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The marriage show was a popular reality show format that invited people to find their soulmate and marry on live television in Turkey. Based on ethnographic fieldwork which took place in the show’s studio between 2011 and 2012, this chapter explores female participants’ investment of their trust in the show. While being reluctant about finding a spouse on television, women take on registers of safety, familiarity, and secrecy to navigate the show as a safe venue. This endeavor also involved women’s safeguarding of themselves on their way to marriage. The fragility of trust in the show, therefore, indicates how women foresee risks and yet strive for securing happiness and safety in marriage in general. This affective tension, at a larger scale, is related to the increased sense of insecurity at a global scale, and the systematic failure of the family to provide the safe living environment it promises in the Turkish context.

In this contribution, I provide an in-depth rhetorical and textual analysis of a television debate program broadcast in 2015 on the mainstream television news channel, Habertürk TV in Turkey. The debate brought together women committed to varying political projects, including Kemalism, Islamism, leftist movements, Kurdish women’s movements, and feminism. I find this debate program unique because it took place at a crucial moment in Turkey’s recent history, preceding increasing restrictions on the media that eventually cost more than half of the program participants’ jobs and positions. In my analysis, I focus on how the program’s moderator and the women participants define “women’s issues” in an increasingly authoritarian and conflictual political climate where women are divided with regard to supporting or opposing the Justice and Development Party’s (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi—AKP) political program. The results of my analysis show that “sisterhood” does not provide common ground for women in a politically polarized environment and women with more political power dominate the conservation.

This chapter examines the social transformation of the television audience of rural Turkey. Villages near a metropolitan area, which were subject to an administrative decision to be relocated, were the focus of my fieldwork 30 years ago. Several visits between 1987 and 2019 to the same location, which is inhabited by television viewers and non-viewers alike, yielded an insightful mapping of engagement with popular culture via television at the periphery in Turkey from a historical perspective. While rural inhabitants are busy with daily labor in the countryside and are not keen on watching television, they are nonetheless aware of and connected to new, nationwide cultural trends and social changes. By reflexively discussing these experiences in ethnographic fieldwork on television habits and reception in rural Turkey over a 30-year span, I avoid the traps of modern-traditional and urban-rural binaries, allowing for an exploration of the role of television in mediating social change in the rural context and thus an analysis of the various complex layers and processes of mediatization among rural audiences.

The 1990s’ popular televised journalistic/history documentaries have played a vital role in the making of political television culture, society of political spectacle, and the production of popular history and memory in Turkey. Despite their importance, these documentaries did not attract enough scholarly attention. By focusing on arguably the most popular and impactful journalistic/history documentaries of Turkey’s history, developed by Mehmet Ali Birand in the 1990s, I will assess the role of television in teaching, telling, and writing the political history. In doing so, I will also contextualize the form and discourse of these documentary series within historical juncture of globalization and neoliberalization of television as well as the country’s political economy.

In contrast with radio broadcasting, which began in 1927, television started remarkably late in Turkey. When the country’s sole public service broadcaster, Turkish Radio and Television Corporation (TRT), was established in 1964 and all of the radio transmitters were transferred to the Corporation, even radio broadcasting was not successfully institutionalized to catch up with its Western counterparts. For a very young Republic like Turkey, radio was an integral part of the modernization and nation-building agenda of the early ruling elite and therefore it institutionalized as a part of the machinery of the state, under very strict state control. Much known indispensable merits of autonomy and independence attributed to the historical public service broadcasting model in Europe were hardly appreciated and supported in Turkey. Television broadcasting also had its share from this negative perception and had to face similar obstructions as radio from the beginning. This chapter traces the history of content regulation in television broadcasting by situating the political controversies at the center at different times from the 1960s until today. Unfortunately, as the saying goes, there is nothing new under the sun, not in Turkey.

The Turkish television industry has undergone great transformation during the past three decades and enjoyed unprecedented success among national and transnational audiences alike. This chapter reconsiders the rise of Turkish television as a global player and an emerging national industry from a new theoretical perspective by situating Turkish television within the contemporary global developments of international television markets and within its own national history, economic, political, and cultural dynamics. By providing different examples of key turning points in its history, we offer a brief overview of TV production, distribution, and reception in Turkey since the beginning of the industry. We also illustrate how societal debates around television content, such as Turkish TV dramas (dizis), have ignited the question of representation and caused a struggle over official narratives, resulting in the entwining of the industry and production processes with politics. In our introductory chapter, we argue that with the increasing demand for content and the expansion of access to online TV platforms, emerging TV industries play an intricate and complex role in reshaping global television flows. Therefore, the case of the Turkish TV industry constitutes a significant example for understanding the current structural transformations in global television and sheds light on the interplay between national and transnational production, distribution, and reception processes.

This book analyzes the relationship between media power and democratization in transitional societies based on a case study about TV Globo, Brazil's largest media group.

La production de fictions sérielles turques est en constant développement. Ces fictions ont un très grand succès au niveau local (Tanriöver, 2011 ; Öztürkmen, 2018), avant d’être exportées au-delà des frontières turques depuis les années 2000, d’abord dans des pays sous l’influence culturelle de l’ancien Empire ottoman (à savoir les Balkans et le Moyen-Orient, puis au-delà (en Amérique latine, en Chine, au Pakistan, en Inde, au Bangladesh, etc.), faisant de la Turquie un leader mondial en matière de production et d’exportation. La Grèce est devenue un grand consommateur de fictions sérielles turques et les forts taux d’audience que ces dernières y réalisent ont conduit certains chercheurs à débattre du soft power turc. Plus précisément, en se basant sur les activités des fans des feuilletons en question (comme le tourisme en direction de la Turquie), certains ont soutenu que le visionnage des feuilletons turcs entraîne une amélioration des relations gréco-turques (Paris, 2013). En parallèle, de nombreux articles journalistiques, aussi bien en Grèce que dans d’autres pays, analysent le succès de ces feuilletons auprès du public grec comme une réussite diplomatique du gouvernement turc (Moore, 2013 ; Dimitrakopoulos, 2020).

Television delivery throughout the world has changed rapidly over the past two decades. Within South Africa, much of this global narrative is repeated. The last 25 years saw a move from a single monopoly broadcaster within the ‘public service’ tradition (but later subsumed into the apartheid political agenda), to the present situation of a multi-company, multi-platform, increasingly digital delivery, calling into question even the very definition of ‘broadcasting’. ‘Global difference’ in South Africa plays out through a relatively late start but surprisingly short catch-up period, emphasizing a demographic/socio-economic specificity that has resulted in a highly skewed television market in which the uptake of high-end technology is less widespread than in other more ‘developed’ markets, and where the taste of local programming dominates even the technologically advanced sectors. The move toward a digital system, together with the introduction of competition, has provided challenges to the regulatory regime. The majority of the audience share, however, remains with local programming, regardless of its delivery.

Stuck between the political economy of the larger domestic television production industry and global market imperatives, I argue that Turkey’s TV industry executives and professionals had to develop and implement a number of tactics to achieve a locally based transnational cultural industry able to withstand both global and domestic pressures. In this chapter I identify three main tactics employed by Turkey’s TV industry executives and professionals to combat the socio-economic and political challenges they face: These tactics are: (1) carefully managing the content to skirt government restrictions; (2) adopting the government’s soft power discourse and public diplomacy aspirations by cooperating with government officials and businesses in their cultural promotion and nation-branding efforts; and (3) adapting to global TV trends by undertaking rigorous marketing and branding campaigns. A discussion of these tactics in the Turkish case can help us understand how culture industries in the developing world, which had to integrate into a neoliberal media environment after the 1980s due to market- and state-driven policies propelled mostly by US-based global media giants, negotiate being locally based transnational culture industries in the face of increasingly authoritarian and right-wing domestic political climates.

The chapter traces the evolution of Chinese television since 1958 from a state propaganda organ to a profit-generating media juggernaut, with China Central Television (CCTV) as the only network TV responding to both market principles and party directives. Commercialization and marketization played a major role in the rapid development of the Chinese television industry. In recent years China’s TV industry has witnessed the rise of private media companies and the rapid expansion of digital media and the proliferation of over the top (OTT) content. The chapter further provides an overview of China’s overall TV structures and teases out the relationship between CCTV and local stations. The most popular genre on Chinese TV is serial drama, which developed from predominantly single-episode anthology dramas in the 1980s to chiefly multi-episode serial dramas. Talk shows and reality TV became fashionable since the late 1990s.

African television is at the crossroads. This chapter surveys, describes, analyzes and explains the major changes that have taken place in the African television landscape since the 1990s. It focuses on three major developments that have marked the African television landscape: (1) liberalization of the television space to keep abreast of international developments, and the tension between entrenched governmental public broadcasting systems and newly licensed “independent” TV stations, (2) the process and impact of the analogue to digital TV switchover shepherded by the International Telecommunications Union, and (3) the diffusion of Chinese electronic technology, television, and film content on the African television market as part of the Asian giant’s “soft power” diplomacy and State capitalism. African television is constrained by political regimes that restrict freedom of expression, and regulatory agencies that preside over systems in which the law takes precedence over rights.

This chapter examines the structural changes that can be identified in Ibero-American television in the first 15 years of the 21st century. Taking as a reference the main TV markets in the region (Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Spain) and their peculiar historical developments, a brief introduction and overview describes their characteristics, potentials and limitations, underlining their strengths, weaknesses and challenges. The analysis, framed in the globalizing phase that cultural products and services are undergoing jointly with their increased digitization, suggests two fundamental drivers of change, summarized in the notions of concentration and convergence. To conclude, policies and recommendations for action are explored, with a view to promote and protect audiovisual diversity.

This chapter provides an overview and analysis of emerging alternatives in the context of Arab television production, programming, and distribution. Media convergence and the access to digital technologies have accentuated the fragmentation of audiences, revenue streams, and forced alliances and competitions between previously discrete sectors of the media business. Yet, alternative practices are closely associated with changing political, economic, and cultural vectors in the Arab region and the increasing integration of its television industries in global media. The chapter argues that these alternatives constitute a set of continuities with the history of Arab television. Taken together, they also demonstrate some level of transformation in production practices, programming strategies, and distribution operations.

This chapter discusses how Chinese television has been refashioned by the digital entertainment industry, and contends that new genres, identities, and representations have emerged in recognition of youths as the most valuable and desirable category of audience. It does so by way of three case studies. The first illustrates the symbiotic relationship between online literature and television drama production, and how the former contributes to the fantastical turn of Chinese television. The second seeks to understand the emergence of new cultural figures of “supreme heroine” and “sweet males” in the context of the rise of female fandom in contemporary Chinese popular culture. The third reveals how traditional television content, or in this case a political drama, may be recreated by online distributors and influencers so as to be aligned with the habits, attitudes, and preferences of the younger audiences. The chapter concludes that to understand contemporary Chinese television culture, the Internet and social media must become an integral component of inquiry because of their powerful remediating role in the public communication of any cultural text.

Television is predisposed to the perception that it is the opposite of art and politics and that it is a time-consuming means for “dumbing down,” placating, disempowering and benumbing the citizenry. Through a discussion of the place of art and that of television, I use, as a conceptual framework, the convergence of the white cube and the black box to interrogate dynamics of postcoloniality, vision and power and how this forged divergent modernisms. Television in Africa did not, as with postwar America, create a sense of collective communities of spectatorship that would be brought closer to art appreciation through television. Rather, television, as the political, social and cultural phenomenon of modernization in various African countries, seemed to corrupt what was regarded as “pristine” cultural practices. However, since it coincided with colonial independence and the emergence of postcolonial nations, it became intertwined with various modes and mediums through which new forms of social consciousness aimed at self-definition and self-representation could be disseminated. The convergence of the white cube spaces of art and the black box of television enables an engagement with the colonial spatio-temporal distanciation of Africa from the global stage.

There was a time in Indian television when actors who had limited luck in the Hindi film industry would migrate to Indian television. By the 1990s, with the beginning of television’s transformation in India owing to economic liberalization, the converse was also occasionally true with former TV actors such as Shahrukh Khan and Vidya Balan becoming successful in Hindi cinema. The boundaries between Indian film and television were slowly becoming blurred toward the end of the twentieth century. Yet, the migration of stars from the big screen to the small was still considered a “failure” and the less common movement from television to film was deemed more successful. In the twenty-first century, however, television is no longer considered a consolation medium. The Hollywood television debut of the hugely successful Bollywood star Priyanka Chopra in a leading role on the TV show Quantico (USA, ABC, 2015–2018) and her subsequent numerous appearances on American television talk and award shows, including the Oscars, offer a prime example of television as a competitive medium for established stars. However, Chopra’s case is noteworthy for exemplifying not just star mobility between film and TV but also across national industries. Her move to American TV testifies to the increasing transnational viability of Bollywood stars in the twenty-first century. Importantly, the uptake of her rise on the American TV screen has been seen as part of the broader arrival of South Asian performers on American TV. But her success differs from Indian actors of American origin whose trajectory recapitulates the immigrant narrative of breaking free of stereotypical roles to play realistic, meaningful characters on the screen. Chopra’s representational currency and her “global” Indian English accent instantiate the logic of televisual mobility – her transnational screen navigations speak, not to a teleological moment of arrival on the American screen but her ability to make professional choices that enable her to represent Indians everywhere.

This chapter examines the intersection of popular culture and populism in Turkey by focusing on the TV show Payitaht Abdulhamid. Our motivation to analyze the recent TV series Payitaht Abdulhamid stems from our interest in the instrumental mobilization of popular culture for the Turkish government’s dual desire to both establish cultural hegemony and consolidate its populist style of government. Our analysis reveals that television, especially in the Global South, still plays a central role in governments’ desire to reconstruct history and establish cultural hegemony. This is particularly important as Turkey is going through a crisis of hegemony since the public is completely divided in its support for the government. Within the context of this hegemonic crisis, televised popular culture is vital, perhaps more than ever. Specifically, the show reduces a complicated history into easily understandable dichotomies and projects them on to contemporary politics in order to consolidate support for the government. Through televised popular culture, the government mobilizes history for purposes of cultural hegemony and populist politics flavored with nationalist, Islamist, and anti-Western motifs. Ultimately, the TV show presents yet another moment for understanding the mediated nature of 21st-century politics outside Western contexts.

This essay examines the 2010 NBC situation comedy Outsourced, with special attention to its representation of the racial politics surrounding business process outsourcing to India. Specifically, it discusses how Outsourced participates in what Jodi Melamed calls “neoliberal multiculturalism” to work through, symbolically and narratively, the realities and contradictions of globalized economies as they are experienced. By staging the dilemmas of outsourcing through the specter of the white male middle manager traveling to India to train Indian call center workers, Outsourced minimizes the affective labor necessarily performed by Indian call center workers and dramatizes outsourcing as a crisis of white U.S. masculinity alone. Moreover, it figures our white male protagonist as the global multicultural citizen to be emulated insofar as he models the appropriate attitude toward outsourcing and toward “other” cultures in general. Finally it suggests that the failure of the show has less to do with issues of cultural stereotyping and more to do with the failure of neoliberal multiculturalism to soothe anxieties around changing global economies.

During 2019, various situations once again showed the deep crisis in the country. Audiovisual production continued, albeit with figures that account for a declining industry. Four productions were released: a first was made by the state channel (TVe), a second by a local independent producer (Oduver Cubillán and BGcreativos), the third was produced by the private channel (RCTV) and broadcast by the subscription channel IVC Networks, and the fourth was also produced by RCTV. While the first two productions did not exceed the 35-episode figure, the third and fourth had 73 episodes. On March 7, there was the biggest blackout in the country’s history. For more than a week, 95% of the territory was paralyzed by a lack of electricity. The action was classified by the government as an electric sabotage. The darkness that covered the country also subsumed serial fiction.