Abstract
In the first special issue dedicated to European Cultures of Production (2018), we emphasised our wish to expand on the knowledge about television production processes by going beyond the Anglophone sphere and by giving greater focus on the wider contexts in which production processes take place. This led us to highlight the cultures of production which inevitably had strong national foci. Although we indicated that these cultures of production were situated in larger developments including digitisation and globalisation, the focus of the six contributions was on understanding the specificities of imagined national (Anderson, 2006) structures and processes of production. In this second special issue, we want to draw greater attention to how these imagined national processes are embedded in transnational structures. We thus want to situate production cultures within larger glocalising tendencies (Robertson, 1995).
In his seminal essay, Ronald Robertson (1995) explained how globalisation always contains elements of localisation – and vice versa. His comprehensive discussion of discourses developed around globalisation indicates how the local and global spheres are constantly determined by each other, with the world becoming at once more homogenised and heterogenised, a point further developed particularly well in research that examines the adaptation of television formats into local contexts (e.g. Esser, 2013, 2017; Moran, 1998, 2009). As Manuel José Damásio and Jorge Paixão da Costa in their contribution to this issue argue, much of the research so far, however, has focused on reception processes. While there is a whole range of scholarship available that looks at the local–global negotiations within the industry as a whole, from commissioning to production (Weissmann, 2018; McElroy and Noonan, 2019) to international sales processes (Havens, 2006; Kuipers, 2011), they nevertheless emphasise the meaning-making processes based on the encounter with the global and how this encounter is processed into national imaginations. This special issue in contrast is focused on how the transnational encounters shape or are shaped by national cultures of production. Thus, the authors in this special issue draw on production studies methods (Banks et al., 2016; Caldwell, 2008) in order to show how these transnational–national negotiations operate during the process of production. Importantly, rather than emphasising the ‘audience-like’ sense-making processes of production personnel (Levine, 2007), the contributors here emphasise that the transnational is precisely part of the local context of the cultures of production.
Many of the contributions draw on Bourdieu’s field theory (1993, 1998) in order to describe how despite operating in global contexts, television workers nevertheless produce closed systems of practice which become solidified into local cultures of production. In doing so, they highlight very specific conditions that affect both working practices and the output produced. Damásio and Paixão da Costa discuss the specific conditions in Portugal, a country that, after having been dominated by Brazilian imports for many years, became one of the most prolific producers of television fictions in Europe. They highlight how this happened as a result of a number of conditions: on the one hand, the close relationship between two broadcasters and two production companies whose personnel relied on high levels of social capital of the bonding type, and on the other hand, by massifying the production of telenovelas while also emphasising success and a number of characteristics that were perceived as specifically local. Overall, they argue for the need to investigate both production processes and the larger national systems in which they operate, so that both self-mythologising elements (Caldwell, 2008) and the structures that form the conditions for production processes can be highlighted. In doing so, Damásio and Paixão da Costa clearly emphasise opportunities, as well as some pitfalls, that emerge as a result of the localisation of production processes of transnational programmes.
Greta Gober more strongly uncovers the pitfalls of the transnational process of marketisation as it impacts the local production cultures of news in Poland. In her detailed ethnography of news production at the national public service broadcaster, Telewizja Polska (TVP), she examines how the local production culture, which emerged as a result of this transnational process, is deeply affected by the combined discrimination of sexism and ageism. Women television workers are perceived to want to work primarily in front of the camera, but when they do so, their careers are limited by a focus on traditional beauty standards which means that they are perceived as too old by the age of 40. Drawing on Bourdieu (1993, 1998), Gober highlights how both the habitus and the space of possibles create deeply discriminatory conditions that are legitimated through the constant recourse to the market and (assumed) audience preferences in particular. Thus, the transnational conditions appear to underscore the local specificities of the culture of production in which ageism and sexism combine to exclude women from production processes.
In contrast to the previous articles, Vilde Schanke Sundet considers the local production processes that led to a locally specific programme which later became internationally successful. Schanke Sundet indicates how SKAM (2015–2017), a teenage drama published online on the NRK website and social media, was very much produced for and in line with the remit of the local public service broadcaster. She describes a tradition of public service production that emphasises the local needs of audiences, which when making the programme is being placed at the centre of the production through extensive research processes that involved hundreds of interviews and casting sessions with 1200 teenagers. The specificities of this local culture of public service broadcasting, however, translated relatively quickly into international success. Schanke Sundet indicates that this success did not occur through traditional channels of international television exploitation. Rather, the programme relied on international audiences finding the series online and developing a fan community that provided subtitles via Google Docs and similar channels. As Schanke Sundet argues, it seems to be precisely the local culture of public service broadcasting that creates the conditions for its international success, a culture that can also explain the success of Nordic Noir which simultaneously paved the way for SKAM.
Before the contributions to the special theme, Michael Mario Albrecht starts off this issue by examining the opportunities offered by American prestige drama to generate important public debate. Examining think pieces that were published in response to True Detective’s (HBO, since 2014) first season, Albrecht discusses the debates that the series generated around the representation of masculinity. Rather than trying to answer the question of whether the series is misogynist or not, Albrecht shows how think pieces responded to the representations of hegemonic masculinities and traditional femininities by bringing to the mainstream debates about toxic masculinities that had previously been the reserve of academia and leftist enclaves. Here again, then, we see television function as a public forum (Newcomb and Hirsch, 1983) that, in the case of True Detective, Albrecht argues, ‘became a discursive point of convergence for problematising masculinity and the ways in which prestige television intersects with discourses of toxic masculinity’.