, such as the controversial ad for Narcos in Plaza de la Puerta del Sol in Madrid in 2016 or the very original 15-metre high red-hooded thief placed in Piazza Affari, Milan, to advertise La Casa de Papel in 2019.

What´s great about streaming apps is that you can watch the series, films and shows that you want without having to endure adverts, schedules or waiting for the next episode. You can binge-watch a whole season of Game of Thrones in one day if you want to!

Some of the most popular series in the last few years are Breaking Bad – the drama of a high school chemistry teacher who becomes involved in the drug world due to economic problems, which won 16 Emmy awards; Peaky Blinders – a British historical drama about post-war gangsters in Birmingham, and the Spanish crime series La Casa de Papel, in which an organised group of thieves carry out a money heist on the Royal Mint of Spain, not to mention the huge success of Game of Thrones, the fantasy series it seems that everyone has seen. With series, there´s something for all tastes and the shows draw huge audiences as well as creating a lot of hype. The documentary series Tiger King – a bizarre documentary about wild cat keepers in the USA - had a whopping 64 million views and millions of comments and reviews on social media. German sci-fi drama Dark, in which a mystery surrounding children disappearing from a German village leads to the discovery of a time travel conspiracy, has recently been rated the most viewed non-English series.

These streaming platforms have many non-English series and documentaries, which means you can watch many shows in their original language with subtitles, in your native language or in English if you want to practise!

Binge-watching series seems to be a modern-day hobby, whether you prefer crime, period dramas, fantasy or realities, and it fits in with our busy lifestyles, being available on any device with a screen!

So, what are you watching at the moment? Do you and your friends recommend series to one another? Have you been watching anything in English?


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