THE TRANSNATIONAL SPREAD OF TURKISH TELEVISION SOAP OPERAS

Abstract

Turkish soap operas that are primarily popular in Turkic Republics, Middle East, and the Balkans have in recent years spread to different countries. With the entry into Ukrainian, Pakistani, Russian, and Chinese markets last year, tens of Turkish soap operas now reach their viewers in over 50 countries, and generate export revenues. Short-term return on investment, new communication technologies, Istanbul’s ‘magnetic nature attracting new talents’ and different sociocultural forces and policies play key role in such extensive spread of Turkish TV series. As cultural commodities, TV series, while the images and identities they contain spread, reach at the same time new customers through geographical expansion, and increase the earnings of producers. Yet, the distribution of soap operas is important as much as their production. This requires focusing on the commodities with geo-linguistic and geo-cultural markets rather than companies producing these commodities. Therefore, demand for these non-Western commodities of different geographies points to a contra-flow. In a sense, while new media centers are emerging elsewhere other than the United States of America (USA)-Europe axis, it can be spoken of a regional opposition to the Western hegemony, though there is not an important historical leitmotive or transformation. Thus, in this study, relations between power, cultural commodity, and geography and the spread of Turkish soap operas in different geographies will be discussed with a political economic approach by also drawing attention to the historical commonality