Will It Travel? The Local Vs. Global Tug-of-war for Telenovela and Turkish Dizi Producers

Abstract

Dramatic serialized television content currently enjoys a dominant position in the television and OTT global market. Simultaneously, production and consumption are changing due to digital technologies. In this environment, long-established telenovela production powerhouses—Mexico, Brazil, Colombia and U.S. Telemundo—face new opportunities and threats that complicate some of the differences between their local and global audiences. In addition, new non-Latino-American players, such as Turkey, have been displacing telenovela producers in several markets, including on their own turf. Turkish dramas—dizis—have made a global footprint. Annual revenue from overseas sales of Turkish TV shows exceeded the $300 million mark in 2017, giving Turkey a 25% share of the international market for television fiction. Turkey and the major telenovela producers mentioned above are undergoing political and economic changes that impact their television sectors, the stories they tell, and their production conditions. As production decision makers for both telenovelas and dizis factor in both their national audiences and contexts and the global market trends, the perennial tension between prioritizing the domestic or the international market has become even more critical. Underpinned by how they rank local ratings versus global sales, these tensions influence the writing, casting and production processes. In this chapter, I examine the tensions between local and global markets for the telenovelas produced for Telemundo and Univision—which are inextricably linked to Mexico’s telenovela production and consumption—and for Turkish dizis, and how these impact their production.