Esra Erol’da (which can be translated as With Esra Erol, the name of the host) is a marriage show that had aired under a few different TV channels in the same format for a decade until it was cancelled a few years ago. It is a live broadcast show that airs five days a week, recorded in front of a studio audience. Every episode features a group of ten to fifteen contestants, and these contestants change gradually as they get married and leave the show instead of being structured around the seasons. One significant difference of the show is that the participants literally can be anyone, they are not young and pretty as one normally expects them to be in a show like this. The contestants are both male and female, come in all kinds of looks and body sizes, and even more interestingly, from all ages. Contestants in their 60s are quite prevalent and accepted as a normal part of the show.
Another key aspect of this show that makes it truly interactive is the fact that the progression of the story is entirely dependent on the phone calls they receive on live TV. The show starts with the contestants, audience and the host in the studio, waiting for the phone calls from potential suitors (can be either men or women) who call to express their interest in marrying a certain contestant. Both the contestant and the host ask a bunch of questions to the suitor, and if the contestant is interested in the end, the suitor is invited to come to the studio to meet the contestant next day, which also happens as a part of the show. Basically, everything that happens in the show is brought by people, and the host is simply there to moderate the conversations.
One can’t deny the fact that this show, and the other shows in similar formats, not only do provide a widely acknowledged public space for meaningful participation, but also rely on that participation to exist in the first place. In that sense, the viewers’ agency is essential. However, this public space is embedded in a political context which is significantly defined by public opinion, but heavily sanctions it at the same time. Polls are the most crucial piece of information when the government is making decisions in Turkey right now, and it is a well-known fact that Erdoğan conducts his business based on polls. With the constitutional change, the necessity to get the 50 percent plus one of the electoral body narrows down politics (at least for Erdoğan) into a struggle over the margins, which creates a situation where the participation in the public space is encouraged, but at one’s own risk.
There are times people take the risk for the sake of meaningful participation and exerting agency. One example that immediately sparked a nationwide conversation took place in this marriage show. A Turkish woman from Amsterdam (the show was aired live in several European countries that have significant population of Turkish immigrants) called the show, stated that she is a lesbian, and expressed her interest in marrying a female contestant. Considering this was a conservative show that claims to encourage marriages within the traditional values of Turkish society, the host was caught in shock, and chose to scold and insult the woman on the phone, and disconnected the call. The shaming continued afterwards, this time with the participation of the studio audience and contestants as well. This woman most probably already knew what she was doing, decided to take advantage of the interactivity of this show to make a point (which she managed to do, this incident was discussed widely in the media afterwards) but also risked being publicly humiliated in front of millions of viewers in various countries, and potentially gaining enemies.
Sometimes the risk of participation is higher than the viewer would assume. In 2015, five years after the incident described above and in a much more politically tense Turkey, another viewer called another show on live TV. A teacher from an Eastern city, where the civil war between the Turkish government and the Kurdish minorities has been going on for decades, wanted to use this very popular show as a platform where she could tell something to Turkish society: “Are you aware of what is going on in the East? The media tells it very differently. Please don’t remain silent. Be more sensitive about it. Don’t let people die, don’t let children die”. This was the entirety of what she said, and the host responded in solidarity, saying that they would do their best to make it known. However, immediately afterwards, a formal investigation was started for both of them, even though she did not openly state any solidarity with any ethnicity or sides in the conflict. The host was cleared when he apologized for his words, claiming that he thought “she was referring to our martyrs” whereas the teacher is sentenced to prison after two years of investigation, due to making terrorist propaganda.
So why does the government allow this level of interactivity (they have no problems with heavily censoring everything else on TV) and why do people continue to call? What happened to Esra Erol’s show can provide some clues. It wasn’t cancelled because the network decided to do so. As a part of the state of emergency the country had been living in for two years after the coup d’état attempt in 2016, executive orders have been issued one after another, and the marriage shows were cancelled with an executive order of their own.
However, to a lot of people’s surprise, this particular show was announced to come back this fall, hosted by the same person, but “with a new format”, which the network did not elaborate on until the day it was aired. It turned out to be equally interactive and based on audience participation, but with a difference: now the “contestants” with the saddest life stories are chosen to attend and tell their stories in front of the audience, promising to make everyone cry. The show develops by building upon the potential other characters in the stories that can be found and traced, or organizing some sort of response to a tense situation they are asking help for. Basically, the government decided that marriage isn’t a suitable conversation to be held on public anymore, because it creates “negative influences” What is interesting is that the public affect once created by this show was immediately replaced by another, “more appropriate” one. The strategy of producing preapproved emotion through interactivity as the widespread participation of the public on TV remained as a consistent formula, encouraged by the government, as a supervised public space.
This is very fascinating to read, and in many ways, I echo your call to think of tv interactivity in its multiple meanings instead of only focusing on the technological side. The two examples presented here demonstrate how live tv in Turkey—and particularly, phone calls involved in tv shows—once opened up spaces for people to cut in to discuss gender politics and register political opinions. I’m not sure if this is the case in contemporary Turkey, but as tv gets increasingly personalized in the microcasting era in general, liveness that was once recognized as a core ontological form of tv seems to have somewhat lost its attraction for viewers. Instead, people seem to more and more resort to the internet for a sense of liveness. In this light, I could not help thinking whether traditional tv today has more or less lost its capabilities as a cultural forum and will ultimately lose it in the future as the convergence is likely to eventually gravitate towards the internet.
ReplyDeleteI am glad to hear that you enjoyed it! I agree, I also think the concept of liveness that was so integral to TV is relocating to the realm of internet. However, these examples from Turkey also make me notice the differences between the liveness in these two realms. In the post coup d’eta Turkey, such instances can’t really happen anymore on TV, and people do look for that sense of liveness which created a different public space in internet. However, to encounter such liveness on internet, you need to look for it, it becomes one of the countless niche content online. Whereas on TV, live content finds you, which makes its so much more powerful (and threatening, in the case of Turkey) as a form of public speech.
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