Television Series Research Articles

Turkish TV Series as a Soft Power Tool

The concept of soft power, developed by Joseph Nye in the 1990s, refers to a country’s ability to influence others in pursuit of its interests through cultural, political values, and foreign policy, rather than military or economic coercion. Turkey has adopted this strategy by transforming cultural and media elements into tools of foreign policy. Particularly since the 2000s, the significant leap in the television series industry has positioned Turkey as one of the leading countries in television exports globally. This study examines the impact of Turkish television series, a crucial tool of Turkey’s cultural diplomacy, on the international stage through content analysis of the series “Gümüş” and “İstanbullu Gelin”. The analysis reveals that these series idealize and present Turkey’s cultural values and lifestyle while simultaneously reflecting and transforming Turkish culture and society in various ways. This phenomenon is notably supported by visual representations that highlight Istanbul as a center of attraction. Furthermore, it has been determined that foreign audiences develop a positive perspective towards Turkey and Turkish culture through these series, indicating that they play a significant role in strengthening Turkey’s soft power. In conclusion, it is emphasized that Turkish television series enhance the country’s cultural influence on a global scale and support its soft power strategies, thereby strengthening Turkey’s position in international relations.

Between Memeability and Televisuality: The (Self-)Memefication of Television Series

This essay explores how seriality and televisuality inform and fuel meme culture. Television and streaming series not only provide material for internet memes, i.e., appropriable audio-visual extracts that circulate on social media and video-sharing platforms, but often already feature meme-like visuals themselves, e.g., visual or scenographic imitations of artwork, reenactments of movie scenes, or even entire iconographies of a media franchise. In a semi-historical approach, this essay explores these “memefications” as intertextual practices for recalling, recycling, and preserving cultural artifacts. Citing various cases in US series from an autobiographical collection of such revisualizations and elaborate referential networks in both legacy TV series and popular contemporary shows, this essay proposes a taxonomy of pre-internet memefication within and between series: intermedial, interserial, and intraserial memefications. I discuss them as aesthetic and praxeological precursors of current moving image memes such as TikToks, which similarly restage scenes, characteristics, or tropes from other shows, films, or media. As it is a key characteristic of televisuality to adopt and transform modes of representation from other media, I argue that television may have premeditated and mastered memefication before the conception of internet memes, which are now prevalent in everyday communication.

Organic Representation as a Critical Media Approach to Leadership Studies in Popular Culture.

This article applies the critical media concept of organic representation to leadership studies as an analytic of how various creators in popular culture today are not just writing inclusive storytelling but, more notably, modeling new modes of production and self-presentation that are actively challenging hegemonic industry practices and larger cultural ideologies around power, equity, leadership, and success. In conversation with leadership for liberation (see Patterson-Stephens etal. in this issue), I employ an interdisciplinary approach that bridges critical leadership models with critical media analysis to place their aligned perspectives in direct conversation with one another. In pursuant of adding critical media analysis to the leadership studies toolkit, this article applies organic representation to an original analysis of the television series Reservation Dogs and advocates for a critical interrogation of media storytelling, production, and distribution to better understand represented communities also as stakeholders in pop culture narratives.

Love with exploitation: monogamy, prostitution and concubinage

ABSTRACT This essay reads a Taiwan prime time television series on the making-good of a widowed wife-concubine pair (Monga Woman, 2014) in the series’ indirect indexing of a licensed prostitute movement turned squatters’ struggle on the one hand, and the representation of a residual form of domestic cohabitation (concubinage), incidentally part of public discussions of marriage equality reform before the legalization of same-sex marriage in 2019. The essay argues for a feminist historiography that re-connects monogamy-adultery/concubinage-licensed prostitution as a historical continuum (bianxuti) divided in moral and economic opposition rigidified in post-cold war epistemological re-alignments. A feminist story about history that forgets monogamy-prostitution-adultery as a continuum mediating processes of enforced political change might harm as much as help, at the ground (subsistence) level. Considering prostitution, monogamy, and concubinage/adultery on a marriage spectrum would help show the connection between legal regulation in transition and changing forms of moral and economic exploitation. Such connections make for sexualized peoples and vulnerable communities, with lives rendered more difficult in moving or not, in between, along the spectrum in time. In proposing a relay of feminized intimate labors in a regime of married coupledom, I suggest that holding concubinage in long view as mediating and mediated by a changing marriage form allows us to see concubinage and prostitution in living connection to coupled marriage and/as housewifization process.

Past imperfect: Transition narratives, popular discourses and The Informant

Introduced in April 2022 on HBO Max, Hungarian coming-of-age espionage dramedy set in the mid-1980s, The Informant fits seamlessly into the trend of Eastern European contents that utilize global waves of nostalgia and socialist allegories to reference contemporary political issues. In this article, we propose that due to the specific situation of the totally centralized Hungarian media industry, and its capacity to rearticulate history in favor of the populist vision of the Orbán regime, the series goes much further than the aforementioned global trend. The television series effectively thematizes a fundamental doubt in the transition narrative as a teleological story with a universal moral lesson and injects an alternative interpretation of history into public discourses by proposing a third, critical space not overdetermined by the bipolar logic of contemporary right-wing populism. As such, the show utilizes a transnational – often highly stylized – image of socialism with the explicit goal of distancing itself from the discourses on individual moral responsibility, collaboration and resistance. The significance of this detachment consists in the fact that the language of moral responsibility has been effectively monopolized by the post-globalized, nationalist Hungarian state media, in which the forces of the nation are always cast in the roles of heroes, and anybody who does not agree as antiheroes. This in turn highlights the gap between the operational aesthetic of a transnational television series created for global audiences and the blind spots of the local cultural memory of the 1980s.

They don’t know ‘Diddly Squat’: An exploration of students’ knowledge and perceptions of agriculture through Clarkson’s Farm

Documentary television series Clarkson’s Farm has been lauded for its positive, entertaining depiction of British agriculture. Airing in 240 countries and territories, the program follows British TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson in his attempts to manage his operation with the help of more experienced farmhands. Researchers at The Ohio State University, curious about the implications of screening the show for audiences with varying degrees of agricultural knowledge, analyzed students’ written responses to two episodes using a conceptual framework comprised of the Differential Susceptibility to Media Effects Model and agricultural literacy. We found that all students enjoyed the program, but students with less initial agricultural knowledge gained a greater appreciation for and understanding of agricultural practices, while their counterparts related to the content themselves and identified it as an example of a positive depiction of agriculture that could be used to educate others. We offer recommendations for implementing Clarkson’s Farm as an educational tool and for further exploration of its potential future impact on agricultural literacy.

From the Small Screen to the Big Screen: The Super8's Distribution of Sandokan TV series

‘From the small screen to the big screen’ proclaims the advertising text of the Super8’s of a television series distributed in 1979 by the German company Piccolo Film, emphasizing the novelty and the potential of format. The film is Sandokan, an Italian miniseries from 1976 directed by Sergio Sollima and starring the Indian actor Kabir Bedi as the exotic protagonist of Salgari’s famous adventure. This contribution maps the European and global success of the series and its media format’s history, focusing in particular on Super8’s distribution. It retraces Super8 ‘reduction prints’ in different languages by relying on film catalogues from the seventies and on sources gathered from platforms such as Imdb and Ebay (where collectors trade Super8) and interviews to ex-employees and owners of former Super8’s distribution companies in Italy and Germany. The paper considers the geographical circulation of Sandokan’s Super8 editions to investigate Sandokan’s figure beyond its literary origins. Super8’s history shows an unexplored relation between media broadcasting and past practices of home viewing beyond the theatrical realm. Sandokan’s Super8 circulation can be regarded as part of larger phenomenon of consumer culture, where reduction prints become a synecdoche to a larger cultural myth.

Poking the beaver: feminist approaches to television comedy as creative resistance to patriarchal and organisational power

ABSTRACT This article explores how humour in television comedy is used to satirise patriarchal and organisational power structures. The research combines feminist critique with Foucault’s theories of power to examine the moral viewpoints from which two comedy screenwriting academics target the objects of satire in their comedy television series, Fighting Fit (Cake) and The MILF Next Door (Leder). Cake establishes an anti-neoliberal moral viewpoint as the critical lens through which to satirise bureaucratic workplaces. Referencing narrative comedies such as The Office (2001–2003) and Utopia (2014–2024), her analysis highlights how Fighting Fit subverts corporate power structures by situating them within the context of a gym. Leder’s discussion of The MILF Next Door uses a feminist perspective, drawing upon Love (2016–2018) and Veep (2012–2019) to examine how transgressive female protagonists publicly and personally resist patriarchal power. By locating their series in relatable, suburban settings, the writers of Fighting Fit and The MILF Next Door, extend the reach of satire that provokes an ideological critique to a broader audience. The authors’ analysis demonstrates how satire is operationalised as a potent tool for challenging entrenched power structures. Their use of satirical feminist moral viewpoints enables a powerful form of creative resistance.

Review of Bednarek (2023): Language and characterisation in television series: A corpus-informed approach to the construction of social identity in the media

Review of Bednarek (2023): Language and characterisation in television series: A corpus-informed approach to the construction of social identity in the media

Psychoanalysis on Conflict of the Main Character in TV Series Emily in Paris Season 2: Psychoanalytic Analysis

This study aims to examine the character of Emily Cooper in the second season of the television series Emily in Paris from a psychoanalytic perspective. The focus of the research will be on Emily Cooper's problems and how Emily solves them. This study applies a qualitative methodology, as qualitative research mainly concerns qualitative phenomena. This study aims to determine how individuals feel or think about a particular issue or institution. The data of this study were collected by watching the television series on Netflix, screen shooting and then analyze descriptively. In addition, this research implements two theories: the first is from Sigmund Freud (1989), known as the model of the mind, and the second is from Kenney (1966), known as the forms of conflict. According to Sigmund Freud, there are three models of mind such as id, ego and superego. While Kenney classified the conflict into four, conflict within a single man, conflict between men, conflict between man and society, and conflict between man and nature. This study then determined that conflict within a single man, and conflict between men occurred most frequently in Emily Cooper's character. When Emily Cooper tries to solve a problem, her id, ego, and superego all play an important role. Keywords: Conflict, Psychoanalysis, Kenney, Sigmund Freud

From Absent Mothers to Wicked Stepmothers: The Brontës, Motherhood and Neo-Victorianism

The present article will try to cover the main considerations regarding the depiction of motherhood in the most culturally reproduced Brontëan novels, namely Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) and—to a lesser extent—Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) and Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853). Special attention will be given to Wuthering Heights and its cultural reproductions due to its potential to delve into generational traumas and physically absent matrilineal bonds as well as due to its influence in popular memory through adaptation—be it faithful or “classic” adaptations of the novel or those imaginings that use a characteristically Brontëan language to deal with some of the issues present in the aforementioned narrative. Thus, the main aim of this discussion is to trace the affective potential of the mother-daughter bond in the Brontës narratives so as to provide a framework of reference from which to explore how neo-Victorian fiction—in this case, Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Michael Stewart’s Ill Will: The Untold Story of Heathcliff (2018), William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth (2016) and Kristoffer Nyholm and Anders Engström’s television series Taboo (2017—)—has re-imagined these relationships and their affective legacy in cultural memory.

“I Don’t Know What to Do with It”

In season 2, episode 4 of the critically acclaimed British television series Fleabag, the eponymous main character speaks to her best friend, Boo, in a flashback following Fleabag’s mother’s funeral. “I don’t know what to do with it,” Fleabag tells Boo. “All the love I have for her.” Here, Fleabag demonstrates what I refer to as affective excess—an overwhelming emotional response that feels too much for an individual to bear alone. In this case, Fleabag feels too much love for her mother but has no mother to receive it. Boo responds in her typical, guileless way: “I’ll take it. No, I’m serious. It sounds lovely.” The series implies that Fleabag channeled her love for her mother, and the grief accompanying her death, into her relationship with Boo. However, after Boo also dies, the viewer is introduced to one of the show’s central questions: Where can one place their affective excess when the usual channels are no longer available? The show explores how the intersecting demands on Fleabag—as both a feminist and a neoliberal postfeminist agent—leave her without an adequate outlet for unburdening her excess grief and guilt, ultimately rendering healing and relief impossible. Despite her avowed atheism, Fleabag appears to eventually find relief through spiritual means, specifically confession. This article argues that while Fleabag offers a powerful feminist critique of neoliberal society, it also presents an implicit reflection of the limits of feminism and advocates for a transcendent element in human relationships as the only adequate place to unburden affective excess.

‘It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s proof that America wants a female superhero!’ Adapting Supergirl for #MeToo Era Television

Abstract Comic book superheroes have been adapted in countless TV series and movies, but adaptations of women superheroes have been less frequent and often poorly received. The six-season run of Supergirl (2015–2021) is one of a few recent exceptions. To better chart the adaptation process, this article will draw on published interviews with the show’s creative team, as well as a first-hand interview with one of the show’s producers that I conducted in 2020. The comments of the creative team are triangulated with textual analysis of the show and an examination of the wider cultural context in which it was produced to provide a rounded understanding of how this 1950s comic book character was adapted for #MeToo era broadcast television. How did producers grapple with Supergirl’s diminutive name, sexualized image, and overshadowing cousin, and turn her into a twenty-first century feminist icon for a diverse broadcast audience? As a revisionist adaptation, Supergirl demonstrates a tension between progressive potential and limitations for comic book superheroines on television. This article reveals how writers and producers balanced Supergirl’s history with the contemporary cultural landscape to create a television series with wide appeal and emphasizes the role of adapters in this process. Supergirl offers both a critique of comic books and a commentary on the historical representation of superheroines, but the success of the show ultimately does not herald dramatic changes in adaptations of comic book superheroines.

Du måste veta vad du vill

You must know what you want. Children and the issue of consent in a Swedish educational television series. In this article, constructions of consent are analysed within a Swedish educational television series aimed at primary school pupils. Utilizing critical discourse analysis, two discourses within the program series are identified and examined: a juridical and a neoliberal discourse. Additionally, the study analyses how discourses are expressed and reinforced through e.g. different modalities. Among the study’s most significant findings is that consent is presented as something relatively simple. In relation to consent, responsibility is portrayed as a complex practice where the child is constructed in multiple ways. Thus, the child is portrayed as both a competent and responsible subject, and a subject in need of the adult’s assistance and protection.

Encountering Heathcliff and the Madwoman in the Attic in Taboo (2017—)

ABSTRACT This article discusses the extent to which the television series Taboo (2017 –) can be considered a (neo-)Brontëan text due to its (re-)appropriation of Brontëan discourses, specifically those connected to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), as well as to Jean Rhys’ neo-Victorian rewriting of the latter, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). The series appears to do so in order to delve deeper into the problematics of fictionalising nineteenth-century conceptions of “the wild” that replicate stereotypes of the British colonial past and its violence. That is, this work analyses how Taboo seems to question the particular power structures that are responsible for that violence through its rewriting and revising of distinctively Brontëan characters and tropes such as Heathcliff, the “madwoman in the attic,” and the “hilltop lovers” motif, which attests to the politicising and neo-Victorian potential of the above-mentioned narratives.

‘You can’t do that’? The ambiguities of Wet and Messy fetish videos

ABSTRACT Although the study of transformative works and the study of pornography are both decades old, there has been little analysis of any pornographic text as a transformative work. This article aims to address this through analyzing the Wet and Messy (WAM) fetish video series You Can’t Do That On Set (YCDTOS), a fan-created iteration of the transnationally successful Canadian series You Can’t Do That On Television (YCDTOTV; CTV/Nickelodeon 1979–1990). The article also addresses issues of genre and format with regard to pornography, in that YCDTOS is both a fan-created iteration of an episodic television series and features no explicit sex or nudity but is still positioned as pornography by its producers. The article also addresses the false binary of mimetic/affirmational versus transformative works, and the unclear boundaries between amateur and professional in fetish/WAM production, to illustrate just how messy a concept WAM fetish media can be.

“Let's Take the B*tch Down!”: A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of Race and Gender in HBO's Vice Principals

Purpose: In the HBO comedy series, Vice Principals, two white men vice principals respond to the hiring of a Black woman high school principal with physical, emotional, and workplace violence. The purpose of this study was to explore (1) white men educational leaders’ perceptions of a Black woman educational leader, and (2) their responses to being passed over for promotion by a Black woman. Methods: Using whiteness as property as the theoretical framework, this study uses a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis applied to the first season of the television series (nine 30-min episodes) to uncover the relationships and power dynamics between the three main characters. Findings: White men are the most likely to hold the high school principalship. The findings highlight how the series’ white male characters worked together to force the Black woman out of her role as principal, based on the assumption that either of them was more deserving of the position than her. Although fictitious, these examples parallel the real-world experiences of Black women educational leaders in today's public schools. Implications: This study contributes to scholarship about why Black educators may leave the profession, particularly highlighting the influence of unsupportive school contexts, and more specifically, the gendered racism experienced by Black women. Superintendent preparation programs can consider coursework that encourages aspiring district leaders to identify specific mentoring and support for Black women principals and principals from other marginalized backgrounds. Finally, this scholarship highlights how popular media can be a useful data source for educational leadership research.

Attitudes towards autistic characters in mainstream series and connections with viewers’ own characteristics: an exploratory study

Purpose This exploratory study aims to investigate viewers’ attitudes towards series with autistic characters. In recent years, there has been a noticeable increase in the depiction of autistic characters or characters displaying autistic symptoms in mainstream series. While research calls for a more realistic portrayal of these characters, little is known about viewers’ attitudes towards the portrayal of autistic characters. Design/methodology/approach Using an online questionnaire, the authors collected data from 348 young adults regarding their media consumption habits related to 15 different series featuring autistic characters. Additionally, the authors used an emotion recognition task (ERT). Findings The results show that participants expressed a stronger preference for series depicting characters with savant abilities compared to more “realistic” portrayals of autism. However, participants with lower scores in the ERT tended to watch series without savantism significantly more often. The findings revealed no significant differences based on sex in terms of viewership or preference for these series. These results suggest that biased or stigmatising portrayals may in part be influenced by viewers’ inclination towards savant characters. This study sheds light on viewers’ perceptions of television series featuring autistic characters, revealing potential preferences and the influence of certain character traits. Research limitations/implications Because of the exploratory nature of this study, further research is needed to enhance our understanding of the impact of media portrayals on attitudes towards autism. Originality/value The results suggest that biased or stigmatising portrayals may in part be influenced by viewers’ inclination towards savant characters. This study sheds light on viewers’ perceptions of television series featuring autistic characters, revealing potential preferences and the influence of certain character traits.

A commentary on “queering” Darna: how the Darlentina fandom reimagined the Darna 2022 TV series

ABSTRACT Darna is a female superhero from the Philippines who first appeared in Pilipino Komiks on May 13, 1950. Her image in Filipino society has evolved from being a role model for young children to an object of desire for cisgender men to an icon of female empowerment to an aspirational figure for the Filipino bakla (gay men). However, through all these roles, she has never resonated with nor connected to Filipino queer women – that is until the Darna 2022 television series. This essay looks at how Filipino female queer fans, known as Darlentina, have queerly read the Darna 2022 TV series and produced queer fan works such as queer fanfiction.

Insights on film and TV series analysis in sociology in times of digital media spread

This article aims to combine research agendas on Digital Sociology and the Sociology of cinema, explicitly considering the spread of Serial TV Shows on streaming platforms such as Netflix and HBO-Max. Since the early 2000s, with Web 2.0 allowing a shift in the traffic and consumption of multimedia–music, photos, videos, and animation– on the Internet, the presence of audiovisual content in everyday life has become more intensified than before with cinema and broadcast television. It is argued in this paper that this technological shift changes how societies and individuals relate to electronically mediated images and constitute symbolic and valuation references through social life. However, much of the cultural and imagistic references set in motion in present digital media were established by cinema and television currently in the 20th century, being seen in a naturalized way, although historically produced. This paper reviews Pierre Sorlín’s sociological approach to films as ideological productions, contributing to form historical and social shared ways of conceiving reality, and Sorlin’s methodological guidelines for analyzing films. However, the differences between cinema and television series are considered, according to Esquenazi’s approach to TV series. Nevertheless, this paper highlights how technical and cultural specificities of today’s digital media, paired with a deep individualization process, set new analytical challenges. So, it is presented an analytical reflection that places together connectivity and cinematic culture in order to comprehend how today’s ideologies are partly influenced by specific recurrent imagistic constructions diffused by streaming platforms by using cinema and television languages.