Everything That's Different About Turkish TV Is Different Because The Episodes Are Longer.
well not everything, but hear me out
*No spoilers for Turkish TV; instead I’ll use Game of Thrones for one example, since almost noone will be bothered by spoilers for that*
This recent xkcd comic struck a nerve:
The Turkish “dizi” serials tend to put out a movie-length episode each week, for half of the year. Season one of TRT’s Diriliş: Ertuğrul consists of 26 episodes, each around 2 hours long. If you weren’t enjoying season one, but wanted to sit through it to get to season two, that’s around 52 hours of TV, or more than 26 movies using xkcd’s units of measurement.
The complete five seasons of Ertuğrul clocks in at 150 episodes, or around 300 hours of TV.1 By comparison, all 11 seasons of AMC’s The Walking Dead, plus the 7 seasons of spinoff series Fear the Walking Dead adds up to a total runtime of “only” 194 hours.
Of course, it was totally worth it for my wife and I - we started watching Ertuğrul during Covid lockdown when we had plenty of time for TV and few occasions to go out. Under those conditions binge-watching is easy; a western-format short episode feels like biting one corner off your appetiser and then leaving the feast.
The sheer quantity of TV involved affects everything though; from the the content of the episodes themselves, and the brutal demands on the actors making them; to the number of shows that each viewer can realistically keep up with, and the efforts made by producers to attract and retain the audience. Here is some more detail on some of the effects, both good and bad; and how things are continuing to change.
I. Longer episodes can tell a bigger story at a slower pace
The long-format episodes solve one of the biggest problems with bringing epic storylines to the small screen: you just can’t fit much in a Netflix season. I’ve mentioned previously the bittersweet feeling as as we sat down each year to watch the season finale of HBO’s Game of Thrones, knowing there was plenty more story to come, but the next installment was a year or more away.
Consider the final episode of Game of Thrones Season 7, where the lumbering army of the dead reaches the famous Wall that has kept them out of the realms of the living for eight thousand years. The Night’s King reveals he now has the ultimate siege weapon, an undead dragon, which cuts through the icy Wall and its protective spells like a leathery-winged blowtorch. The dead, unperturbed by the momentary pause, resume their inexorable march to war. Literally every single viewer pictures the oblivious humans playing their petty game of thrones in the south, and prays the same prayer in unison: “Oh God, they are so fucked now”.
That episode was broadcast on August 27th, 2017. The audience had to live with the resulting dreadful anticipation for twenty months, until the broadcast of S08E01, on April 14th, 2019. What TV show could truly live up to the hype I had built up in my own mind, having watched a scene like that (Youtube link)? How will they ever defeat such a foe? Turns out, The Night’s King, his dragon and his entire undead army could be destroyed in only 82 minutes of screen time (S08E03).
Of course, if each season of Game of Thrones had actually been 50 hours long, noone would have been able to afford all the computer-generated special effects. In the hypothetical Turkish dizi version of GoT, the Night’s King would have been just a guy with a funny hat. No dragon, but he would have had a pretty nice horse, and a good sword. We would have heard a lot more of Old Nan’s stories (a good thing), and minor characters would have had a lot more screen time (everyone could have done with more of Bella Ramsey as Lyanna Mormont, especially given her ongoing excellent performance in HBO’s The Last of Us). But importantly, that cliff-hanger where the Wall was destroyed would have hung over us for a week, not twenty months.
Without extensive CGI as a crutch to lean on,2 Turkish TV has to depend on old-fashioned things like character development, story and dialogue (and padding, but let me talk about that later) to fill long-form episodes. In short-form episodes it’s character development that suffers most of all, particularly in the minor roles. There’s no time to depict a long, slow courtship or a detailed character arc for anyone other than main characters. You can’t build an epic world full of people without spending time on each of them; a lesson that the writers of the Marvel Cinematic Universe understand very well.
Turkish TV then is ideally suited to telling epic tales about the rise of empires, multiple factions squabbling over the same piece of territory, multi-generational dynastic storylines where whole tribes rise and fall. These are the shows I gravitate towards, but of course there are plenty of other genres. The romance dramas are a particularly popular category, and here the long episodes allow for extended will-they-won’t-they courtships which make the eventual marriage even more satisfying.
II. If you push your actors hard, you’ll occasionally lose some
Back to Game of Thrones for a quote from showrunners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss around the launch of the final season:
From the beginning, we've wanted to tell a 70-hour movie. It will turn out to be a 73-hour movie, but it's stayed relatively the same of having the beginning, middle[,] and now we're coming to the end. It would have been really tough if we lost any core cast members along the way[;] I'm very happy we've kept everyone and we get to finish it the way we want to.
They are, indeed, very lucky they didn’t lose a particular cast member; Emilia Clarke (who played central character Danaerys Targaryen) never opened up about how close she came to death between the first two seasons of Game of Thrones until after the show had ended. In an essay in The New Yorker in 2019 she tells of the aneurysms and multiple brain surgeries she survived at age 24, and the exhaustion she suffered when returning to work during her recovery. She managed to push through it, continued filming, and the rest is history; but Game of Thrones would have seemed like a very different show if they’d had to recast such a critical role after season 1, and the world had missed out on Emilia Clarke’s performance.
In order to produce a movie-length episode each week for half the year, the Turkish filming schedule is notoriously punishing. These recent comments from Korel Cezayirli mention 12 hour days and 6 day weeks on the set of Alparslan: Büyük Selçuklu; a physically demanding show with a lot of horse-riding and fighting in hot and heavy costumes. Fit and healthy actors such as Barış Arduç may work “non-stop”, taking on extra work in the off-season of Alparslan, but inevitably some actors will occasionally drop out mid-season due to illness or injury. The writers simply adapt the scripts and push ahead: the show must go on.
The result can be jarring for the audience, but it’s pretty normal in Turkish TV to lose a character you thought would be around for the long haul. Occasionally a character will disappear for a while, then reappear later in their normal role. A common excuse given for this type of event is that they went “to Konya” to go to university, or on some undercover assignment. However, my wife and I like to say that they “moved to Queensland”, which was the fate of characters Scott and Charlene on long-running Australian soap Neighbours.
Neighbours actually has a lot of similarities to a Turkish “dizi”, from the pace of filming (five 22-minute episodes equals 110 minutes of TV per week, for most of the year), to the frequent turnover in young cast members making their acting debut.
IV. Looser, wandering plotlines; and padding
With a short-episode show like Game of Thrones, every minute of every episode is important for telling your story, and also hideously expensive to produce. Every episode must therefore be planned ahead in detail, so that all the work before (model and set building) and after (special effects and editing) can be organised and budgeted.
Obviously, you can’t begin a soap opera like Neighbours, which ran for 38 seasons, knowing how the show will end. The same goes for a long-running dizi, where broad themes and major plotlines are planned before a season, but episode by episode the writers just kinda fill in the details as they go.
When something unexpected happens, this can mean the dizi producers simply don’t have enough material in some weeks to fill the entire episode. The old tricks from the soap operas come to the fore here: long lingering pauses on the actors’ facial expressions at the end of scenes; repeating the final five minutes from the previous episode to “remind you” what happened; and the occasional wandering side-plot that doesn’t seem to go anywhere.
While plenty of episode padding occurs, the Turkish dizis more rarely need to resort to “filler” episodes; defined3 as whole episodes that viewers can safely skip as they don’t advance the main story in any way. Filler can be common in Japanese anime, where the animated version may overtake the written source material, requiring that the anime marks time for a while to allow the manga to catch up. However, the Omicron Covid wave at the end of 2021 seemed to hit some dizis particularly hard, and filler episodes became more common for a while. In a Turkish historical drama, filler mostly consists of two groups shouting threatening dialogue at each other but not actually doing anything, or futile cycles of the capture and rescue of prisoners.
V. Ratings are king
Just because the special effects are limited, doesn’t mean Turkish TV is cheap to make. The costs are all supported by advertising, and if noone is watching, TV shows quickly become unprofitable to produce. This means that TV producers and pop culture news sites alike are obsessed with ratings, and the competition between shows that are broadcast simultaneously is fierce.
For me, one of the benefits of longer episodes is a deeper connection with the characters, for the simple reason that you spend more time with them. This leads to a high switching cost for me, i.e. I am reluctant to abandon a TV show that I’ve committed to, even if the current story isn’t working out for some reason. Although, as the xkcd comic reminds us, saying “only eight more episodes left until the end of the season; better stick it out” becomes less attractive when each episode is movie length. According to the ratings, the average Turkish viewer is much more likely than I am to change the channel and watch something else. TV producers encourage switching by broadcasting episode summaries (“özet”) to help viewers catch up.
The flexibility of the long-episode format becomes crucial here, and the producers aren’t afraid to make big changes to the cast or script in an attempt to shore up flagging ratings. Unfortunately it’s not always successful (as I complained about previously), but sometimes they can zap some life back into the show, at least temporarily. And sometimes their attempt is unintentionally hilarious, as in Barbaroslar: Akdeniz’in Kılıcı which I’ve now decided deserves its own separate post.
III. Effect on scriptwriting and acting
With the ratings damning each new dizi to sink or swim, almost from the first episode to be broadcast, the shows must start strong. Although writers can have some amazing plot twists planned for later in the season, they do no good if viewers are bored by the first episode.
A requirement for a strong start is of course a good thing when each episode is two hours long, but this can discourage some plot techniques, such as the kind of slow-burn mystery that gradually unfolds over a season.4 If as a screenwriter you attempt such a long-term plot, it’s likely that at some stage your plans will be interrupted when the producers demand changes to improve the ratings in the short term.
It’s not just me who wishes that writers could be left alone to tell a story that they’ve planned. See this article on StarTV’s Gecenin Ucunda:
Gecenin Ucunda (At the end of the Night) series gets low ratings, but it doesn’t deserve this lack of attention in terms of both story and acting performances. In particular, […] Neslihan Atagül […] proves a little more in each new episode that she is one of the most influential female stars of drama stories. When you look at the comments made on social media, you can see that the audience is also affected by this performance.
A series of fans say: “Don’t sacrifice this show for ratings. Please keep this series going.” Will Star TV hear these voices rising from social media? Kadir Doğulu had announced that there was a desire for the series to continue, at least until the end of the season.
One problem is that ratings only measure relative popularity of TV shows, as broadcast on traditional TV at a set time. The ratings cannot measure the absolute quality of a particular show, which could for example be overshadowed by a particularly strong competitor broadcast at the same timeslot.
The article notes one of the most promising ways to escape the enslavement to ratings, which is that feedback via social media gives much more information than the single-bit “did you watch it? y/n”. Alternative “social rating” scales based on number of comments received are starting to pop up. TV producers do already follow suggestions from social media about the popularity of characters or perceived weaknesses in the script when making changes to the shows, and this should rightly continue. But StarTV should be applauded in the case of Gecenin Ucunda for their willingness to let the show continue regardless of ratings. Why not let artists finish their piece, before you judge its worth?
Another change to the traditional ratings-dominated model is coming from the move to on-demand broadcasting such as through Youtube and Netflix. While the final episode of Diriliş: Ertuğrul apparently had 11.44 million viewers when broadcast on traditional TV in Türkiye, it currently has 23 million views on the official Turkish-language Youtube channel. When the Prime Minister of Pakistan ordered their national broadcaster to dub the show into Urdu the viewership increased again; the official Urdu channel registers 16 million views for the finale in the year since it was released there. This is in addition to countless unofficial views: when the internet in Kashmir was shut down by the Indian government in 2019, the episodes immediately began circulating on flash drives.
This, of course, suggests the better alternative to meddling with or canceling unpopular shows within Türkiye - find an international audience who appreciates them better. I’ve complained loudly that ATV’s Destan, which was driven into the ground and then canceled after it dropped to the unacceptably low position of third place in the ratings, subsequently shared the award for “Best Drama”5 at the 17th International Seoul Drama Awards, from a field of 225 entries from 39 countries. Give it some subtitles and sell it to Netflix, maybe you’ll have the next Squid Game?
Happily for all, foreign interest in Turkish TV is increasing. Classic series Fatmagül’ün Suçu Ne? is apparently the 5th most watched TV series in Spain on all platforms. New dizi Maviye Sürgün will be broadcast in South American countries before it hits screens in Türkiye itself. Popular series Yalı Çapkını was sold to more than 30 countries on the strength of its first ~15 episodes.
With a more diverse international viewership and a bit of luck, there will always be an audience for good TV. I’m betting this blog on it.
I couldn’t be arsed summing all the episode runtimes to get a more accurate total. If you go by the Netflix edit, which reformats the show into 448 episodes of around 45 minutes, you get a slightly higher total of 336 hours. Not sure which estimate is closer.
The Turkish directors of Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam (1982) had a problem, in that they wanted to remake George Lucas’s Star Wars (1977) but they didn’t have access to the special effects. The simple solution they came up with was to rip off whole scenes from Star Wars and paste them directly into their own movie. It’s one of the worst films ever made, so you should watch it on Youtube as soon as you possibly can. These subtitles seem reasonably well-synced. You need a browser addon like Substital to use custom subtitles; see my guide for more info.
TV Tropes link; do not click: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Filler
Netflix’s Shamaran is an attempt at a slow-burn mystery in Turkish, but unfortunately it’s not very good. Instead you should watch Amazon’s The Devil's Hour.
Destan shared the award with another Turkish dizi called Mahkum, which was similarly canceled.
Maybe you already know this but just wanted to chime in. The reason Turkish series is so long is that, due to regulatory laws during each clock hour, a TV channel can put at most 12 minutes of advertisements. Usually TV channels decide to combine 2 consecutive ones so there's ads let's say from 20:48 to 21:12. The same between 22:48 to 23:12. The last cliffhanger scene takes a further 3-5 minutes, and before the first ads they air for at least half an hour which takes the total runtime over 2 hours.
Another thing is that, I don't know how is that internationally but in Turkiye channels and production companies make deals every 13 weeks. So unless the ratings are atrocious, a show remains on air for 13 weeks and if it's good it's renewed further. 3x13 weeks is a season and the remaining 13 weeks of the year is the summer break. During summer breaks, producers either try different style of series or new young talent actors (mostly this, with poor quirky cute protagonist girl seduces the cocky rich and handsome son of the owner of the rich company that she starts working in) for 13 weeks. Most end with the summer but if one becomes very successful it goes on during the winter as well to make a humongous 52 week season.
This make or break at the 13th week means many production companies or writing houses optimize for the first 13 weeks. So there are many shows which go great until episode 12 or so, and after getting the green light from the tv channel to continue, hurriedly changing their plot which is about to naturally reaching its end point, mostly cheapening the show. Suddenly things start becoming more cliche, new characters are introduced for no good reason or characters suddenly start behaving like idiots just to bring the plot to a place the writers need in the matter of an episode or so.