The entertaining idiocy that is Turkish TV

I used to think there was nothing worse than an evening of British telly, more specifically programs broadcast on, for example, channel five, ITV or E4. For instance an episode of Made in Chelsea, I'm a Celeb, Get me Out of Here topped of with an episode of Emmerdale. This is a rant about Turkish TV shows, which if you enjoy, then fair enough, but maybe you don't, for the same reasons as I don't.

Turkish TV and Soap Operas are one of the biggest success stories to come in recent years from this growing country. TV Shows have been picked up and exported all over the World, to households from Morocco and Algeria to Russia, the Baltic countries and even South America. They have been dubbed or subtitled into a variety of languages.

But where is the substance to these programs? Think of other TV Shows and channels to have found a substantial amount of international success, such as the BBC, Al Jazeera, CNN; mega-productions and dramas like Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad and the Walking Dead; witty comedies like South Park, Peep Show, Friends, Orange is the New Black and Modern Family, which have all seen great success. Not every TV show can appeal to every country and culture, but it is hardly arguable whether these shows have appealed to a Worldwide audience. They have, and so have Turkish dramas and soaps.

Why are there, from what I can see, no informative or educational, even witty, funny or sensible shows being produced in the land of tea and baklava? As I flick through TV channels here, all I can seem to find are slow paced cooking shows where the hosts do more talking than cooking, spin off of UK and USA TV shows like the Voice, Britain's got talent (except, Turkey's got talent), Big Brother (which is amazingly still on our TV screens albeit to a declining audience but has been picking up ratings in Turkey) and Survivor (a program so outdated you won't even remember it's once upon a time success in hooking UK audiences).

This mark of blood on the characters face slipped through the censors

Well if the Turkish Telenovelas are mildly entertaining, what problem do I have exactly with them? As a matter of fact, the story lines are so far-fetched and fantastical that you'll at times think you're watching a parallel universe, or that the script writers may have been on crack or heroin when they sat down to plan out the plot and characters. Every time I turn on the TV, a grown man or woman, usually in his or her late teens, is finding out who his or her real parents are, amongst floods of tears, bouts of screaming, fits of breaking or even burning objects (like their own clothes in a river), and other self-destructive behaviour. Because it's very hard to know, who your father or mother are, in the World of Turkish drama. You may either have been switched at birth with another child by mistake or deliberately, stolen from your parents by another couple, your mother may have had an affair with another man. But if you are an adolescent character in a soap, you will eventually find out one of the above, in the first or second episode, because without this kind of drama there is no story line or character development that the story writers think could possibly interest the patronised public who tune in like fools week in and week out.

I would say "let's not even mention the violence", but we have to, just because it is so predominant. Turkish broadcasting restrictions from the government don't allow any alcohol (bottles, glasses, etc), cigarettes or blood (yes, that's right) to be shows on TV. So forget about watching your favourite action film without large blurs around any blood, or covering people's hands and mouths in those bar scenes or intimate moments. In mafia programs like Kurtler Vadisi Pusu, expect gun fights in every episode, with no interestingly no restrictions on violence or portrayal of gun violence in daytime TV.

The most disturbing episode yet; a woman in tears, Melek, takes her like on
public TV at 9 pm, so she can reunite with her violent knife holding man,
who in her dreams is in heaven, of course

However, like in Karagül, it should be no problem to show a woman locking herself in a room and hanging herself from a stack of books, semi-chocking to death while her mother watches in horror through the window. Or for a man to try and choke a woman over a petty argument, which also involves lots of spitting in each others faces. And then there's the classic "your boss who is always male harasses you at work and even makes an attempt at raping you", which the Turkish public, at least the people I know, are not really that horrified by. The new episodes of Karagül are shown at 9 o'clock, but repeats are always shown earlier, at around 8 o'clock, when 100% of Turkish kids are still awake and plugged into the TV, even my husband's 1 and a half year old nephew and his 10 month old cousin.

I would describe the Turkish Dizi (soap opera), as a South American Telenovela on crack. They have taken all the fun elements from the telenovela and magnified it to a horrendous mess of inhuman activity, that broadcasts in daylight hours, to kids in many homes around the World, building a distorted picture of the World they live in. The violence can be more exaggerated than a Quentin Tarantino film (just without the blood), and you wouldn't want your 4 and 6 year old watching that, would you?

Gun violence is glamorised in 90% of popular TV shows, watched by child and
adult audiences alike  

I'd like to end revealing one of the more recent episodes of Karagül, in which a young adolescent as response to family stresses, locks himself in a barn and sets the produce on fire with himself in it. Watch the rest of his episode and his whole family braving into the flaming barn in an effort to save their pyromaniac son. Let's hope that Turkish adolescents have better coping mechanisms to deal with family problems.

I hope you've enjoyed this article, after all I've only scratched the surface, because I try and stay away from the TV anyway. What do you think?

For a taste of Turkish TV, check out the following links:
Wikipedia - Turkish Television Drama
Most Popular Turkish TV Series
Best Turkish TV Series of 2015 - Do You Know Turkey?


Tags: the entertaining idiocy that is Turkish TV, English TV channels in Turkey, Turkish soap operas, Turkish TV series, Turkish TV series with English subtitles, media censorship in Turkey, Turkish TV canli