New Kings of the World by Fatima Bhutto

Author:Fatima Bhutto
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia Global Reports
Published: 2019-02-22T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

“The first agreement we should do is don’t call them soap operas,” Dr. Arzu Ozturkmen, who teaches oral history at Bogaziçi University in Istanbul, scolds me. “We are very much against this.”

Soap operas, telenovelas, and dramas are all different genres. What Turkey produces for television (“we don’t call it Turkish television either”) are dizi. They are a “genre in progress” declares Dr. Ozturkmen—who is a published author on the subject—with unique narratives, use of space, and musical scores. While most statistics show that Americans watch the most TV in the world at 4.5 hours a day, Turkey’s Radio and Television Supreme Council (RTUK) claims that the honor goes to the Turks, who watch an average of a full hour more.* More surprising, however, is that, due to its volume of international sales and global viewership, today Turkey is second only to America in worldwide TV distribution.

The first Turkish dizi to leave home was Çalikusu, which Russia bought in the 1980s and retitled Lovebird. It was such a big hit that Tims Productions, one of Turkey’s biggest dizi producers, remade it in 2013 and once again it was snapped up by Russian audiences. Ay Yapim—alongside Tims, these two production houses are the Alpha and Omega of Turkish dizi—first began investigating international markets as early as 1994, though they didn’t find many takers then. In 2007, foreign sales of dizi only brought Turkey a grand total of $1 million. Ten years later, the value of dizi exports exceeded $350 million.

At the 2012 MIPCOM, the commercial TV festival at Cannes, Turkish production companies did business with traditionally closed markets like China, Korea, and even NBC Universal, which bought the rights to distribute Aşk-ı Memnu to Latin America. Latin America was once the mother ship of soap operas, exporting telenovelas to the world. But today Chile is the largest consumer of dizi in terms of number of shows sold, while Mexico, followed by Argentina, pay the most to buy them.

Dizi are often adapted from Turkish literary classics and are sweeping epics that run over two hours long. Advertising seconds are cheap in Turkey, and RTUK mandates that every twenty minutes of content be broken up by seven minutes of commercials. Every dizi has its own original soundtrack and can have up to fifty major characters, as Magnificent Century did. They are filmed on location in the heart of historical Istanbul, at exquisite yali or Ottoman-era wooden homes along the Bosporus, or the stunning Izmir coast, using studios only when they must. In the 134 hours (and counting) that I’ve spent watching dizi, the best show yet has been Çukur (The Pit), a faithful Turkish rendition of The Godfather set in an Istanbul ghetto.

Çukur films on location in Balat, a run-down but vibrant Greek Orthodox and Jewish neighborhood dating back to Ottoman times. The day I visited the set, a stringer for China’s Xinhua News was filming a segment on the show while a bearded simit-seller screamed out his wares, oblivious to the cameras

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