2 Different Japanese Channels, 2 Nearly Identical Programs

On September 26th, NTV aired a variety program in which one guy attempted to travel across the world and eat the original offerings of McDonald’s fast food restaurants in each of the countries. Here’s a clip of him eating the Maharaja Mac and McCurry Pan in India:

It was a pretty cool concept for a TV show, so cool that another Japanese network, TBS, aired a variety program on October 20th that did the exact same thing. The only difference was their use of several different celebrities simultaneously visiting different countries to sample McDonald’s foods. Here’s a clip from the India portion of that show:

It looks a hell of a lot like one TV network copied another. As production time and other factors could mean that the program that actually aired at a later date was thought up and filmed earlier, it could be premature to label TBS as a bunch of thievin’ bastards. It’s also possible that each network coincidentally thought up the same program idea and filmed the shows without the knowledge that their competitor was making something exactly the same.

As I don’t have the authority to properly determine who copied who, I’ll at least give you my opinion on which show did a better job of presenting the same concept. In my mind, the NTV program was more interesting and far less irritating to watch than the TBS program. NTV’s program’s camera work had more of “reality” feeling to it, the one man challenge aspect made things interesting, and most important of all, its celebrity reporter did not act like a loud idiot.

It is quite annoying to watch a television show in which the host visits a foreign country and proceeds to wildly overreact to everything in a loud voice:

Random Indian customer, I feel your pain.