‘Desperate’ for English translation
Bree’s mother-in-law (Shirley Knight) got her in trouble with the law, Lynette’s demanding boss made her miss her son’s first day of kindergarten, and Gabrielle and John met again. But unless they spoke Spanish, some Southern California viewers of ABC’s “Desperate Housewives” weren’t sure what happened Sunday night. And many were upset.
Adelphia customers said they saw a brief message saying the show was also available in Spanish, and then received the dubbed version of the show. The problem occurred days after some customers had complained that the last 15 minutes of ABC’s “Lost” were in Spanish, or that the show had disappeared from their screens.
For the record:
12:00 a.m. Oct. 5, 2005 For The Record
Los Angeles Times Wednesday October 05, 2005 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 2 inches; 80 words Type of Material: Correction
Adelphia glitch -- A Quick Takes item in Tuesday’s Calendar section about Adelphia cable telecasting “Desperate Housewives” in Spanish referred to a series of plot developments on the show. Those actually are from the episode scheduled to be shown Sunday. The item also said callers to Adelphia’s customer service line were told they would receive a refund. An Adelphia spokesman later said that refunds would be made on a case-by-case basis to viewers who received the Spanish-language broadcast by mistake.
Monday morning, Adelphia switchboard operators said the phones were ringing off the hook. Art Maulsby, an Adelphia spokesman, said about 175,000 customers in Los Angeles and 65,000 in the Hemet, Moreno Valley and Redlands area, representing 20% of its base, were affected by the problem, which resulted from damage to Adelphia’s fiber cable in last week’s fires. “We had to move the service to an alternate transport system. A piece of equipment in this alternate system failed. As a result, the audio channel settings were not configured properly,” he said. “Instead of picking up ABC’s first audio channel, which is English, it picked up the second audio channel, which is Spanish....”
Callers to customer service were told that they would receive a refund. ABC will rebroadcast the episode at 10 p.m. Saturday.
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