The Turkish soap opera, or dizi, as it is called in Turkey, has come into preeminence as a genre since the turn of the millennium. A nexus of cutthroat competition, market forces allowing for intense investment, and high skill levels among production staff have combined with strong traditions of storytelling to yield a product that has achieved near complete dominance of the Turkish primetime market in the last 15 years. More recently, this content has started to move abroad, dominating the Balkans, Bulgaria, and Greece in the early 2000s, adding much of the Arab world to that list since 2008, and moving on to Russia, Eastern Europe, and even Latin America more recently. This phenomenon has led to claims both within Turkey and without about Turkish "soft power" and its coordination with Turkish Foreign Minister Davutoglu's diplomatic policy of "strategic depth." While both admirers and critics have called attention to the "neo-Ottoman" aspects of Turkish foreign policy and Turkish drama distribution, the programming clearly does not operate on an agenda coordinated with that of the majority AK-Party, as evidenced by Prime Minister Erdogan's November 2012 condemnation of and threat to the most popular TV export, the 16th Century Ottoman costume drama Magnificent Century. This paper examines the overlaps and disconnects between the cultural movement of Turkish dizis and the diplomatic maneuvers of the AK-Party through an analysis of discourses regarding the shows in both Turkish and international media and through ethnographic engagements with viewers and media workers in Turkey, the Balkans, and the Arab world. It finds that terms such as "soft power" and "neo-Ottomanism" are strategically deployable shifters (Urciuoli 2003, Silverstein 1976), with meanings that vary greatly depending on the context and the actor. It then examines the cross-purposes of these multiple discourses in light of media ownership and political patronage in Turkey, and with regard to national identity in the international media.