Abstract
Although mostly neglected by media and communication scholars, the failures of cross-cultural remakes, particularly the genre of crime drama, provide a rich and fruitful field to illustrate the complex relationships between global media flows and (trans)national audiences. In this chapter, I argue that in addition to the rugged historical development of Turkish crime drama fiction, Cinayet lost its local drama status by not accommodating the Turkish cultural context to the remake. Drawing on audience’s response to the Turkish remake of Danish crime drama Forbrydelsen in the very popular collaborative hypertext dictionary and virtual socio-political community, Eksṃi Sözlük, I analyse factors that contributed to the remake’s failure in Turkey. Turkish audiences responded critically to the remake by demanding a delicate balance between the notion of “fidelity” and cultural specificity (Turkishness) of the remake. However, among other reasons, Cinayet failed to live up to the original TV drama because of the loss of cultural specificity and a lack of balance between fidelity and creativity.
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Notes
- 1.
‘Our Mission is Our Duty’ was a-ten-minute unconventional TV show which was aired for only two episodes. Therefore, Kaynanalar is considered the first Turkish sitcom in a traditional TV series format.
- 2.
Turks were exposed to the Danish crime genre in popular culture long before the TV remake of Cinayet. The first Scandinavian crime genre book translated into Turkish (1945) is a detective story, The War Testament (Krigstestamentet), by Danish crime novelist Carlo Andersen, who won the inter-Scandinavian crime novel prize in 1938 (Uyepazarci 2008, 1017).
- 3.
Using torrents (personal interviews, 2016–2018) is an indication of illegal downloading and circulation of media products in Turkey. However, it is a common practice due to the lack of harsher penalties.
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Kaptan, Y. (2018). A Crime Drama Between Fidelity and Cultural Specificity. In: Toft Hansen, K., Peacock, S., Turnbull, S. (eds) European Television Crime Drama and Beyond. Palgrave European Film and Media Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96887-2_11
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