Families in constant crisis:
Ömer’s nostalgia,
critical affordances of TV genres, and shifting politics of
intimacy in “New Türkiye”

by Zeynep Serinkaya Winter and Cüneyt Çakırlar

Over the course of three years, a new wave of TV productions emerged in Türkiye , narrating encounters between secular and conservative families, with familiar stories of romance and intergenerational conflicts.[1] [open notes in new window] Transforming the generic limits of soap operas and considered a distinctly local cultural phenomenon, a “genre in progress” categorized as dizi,[2] these shows include Kızılcık Şerbeti/Cranberry Sorbet/One Love [GoldFilm & ShowTV 2022-], Ömer [OGM & StarTV 2023-2024] and Kızıl Goncalar/Scarlet Rosebuds [NOW 2023-]. Although different in their stylistic registers and thematic frames, these serial melodramas have mobilized a public debate about rampant political polarization in Türkiye, and discussions of the authenticity of how they represent pious, conservative and secular lifestyles. Engaging with this expanding televisual ecosystem of primetime Turkish dizis, we use the case of Ömer to suggest an alternative reading of the political backdrop: a critical reading that prioritizes politics of intimacy, rather than that of the oppositional axis of pious conservatism vs. secularism.[3]

Following a brief overview of the ruling Justice and Development Party’s (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi [AKP]) current authoritarian policies of family and social welfare, and its instrumentalization of the Directorate of Religious Affairs (hereafter Diyanet), we will introduce a critical reading of Ömer through Lauren Berlant’s concepts of “cruel optimism” and “crisis ordinariness”.[4] Berlant argues,

“The optimism is cruel when the object/scene that ignites a sense of possibility actually makes it impossible to attain the expansive transformation for which a person or a people risks striving; and doubly, it is cruel insofar as the very pleasures of being inside a relation have become sustaining regardless of the content of the relation, such that a person or a world finds itself bound to a situation of profound threat that is, at the same time, profoundly confirming.”[5]

Cruel optimism, in the case of Ömer’s narrative, emerges as a constant investment into heteronormativity and kinship relations when the family has failed to fulfil its promises. The characters’ optimistic attachment to their family is “cruel” as it is more unbearable for them to sever their ties with it, even in the face of disillusionment and harm, than to remain in the stifling familial setting. Following Berlant, our reading of Ömer will depart from the question of what happens when the fantasy of family starts to fray and how the characters adjust to the crisis ordinariness through their desires to sustain these attachments (no matter what) and inhabit their affectivity despite their families’ “cruel promise of reciprocity and belonging”.[6]

We will then discuss the shift in Ömer’s political undertones as the narrative moves into plain “old” optimism, articulated with the show’s reproduction of the generic tropes adjacent to Yeşilçam melodramas.[7] While the thematization of political debates around patriarchy in these TV productions assumes a “cruel optimism” as the default spectatorial identification for Turkish-speaking audiences, Ömer’s shift to a “nostalgic”, anachronistic representation of family and intimate/amorous attachments separates the show’s affective register from Turkish TV’s new genre paradigms of competing primetime stories. Having ended after two seasons with a surprisingly rushed finale, the show did not survive this competitive ecosystem, likely because its nostalgic swerve to the “waning genres”[8] of Turkish cinema compromised its ideological relevance and affective currency. This nostalgic turn in Ömer’s narrative trajectory, and its failure to align with the new generic system’s valorization of spectacularized crises, provide us with a critical point of entry into a discussion on the ways in which hegemonic discourses of representation operate in contemporary Turkish television.  

Ömer’s familial world

Starting as an adaptation of the Israeli television drama Shtisel (Yes & Yes Oh 2013), Ömer tells the story of the titular character Ömer Ademoğlu, a young müezzin who likes spending his spare time sketching and drawing. His father, Reşat, is the neighborhood’s imam, devoted to his congregation and family; he exercises a strong authority over his three children, Ömer, Nisa and Tahsin, who have recently lost their mother. Nisa and Tahsin are both married and are also devout Muslims, leading modest lives. Nisa has five children and has a fraught relationship with her father as she married Hakan against her father’s will. Hakan is a frivolous and immature man, who later elopes with his girlfriend, taking with him a large sum of money that Ömer has taken out for him as a bank loan. Tahir is a very stern zealot, who terrorizes his family with strict rules. His wife Şükran, an obedient housewife, is often the target of his ridicule and insults. His daughter Eda is sick of her father’s despotism, and is fascinated with popular culture, despite her father’s ban against TV and mobile phones in her household.

Ömer and Reşat reside with Reşat’s mother Nezahat, living a quiet life until Gamze comes back to the neighborhood. Gamze is a recently divorced mother in her 40s, forced to come back to her mother’s house after her con artist husband flees abroad, leaving her with a huge debt. Fatma, Gamze’s mother, does not let her in, as Gamze never had her consent to the marriage in the first place. Gamze also has a broken relationship with her sister Nuran as Gamze did not visit during their father’s illness. Ultimately, Gamze and her son Tuna start living in the already crowded family household, together with Nuran and Sadık (her brother-in-law), Erdem (their son) and Fatma (Gamze and Nuran’s mother).

Gamze and Ömer fall in love instantly, yet their age difference and conflicting lifestyles lead to many conflicts. Although the series does not explicitly spell out what makes their love affair transgressive, an implicit bias towards divorced working mothers moves the narrative arc forward and help new subplots unfold. It is important here to note that in Turkish popular culture, divorced women are immediately associated with moral ambiguity, and often stigmatized.[9] With patriarchal reasoning, the promiscuity of a divorced woman (or a widow) is always a possibility as their virginity can neither be expected nor proven as in the case of women who are marrying for the first time.[10]  Furthermore, in Gamze’s case especially, reluctance to have another child or impending menopause would mean the end to the bloodline of the male partner. As further episodes also reveal, another social anxiety around such relationship arise from the fact that an older woman with career aspirations stands in the way of a younger man from performing his gender role as primary—and protective—breadwinner.

 These kinds of social anxieties about such transgressive intimacies fuel Ömer’s narrative drive. Both families condemn this relationship due to Gamze being an older (i.e. 15 years older than Ömer) divorced mother of a young boy. Although Ömer keeps reminding his father of the parable of Prophet Muhammed marrying Khadija, an older widow, Reşat vigorously tries to dissuade his son from this relationship. First, Reşat arrange for Ömer to get engaged through a matchmaker, and he later gets a suitor for Gamze, to ensure the two do not end up with each other in an “unhappy”, unsanctioned marriage. The fact that Ömer’s fiancée is a distant relative of Gamze’s family amplifies the transgressive potential of their love affair. However, this does not stop the couple from secretly getting married, resulting in further dramatic situations, including Gamze’s ex-husband’s coming back to kidnap her and her son, and Ömer’s becoming an alcoholic and his family’s ending up in further debt. Later in the show, the plot thickens with the introduction of new characters such as Vicdan, a sex worker and Tahir’s ex-girlfriend, and İzzet, Ömer’s uncle, the leader of an ultraorthodox religious cult who seeks revenge from his brother Reşat.

The convoluted storyline has social resonance. In particular, it echoes the complexities of the contemporary sociopolitical context with regards to women’s rights and family policies under the AKP rule in postmillennial Türkiye. Under the current neoliberal and neoconservative governance, a restructuring of social welfare has largely redefined the family as a self-reliant economic unit which is burdened with the responsibility of its members’ welfare. The family that lacks managerial skills is associated with moral failure.[11] Women and children have been rendered more precarious and dependent on family bonds because of changes in legal frameworks and financial aid policies, especially with the withdrawal from Istanbul Convention. Although the state’s role in regulating religion has been an ongoing issue since the foundation of the Republic, AKP’s Diyanet[12] has new powers and an ever-growing budget to further consolidate its hegemony directly through the domestic space of family.[13] Delegation of educational and social welfare oversight to religious foundations and Diyanet have contributed to the reconsolidation of moralist discourses about gender roles and familial duties.[14] For example, recently, Diyanet’s astronomical budget has been increasingly allocated to regulate the family through the Family Bureaus.[15]

Over the last decade, the country has given rampant impunity to perpetrators of femicide and domestic violence, and it has criminalized feminist interventions and safety networks. Furthermore, political demands for gender equality and LGBTI+ rights have been responded to with heavy-handed repression.[16] Such repression is aided by the mobilization of religious foundations, orders and pro-government civil society to enact anti-gender politics. In addition, government discursively associates LGBTI+ and women’s movements with terrorism and foreign espionage. Amid this neoliberal and conservative framing of the moral crisis of families, the increased precariousness and financial strain on the family as a managerial institution bleeds into various stories in Turkish media, ranging from independent “art house” cinema to reality TV and investigative journalism, and including the primetime dizis.

Ömer’s engagement with the “crisis of family” is significantly shaped by the show’s overarching diegetic setting of “crisis ordinariness”. In Berlant’s terms, “crisis ordinariness” is a state of living under neoliberalism, whereby crisis is not “exceptional to human consciousness but a process embedded in the ordinary that unfolds in stories about navigating what’s overwhelming.”[17] It is a part of ordinary life, with people adapting, making do with what they have, a present where unfolding of crises generates new norms and forms. Berlant notes,

“Even those whom you would think of as defeated are living beings figuring out how to stay attached to life from within it, and to protect what optimism they have for that, at least.”[18]

In Ömer, the neoliberal transformation of family in Türkiye is made strikingly visible as the ordinariness of the cycles of constant debt and financial problems that the family faces. At the show’s various turning points, lack of safety nets of social welfare stream through the plotline as “crisis ordinariness”.

Two recurring tropes that point to crisis ordinariness are episodes that show characters adjusting to constant job change and shuttling back and forth between households. The Ademoğlu family must often rely on a pool of money saved or loaned by family members in case of rising hospital bills or unemployment. Increased rents are a recurring problem which leads Nisa and Gamze to be constantly on the move or on the brink of homelessness.  Nisa’s desperation deepens during Hakan’s disappearance, due to lack of opportunities for childcare, so the duty for household management falls on her daughter Emine’s shoulders, which not only compromises her academic performance at the school but also causes an unhappy teenage life. Nisa has a hard time holding onto a job as she never worked before, and at the same time she must also take care of her baby. Her unpaid and invisible domestic labor later yields a new career as a restauranteur. This depends on the bank loan Gamze can get, as she often does, thanks to her job as a branch manager of a local bank.

Although economic precarity is a recurring theme in Ömer, class differences are obscured in a neighborhood/mahalle [19]setting, in contrast to the ways in which the political economy of class relations is registered in the competing dizis such as Kızılcık Şerbeti and Kızıl Goncalar. Kızılcık Şerbeti and Kızıl Goncalar rely on the spectacularisation of class difference, both in their visual style and trajectory of the plots. While Kızılcık Şerbeti articulates the pious vs. secular frictions through the lens of not only cultural differences but also class relations that have been transformed by neoliberal Islam (as the “new”, i.e. postmillennial, status quo), Kızıl Goncalar reduces these contemporary class formations to settings and spectacles of antagonistic relations between a Kemalist family of secular “white” Turks and an ultraconservative tariqah order that deviates from the state-sanctioned, or “official”, Islam.

Evoking class consciousness, the differences in these families’ lifestyles are symbolized by expressive choices in the mise-en-scene (to almost farcical degrees), e.g. consumer goods, household settings and consumption patterns. In Kızılcık Şerbeti, the wealth of the Ünal family is always on the forefront, from the palatial decor of the living room to their private vans with tinted glass driven by chauffeurs. The Arslan family, although still an upper middle-class family living in a flat overlooking the Bosphorus, has Kıvılcım as the main breadwinner, whereas Nursema, Abdullah Ünal’s daughter, is often dissuaded from building a career as she does not need to work. In Kızıl Goncalar, the class difference is even more pronounced, as Zeynep’s family is impoverished new migrants who take refuge in the lodgings of the tariqah. The modesty of their household is juxtaposed against her twin sister Mira’s secular lifestyle in an upper-class villa, donned with modern furniture, a fireplace and high-end house appliances. In fact, for several episodes, this setting is used for commercials for a very expensive vacuum cleaner, with Meryem learning how to use this novelty device. Both pairs of families in the two shows are constantly marked by their lifestyle choices, but more importantly, by whether the women in the family are encouraged to participate in public life.

In Ömer, however, a nostalgic investment in the mahalle setting obscures the postmillennial formations of new pious middle classes by “culturalizing”, and thus de-politicizing, neoliberal Islam. While the pathos of familial crises in Kızılcık Şerbeti and Kızıl Goncalar is produced through the antagonizing forces of gender-based violence and class privilege, Ömer’s “crisis ordinariness” does not instrumentalize family through such a spectacular economy of oppositions and confrontations. Unlike in other two shows, the characters’ lives are situated in not just familial relations, but also mahalle relationships, marked with social and cultural homogeneity absorbing class differences. Although the Ademoğlu family’s house is portrayed with almost anachronistic decor, with no TV in sight and old furniture and handcrafted ornaments, the lifestyles of all families in the neighborhood are quite similar. From the clothes they wear to the dinners they eat as families; characters are portrayed as people with humble lives. Mahalle residents know and respect each other, as long as their moral values and norms remain uncontested.

In this setting, Vicdan and Gamze are the only markers of difference, due to their insistence on seeking independence as women, mostly expressed by Gamze’s wanting to live in her own house and to go out at night, and by Vicdan’s continuing to pursue sex work in a conservative neighborhood. Thus, Ömer's mahalle setting contributes to the show’s evasion (if not erasure) of class difference and cross-class/cross-cultural conflicts. In this way, the show deviates from its rivals’ diegetic intensification of crisis-spectacles, and ultimately, brings it to an earlier finale as a series, since such “nostalgic” choices hinders sufficiently competitive opportunities for plot expansion. 

	The pathos of familial crises in Kızılcık Şerbeti is produced through the antagonizing forces of gender-based violence and class privilege, by instrumentalizing family through a spectacular economy of oppositions and confrontations.