The downing of a Russian military jet by Turkish forces in November 2015 caused a major crisis between Russia and Turkey, with a Russian reaction of freezing bilateral relations. At the same time, a new Russo-Turkish project sprouted, also in November 2015, “the first Russo-Turkish drama” (“Premier! New series,” 2016). Casting was completed by February 2016 and filming began in early March, at the height of the Russia-Turkey crisis. Star Media, a Russian production company with offices in Moscow and Kiev produced the drama by hiring Turkish and Ukrainian actors and filming in Ukraine and in Turkey. One of the producers of the drama, Ryashin Vitalievich, founded Star Media and is also an executive of Channel Inter in Ukraine, notorious for pro-Russian propaganda and owned by oligarchs with alleged ties to Russian business. The name of the drama, “East/West” reflects the narrative and popular geopolitics agenda accurately; it is a story that positions Turkey in an essentialist, backward East, and Russia in a progressive West. That market demand was one of the main factors that drove the production of the series is certain (“Evgeniya Loza,” 2016). However, why produce the series at the height of a major rift between Russia and Turkey? Why film in Ukraine and hire Ukrainian actors to pose as Russians--a year after the Crimea crisis? The principal aim of this study is to multimodally examine (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2001) how East (Turkey) and West (Russia) are discursively reproduced in this Russian drama, in response to and by employing neo-Ottoman cool, the political, economic and socio-cultural capital that promotes Turkey as a great power (Kraidy & Al-Ghazzi, 2013). By extending the breadth and depth of the dynamics of the intersection of geopolitics and popular culture in considerations of East and West, this study will demonstrate how political agenda can be enacted in spaces of popular culture. Guiding research questions are: How does this drama attempt to tame neo-Ottoman cool and Ukraine? What can television drama illuminate about the geopolitical history and contemporary tensions between great powers? Multiple theoretical tools will be used to interpret data, including neo-Ottoman cool (Kraidy and Al-Ghazzi, 2013), Orientalism (Said, 1978), and Eurasianism.