A dash of glamour brightens the daily crush at Istanbul’s giant Esenler bus terminal. In one corner, commuters have gathered around a thicket of cameras and sound booms to glimpse celebrity Akin Akınözü as he filmed a scene for one of Turkey’s world-beating television dramas.
“It’s chaos!” exclaimed Akınözü during a break in the shooting of Veliaht, a genre-blending saga of crime, romance and family built around the imposter heir of a lucrative bus concession.
“We film an episode a week, broadcast it the next week, and work 12-hour days, all on location. It’s crazy. But you can’t create such an electric atmosphere otherwise. It makes the impossible possible.”
Turkish TV dramas, known as dizi, are renowned for making the impossible possible. Shows such as Magnificent Century, about the 16th-century Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, have hooked audiences across nearly 170 countries, according to official figures. Hollywood star Bradley Cooper counts himself a fan.
Now, though, they face an unusual plot twist: high inflation. Soaring prices have driven up costs, threatening to hollow out an industry that rakes in hundreds of millions of dollars a year in export revenues and has been celebrated by the government of strongman President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for attracting tourists and projecting Turkish soft power.
“We currently face even higher production costs than in Spain,” said Özcan Altunkaya, a member of the media committee at Istanbul’s Chamber of Commerce. “That affects international sales. After a while, TV exports will begin to decline.”
İzzet Pinto, founder and chief executive of Global Agency, a Turkish content distributor, said “shows now have to be superhits to survive. The result is a smaller ecosystem.”
The sector’s squeeze is a parable of Turkey’s economy, where an inflationary hangover from ultra-low interest rates has hurt competitiveness across industries from textiles and car manufacturing to white goods such as fridges.
Last month, the head of Turkey’s white goods association — second only to China in terms of global production — warned that exports dropped 10 per cent last year. Textile manufacturers face similar problems, with 380,000 jobs lost over the past three years, according to Turkish trade bodies.
Inflation, which peaked at 85 per cent in late 2022, is currently running at 30 per cent. Real exchange rate appreciation, fuelled by inflation outstripping the lira’s rate of depreciation, has added to the pain by boosting dollar- and euro-based costs further.
“Turkish television is the most incredible, efficient and beautiful machine,” said one European media executive who stopped operating there after hourly production costs tripled to more than $240,000. “The rise in costs means that the secret sauce of Turkish TV production is under threat.”
Turkish film producers have made consistently binge-worthy shows that sold across the world and had been watched by nearly 1bn people, according to the culture ministry.
Lush production values, good-looking actors and gripping dramas that often involved impossible love were shot against glamorous backdrops, such as Ottoman palaces or the Bosphorus, attracting audiences in the Middle East, north Africa and Latin America.
“I call it southern stories,” Veliaht’s co-producer Mehmet Eryılmaz said.
Muslim viewers could relax with family dramas that had no alcohol, were sexually modest (although a little violence was OK) and lead characters that depicted Muslims as heroes instead of fanatics, as many US or European productions can do. Latin Americans, meanwhile, enjoyed melodramas set among extended families, with conservative social mores that felt familiar.
Arguably, media executives and analysts said, the bigger part of dizi’s success lay in the structure of Turkey’s fiercely competitive television business model, which is now under threat.
On weeknights, Turkey’s five commercial channels and state broadcaster TRT typically broadcast a dizi each at prime time. As each dizi typically lasts three hours, including advertising breaks, that makes for up to 75 hours of programming a week.
Such massive output is winnowed by rating numbers the morning after broadcast. That leads to the swift cancellation of dud shows and fosters intense competition. For the roughly 60 per cent of Turkish programmes that succeed, it also leaves international sales as pure profit on top.
Assume eight successful series a year, said the European media executive, and that could mean “close to a thousand hours a year of programming sold overseas at $100,000 an hour”, he calculated. “It was a dream.”
Turkey’s risk-taking structure was also strikingly different from the European, US, Latin American or streamers’ business models, where the number of episodes is often set far in advance, independent of a show’s success, said Carolina Acosta-Alzuru, professor of media and cultural studies at the University of Georgia.
Today, however, Turkey’s high inflation has slashed the value of ad revenues, which now barely cover half of an episode’s production costs. That has led to a thinner pipeline of shows, less risk-taking and fewer chances of a hit.
“It’s a vicious circle,” said Burhan Gün, an industry consultant. “When output is high, you can experiment with new talent and new scripts. But when a series cannot cover its costs, everyone opts for safe formats.”
It has also made advance foreign sales essential for any show to go ahead.
Yet high production costs make it harder for dizi to compete against increasing drama production overseas, including in the Middle East, north Africa and Latin America.
There is no obvious solution. Government aid, sometimes suggested, risks state intervention. RTÜK, Turkey’s media regulator, has regularly fined shows or ordered them off air for offences such as abusing family values.
Alternatively, consolidation of the five private channels that broadcast dizi would concentrate advertising revenues and support domestic production. But that was highly unlikely, analysts said, given the politicisation of mass-media ownership in Turkey.
Still, all is not lost for a sector that has won four Emmys for “best telenovela” since 2017, three “best series” at Seoul’s international drama awards since 2022 and produced 25 new dizi last year, according to Parrot Analytics, even if Turkish production now lags South Korean, a big competitor.
Turkish distributors have opened new markets, such as Russia. Producers have also diversified abroad, such as Ay Yapım, which is co-producing a series with Saudi Arabia’s MBC Studios as part of the kingdom’s media push.
“The Turkish dizi business model might be under question, but its production model is intact,” said Acosta-Alzuru. “You can’t imagine the adrenalin it produces.”
Veliaht producer Eryılmaz agreed. Threading his way through wardrobe lorries and film trucks in a basement of Istanbul’s biggest bus station, he recalled a villain in the series who hurt his knee so badly offset that filming became impossible. They had to bury him to keep the show rolling.
“He disrupted the filming schedule, and was a despicable character anyway, so he deserved to die,” Eryılmaz said. “I must admit: the whole thing makes me feel very alive.”
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