Introduction: new directions in Turkish television dramas, Part 2

by Baran Germen

This sequel to “New Directions in Turkish Television Dramas” extends the original special section’s goal to diversify research into the globally popular serial format in Turkey known as the dizi with novel methods and innovative approaches. The three essays that make up of the present installment also take a snapshot of the here and now within a shifting media ecology marked by industrial transformation, on the one hand, and tightening regulation and political subjection, on the other. At the same time, each essay showcases ample attention to history as they expand on the formal, generic, and ideological analyses of dizi in ways that highlight their social and political implications.

At a time when the standards and conventions of the format as primetime entertainment is challenged by the growing impact of streaming and of leverage of digital platforms, local and global alike, Savaş Arslan aptly prompts us to situate the dizi in the longer and larger history of Television in Turkey. In “A Brief Look at Turkish Television Series,” which opens the special section, Arslan presents his genealogy of dizi in line with the periodization of the history of TV in Turkey; however, he does so by focusing not on “the technological, social, and quantitative aspects of televisual production” but on the content of these productions. Arslan’s alternative approach to historiography of Turkish television series places special emphasis on genre, namely melodrama, and tracks two distinct modular coagulations that comprise what would come to be known as dizi today across three eras: action adventure and romance adventure. The proliferation in content, concomitant with changes in modes of production as well as in consumption patterns, for Arslan, ushers in a fourth era that is taking shape in today’s changing media ecology.

Next, Sasha Krugman continues Arslan’s historical emphasis in her transmedial analysis of the soldier-hero figuration that extends from Turkish cinema to its use in political imaginary. In “Televisual Repatriation: An Analysis of Börü (2018) or How to Repatriate Your Military Post-Coup,” Krugman charts out the ideological construction of this figuration with a focus on the series Börü (2018) made for television and later picked up by Netflix. As a part of Netflix’s project of localization, Börü, Krugman argues, taps into the archives of soldier-hero to mediate the recent history of Turkey and its constant state of emergency –especially the post-2016 attempted coup period– through the figure. Turning to many apparitions of the soldier-hero within the secular imaginary and its recasting in the series in line with the ruling AKP’s ideology establishes a compelling link between politics and aesthetics. In its privileging of the local context, the essay offers an important exploration of the entanglements of media production and political discourse that will potentially be useful in other contexts.

In the final essay of the sequel, Cüneyt Çakırlar and Zeynep Serinkaya-Winter attend to an emergent trend within the contemporary dizi landscape: series on primetime TV that negotiate the polarization between the secular and pious worlds. In “Families in Constant Crisis Ömer’s Nostalgia, Critical Affordances of TV Genres, and Shifting Politics of Intimacy in ‘New Turkey,’” they focus specifically on the series Ömer (2023-24) with a close reading. Instead of sensationalizing secular-pious polarization, they contend, Ömer as a familal dramaforegrounds a “politics of intimacy” that alerts us to the neoliberal governance in contemporary Turkish politics and culture. At the heart of their argument is “cruel optimism” that defines as much a nostalgic orientation to as an attachment to a fantasy of a family, one that is abstracted from heteropatriarchal despotism. Observing what they call “cycles of subversion/innovation and banalization” at work, they demonstrate how at once Ömer struggles with and succumbs to a construction of family as enshrined kinship. More than an argument for the conservatism and defeatism of the genre, Çakırlar and Serinkaya-Winter provide a nuanced understanding of the politics of dizi with attention to the ways in which narrative elements of conflict, crisis, and resolution have implications in relation to and for the social and political environment in which scripted televisual shows are produced.

This twofold special section comes to a closure with this sequel. As work on dizi continues to grow, my hope is that these exciting essays point to new avenues of research and inquiry as much as they build on extant and growing literature on the format. As always, I thank the contributors for their time, work, and collaboration, and Julia Lesage for her unwavering support and patience.