Since the 1980s, television (TV) has been one of the most dominant mediums for global audiences (Chakravartty and Roy 2013; Miller and Kraidy 2016; Punathambekar and Sundar 2016; Straubhaar 2007; Kraidy 2002). Recently , with the addition of new TV industry actors—Korean, Indian, Danish, and Turkish TV industries—and the increase in the demand and access to TV programs due to the readily availability of multiple platforms, the 2000s have been popularly named the “second Golden Age of TV” (Lawson 2013). We believe that all these transformations necessitate a theoretical rethinking of the role and dilemmas of emerging television industries within global media flows that have increasingly been characterized by the fluidity of content due to global TV formats, adaptations of popular literature, remakes, and the ease of sharing via new media across countries and regions multidirectionally. By focusing on the rise of Turkish television in the global sphere, our book aims to critically examine a lesser-known emerging industry but one that has a rich history as a result of its complex sociocultural and political landscape formed partly through centuries-long interactions with both the Eastern and Western worlds and a turbulent relationship with modernity and Westernization. By situating Turkish television within the contemporary global developments of international TV markets and its own national sociopolitical, economic, and cultural dynamics, our goal is to explore both the ripple effects of emerging industries’ entrance into global markets and the political implications in the domestic realm of its transformation into a global growth industry.
Although it has been less than two decades since Turkish TV exports first met transnational audiences, they have already enjoyed unprecedented global success with no signs of slowing. Since 2014, the Turkish TV industry has maintained its status as the second highest exporter of scripted TV dramas in the world (Turkey World’s Second 2014; Vivarelli 2018) and since 2016 as the fifth largest TV program exporter worldwide (France and Turkey 2016), bringing over US $350 million in revenue and reaching over 500 million viewers (Sofuoğlu 2017). With their popularity soaring to such surprising heights, TV dramas produced in Turkey have caused tremendous excitement and awe among global audiences, TV executives, advertisers, and related media industries, as well as government officials and businesspeople who have been eager to take advantage of the curiosity and demand created by the Turkish TV dramas. Big mainstream dailies and trade magazines have offered numerous stories asking “what explains their global success” (Bhutto 2019), with enthusiastic titles such as “How Turkish TV is taking over the World” (Bhutto 2019) and “Turkish TV travels far as craze for dramas goes global” (Del Barco 2015), to name a few. These pieces attempt to grapple with various aspects of Turkish soaps’ rise to global popularity by focusing on the novelty of the productions, especially the characters struggling to negotiate conservative family values with the dilemmas of modern life, the presence of strong women characters and emphasis on women’s issues, the high production quality, the attractive actors, the fashionable costumes, the historic sites like the Topkapı Palace, and the exotic Istanbul locations, all of which appeal to diverse global audiences who, according to a number of distributors, are bored with American content (Cabrera 2015, p. 94).
Undoubtedly these factors are significant in the Turkish TV industry’s success, but what is at the core of the issue, we believe, is the question of how to evaluate its transnational expansion within both national and global media developments taking into consideration the various economic, cultural, and political implications of Turkey’s global televisual presence in and outside the country. The content at the center of the hype—Turkish TV series (dizi in Turkish)—did not develop in a vacuum and is first and foremost a product of a larger national televisual history with a distinct past that reflects the sociocultural and political dynamics of the country. We believe that in order to evaluate Turkish TV exports’ place in transnational markets, we first need to closely examine how TV broadcasting has been shaped, developed, and transformed in Turkey as a result of socioeconomic and political changes in both national and global contexts that have impacted the production and distribution of media, and reception processes.
Instead of attempting to offer a simple prescriptive formula to explain Turkish TV exports’ global popularity and Turkish television’s transnational success, our book aims to ferret out the national socioeconomic and political relationships and structures that have shaped the Turkish TV industry on its competitive journey through the international markets. We believe that studying the Turkish case can help us understand how national 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 the new players in the transnational media environment. The essays in our collection detail how the transformation of Turkish television from a domestic industry to a major transnational player was influenced by numerous supportive and disruptive local and global forces. They also underline various domestic challenges posed by the highly unstable political and economic environment of the country, deepening crony capitalism, and strong governmental control of the media in an increasingly authoritarian regime that the change from a parliamentarian to a presidential system has further accelerated.
In this introduction, we offer a brief overview of the sociopolitical, cultural, and economic struggles surrounding TV production, distribution, and reception in Turkey since the beginning of TV broadcasting. The changing dynamics of the cultural and political economy of Turkey’s television industry, including its structural and ideological transformation, the transnational aspirations of Turkish media, and the implications of its transnationalization will be discussed via examples that indicate key turning points in its history. We will also illustrate how societal debates around television content have ignited the question of representation and caused a struggle over official narratives, resulting in TV production processes and the industry becoming intertwined with politics. While under fierce competition for popular TV content and integrating its production processes with those of the global markets, the Turkish TV industry’s tactics for managing the ideological rifts in society that occur along its ethnic, religious, and political fault lines will also be explored, offering clues into the dilemmas that emerging TV industries face.
A Brief History of Television in Turkey
Contrary to common understanding, the history of television in Turkey did not start with the launch of the Turkish Radio and the Television Corporation (TRT) in the 1960s. Regular TV broadcasting was initiated in 1952 in the studios of the public Istanbul Technical University (ITU TV). However, due to its restricted reach (it was broadcast only in and around Istanbul), it is not ITU but the state-initiated Turkish Radio and the Television Corporation (TRT)—the one and only public broadcaster in Turkey—that is considered the first professional television (and radio) broadcaster in the country. After the establishment of the General Directorate of Turkish Radio and Television Corporation in 1964, state-controlled national broadcasting for the general public officially began on January 31, 1968. Between 1964 and 1972, TRT was an autonomous public institution. However, with the initiation of a 1973 ...