The South African-produced television show, Home Affairs, foregrounds the challenge of creating a united and homogenous notion of nation. The heterogeneous images of 9 female protagonists set within the discourse of nation-building draws attention to issues of equality and empowerment. However, these representations also expose ruptures within feminism, and the project of nationalism as feminist sensibility is often criticized as a betrayal of the nation. Locating these tensions within feminist and historical contexts, I argue Home Affairs allegorically represents the rebirth or rebuilding of the nation. However, although Home Affairs can be read as representative of the nation that valorizes middle-class values, it simultaneously demonstrates the competing interests of national solidarity and free-market forces that perpetuate socioeconomic and educational segregation.

This article explores Netflix’s changing business strategies to diversify its catalogues, examining the practices of ‘direct commissioning’ and genre adaptation. The case study of Queen Sono, the first Netflix African Original, reveals how the spy thriller conventions are leveraged to attract a Western audience even as the series is adapted to the African context. Although Queen is portrayed as a female spy with clear moral impulses, I argue that her agency is constrained by the male-dominated spy thriller conventions and the transnational postfeminist sensibility of the series which Netflix paradoxically needs to utilise to attract both African and transnational subscribers.

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The situation comedy Madam & Eve (2000 debuted on e.tv, a free-to-air South African television channel, and emerged as one of the most popular local shows, even winning international recognition. Raising pertinent issues of race, class, and gender within the context of domestic service in postcolonial South Africa, Madam & Eve follows the interconnected lives of Gwen Anderson, a well-to-do, white "Madam," and Eve, a younger, working-class, and black "Maid." Although directly confronting inequalities of race and class by integrating the perspectives of the maid and the employer, and undermining hierarchies of power through the unruliness of mimicry, the comedy confines racial resolution to the individual. By scapegoating individuals for their discriminatory attitudes, and effectively quelling the motivation for collective resistance, the show embodies the larger industrial trend of promoting profitability at the expense of progressive politics.