To Örebro University

Building on the notion of the Greek crisis as a discursive event and revisiting theories about the sociocultural role of television fiction, this chapter introduces the latter as a framing mechanism through which events of the social world are defined and assessed. By uncovering the dominant interpretative frames underlying the story, setting, characters and plot of the popular Greek television comedy Piso Sto Spiti (MEGA channel, 2011–2013), this analysis illustrates television fiction’s contribution to the construction of the root causes of the crisis as tied to the cultural traits of Greeks, the impossibility of change and the futility of an alternative, left-wing consideration of the crisis, as well as an attempt to morally assess the situation at hand.

This article investigates how the Eurozone crisis is thematically negotiated in a popular Greek television comedy. Inspired by the increasing interest in the ideological role of news media during the Eurozone crisis of the late 2000s, it turns the spotlight on the sphere of entertainment in an attempt to address the importance of fictional mediations and meaning-making processes. To that end, it proposes an understanding of television fiction as an accommodator and shaper of ‘hot moments’, instigating processes of self-assessment and evaluation of change. More specifically, the study examines the ways in which the family comedy Piso sto Spiti (MEGA Channel, 2011–2013) provides culturally based understandings of the Eurozone crisis by depicting it as associated with inherent flaws of the modern Greek and by assessing the possibility of change through a juxtaposition with national ‘others’. At the same time, it identifies ways that ideology leaks from television fiction in its interaction with other media discourses simultaneously circulating within a society.

This study engages with the cultural consequences of the self-disparaging politics of television satire. It focuses on an emblematic program of Greek television fiction, Oi Afthairetoi (MEGA channel, 1989–1991) and the ways it both constructs and ridicules a particular version of the Greek self, the “Neoellinas”. By proposing a wider understanding of the political side-effects of television satire, which have so far been mainly addressed within the study of political satire, it turns the attention toward the role of satirical discourse in a public’s view on its national self in times of change or transition. More specifically, while it recognizes the contradictory impact that satire can have on society, it applies the concept of “satiric misfire” as a means to understand satirical endeavors which reinforce rather than counter the problematics they set out to fight against in the first place.

This article draws from interviews with creators of television fiction (directors and screenwriters) with professional experience in Greek private television and examines how and why fiction programmes are produced in a commercial context. By focusing on the first decade of private television in Greece, an era popularly remembered as the ‘golden age of Greek television’, this study makes use of accounts from ‘exclusive informants’ in order to complicate facile assumptions about the relationship between commercialization, ideology and entertainment. As such, this article aspires to update the (limited) scholarship on Greek television production culture and to contribute to the recent research focusing specifically on private television in Greece.

Popular geopolitics has recognized in popular culture a platform where geopolitical imaginations are created and discursive constructions of ‘self’ and ‘other’ take place. However, limited work has been done on the employment of specific methodological tools of Critical Discourse Analysis on popular culture texts. This article attempts a hands-on analysis on an episode of a popular product of Greek television fiction (Oi Aparadektoi), and constitutes a combination of theoretical discussion, on one hand, and data presentation and analysis, on the other. Building on a growing body of literature arguing in favor of popular culture’s value for study of politics, the main argument is that television fiction can, and should be, included in investigations of the (geo)politics of the contemporary world and the politics of (national) identity, while special focus is placed on how a discourse-oriented approach can be adopted for the study of products of television fiction.

The private life of a nation in crisis offers in-depth studies of the fictional reconstruction and negotiation of moments of heightened societal tension that take place throughout the life of a nation. Its constituent papers focus on the role of television fiction in representing and shaping either critical moments, events, or periods that disrupt the normal pace of life, or unresolved societal tensions that become part of everyday life. What is more, the papers investigate the socio-cultural consequences of representations, in terms of the interpretative lenses television fiction provides for understanding the events as such. The empirical focus is placed on television fiction produced and broadcast in Greece, a country that has recently received a large share of publicity because of its protagonistic role in the late 2000s Eurozone crisis and, at the same time, a media landscape with multiple aspects that still remain uncharted. The thesis contains case studies from different periods of Greek television fiction, from 1989 – the year of the launch of the first private channels in Greece – onwards, in an attempt to connect the overall project to the production context characterizing commercial television, another aspect of European television in the process of continuous exploration. Through a close analysis of specific television programmes, as well as a complementary study of the production culture of private television in Greece, this thesis aspires to contribute to the general question regarding the role of the media in critical, uncertain, or tumultuous times, with an emphasis on television fiction’s potential to recode their meaning and to reflect back on society.

In this article we discuss discourses of white mobility in reality television, a genre whose problematic post-racial and neoliberal discourses have long been exposed. Moving beyond the widely researched Anglophone media landscapes, we interrogate the discursive construction of white mobilities in the Swedish romance reality show Bonde Söker Fru – Jorden Runt (TV4, 2019-2020) [Farmer Seeks Wife – Around the World] where Swedish North-to-South migrants working as farmers abroad seek a partner from Sweden through the assistance of reality TV. By focusing on the discursive and visual strategies through which the show perpetuates racial hierarchies, we discuss the colonial imaginaries, the absence of border policies (such as residency, employment, or integration), and the significance of individual migratory preferences in the mobility discourses. We identify three forms of white mobility – the tourist, the adventurer, and the philanthropist – and show that migration is depicted as something reversible, an adventure, and a possibility for self-development, rather than a life-long decision with high stakes.

This introductory article to the Special Issue ‘Greek Screen Industries’ of the Journal of Greek Media and Culture offers a critical overview of the recently emerging field of Media Industry Studies and situates existing work on Greek screen industries in its context. It argues that the current fragmentation and lack of dialogue between social sciences and arts and humanities approaches on the topic is particularly marked in the Greek context, a fact that can be explained by institutional and historical reasons. It calls for an expansion of the agendas privileged by political economy approaches to screen media towards the more pluralistic, empirical and culture-orientated perspectives facilitated by Media Industry Studies.

This chapter examines the globally peripheral case study of Greek media industry studies for the twofold aim of locating the relevant research trajectory in and about the country and arguing for the significance of localizing media industries research within the context of Media Industry Studies. Media Industry Studies (MIS) emerged in Anglo-American scholarship in the late 2000s as an umbrella term that aims to bring together the study of diverse and historically distinct media industries through a variety of disciplinary and methodological traditions, embracing aspects of both the humanities and social sciences. In celebrating plurality, however, MIS has faced difficulty in establishing common ground with certain media-related disciplines whose research agenda was incompatible with others. Central to this has been the prioritization or not of issues related to culture, and the concomitant methodological implications of such a choice. In retrospectively locating MIS in and about Greece, this chapter traces a similar trajectory, with political economy-driven social sciences research dominating media industries research and with hardly any dialogue between such an approach and less dominant approaches emerging from arts, humanities, and cultural studies. Recently, however, there has been a significant shift toward a more methodologically mixed and qualitatively orientated humanities-inspired agenda that also reflects the expansion of the objects of research from an almost exclusive focus on such issues as the print press, television news, or online journalism, to film, television fiction, or video games. The chapter demonstrates that such a shift has been taking place because of changes in the sociopolitical, economic, and cultural environment in which Greek media industries operate, and therefore argues for the significance of localizing MIS rather than unconditionally adopting its agendas as these emerged in Western media contexts.