Post-Socialist Rurbanity or When Rurality Meets Periphery. National and Transnational Representations in A Romanian Popular Comedy Series

Abstract

In the last decade, TV series in Romania have witnessed an increase in audience numbers, especially with the development of VoD platforms. In contrast to the research devoted to them, we will focus on a comedy series broadcast by the most popular Romanian TV channel, PRO TV, devoted to a local audience, but with an important socio-political relevance: Las Fierbinți. We will try to show that this series, which started after Romania joined the EU, indicates an essential transformation of the post-socialist socio-cultural reality: the rural/urban opposition is sliding towards another, periphery/core, where the core is the West idealised as order and wealth. Although it is considered a rural comedy – like several other popular Eastern European series – Las Fierbinți presents a world that can be called rurban, typical of the post-socialist Western periphery: although they live at home, the characters in the film have very little to do with an agricultural economy. The characters form a rurban typology in which the series presents us with a world that is neither rural nor urban, but which cannot adapt to an idealised West, the centre of the wealthy and rational world towards which the middle classes are tending.