Abstract
Turkey has not only attracted attention for its rich Ottoman history, politics, and republicanism in modern times but also for its media, including a growing television industry. The Turkish television network has attracted global attention for both its domestic popularity and the viewership abroad. The edited volume Television in Turkey provides a historical backdrop and contemporary analysis of the local and transnational aspirations of the media industry in Turkey. It acquires significance because of the deep historical roots and wide political and cultural influences of the Turkish language and culture.
The volume is enriched by the academic background of both the editors, Yeşim Kaptan, a professor at the School of Communication Studies in the Kent State University and Ece Algan, a professor at the Communications Studies in California State University in the USA. While Kaptan’s research interests include Turkish media and audience reception, and global culture, Algan’s works focus on global communications, local and ethnic media, and gender and youth cultures. The book has contributions from authors of diverse backgrounds and expertise, mostly Turkish academics and researchers.
The subject is of immense interest and value to today’s academic and public discussion of media, transnationalism, and localism. Taking the case of the vast Turkish television network, the volume examines its impact on the regional and global culture, competing networks, and the phenomenon of either exporting its drama and movies or importing contents from abroad through over-the-top (OTT) platforms such as Netflix.
The editors aim to explore some lesser-known aspects of the Turkish television industry and its overreaching impact, locally, globally, and transnationally. In addition, it sheds light on the development and transformation of the Turkish television industry and the challenges faced by it. Further, the volume analyzes the state of Turkish television in the context of the socioeconomic and political atmosphere since the inception of the state media, represented in Türkiye Radyo Televizyon (TRT) in the early 1960s and after the ending of the state monopoly over the media (including television) in the 1980s. Issues related to the coverage of gender and identity questions have also been examined.
Television in Turkey traces the roots and beginnings of the transnational expansion of the Turkish television industry since the 1990s to former Soviet republics in Central Asia and Arab neighbors that were once Ottoman-ruled. It highlights the impacts of the Turkish television industry transnationally, drawing on some soap operas and shows from the 2000s and 2010s. In the words of the editors, the book “comprehensively examines…concepts and process by considering local dynamics…unique to Turkey such as its ethnic and gender identity politics, media policies and regulations and television consumption” (p. 19). The 13 essays, broadly divided into four sections, analyze the content of Turkish TV shows and how the Turkish television developed, then transformed from being locally popular into a transnational influencer, while underlying local challenges, including socioeconomic conditions, state’s roles, and control, and local and global audiences.
Exploring the locality of television in Turkey, the first three chapters provide a historical analysis for the state monopoly, commercial broadcasting, documentaries of the 1990s, and rural audiences. Burcu Sümer and Oğuzhan Taş, in their essay on the regulation of television contents, underline that the “broadcast content regulation in Turkey has always been tied to political partisanship and polarization” (p. 43). The third chapter by Burçe Çelik, which focuses on the documentaries telecast in the 1990s, notes that the three documentaries—DEMIRKIRAT: Bir Demokrasinin Dogusu (Demirkirat: The Birth of a Democracy], 12 Mart: Ihtilalin Pencesinde Demokrasi (March 12: Democracy under the Threat of Junta) and 12 Eylul (September 12)—were products of the neoliberal social order (p. 62). Nurçay Türkoğlu explores the rural audiences by conducting extended field research in 1987, 2010, and 2019 and concludes “the basic conditions of my research subjects—their use of media—television viewing habits…had hardly changed” (p. 79).
Esra Özcan uses mixed qualitative methods to analyze women’s participation in Karşıt Görüş [The Opposite View], a debate shows aired on Habertürk TV, a pro-government channel, in 2015 and notes, “women critical of AKP shied away from directly criticizing Erdogan … Elite women from the left and the right debated women’s issues … The perspectives of poor women, housewives, and women living in rural areas … were missing” (p. 99). Feyza Akınerdem examines women’s safety, trust and familiarity in the reality TV show Esra Erol’da Evlen Benimle (Marry me on Esra Erol’s Show) found how often women suffered from fragility and lack of confidence. Ayşegül Kesirli Unur’s essay explores female representation and demonstrates how detective dramas and shows are dominated by masculine norms.
Gökçen Karanfil examines the TRT’s transnational development through the establishment of channels, including TRT–INT, TRT Avaz, TRT El-Arabia, TRT Kurdi, and TRT World and shows that such transnational expansion is motived by planned reconnection with the Turkic and the formerly Ottoman-ruled regions in the Caucasus and Central Asia, as well as with Arab countries. Writing on the mediatization of sport in Turkey, Dağhan Irak explores how sports are delivered through the Turkish media locally and globally and provides a historical analysis of events and the role of the Turkish state in support of the international sports. In their essay on Turkish dramas streaming on OTT platforms, such as Netflix Turkey, Blu TV, and Puhu TV, Eylem Yanardağoğlu, and Neval Turhall argue that the transition to OTT streaming has allowed local production to become globalized.
Kumru Berfin Emre Cetin writes about how television mediatized the culture of the second-generation Alevi Kurds in London by understanding Turkish language dramas and Turkish news channels and how they impact this community. Miriam Berg sheds light on why Turkish drama series are popular in the Arab world based on interviews with Arab nationals in Qatar and finds that Turkish serials are seen as a women’s genre and indicate a desire to engage with alternative modernity, escapism, and personal identification. Finally, Inaya Rakhmani and Adinda Zakiah explore how Indonesian audiences consume what they describe as “Halal Turkish” dramas drawing the example of the popularity of Muhteşem Yüzyıl (Magnificent Century) in the Southeast Asian country (p. 245).
Television in Turkey provides a diverse but connected account of a complex subject. It draws its analyses from various contents, including political, developmental, sport, TV reality and debate shows, and serials. The sources of the work are contemporary, focus being on the 1990s to the present. The significance of the work lies in bringing together a vast view and issues related to the evolution of Turkish television networks and the impact of its globalization on politics, society, and international relations, a subject that remains largely unexplored in English academic writings.
The volume could have benefitted from annexures or a section outlining the vast expanse of Turkish TV serials and genres and statistics regarding their viewership, revenues, and exploring the issue of state support for private networks. Nonetheless, it will be of immense value to students, researchers and academics, and journalists interested in Turkish television studies, its transnational and global expansion, and those interested in media and gender studies in general.