Introduction: Turkey’s National Television in Transnational Context

This study explores the reception of selected melodramas and their cosmopolitan imaginary, based on a large-scale qualitative study consisting of 79 in-depth interviews with young Turkish audiences across three locations: the metropolis Istanbul, the rural town of Emirdağ, and Brussels which has a large Turkish diasporic community. In the past two decades, melodramas representing the upper-class, elite, westernized lifestyles taking place in luxury residences in Istanbul's urban landscape occupy a central space in the Turkish series as an example of cosmopolitan imaginary in their representation and mode of production. The study reveals that the cosmopolitan imaginary of these TV series leads participants to negotiate Turkish modernity, westernized secular, upper-class lifestyles, Turkish values, religion, and identity issues in these settings and destabilizes a uniform and fixed understanding of their identity and imagined community.

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cosmopolitan imaginary: The reception of Turkish TV series among young audiences in urban, rural, and diasporic settings (Istanbul, Emirdağ, and Brussels)

Tahralı,

Smets,

Meers

2023

“…Furthermore, it deployed various state apparatuses, such as Turkey's public broadcasting channel (TRT) and its 24-h English language news channel TRT World, in order to foster the type of television content that can ideologically serve the government's conservative and neo-Ottomanist agendas (Karanfil, 2020). Not only has the Turkish government failed to initiate any particular cultural policies to protect and develop its television industry's exports except for contributing a small amount of the production companies' advertising costs for trade fairs (Algan, 2020) but it also has stifled the industry in order to instrumentalize TV exports to fulfill President Erdoğan's cultural, economic, and foreign policy agendas within the country and abroad. President Erdoğan's efforts to assert his conservative worldview and plans for cultural engineering have been adopted by his center-right and religiously conservative Justice and Development Party (AKP), which has been in power since 2002, and appropriated by a number of state and governmental institutions in Turkey through various means from censorship to content creation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Content is power: Cultural engineering and political control over transnational television

Algan

Kaptan

2023

Self Cite

Since the 2000s, the television industry in Turkey has emerged as a transnational business and as one of the largest TV program exporters worldwide. However, Turkish television is still largely national in its production practices and content, and thus, highly vulnerable to the domestic political landscape and media regulations of the government. In the last two decades, rather than endorsing the independent growth of this emerging industry in the international markets, the Turkish government has erected barriers by tightening censorship and passing new regulations to control national television and its content production. The AKP government deployed various state apparatuses, including Turkey's public broadcasting channel (TRT), English language news channel (TRT World), and the regulatory agency Radio and Television Supreme Council (RTÜK) to foster the type of television content that can ideologically serve the AKP's conservative and neo-Ottomanist agendas. Drawing on the political economy of media and through critical analysis, this paper analyzes how these state mechanisms are used to instrumentalize TV exports and media institutions in service of President Erdoğan's cultural, economic, and foreign policy agendas within the country and abroad. By investigating the tension between the state's ideological project and the regional, transnational, and global mediasphere, our work sheds light on how the implementation of the government's new media and cultural policies, top-down directives and pressures from the state and government on both the TV industry and its audience, and South-to-South cultural flows have shaped the Turkish TV industry and its content in the last two decades.

“…The unexpected global popularity of Turkish media products across diverse populations and regions and its consequences for the global TV industry and audiences have been captured in several important studies (see Acosta-Alzuru, 2021; Alankuş and Yanardağoğlu, 2016; Al-Ghazzi and Kraidy, 2013; Arda, Aslan and Mujica, 2021; Berg, 2020; Kaptan and Algan, 2020; Öztürkmen, 2022; Rakhmani and Zakiah, 2020; Salamandra, 2012). The rise of new players like Turkish television challenging the dominance of older content providers in the international arena points to the continuing importance of global television studies and the necessity to understand the formation and influence of new transnational media and cultural flows.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…While having robust Asian and European markets, respectively, supporting the growth of these national industries could be partly attributed to how quickly they grew internationally, Turkish television's rise was surprising to many both within and outside Turkey as it initially only attracted audiences from neighboring countries and its diaspora in Europe. As it soon became a global industry by captivating diverse national audiences all around the world, the arguments regarding cultural proximity or Turkey's soft-power in Eastern Europe and the Middle East throughout history have begun falling short of explaining how Turkish dramas managed to find a place for themselves in global audiences’ living rooms (Kaptan and Algan, 2020).…”

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confidence: 99%

Guest Editors’ Introduction: Cultural Politics and Production Practices of the Turkish TV Industry

Kaptan

Algan

2023

Self Cite

The transnationalization of the Turkish television industry, which began in the late 1990s, has been continuing with enormous success with Turkish TV series now being exported to more than 150 countries. In both introductions to the double special issue, we contextualize television in Turkey as a significant cultural field of production within its historical background and trace the transnational trajectory of Turkish dramas in Turkey and abroad. By focusing on the tensions and transformations spurred by the global presence of Turkish television, we critically examine what it means both for global audiences to consume and for the industry to produce Turkish dramas in the contemporary global televisual landscape. In the first volume (Issue 3) of this double special issue, the contributors reflect on the reception of Turkish TV series as well as their global and local consumption networks. In the second volume (Issue 4), the manuscripts explore the consequences of the industry practices and perceptions around what travels well along with nation-states' interventions and influences.