In the last decade, television drama series of Nordic countries have travelled worldwide and have become very popular among globally diverse audiences. The big success of Danish TV exports in Europe such as Borgen, Forbydelsen (The Killing), and Broen (The Bridge) have attracted attention of niche Turkish audiences who are well-educated, white collar, urban, middle age, global consumers of media products. Relying on focus group and personal interviews with the Turkish audiences of Danish dramas, I explore the cultural reception of these dramas in Turkey and strive to understand why some Turkish audiences passionately watch and value Danish dramas. Considering media texts as cultural transporters of social, political and economic features of a specific society, I ask which hybrid cultural dynamics in Danish dramas entail the Turkish audiences and touch their sensibilities. In this context, I investigate the significant role of transnational media consumption in the identity construction of national audiences at the age of global media. In this paper, I also question the concept of cultural proximity (LaPastina and Straubhaar 2005) to analyze how perceived similarities and commonalities influence TV drama viewing choices of the global Turkish audiences. Straubhaar’s definition of cultural proximity, “the tendency to prefer media products from one’s own culture or the most similar possible culture” (Straubhaar 2003, p. 85), and even La Pastina and Straubhaar’s (2005) broadened definition of the concept including language, ethnic appearance, humor, historical reference, dress style etc., is not quite helpful to explain the Turkish audiences’ engagement with cultural politics of the Danish TV series. Therefore, cultural proximity, in its current form, cannot explain whether the diverse and heterogeneous perceptions of audiences that facilitate the sense of cultural intimacy and immediacy to the media text. Therefore, I try to extend the notion of cultural proximity by conceptualizing it as a dynamic process constructed in a historically specific context and grounded in active articulation of the sense of immediacy by the audiences’ expressions and experiences.

Eylem Yanardagoglu, Kadir Has University, Turkey In the last decade one of the most rapidly developing areas of the Turkish media industry has been TV series production. Highly diversified in their themes and target audiences, until the beginning of 2000s, these series remained as locally produced and consumed products. They varied from big productions of literary adaptations to small budget sit-coms, but all somehow managed to glue their viewers to the TV screens. In the last decade series became more professional, industrialised and transnational. So far, around 70 different Turkish titles TV series have been broadcast to audiences in 39 countries. For instance, in the Arab speaking countries, they comprise approximately 60 % of the shares in foreign programme broadcasts. Some experts have characterized this as neo-Ottoman cool, referring to Turkey’s growing “soft power” role in successfully combining Islam with democracy. However, survey data from 16 Arab countries, previous audience studies, and our in-depth interviews with Istanbul-based producers and distributors refute this. This paper is based on research that underscores the region’s glocal flexibility and the market articulations overarching Turkey’s soft power ambitions. It explores the factors that made TV series such a major attraction for transnational viewers by re-evaluating the public diplomacy debates and considering the shifting global dynamics of production as well as distribution with in-depth interviews conducted with distributors and producers based in Istanbul.

Turkey’s television industry has become a global growth industry with over 250 commercial TV channels, whose national and transnational audiences span over 100 countries from the Balkans to the Middle East and from Asia to Latin America, making the country the 2nd largest producer of television series in the world after Hollywood today. In 2016 alone, television series exports brought over 350 million dollars in revenue reaching over 500 million viewers, with a number of TV series breaking viewership records both inside and outside of Turkey. This global success and popularity brought both TV industry professionals and government officials together to opportunistically unite under the claim that these exports strengthen Turkey’s soft power in the world, particularly in the Middle East. While this claim aligns with the government’s current foreign policy aspirations, it also puts an accountability burden on the industry. As a result, the professionals in the industry often find themselves trying to fend off interventions by governmental actors and various organizations that are close to the government. These interventions range from complaints and criticisms regarding the perceived inaccuracies in the representations of Turkish national identity, history and cultural values to government officials’ openly supporting TV series that they deem friendly to national interests and their conservative ideologies. With the help of my findings from the in-depth interviews I conducted with TV industry professionals in Turkey, I analyze how the cultural policies implemented on TV exports and interventions by government officials influence the content, production and sales of these TV series. By doing that, I aim to illustrate the hegemonic struggles over the cultural representations of “Turkishness” by both the commercial TV industry and Turkish government.

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.