I don't think it translates to "boîte pour les nuls..."

I watch far too much TV, as a rule, but here I look at it as cultural research. Anthropology, if you will.  What I've noticed:

• The schedule is, as they say, whack.  

I'm used to the very regimented North American TV schedule. Everything starts on the hour or half hour, and only crazy commie stations like PBS have bizarre starting times like 2:45. Here, it's all over the place. See those little boxes? Those are sports and weather updates. Every channel has them sprinkled throughout the schedule. When it's convenient.

• They don't have a lot of French episodic television.  Maybe I'm missing something; they do have a lot of French programmes, but those seem to be variety shows or talk shows.  Even those are strange to me: unlike the host-talks-to-one-guest-at-a-time thing I'm used to, they have host and a guest-panel who all talk together about the act.  They even do this with clip shows.

Most of the episodic television I've seen so far has been dubbed older American or British shows (love me some Frost and MacGyver).  They do have more recent shows, like Desperate Housewives and Lost, but I don't know how current they are. "Les experts" = CSI. I think I need to see "Les experts: Miami" to see if Horatio is just as annoying in French. How do they translate that special way he has of saying Hi-i-i-i-i?

Edited to add (one week later): So, they do have episodic TV. There is a CSI clone called R.I.S.: Police Scientifique (Recherches Investigations Scientifiques, in case you want to know). Made in France. As in the US shows, they have smartly dressed men and women (no scarves, alas), a hip young tech who spins around in his chair as he analyses blood and hair samples, and witty banter, but there is much cooler editing between scenes, and let's just say they're not shy about naked bodies during the autopsy sequences.

• Ads.  A lot of stations show content for longer and group ads together in a larger bunch.  I especially notice this when I'm watching, say, Profiler and after a mini-cliff-hanger that was meant to break for a word from our sponsors, the show continues into the next scene.  After about 30 minutes, you get a little animation about "Publicités" and then a slew of ads.  
• Ads for any food, even for grocery stores and things like yogurt and cereal, have little notices about healthy living at the bottom.  My favourite is when you get a "For your health, don't snack between meals" message on an ad for Cheese Doodles.  Not that they have Cheese Doodles here, but you get the idea.

So far, the thing that has amused me the most (well, after seeing MacGyver in French (especially with Teri Hatcher -- on the same day I could have seen Penny Parker, Lois Lane, and Susan Mayer, like the evolution of Teri -- they do have Seinfeld here, but I didn't look to see if it was her episode) and being enthralled by the dubbed exclamations on Home Edition (Les Maçons de la Coeur) ("Oh, c'est pas vrai!")) was watching a French documentary, in French, about Quebec, with French-Quebec speakers, and seeing that it was sub-titled.