In this contribution concerned with the level of audience tolerance to dubbing in Italy, the authors discuss the results of a large-scale research project which set out to explore and assess the quality of dubbed television programmes. Based on a corpus of over three hundred hours of dubbed television programmes and by means of web technology, over five thousand Italian viewers were tested on their perception of dubbed Italian. After conducting an ANOVA multivariate analysis of the raw data, an index was created, accounting for the perception of linguistic naturalness in dubbed Italian by viewers. After analysing the responses of a robust sample of randomly selected viewers, the results seem to point towards a certain tolerance of what viewers recognise as being unnatural, an acceptance of linguistic features adopted on screen which are virtually non-existent both in autochthonous Italian fictional programmes and in established electronic corpora of naturally occurring Italian.