Nationalisms in the era of global quality TV: how SVODs main/stream the local

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NATIONALISMS IN THE ERA OF GLOBAL QUALITY TV:
HOW SVODS MAIN/STREAM THE LOCAL

by

Katalin Kis

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(CINEMA AND MEDIA STUDIES)

August 2021

Copyright 2021 Katalin Kis
ii
Dedication
I would like to dedicate this work to my loving parents. Munkámat szeretett szüleimnek
szeretném dedikálni: nagyon, nagyon szeretlek benneteket, és köszönöm az életemet
meghatározó szereteteteket és támogatásotokat.

iii
Acknowledgements

I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to my mentor and dissertation supervisor Aniko
Imre for her relentless guidance over the years that we have known each other. Without her
friendship and intellectual, practical, and moral support, the completion of this dissertation
would not have been possible. I remain inspired by and indebted to her scholarship and honored
by her trust that she has put in me.
I would like to thank all my Ph.D. committee members for their engaging scholarship, as
well as for their flexibility, collegial generousness, and insightful comments on my work. I am
grateful to Nitin Govil for all the intellectually vibrant classes we had together, his consistent
availability as a mentor and teacher, and the immensely useful comments and questions with
which he has challenged me. I would like to thank Ellen Seiter for her invaluable suggestions,
collegiality, generosity of spirit, and the professional support she kindly offered to me at key
stages of my student career. I am grateful to J.D. Connor for his incredibly generous engagement
with my project, his incisive and immensely helpful comments, and his professional support. I
would like to express my appreciation and gratitude to Tim Havens for offering, with such
enthusiasm and selflessness, his amazing expertise and mentorship.
I am grateful to all the staff members, fellow students, and faculty members at USC who
have inspired me through their knowledge, wit, professionalism, and kindness.
I would like to thank my friends, my family, and my partner for their love, humor, and
patience.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dedication ................................................................................................................................... ii

Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................... iii

List of Figures ........................................................................................................................... vii

Abstract .................................................................................................................................... viii

Part I: TV Multiculturalism and the Identity Politics of the “Local Original” ........................... 1

Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 1
A Multicultural Global TV Community: Are We Just “One Story Away"? ....................... 1
The Global Digital Distribution Revolution and Netflix’s Place in It ................................. 5
My Arguments ..................................................................................................................... 9

Chapter 1. Authentic” “Local Originals” in a “Global Catalog” “Available To Everybody:” The
Future of Global TV and Nationalist Identity Politics ........................................................... 40
Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 40
Universal Access and the Global Citizen-Consumer: The Ideal of the Global Catalog .... 44
The Impossibility of the Multiculturalist Global Catalog ................................................. 47
The “Local Original” as Representing Authentic Local Cultural Difference ................... 49
The “Local Original’s” National Container ....................................................................... 54
The Cult of Local Originals Gives Television’s Historical National Container a New Shine
........................................................................................................................................... 58
The Curse of Politicizing Difference as Identity ............................................................... 60
Economic Injustice in Identity Politics .............................................................................. 67
Local Originals as Nationalist Identity Politics: An Argument Against the Neoliberal-
Nationalist Synergy of Multiculturalist Quality TV .......................................................... 69
Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 71

Chapter 2: Cultural Diversity, Globalization and Digitalization: How Platforms Like Netflix
Impact Global Culture............................................................................................................ 74
Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 74
Qualifying Cultural Diversity ............................................................................................ 75
The Digital Distribution Revolution and Its Cultural Effects ............................................ 77
“Local-Language Production” vs the “Local Original” as Globalization-Localization
Strategies ........................................................................................................................... 97
The Internationalization of Global TV and the Mainstreaming of the Global Diversity
Discourse AKA How Netflix “has become the internet’s most invaluable and intoxicating
portal to the parts of planet Earth that aren’t America” ................................................ 102
Netflix’s Multiculturalist Corporate Branding, and Trade and Journalistic Discourses.. 102
The Centralization of “Globality” in Media Corporations’ Diversity Politics ................ 107
The Sociocultural Significance of Globalizing Mainstream TV: A US Perspective ...... 111

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Part II: The National Lives of Netflix: Global SVOD Localization and Disruption in The UK,
Australia, and “Small-Nation” Hungary .............................................................................. 119

Introduction to Part II.............................................................................................................. 119
Key Concepts & Theoretical Background ....................................................................... 120
Small Nation, Small Market ............................................................................................ 120
National & Local ............................................................................................................. 121
Cultural Nationalism ........................................................................................................ 123
Public Service Broadcasting & Neoliberalization ........................................................... 125
The Case Studies of the UK, Australia, and Hungary: Generalities and Particularities .. 137

Chapter 3: Netflix in the United Kingdom ............................................................................. 143
2012-2019: Becoming a “Nation of Streamers” .............................................................. 143
National Storm Clouds and the “Streaming Wars against Netflix and Amazon” ........... 146
Keyword “Local”: Where National Specificity, Cultural Diversity, and Old-Fashioned
British Imperialism Meet ................................................................................................. 149
Total “Streaming Wars” and “Total TV Experience:” The BBC Fights Back ................ 154
Commercialization and British-US Business Entanglements ......................................... 158
“Public Service Broadcasting: As Vital as Ever” – But Why for High-Budget Drama? 163

Chapter 4: Netflix Down Under: “Make it Australian”? ........................................................ 173
A Fast Win for Netflix? ................................................................................................... 176
Traditional Local Content Quotas Meet the Global SVOD Revolution .......................... 178
“Think of the Children” ................................................................................................... 181
The Non-Conspicuous but Forward-Looking “International Face of Australian Television”:
A Comparison to the British and the Hungarian TV Ecology ......................................... 194
Alternative Cosmopolitanism .......................................................................................... 207

Chapter 5: Streaming Revolution in an Authoritarian National Media Landscape: The Local
Series Boom, Nationalism, and Hungarian Netflix ............................................................. 212
Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 212
Netflix, the Dark Horse of the Hungarian TV Ecology? ................................................. 212
A Welcome American Guest Enters Through the Nation’s Back Door .......................... 219
X.IV.MMXIX. The Second Arrival................................................................................. 224
The Status of Premium and OTT TV in Hungary as a Small and Non-Affluent Market and
Authoritarian Polity ......................................................................................................... 226
Globalizing Quality TV and Hungarian National Identity .............................................. 231
Light Entertainment, Dark Quality: The Broadcast vs Premium TV Division ............... 231
The Local Politics of Globalizing Quality TV: Is There a Nationalist-Cosmopolitan
Contradiction? .................................................................................................................. 238
The Series Revolution and National Ambitions: The New Holy Grail of Hungarian TV….
......................................................................................................................................... 247
Authoritarianism, Public Television, and the Future of Hungarian “Quality” Series ..... 258
The Professional and Popular Discrediting of Hungarian Public Television .................. 258
Hungarian TV Series Premiering in 2015: A Comparative Case Study .......................... 267
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Domestic Broadcasters and Transnational Streamers: Complementarity over
Competition…………………………………………………………………………….275
The New National Film Institute and the “Hungarian [State] Netflix:” The Coming of State
Quality Drama? ................................................................................................................ 280

Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 286

References ............................................................................................................................... 297

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List of Figures
1. Figure: Example for a publicity pic for Netflix's One Story Away campaign, featuring a shot
from the SVOD’s signature original series Stranger Things, the red progress bar of the interface,
and the global campaign’s tagline............................................................................................... 1
2. Figure: Our Little Village ................................................................................................... 233
3. Figure: Precious Heirs......................................................................................................... 233
4. Figure: Divorce ................................................................................................................... 235
5. Figure: 5. Figure: “Underworld. The Family is Sacrosanct. But not Inviolable. New Series
from February 19, on Tuesdays at 9:10pm. Catch -up on RTLMost.hu” ............................... 237
6. Figure: When Shall We Kiss? ............................................................................................. 249
7. Figure: In Treatment ........................................................................................................... 249
8. Figure: Golden Life............................................................................................................. 250
9. Figure: Media Mogul Gábor Kálomista as the president of Veszprémi Építők Sports Club
(source: m4sport.hu) ............................................................................................................... 263
10. Figure: Media mogul Lőrinc Mészáros with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán (source: hvg.hu)
................................................................................................................................................. 263
11. Figure: Budapest billboard advertising Poppyseed Roll ................................................... 268
12. Figure: Screenshot from Poppyseed Roll ......................................................................... 268
13. Figure: Publicity image for Summer Fling ....................................................................... 269
14. Figure: Summer Fling ....................................................................................................... 269
15. Figure: Golden Life........................................................................................................... 270
16. Figure: Divorce ................................................................................................................. 270
17. Figure: Poppyseed Roll ..................................................................................................... 273
18. Figure: English-language poster for Strangled ................................................................. 278

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Abstract
Nationalisms in Era of Global Quality TV: How SVODs Main/Stream the Local explores the
globally uneven developments of the streaming revolution within the operations of giant
transnational subscription-video-on-demand (SVOD) platform-studios such as Netflix, HBO and
Amazon Prime, and the meteoric rise of “local original” series. I argue that the mainstreaming of
international TV programs facilitated by leading SVODs, while triumphantly marketed as an
index of global cultural diversity, simultaneously helps reinforce competitive nationalisms and
deter from the examination of economic justice that exceeds the national frame.
Netflix innovated the agendas of the unified “global catalog” and diverse “local originals”
from across the world, building its corporate brand around cosmopolitanism. By now, these two
agendas are widely circulating in media industry and popular discourses on television and
culture. The “global catalog” indexes the universal equality of all individual viewers, while the
production and dissemination of “local originals” are posited as recognizing and celebrating local
cultural difference. In Chapter 1, I argue that Netflix thereby practically envisions a global TV
multiculturalism, which inescapably mirrors the tension at the heart of the modern democratic
polity: how to recognize group differences while maintaining the foundational equality of all.
Contradictions between these two political projects have surfaced in the clashing of cultural
protectionism and viewers’ popular activism. Relying on the materialist critique of identity
politics applied to the “local original” as a currency of nationalism, I show that the current
trending of “local originals” in global television reinforces nationalist cultural policy orientation
and deters from a globalist perspective on economic inequality.
In Chapter 2, I argue that the rise of the “local original” has contributed to global cultural
diversity in one specific aspect: the international diversification of quality TV. This
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internationalization has been enabled by a combination of factors involving the technological
affordances of digitization, market dynamics, production and distribution practices, and business
models. I argue that this particular cultural diversifying potential of Netflix and other giant
streaming platforms occurs precisely because rather than despite of them being (part of)
transnational corporations: it comes from their strong market position and publicity, high capital,
and transnational trade. At the same time, I argue against constructing “local originals” as
emancipatory representatives of supposedly authentic and unique local-national cultures.
Building on Chapter 1, I warn against the hidden neoliberal nationalist direction entailed by the
current TV internationalization. I reframe the latter process in a way that critiques rather than
reinforces nationalisms: the trending of “local originals” facilitates the territorial dispersal of
opportunities for local screen creatives to produce high-budget and travelling content, and the de-
hierarchization of local screen industries and imagined national cultures.
Chapters 3-5 examine the SVOD revolution in the UK, Australia, and Hungary in order to
demonstrate my overarching argument on the “local original” as a currency of nationalist identity
politics working in synergy with global corporate capitalism, and to explore its connections to
local broadcasting and public media specifically. I consider the differences and similarities of
these national contexts in terms of their relation to the English language; the size of the national
market; the developmental stage and international standing of their national television industry
and culture; public and state media legacies; and the current state and prospects of democracy.
Regardless of local differences, in all three contexts, the streaming revolution has been framed
by myopic cultural nationalisms: as a matter of the traditional oppositional binary between the
(mainly American) foreign and the national, with no substantial regard for global diversity,
which framing sharply contrasts US discourses. I demonstrate the appropriative nature of claims
x
made in the name of national culture by stakeholders such as political parties, local producers,
domestic broadcasters, and transnational SVODs. The prioritization of “authentic” and quality
drama series in cultural policies and the public media agenda, including high-end TV series’
significant financial support from the state serves the political and financial interests of narrow
transnational corporate and national elites while relying on the legitimizing force of cultural
nationalism.

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Part I: TV Multiculturalism and the Identity Politics of the “Local Original”
Introduction
A Multicultural Global TV Community: Are We Just “One Story Away"?
“These words [we’re only one story away] perfectly encapsulate the passion for
storytelling that lies at the heart of what Netflix - and the creators we work with all over
the world - are trying to bring to our members.” (Eric Pallotta, Netflix’s VP of Brand,
2020)

1. Figure: Example for a publicity pic for Netflix's One Story Away campaign, featuring a shot from the SVOD’s signature
original series Stranger Things, the red progress bar of the interface, and the global campaign’s tagline
Netflix, the world’s largest global subscription-video-on-demand provider gained close to 26
million new subscribers during the first two quarters of 2020, the year of the coronavirus and
home quarantines, approaching its yearly achievement of 28 million in 2019 (Zeitchik 2020).
Given its disadvantage to the bulky legacy libraries of recently launched studio-platforms like
Disney+ or HBO Max, Netflix has been producing originals programs and acquiring suitable
others to boost up its “exclusive” content with remarkable pace (Alexander 2020a).
Commissioning and licensing programs from international territories is more important than
2
ever, as there are not many viewers left to gain in the highly developed US streaming market,
which is transforming into an oligarchic archipelago of exclusive content owner behemoths
(Alexander 2020b). In contrast, in most non-US territories, it is these new giant streamers with
classic libraries who are at a disadvantage compared to Netflix. Reed Hastings’ company has the
first-mover advantage, already commanding a considerable library of international titles. As
such, Netflix’s modus operandi is more compatible with the cultural protectionism that has been
on the rise in the online on-demand space since the European Union’s pioneering 30% regional
content quota for large SVODs [subscription-video-on-demand services] was approved in 2018.
According to American journalist Julia Alexander’s allegory on US-based Netflix’s global
strategies:
“Netflix is hanging out with its new pals abroad while FaceTiming its friends back home,
introducing them to one another, and hoping they hit it off. It’s why you’re likely seeing
way more international programming, both scripted and not, on your homepage.”
(2020b)
Netflix’s new campaign “One Story Away” launched in 27 countries in September 2020, plays
out this kind of international friendship through stories branded by the company. The tagline is
repeated in digital, TV, and billboard ads, including corporate-produced memes in 27
participating countries. In general, the tagline is featured on the background of a publicity pic of
a Netflix Original complemented by some powerful emotion or a funny satiric comment—such
as “one story away” “from finding love when love is lost” with Marriage Story or “from singing
Ciao Bella in the shower” with La casa de papel”; or “from running a credit check” in the case
of US dating reality show Love is Blind. The US version of the solemn, 114-second campaign
video
1
is a montage of shots from over twenty US and international Netflix Originals, such as
Stranger Things (2016-2020), Roma (2018), Crash Landing on You ( 사랑 의 불시착, 2019-2020),

1
Available on Netflix’s YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqkVUfYMZWM
3
Money Heist (La casa de papel, 2017-2020), or US-Chinese animation Over the Moon (2020).
The montage culminates in three shots of different diegetic group hugs, ending on the visual and
narrative note of close universal connectedness wrapped in positive affect. In the words of Vice
President of Brand Eric Pallotta, “People have very different tastes and moods. But no matter
who you are or where you are, we’re all only one story away from seeing, feeling and connecting
more” (2020).
Though culture and entertainment news site Vulture greets the 2020 multiplatform operation
as Netflix’s “first-ever global brand campaign” (Adalian 2020), “One Story Away” actually
continues the company’s long-term branding work. Netflix has been performing a brand
centering on globality and multiculturalism at least since its first original production, Norwegian
local original Lilyhammer (2012-2014). “One Story Away” metaphorizes the same idea that
structured Reed Hastings’ declaration upon the platform’s global launching: “You are witnessing
the birth of a global TV network… offering consumers around the world our incredible global
catalogue of original content” (quoted in Cook 2016). I argue that Netflix has projected an ideal
vision of a global TV multiculturalism through building a cosmopolitan brand bolstered by the
twin agendas of the “global catalog” and the “local original.” This ideal multicultural TV
community is comprised of universally equal citizens of the world, and unique but equal “local
cultures.” Importantly, as we shall see, the term “local” is most often used interchangeably with
the “national.” In this ideal global community, authentic and specific local content travels
without borders, to the delight of appreciative audiences. To all persons, Netflix wants to
“provide a simple and affordable way to enjoy a great story,” on their own terms and schedules,
“wherever [they] are in the world” (Hastings, quoted ibid). Ultimately, says Netflix, we are only
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one story away from each other in this global community—one locally specific but universally
appealing story.
According to Netflix’s brand narrative, the company has recognized the curiosity of viewers
and the talent of creators across the world, and as the angel of cultural diversity, it makes
possible for the “stories” to be created and the people to connect. Is there any truth to this
corporate PR narrative? This dissertation takes Netflix’s brand built around the ideal of global
TV multiculturalism as the entry point into an investigation of how the streaming revolution and
the emergence of giant transnational SVOD studio-platforms specifically are transforming the
global television ecology. What cultural impact has the rise of platforms like Netflix, and more
specifically, the trending of “local originals” had on global culture, including cultural diversity?
How are these recent international original series perceived in industry, academic and popular
discourses on culture and TV? How are national broadcasting and public media affected by the
transnational SVOD revolution? What roles do multiculturalism, nationalisms, and neoliberalism
play in corporate politics and in cultural policies pertaining to streaming television?
My project addresses Ramon Lobato and Amanda D. Lotz’s 2020 question: “What new
insight does Netflix’s expansion of original series production outside the United States suggest
about whether its strategy may be multinational, rather than global, but also more complicated
than that of a conventional US hegemon?” Interpellated by the work and guiding questions of
Aniko Imre (2018, 2019) and Petr Szczepanik (2017), my project positions the changes related to
digital distribution, transnational streaming platforms, and “quality” drama production vis-a-vis
cultural nationalisms and the Post-Socialist Eastern European context. Continuing Imre’s inquiry
into the simultaneity of the “unimpeded flow of international television and the retreat into
defensive, ‘illiberal’ modes of governance” (Imre 2019: 4), I will explore the cultural politics of
5
the contemporary Hungarian series boom and Netflix’s curious local standing. The dissertation is
comprised of two main parts, both of which ultimately providing a critique against the synergy of
nationalisms and neoliberalism through the examination of the global trending of “local
originals” and quality drama series. The two chapters of Part I address the globalization-
localization dynamics and cultural impact of the transnational SVOD revolution from a
transnational, and secondly, from the US perspective. The conceptual center of these first two
chapters revolves around cultural diversity, multiculturalism, and nationalist identity politics in
relation to giant transnational SVOD studio platforms’ corporate practices, branding and
policies, technological affordances, and business models. Part II zooms in on the local national
contexts of the United Kingdom, Australia, and Hungary and their cultural policy debates with
regards to the SVOD revolution. It engages with the relations between transnational SVODs, and
local broadcasters and public service media.
The Global Digital Distribution Revolution and Netflix’s Place in It
The growing digitization and online flows of film and television have entailed unprecedented
renegotiations around cultural and economic bottlenecks, “democratizing” the creative industries
(Waldfogel 2018: 246). The increasing reliance on the affordances of the Internet and
digitization has radicalized the geographic dispersal and fragmentation of production processes,
triggered a “distribution revolution” (Curtin et al. 2014), and opened up unseen possibilities for
audiovisual media exhibition and consumption. The digital media revolution is parallel to the
dramatic increase of average times people spend in front of screens, especially on connected
devices (DoubleVerify 2020).
Digitization has enabled new business models that facilitate the reform if not elimination of
older ones, comprehending the terms of windowing, licensing, remuneration, and pricing (Curtin
6
et all 2014: 2-4). On the media consumer’s end, this has entailed increasing access, control, and
affordances, including the ongoing normalization of non-linear, ever mobile, instant, and
personalized forms of consumption (Lotz 2007). Increasing levels of interactivity have blurred
the hitherto strict borders between professional media producers and consumers (Ritzer and
Jurgenson 2010; Bird 2011). Consequently, old and new controversies and complexities around
recognition of and rights related to authorship, ownership and “fair use” have intensified, among
agents such as various creators, corporations, national and supranational governments, and,
increasingly, consumers, netizens, and pirates (Curtin and Sanson 2017: 37; Curtin et al. 2014:
138-9; Kuhn 2012).
The hegemony of the silver screen, the living-room TV set, and the traditional linear
channels and physical copies for enjoying films and shows have clearly been broken—and none
of the accessories of the VCR, the DVD, the BluRay, the TiVo or HDD could save it anymore.
The global video streaming market was valued at $42.14 billion in 2019 and expected to grow
further with the worldwide increasing of broadband penetration, smartphone usage
2
, and massive
investment in content—and, at least for the foreseeable future, the COVID-19 pandemic
(MarketStudyReport Worldwide 2020). Streaming via subscription-video-on-demand (SVOD)
has gained the most popularity over ad-supported (AVOD) and transaction-based (TVOD)
models (ibid).
The popularization of the online distribution of films and television has been thought to
harbor great potential for cultural progress and democratization. It has incited high hopes for the
“rise of the fringe” to challenge the predominance of “big players” who lack the power to

2
Not coincidentally India showing the fastest growth in over-the-top streaming (OTT), according to a 2020 industry
report “Media and Entertainment Outlook” (in Jha 2020).
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preclude “alternative content” from flourishing online (Iordanova 2010: 36). However, the
developments of the 2010s have not simply shaken the oligopolistic power of transnational
media conglomerates and the Hollywood studios they control; they have also given rise to
troubling concerns about the “[g]rowing concentration in distribution, and the possible
emergence of technological gatekeeping” (Waldfogel 2018: 256). Of major concerns are tech
company behemoths with diversifying profiles (such as the FAANG: Facebook, Apple, Amazon,
Netflix, and Google), and the further conglomeration of traditional content owners and
distributors. Such conglomeration entails the concentration of the distribution and marketing of
film and television content, and the underlying infrastructures such as Internet, broadcasting, and
cable services, as well as even consumer electronics, in the same hands of a few transnational
companies—exemplified by the recent acquisition of Time Warner by AT&T (Gold 2019), or the
takeover of pay-TV Sky and NBCUniversal by Comcast (Fry 2019).
Indeed, there has been a great deal of speculation as to how the SVOD market will change in
the near future due to the most recent or imminent launches of new streaming services by global
tech giants and legacy players (such as Apple+ or Disney+), by big broadcasters (as could be the
case with Salto, a joint venture by French broadcasters), or the global expansion, further vertical
integration, and growth of existing ones (such as BritBox or YouTube Premium). For the time
being, however, Netflix remains the largest and most sought-after SVOD in the world. Netflix’s
content investment was worth $12 billion in 2018, compared to Amazon Prime’s $5 and Hulu’s
$2.5 billion; notably, the three services’ content spending more than quadrupled between 2013
and 2019 (Parrot Analytics 2018). In terms of spending among all US entertainment companies
on original content in 2019, Netflix tied with ViacomCBS with their $15 billion, coming in third,
being outspent only by Disney and Comcast (Bridge 2020); and it is expected to raise its
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investments to $17 billion by 2020 (Spangler 2020). In some parts of the world, including the
US, Netflix has basically monopolized industry, popular, policy and academic discourses and
imageries alike as the leading entity that exemplifies streaming and stands as a metaphor for
related technological, social, and cultural issues more generally
3
. In 2019, about 60% of Netflix’s
subscriber base originated from outside the US, and the company used about 30% of its original
content spend on international titles (Gadher 2020).
Netflix’s most recent expansion in January 2016 entailed its launching in 130 countries,
leaving the world map with only a handful of “netflixless” territories (Netflix Media Center
2016). Amazon Prime Video followed suit by the end of the same year (Barraclough 2016). They
since have taken over market leader or prominent market positions in many countries. Netflix’s
overall market penetration has been around 90% in the US (Neiger 2019), and it has recently
reached over 30-60% in international markets such as Brazil, Mexico, Canada, the UK,
Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, or the Nordic countries (Cornelio-Marí 2017; Gruenwedel
2019; Lobato 2019; Lynch 2018; Stiegler 2016; Ward 2016). In Mexico, for example, Netflix’s
SVOD market share in the 3rd quarter of 2018 was 80% with Claro Video coming in second
with 14.6%, with the rest of the players taking up less than 3% each (Statista Research
Department 2019). Indexing its robust power across a great variety of markets, in 2018, Reed
Hastings’s company has generated more revenue than any other SVOD service in countries like
Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India,
Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland,

3
Consider the examples of Alison N. Novak’s 2016 study on US media regulation discourses; or the mushrooming
of scholarly publications that incorporate Netflix (instead of Amazon Prime, Hulu, or others) in their title, often in a
more generic way rather than meaning Netflix only, e.g., The Age of Netflix: Critical Essays on Streaming Media,
Digital Delivery and Instant Access (ed. Barker and Wiatrowski 2017), Netflix Nations: The Geography of Digital
Distribution (Lobato 2019), The Netflix Effect: Technology and Entertainment in the 21st Century (eds. McDonald
and Smith-Rowsey 2016).
9
Thailand, Turkey, the U.K., the U.S., Vietnam, and more (Singh 2019). Thus, the potential for
democratization and diversification in the digital era is surely complicated by the growing
structuring power of a few big players, among them Netflix. They grossly affect the visibility,
profitability and viability of smaller producers and distributors who are often bought up or are
pushed out of business.
My Arguments
Netflix as a giant transnational media company has a huge impact on global cultural trends,
though the intensity and nature of such impact may differ across the 190 territories where the
SVOD is active. Supplementing important critiques on US quality television as related to cultural
colonization and homogenization (Buonnano 2013; Baran 2018), I will argue that the structuring
power that a few SVODs like Netflix have in the majority of markets actually contribute to the
cultural diversification of mainstream television in one important sense: the diversification of
transnationally travelling programs in terms of their national territorial origin and affiliation.
Such internationalization includes the trends towards the greater balance of trade flows and the
equalization of nationally based symbolic hierarchies as well as practical professional
opportunities. Regrettably, this nationally based equalization comes at the expense of reinforcing
nationalisms and further naturalizing corporate capitalism. That is, while the transnational SVOD
revolution has contributed to the increase of global cultural diversity in terms of the territorial
origin of travelling TV series, the politics and processes underlying this rising trend of
international “local original” series are synergistic with neoliberal nationalisms. The
international diversification of the mainstream TV trade and culture, and “quality” series
specifically should be recognized as following the logic of inclusion into and representation
within an existing system—nations within the global capitalist order. Accordingly, while I argue
10
to recognize such internationalization in terms of relative progress, I simultaneously warn against
its misrecognition as the ideal peak of global progress. This is because the relative equalization
this internationalization entails is simultaneous with its potential to stealthily sidetrack the
project of equality—insofar as the latter is defined in ways that go beyond nationalist limitations
privileging international comparisons over intranational economic inequalities. Nationalist
identity politics fosters international comparisons over critical inquiries into intranational
inequalities. Its investment in a national cultural essence and unity may appropriate and
emphasize cultural matters in terms of shared interest over conflicting interests existing within
the national public.
The first chapter elaborates the argument about the covert synergy between the “local
original” and neoliberal nationalisms. It identifies the contemporary guiding vision performed by
globalizing streaming companies currently best exemplified by Netflix: a global multicultural
television democracy. I choose Reed Hastings’ company to provide my main example due to its
global leading position in terms of innovative practices that have been taken up by other
companies; the company’s market shares; and its power to orient policy, trade, cultural expert,
and popular discourses on streaming, and increasingly television and global culture as such. The
cultural ideal for mainstream television marketed by Netflix is to realize global cultural diversity
through producing and circulating “local originals” from territories around the world, on the one
hand, and through striving for the worldwide and simultaneous availability of all their programs
in a “global catalog,”
4
on the other. These flagship agendas together underlie the vision of an
ideal TV democracy: a multicultural community comprised by unique but equal “local” cultures
and equal world citizens. These two basic units—of collective cultures and individuals—

4
The more realistic version of the “global catalog” has manifested in the simultaneous distribution of all original
programs in all territories where the SVOD is operational.
11
complement each other: the “authentic” “local” shows have a “global appeal” due to
cosmopolitan viewers worldwide who appreciate “good TV” regardless or precisely because of
cultural difference. According to its brand image, Netflix is the patron of diverse cultures and the
mediator between travelling “local” programs and open-minded viewers; the universal access to
culture as TV programs is treated as a global individual right. Reed Hastings’ company and
increasingly, other SVODs and older media corporations have been competitively branding
themselves as recognizing and supporting cultural specificity and local talent across the world.
These companies posit a mutually beneficial relation between the corporate and the national, a
co-operation that supposedly serves authentic cultural expression and the global cultural
diversity of equal but unique “local cultures.”
I argue that the trending SVOD agenda of the “local original” embodies the politics of
difference, while the “global catalog” is an actualization of the politics of equal dignity (Taylor
and Gutmann, 1994). In Netflix’s rhetoric, territory-based distribution basically discriminates
many people based on their geopolitical location. Conversely, the production of “local originals”
is depicted as a sensitivity to and appreciation of “local” collective cultural particularity as per
the politics of difference. As such, the relationship between the “local original” and the “global
catalog” mirrors the tension at the heart of modern democracy and the contemporary dilemma of
multiculturalism: the demand for the proper recognition and fair consideration of differences,
and the continuing commitment to the principle of the universal, essential equality of all persons
(Gutmann 1994: 3). More concretely, the dominant SVOD agenda of including “local cultures”
on an implicit nationalist basis into an ideal, diverse global community of equals reiterates the
politics of recognizing and appreciating the supposedly authentic difference of distinct cultures,
on the one hand. On the other hand, the territorially universal access to or global availability of
12
all content performs the ideal of equality of all individual viewers precisely regardless of their
literal (geographic and geopolitical) and symbolic (cultural and social) location. Thereby,
individual viewers are posited as the equal citizen-consumers of the globe before being
differentiated as national subjects and members of a distinct cultural community.
The inherent tension and ultimate impossibility of the multiculturalist ideal of global TV has
already surfaced in the conflicting campaigns of national and regional protectionism, and the
popular demand for simultaneous universal access to the same content. The nationally and
regionally based initiatives and actual regulations on content quotas obligate big-enough SVODs
to offer a certain percentage of local (national and/or regional) content in their local catalog.
Such regulations practically aim to prescribe a minimum amount of “local culture” to locally
residing individuals. They bind screen cultures to territories and their inhabitants. Conversely,
viewers in various countries have been demanding equal and simultaneous access to the same
content regardless of their location: as they pay (about) the same price as US subscribers or any
other viewer in countries with bigger and better libraries, they should get the same service, the
argument goes (Greenberg 2016; Thompson 2019). Not only is the US catalog as the largest one
the most frequent object of comparison, but also, when individual programs are mentioned as
available in some local Netflix libraries but not in others it is often popular American films and
shows (e.g., Eddy 2020; Stokes 2019). That is, what these viewers have been protesting about,
defying cultural nationalist and localist agendas, is their discrimination as individual consumers
based on their national location by transnational corporations. Viewers’ individual and collective
activism against geoblocking and banning VPN usage address the access to television programs
originating in the US and other foreign countries—rather than programs from their own location.
13
That Netflix’s flagship global-local agendas harbor an inner contradiction is not the ultimate
problem. It is rather that the trending of the “local original” reiterates nationalist cognitive
structures and affects, and particular nationalisms in local contexts, affecting policies, practices,
and aspirations. Netflix, as well as other industry players and many cultural commentators keep
using the nationalist framing of locality and cultural specificity in a taken for granted manner,
reinforcing banal nationalism. Beyond that, I critique the agenda of the “local original” as the
trending global currency of nationalist identity politics. Playing on the notion of national talent
and originality, the agenda of the “local original” panders to cultural nationalisms. While the
latter is often seen as politically harmless, I emphasize that cultural forms of nationalism share
the basic cognitive and affective ground with more chauvinistic nationalisms: both kinds rely on
the illusion of some special and grandiose national essence and role in the world, the existence or
proper recognition of which is lacking or threatened. Crucially, nationalist perspectives on social
injustice and inequality are necessarily particularistic in comparison to a non-nationally based,
global perspective. Nationalisms are easily appropriated by narrow elites who nationalize global
issues and culturalize economic issues—in the service of their own interest but in the name of the
nation. Accordingly, framing high-scale TV production and trade—tied to state support schemes,
for instance—as a matter of cultural recognition and self-expression in terms of local-national
specificity and talent, on part of media companies like SVODs, broadcasters, and production
companies, policymakers, and influencers of public opinion exemplifies the nationalization of
global issues and the culturalization of economic ones.
In order to build my critique on the “local original” and cultural nationalisms, I explore the
leading role of nationalism in cultural policy debates, and political, industrial, and popular
discourses on transnational SVODs in Australia, the UK, and Hungary in chapters 3, 4 and 5. As
14
I explicate in these chapters, local-national discourses and policy debates in these countries
outside the US hardly even touch upon the issue of availability of globally diverse programs on
local SVOD catalogs. Instead, indexing a nationalist myopia, they mostly stick to a binary
framing of cultures and industries: the home national in opposition to the foreign American. This
oblivion of the rest of the globe is nevertheless simultaneous with a preoccupation with the
cultural standing and representation of the nation and its screen culture abroad, and the
competitive standing of the national cultural industries in the international arena. Likewise, the
average viewer demand for global cultural diversity may remain modest or at least much less
urgent or publicly visible than the demand for immediate equal access to the most popular—and
for now, mostly US-associated—programs.
That is, in contrast to the US discourses on Netflix and streaming, in other national contexts,
nationalistic cultural preoccupations and the popular demand for equal access to the global hit
shows dominate over any sense of bourgeoning cosmopolitanism or multiculturalism. The
transnational SVOD revolution and Netflix’s global-local strategy have reinforced rather than
overridden the nationalist framing of television and culture. The streaming revolution has incited
nationalistic pride or hope in relation to the international success of national “local originals,” as
well as the alarmist notion that national culture is once again under attack. According to a
nationalist binary logic, some media companies, producers, and distributors are deemed as the
proper representatives of the national culture while others (often, Netflix, for example) are
considered as inauthentic ones by some stakeholders such as competing broadcasters or
intellectuals.
At least for the time being, the contradictions between Netflix’s general global and local US
branding centered on globality and multiculturalism, and the implicit nationalisms it must
15
navigate in other concrete local contexts seem to sit relatively comfortably with each other.
Netflix and other transnational SVODs have been able to honor national group identities and
worldwide fans of pop culture at the same time—the nationalist and the cosmopolitan can both
retain their place in corporate strategies. Transnational media companies can play out their
corporate politics of appreciating “local cultures” by submitting to national and regional quotas
and producing “local originals.” This will entail the continuation of considerable differences
between local catalogs. At the same time, the most prominent original shows offered on the big
SVOD platforms are becoming simultaneously available in all territories in which the SVODs
operate, satisfying the most vocal viewers who publicly vindicate their equal rights as individual
consumers to global popular culture regardless of what peripheral territory they may inhabit.
Such programs in high global demand may be still mostly from the US, however, thanks to the
trend of “local originals,” they are indeed becoming more and more diverse in terms of national
origin.
The agenda of the “local original” incites nationalist versions of identity politics: supportive
as well as oppositional forms. In order to substantiate the argument on how “local originals”
regretfully reiterate the synergy between nationalisms and contemporary global capitalism, I rely
on poststructuralist and psychoanalytic, and even more prominently, materialist criticisms on
identity politics, especially as articulated by Wendy Brown (1995) and Nancy Fraser (2000). The
two authors converge in pointing out politicized identity’s inclination to essentialize and
conserve difference and to entrench in a morally distinct, superior position as the injured victim.
As Brown and Fraser argue, identity politics foreground the issues of recognition at the expense
of redistribution: it shifts from class politics and the examination of the social order toward
claims for equal inclusion into and representation within an existing system. Identity politics
16
tends to treat economic inequalities as the derivatives of cultural-symbolic misrecognition and
discrimination. Thus, it addresses economic inequalities as a matter of negative stereotyping of
and discrimination against minority and marginalized groups. This approach to economic
inequality is insufficient because maldistribution is not simply derivative of the misrecognition
of and discrimination against marginalized groups; class inequalities are not reducible to status
inequalities—the two are the embodiments of two, practically intersecting but analytically
distinct forms of subordination (Fraser 2000: 116-7)
5
.
Admittedly, for transnational media companies such as Netflix, which engage in the
production of “local originals” and purchase the rights to local shows and films to provide a
culturally diverse catalog in a politically correct and forward way, the acceptance of the
categories of nationality is surely the most plausible way of legitimization. This is possible
because in contemporary global social reality, national categories still provide a seamless
structure for thinking about cultural difference and, to a great extent, even economic standing
and inequalities. Thereby, the internationalization of an SVOD library—that will necessarily
always remain selective and thus practically discriminatory in terms of many cultural aspects
beyond nationality, related to themes, genre conventions, modes of narration, aesthetics and so
on—could pass as one neatly realizing the ideal of global cultural diversity. Internationalization
aims at the representative inclusion of all (national) cultures into the “global catalog.” If that is
accepted as a proper index for a democratic, equal, and diverse global community of television,
then the project of internationalization threatens not only with the reification of national

5
Nancy Fraser’s arguments have been critiqued by many (e.g., Sánchez 2006; Bohman 2007; Kompridis 2007; Forst
2007), notably by fellow feminist philosopher Linda Martín Alcoff (2006; 2007). Some of the disagreement may
stem from misunderstanding Fraser as claiming that concrete organizations and groups that formed around particular
identities would necessarily practice a uniform identity politics, or that the oppression of certain groups could be
identified as strictly status-based (see Fraser 2016).
17
identities but also with the displacement of the goal of thorough redistribution. The ideal brand
of a transnational SVOD catalog, especially its quality crime and period drama category, may
look more and more like the Olympic Games of TV: a supposedly fair and equal opportunity for
friendly competition that motivates everyone to continuously become their better self. People are
quite successfully interpellated as members of a national community to share in the pride of the
representatives of their country.
6
Participants are pressed and enticed to strive to win inclusion
and better yet, glory, rather than question the very point, structure and rules, and categories of the
game. The agenda of the “local original” to be included in the “global catalog” and the
underlying ideal of TV multiculturalism tend to pose as the compass of a truly egalitarian global
community.
Importantly, the concern of this dissertation is not the global normalization of Western or US
concepts of quality TV as working against cultural diversity and local specificity; nor is it about
the supposedly improper or dumbed-down representation of “local cultures” by programs created
for and circulated by transnational media companies. Rather, my concern here is that the very
focus on culture and the issue of diversity and specificity based on national territorial location
help displace the concerns about inequalities and differences within territories, within the
national, and the very rules by which the game of TV trade has to be played. I do argue that the
opportunities for success in the global TV trade are indeed getting more equal across territories.
However, I also argue that the ultimate question is not about the recognition of nations and
national cultures, nor the equalization of economic opportunities across territories—not even
about the recognition and equalizing of “locations”, their cultures” or their industries. Rather, I
suggest that discussing cultural recognition and diversity be always linked to and possibly

6
See Part II, especially Chapter 5 of this dissertation.
18
overridden by redistributive questions (taxation, labor rights, intellectual property rights etc.).
Furthermore, redistributive questions may be sidetracked by approaches favoring international
comparison at the expense of intraterritorial class inequalities. In the age of transnational
corporate capitalism and increasing globalization, the emancipation of the “local”—the nation,
the region, the municipality and so on—can falsely appear as the restoration of some authentic
global difference and equality. I also find it crucial to conceptualize the “national” as a strategic
construction of the self and others, and to distinguish between nationalist usages of the
“national” that entail some idealizing form of unique difference and normative bind to cultural
and racial and ethnic essence, on the one hand, and, on the other, more objective usages where
the national denotes a territory under a centralized, sovereign government.
The first chapter provides a larger-scale, longer-term view on the impact of the agendas of
the “local original” and the “global catalog” as innovated and mainstreamed by market-dominant
Netflix. Its main argument presented in the above paragraphs emphasizes and adds up to a
negative critique rather than a welcoming evaluation of the SVOD revolution. It basically puts
into perspective the reaffirming argument made in the second chapter: that the SVOD revolution
led by Netflix is enhancing global cultural diversity in the sense of travelling TV’s territorial
origin. In other words, transnational SVODs’ Netflix-type global-local strategies are progressive
when compared to the state of global television before. Namely, these new strategies entail
global television’s international diversification, making territorially based cultural flows more
mutual and balanced compared to the period before the digital distribution revolution and the
SVOD revolution more particularly. This pre-SVOD period was characterized by fewer
territories that would encompass significant media capitals where local creatives could get
opportunities to work on their own large-scale TV projects expected to travel globally.
19
Differently put, Chapter 2 welcomingly argues that transnationally travelling programs including
“quality TV” and global hit shows are increasingly coming from a widening pool of national
states. At the same time, Chapter 1 establishes how this relatively progressive development
nevertheless taps into cultural nationalisms, and thus can be, and has regretfully already been,
reappropriated by local nationalisms synergistic with transnational corporate capitalism.
In Chapter 2, I argue that the transnational SVOD revolution, and the trailblazing
localization-globalization rhetoric and practices on the part Netflix facilitate the de-
hierarchization of nationally framed cultures, and the equalization of opportunities for
professional, high-end cultural production and success across territories. I point out that national
territorial origin (or international diversity) has been operating as a dominant and largely
unquestioned conceptualization of cultural diversity when the latter is examined on the global
level. Crucially, this is only one possible way to construct global cultural diversity—and a
limited one for that. Its particularistic nationalist underpinnings need to be spelled out instead of
remaining implicit and thus further naturalized.
Chapter 2 specifies that the ongoing, desirable but limited effects of internationalizing global
television occur due to a combination of factors at the intersection of the technological
affordances of digitization, market dynamics, production and distribution practices, and business
models. These include online on-demand distribution; (close to) global operation; the vertical
integration of production and distribution; a sophisticated and dynamic taxonomic and
recommendation system organizing a large library; subscription-based consumer access; a quasi-
aggregator type platform that include cultural hits and a fairly wide variety of niche programs;
and occupying prominent market positions and recognizable brands that command high public
visibility. That is, I argue for the special potential of transnational, dominant, high-capital and
20
content aggregator-like SVODs currently best exemplified by Netflix to facilitate
internationalization in contradistinction not simply to physical-copy based distribution but to
national SVOD, niche-focused (such as art film specialist) SVOD, transaction-video-on-demand
(TVOD) and even limitless piratic distribution. Thereby, I posit the perhaps counter-instinctive
argument that Netflix’s mainstream and dominant market positions (as opposed to leaning
toward alternative, niche, and minority content; or occupying marginal market positions) are
synergistic with rather than detrimental to an important aspect of global cultural diversity.
Chapter 2 then engages with Netflix’s US brand as built around “globality,” and cultural
difference and diversity. “Local originals,” the celebration of global cultural differences, and
identifying as a patron and mediator of it have become the core of Netflix’s corporate image. In
the US context, Netflix has greatly facilitated the mainstreaming of “globality.” This entails the
transformation of diversity discourses: Netflix helped elevate “globality” as the geographical-
territorial structure of culture into an umbrella rather than additive term to the usual list of
recognized social differences led by gender, race, and sexuality. This reconfiguration of the US
diversity discourse indexes the going beyond US-centrism toward the stated cultivation of a
world community comprised by different but equal cultures, the US being only one of them.
Importantly, the rearrangement of the biggest US-based transnational media companies’ politics
and policies has concrete practical and material consequences in terms of content commissioning
and promoting, and hiring practices.
Accordingly, in contrast to much cultural criticism against transnational corporations and
Netflix specifically (e.g., Elkins 2019), I establish in Chapter 2 that the cosmopolitan self-
branding of Reed Hastings’ company is actually well-grounded and has practical, real-world
benefits that have spread beyond the direct reach of this company. Indeed, while the trailblazing
21
operations of Netflix particularly have commanded the greatest public visibility almost to the
extent of monopolizing the discourse on global TV, streaming and diversity, other giant media
corporations have been following in Netflix’s footsteps. That is, the technological, production
and distribution and consumer relations attributes most spectacularly pioneered by Netflix are by
no means essential to this company. Conversely, as Netflix’s global position and power are
changing, so are some of their corporate politics and practices towards more conservative
directions. Consequently, while much of my argumentation revolves around the example of
Netflix, I argue against its fetishization as a unique or stable phenomenon. This includes the fact
that there is no sharp and firm binary between Netflix and old Hollywood, between new entrants
and tech companies and old media corporations that were established way before streaming. In
fact, the big traditional media companies have been increasingly taking up practices and politics
pioneered by Netflix and started progressively prioritizing the online on-demand space and
reaching viewers directly. The above two lines of analysis of Chapter 2—breaking down the
combination of enabling factors behind Netflix’s cultural diversifying potential; and its
mainstreaming of the notion “global” in corporate diversity discourses—help me point out how
my dissertation is not about Netflix per se. Rather, it addresses the broader processes that have
been thoroughly transforming the global television ecology and the mainstream global cultural
hierarchy and power relations that operate among national states, industries and cultures.
That media corporations are ultimately or even only motivated by profit seems to be a trivial
assertion. Yet, sometimes, this fact is nevertheless used as a debunking device when evaluating
commercial media phenomena in critical studies. I want to stress that being driven by profit—
rather than genuinely altruistic motives—does not prevent corporations’ activities from
facilitating relative progress and beneficial cultural effects. My example of transnational SVOD
22
behemoths will be but one demonstration that business interests and progressive cultural
implications can be synergistic. At the same time, I also want to stress that by no means do
cultural benefits vacate criticism against corporations and corporatist state policies. Cultural
benefits do not invalidate problematic issues related to economic injustice and inequality (not to
mention other major global concerns such as those related to sustainability). In fact, my
argument integrates critical media studies and neoliberal economy approaches in order to join the
line of critical studies argument according to which recent corporate capitalism thrives on rather
than suppresses and homogenizes cultural difference (see e.g., Curtin 2001). Besides facilitating
rather than obstructing cultural diversity, big media corporations, I argue, are not to be accused
of compromising national cultures either. Unfortunately, this argument is as relevant as ever as
the charge of destroying or compromising national screen culture—rather than simply
industries—has been flaring up against Netflix in many national contexts conquered by the
largest SVOD of the globe. Indeed, as I show in chapter 3 and 4, culturally based and, more
specifically, cultural nationalist charges against Netflix have been prominent in the cultural
policy debates and reforms in countries like the UK or Australia.
My dissertation argues that culturally based and nationalist accusations against transnational
streaming platforms are largely void. Instead, I assert that criticism against and regulations of
corporate capitalism could be more substantially framed by issues of economic justice and
equality considered in a global rather than national perspective. Throughout the chapters, I aim to
deliver insights useful in cultural policy discussions and criticism against corporatism through
rethinking how cultural specificity and difference, locality, cultural diversity, and nationality
have operated in corporate politics and practices, industry, and popular discourses, and regional
and national policy debates. I argue for shedding nationalist, and more broadly culturalist
23
criticisms centering on the notions of authenticity or diversity when fighting against corporate
capitalism, and for the foregrounding of economic arguments. My commitment is to a
democratic ethical frame that posits the essential equality and qualified liberty of persons. My
approach values the opportunity for cultural production/self-expression and access but insists on
a larger-scale and longer-term normative frame that aims at thorough economic equalization. My
argument allows for cultural difference and group identities. At the same time, I argue against
nationalism or any politics that normatively bind the individual to a certain culture or collectivity
on a territorial and/or ethnic basis.
The “local original” is marketed, perceived, and normatively defined as ideally embodying
locally specific, nationally defined culture authentically, in corporate public relations discourses
as well as wider cultural debates including policy discussions. Thus, the “local original” and the
“global catalog” entail clashing politics: the first promotes nationally based cultural group
identities in contrast to the “global catalog” that emphasizes any individual’s right to define
herself culturally and act upon her cultural preferences without any normative bind to their “local
culture”. My dissertation argues against such cultural localism and for individual freedom in
cultural self-definition and access that allows for but does not prescribe collective cultural
identities and preferences on any national or ethnic, or local or territorial basis. I argue against
any presumption that persons living at a certain location share a unified and distinct culture that
their cultural product would, could, or should in turn “properly” represent. Consequently, I
embrace the idea of equal global access while critiquing the agenda of the “local original” as
understood by many stakeholders of the global and national TV industries and cultures such as
Netflix and other SVODs, broadcasters, politicians, members of the creative class, and other
24
cultural commentators in the US and elsewhere, including the national contexts I examine in this
dissertation.
I join, seemingly in agreement with Netflix as a transnational corporation that viewers should
have simultaneous access to all cultural products on SVODs in opposition to content quotas. The
idea of the global catalog could reflect inclusive access to any culture without nationalist or other
prescriptions for all individuals inhabiting any location. My argumentation rejects the cultural
rationale behind imposing local content quotas on transnational SVODs. However, very much in
opposition to SVODs’ corporate claims, I also argue that these companies should be considered
as full-fledged local participants in any given territory. They should bear high, primarily
economically defined responsibilities to society, that is, the location in and the public with which
they do business—regardless of having any brick-and-mortar presence or not.
I would like to propose an alternative positive understanding of the “local original” and
reframe it from a representative of supposedly distinct national cultures and national talent into
means of equalizing the opportunity of cultural creation and making a living as cultural
producers for individuals based on territorial-geopolitical location regardless of national-cultural
identification. Conceptualizing the “local original” this way, it could still serve global cultural
diversity and the equalization of economic opportunities but without reinforcing nationalisms. In
my redefinition, “local originals” could simply be recognized as progressive indexes of a
territorially based economic equalization in the sphere of cultural production—rather than the
emancipation of supposedly unique and unified local national cultures. “Local originals” could
be understood as indexing the multiplication and diversification of transnational screen
production locations with the local workforce providing creative input instead of service work
only for productions commissioned by transnational media companies. The multiplying and
25
geographic dispersal of creative production centers producing for the global cultural market
indeed allow for though hardly guarantee greater global cultural diversity of the end products,
and thus, of mainstream global television. What I argue is that to expect such diversification to
emancipate unique and separate national cultures is not simply unrealistic but politically
undesirable and impactful regardless of its being largely fictitious.
To sum up, the rising trend of the “local original” could be more progressive if it were to
shed its cultural nationalist underpinnings and came to bear different expectations on part of
stakeholders, which would transform how it figures in popular and policy debates. As a
paradigm for productions that helps achieve greater economic and symbolic equality across
territories for local individuals instead of recognizing and prescribing (national) group
difference, the “local original” could be promoted as a progressive phenomenon with less caveats
than its current form is.
I end Chapter 2 and Part I with discussing the celebratory perception of the SVOD revolution
and its multiculturalism in the US, and the intriguing question of just how and why TV
internationalization and the rising openness toward cultural and linguistic differences on part of
audiences can be contemporaneous with the resurgence of chauvinistic nationalisms across the
world including the US and many more (see Imre 2019). My goal is to contribute to our
understanding of this unsettling question through Chapter 3-5, in which I examine policy and
other public discourses on the transnational SVOD revolution, culture and the nation in three
national contexts in which Netflix operates differently and represents somewhat different issues.
What is shared by the three vastly different contexts of the United Kingdom, Australia, and
Hungary, is that the SVOD revolution is primarily framed as a binary issue between the national
and the foreign American, rather than in terms of global cultural diversity as it often is in the
26
United States. Likewise, cultural diversity is habitually framed in nationalistic terms, according
to which the domestic national as such represents diversity in contrast to US homogenization or
even any penetration of foreign culture that merely functions as a threat and not a part of cultural
diversity and richness. Netflix and other transnational SVODs are mostly discussed in political
and policy discourses in an unquestioned cultural nationalist frame and to a great extent in the
form of nationalist identity politics. In these local national discourses, the streaming boom is
perceived to pose new threats or new opportunities for not simply the local industries but for a
supposedly special national culture.
Leading discourses on television and Netflix in the UK, Australia, and Hungary are all
strongly embedded in a kind of economic and cultural nationalism that still entails a lack of
empathetic, open, and communal consideration of other countries as members of the same
worldwide community and submitted to the same capitalist order. Exemplifying nationalist
solipsism, domestic discourses make it seem it is one’s own nation only that would deserve
proper representation and recognition of national talent and culture internationally. The logically
parallel idea of appreciating access to and recognizing other countries’/“nations’” television,
talent, and specificity does not come up as a factor when discussing issues of the domestic
television ecology and culture, and how global SVODs affect these. That is, with some rare
exceptions (such as the academic and journalistic publications by Ramon Lobato, Alexa Scarlata,
and Stuart Cunningham in the Australian context), the potentials of “cosmopolitanism” and more
diverse hybridization of cultures as relevant to the positive affordances of big transnational
SVODs is obliterated in the British, Australian, and Hungarian national discussions. Typically,
the solipsistic cultural nationalist identity of exceptional artistic talent and the aspiration of this
being recognized by others, that is, the international community, is synergized by the notion that
27
such great talent comes from a small nation. This idea of smallness comes up not only in
Hungary or Australia with about 10 and 25 million people, respectively, but even in the UK with
a population of over 66 million persons—probably in an implicit contrast to the US (328 million)
as the only relevant measure of comparison. The idea of being a “small nation” can liberally
bolster cultural nationalist exceptionalism and its fetish of national talent. That is, underscored
by a nationalist solipsism, in all three countries, there is a common combination of the embrace
of the “local” that is one’s own national locality as the one to be recognized in the world in its
authenticity and specificity, on the one hand, and the obliteration from the discussion of the other
(national) “localities” across the world that would also like to have their own TV culture to travel
and be recognized. In the language of policies, this translates into combining protectionism and
competitiveness. “Free-market”-promoting neoliberalism and cultural and other nationalisms are
easy partners in many parts of the world, including the ones examined here. Such a combination
of nationalist protectionism and neoliberal competitive expansionism also underscores the
common, implicit ideal of a self-sustaining, domestic television sphere dominated by
authentically local content and “protected from” the American, the foreign, and the global,
simultaneously paired up with profitable and highly acclaimed cultural export in which
neoliberal economic and cultural nationalist goals can merge. That is, aspirations in these local
contexts generally aim to at least some local shows to travel internationally, thereby displaying
national identity and talent to the international community expected to be an appreciative
audience and also, making money.
The chapters of Part II elaborate on my argument on the normalization of high-budget
“quality” drama as a recently prominent placeholder for internationally oriented, competitive
28
cultural nationalisms in three national contexts
7
. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 answer Ramon Lobato’s
call (2019) for the exploration of the globally uneven development of Netflix as a global service.
Through Chapter 5, I would like to claim an affinity with Aniko Imre’s (2018, 2019) and Petr
Szczepanik’s (2017) scholarship and join them in exploring how the recent developments related
to the digital distribution revolution and transnational SVODs unfold in the local contexts of
Post-Socialist Eastern Europe. Furthermore, I will offer three national case studies for Michael
Curtin and Kevin Sanson’s assertion about private and public media both being driven by market
imperatives, triggering the competition between transnational and local content providers (2016:
6). Part II starts with its own introduction, in which I define the main theoretical and practical
concepts that provide the basis for the main arguments of Chapters 3, 4, and 5, including “small
nation” (largely based on Hjort and Petrie 2007); the “national” and the “local” for my
methodology; cultural nationalism; and public service broadcasting in relation to digitization and
to neoliberalism, as the main subjects of Part II. Clarifying my own stance with regards to the
central concepts, I distance myself from nationalist notions of the “national” in favor of an
approach that conceptualizes the “national” as a strategic positioning of the self and others in
contradistinction to a more objective term based on territoriality and lacking any normative
conception of cultural, racial, and ethnic authenticity. Concurrently, I treat cultural nationalism
as an inherently suspicious rather than politically innocent attitude. I argue that the normative
notions of “culture,” “art,” “originality” and “talent” offer a safe haven for nationalist attitudes
that any nationalism including chauvinistic politics can easily tap into. I take cultural nationalism
to be a form if not the ur-form of identity politics. I concur with Wendy Brown’s, Nancy Fraser’s
and others’ critique against politicizing identities as elaborated on in Chapter 1, among others for

7
For a similar project of exploring quality TV’s global-local relations and cultural implications in the Italian
context, see Buonanno 2013.
29
its tendency to reify differences, create moral binaries between the in- and the out-groups, and to
displace the focus on economic justice towards the frames of recognition, discrimination, and
inclusion or misframing it as a straightforward, consequent matter of identity. I also identify
traditional broadcasters’ including public service media’s increasing focus on high-end “quality”
TV series as driven by and appropriating local cultural nationalisms and neoliberalization. As it
is well-documented by now and will be further demonstrated by my inquiry here, the BBC while
still providing an international model for public service broadcasting, has actually been subject to
intense nationalist and neoliberal re-strategizing. In fact, national public broadcasters across
territories are generally attempting to directly compete and cooperate with fully commercial
media companies through the (co-)production of high-budget and transnationally travelling
drama series. Such competition and cooperation are usually facilitated in the name of national
culture but also motivated by economic success. High-end quality series are increasingly
prioritized over complementing the cultural spaces where the market is failing or
underperforming. Thus, public service broadcasters are losing from their potential to perform
democratic functions such as fair and balanced information on current affairs and watchdog
journalism independent from both political and corporate powers. Considering the changes of the
media ecology related to digitization and the on-demand and streaming revolution, I position
myself against the insistence on not only public media’s centralization of quality fiction but also
the continuation of the comprehensive public service remit more generally. I join arguments
according to which the comprehensive model of PSM should be reexamined based on the recent
developments of media ecologies, notably the quantity boom as well as diversification of
content, and the increasingly easy and affordable access to it. The insistence on the
comprehensive remit may also index political opportunism over and economic colonization of
30
public resources—such as the wasteful production and overpayment for programs without
cultural or popular significance. This will be perfectly exemplified by the contemporary
Hungarian public media.
My case studies enable a comparative approach based on a variety of factors. Both the UK
and Australia are among the territories that have been thoroughly Netflixed, with their media
ecologies including the position of traditional broadcasters disrupted. Concurrently, in both
countries, the rise of transnational streaming platforms has occasioned heated policy debates
permeated by nationalist identity politics. Importantly, both countries also share a strong public
service broadcasting tradition, which, though more or less constantly threatened has arguably
still remained within the frame of democracy. While the BBC is dominant at its home market,
the Australian PSB ABC has been less so but still a significant player. Furthermore, cultural
nationalisms play out quite differently in the UK with its historically exceptional status as a
strong TV exporter and the home of the number one model for public broadcasting; in
comparison to Australia with a developing but ambitious TV cultural industry with colonial ties
to the UK and the US. In contrast, Hungary is one of those territories where Netflix is part of the
public consciousness, yet it has not become a subject of major cultural political controversy let
alone policy debates. However, by the end of 2020 and early 2021, Netflix and HBO have
emerged as prominent figures in the Hungarian culture war between the rightist and the socially
liberal forces. These two studio-platforms—the two most prominent SVODs in the Hungarian
context—have been identified as the agents of American PC “brainwash” and “gender ideology”
by some cultural commentators on the right.
Importantly, Hungary is a national context where public service broadcasting is not rooted in
democratic traditions but has been attached to different authoritarian forms of governance before
31
as well as since the end of socialism. Crucially, PSM (as well as a growing part of private media)
has been colonized by the ruling FIDESZ party and their cronies. Relatedly, while the Hungarian
state television has had notoriously low viewership, its budgets have been enormous rather than
“rationalized” as per the more common versions of neoliberalization. I examine the factors
behind Netflix’s relative positions in Netflix-dominant versus niche-Netflix countries, including
but not exhausted by factors related to being a large or small market. The case study on Hungary
also addresses the ongoing gap in scholarship on the local specificities of digitization and the
streaming revolution in the Second World, and their interrelationship with political systems.
One comprehensive aim of Part II is to call attention to the persistent naturalization of
framing culture in nationalist terms, and the contestation of anchoring cultural normativities in
“the nation.” As I will demonstrate, in the current era of the digital, and more specifically, the
transnational SVOD revolution, traditional broadcasters tend to position themselves as the proper
representatives—curators and distributors—of “national culture” in contrast to the new SVOD
entrants. While there are reasonable grounds for such claims, my goal is nevertheless to show up
such claims in their complex, contradictory, self-interested and strategic nature, relying on the
examples of the media ecologies of the UK and Australia. Any claim to represent the national (as
in national interest, national culture, national authenticity, etc.) is necessarily partial, fragmented,
and ambiguous, and can simultaneously be made by various agents and stakeholders. Claims on
part of broadcasters, independent producers, artist and creators, TV-loving audiences and fans,
cultural experts, and elected or aspiring politicians, can partly overlap but also oppose each
other. Importantly, in certain national contexts ruled by authoritarian governments, public as well
as private broadcasters may be more thoroughly submitted to authoritarian governmental rule, in
contrast to newer transnational companies operating in the still underregulated online, on-
32
demand space. As such, these newer transnational media companies, while being less localized
than the main domestic legacy players, may actually be in a better position to offer what can be
considered critical, progressive, or liberatory representations to the local-national audiences—
thereby serving the public democratically. Unfortunately, this possibility has been more and
more relevant to the Hungarian context, where HBO has had (and Netflix can have) an
increasing role in serving the democratically defined public through its critical and progressive
fictional representations (Imre 2018).
I demonstrate the ubiquity of mostly banal, unmarked forms of cultural nationalism in all
three contexts. Cultural nationalism pervades the discourses on quality drama series in the era of
globalizing on-demand television and the trending of “local originals.” As the Hungarian
example shows, banal cultural nationalism commonly accompanies aspirations and thoughts by
subjects who empathically oppose popular-chauvinistic forms of nationalism including the kind
represented by the notorious FIDESZ government. Certainly, there is a key difference between
the harmfulness of banal forms of cultural nationalism and those of explicitly chauvinist
populism. However, there is considerable synergy between the two, which becomes a lot more
potent in the arena of quality television. For quality TV, as a hybrid cultural form, combines
cultural value and artistic merit with popular appeal. Thus, I argue that the worldwide
preoccupation with nationally-locally “specific” but transnationally mobile quality drama is in a
threatening synergy with the nationalist neoliberal polity that taps deep into a national identity
politics the gains of which can be appropriated by a narrow political and economic elite.
Importantly, national stakeholders in all three contexts have been unanimously arguing for
the importance of domestically produced, national-local original dramas, and large-scale high-
production-value projects especially. Such projects are not only supposed to embody national
33
culture and strengthen national identity, but also, bring international recognition (and profit) to
the nation. Nationally based broadcasters in the UK and Australia simultaneously emphasize
their special ability to produce authentically local-national drama in contradistinction to
transnational SVODs, and the growing need and difficulty to compete with such SVODs.
Importantly, they take for granted the normativity of the practices and branding on part of these
large transnational companies in the first place, like the flagship status of high-profile original
TV drama series. They are compelled to compete and cooperate with these fully commercialized
media companies on the latter’s terms. The conflicts between national broadcasters and
transnational SVODs help me complicate the binary constructions of the “national” and the
“local” versus the “global,” “transnational” or “foreign.” More concretely, I criticize how such
binaries often translate, in the field of television, into an opposition between the supposedly
properly national, free-to-air (public, and sometimes, private) broadcasters versus the more
conspicuously transnational, underlocalized SVODs like Netflix. This includes questioning the
assumption that the former necessarily serves the nation (as in the locally residing public) better
while transnational SVODs like Netflix would function in compromising ways.
In the case of the UK, and also in Australia, a considerable amount of content categorized as
“national”/“local” has been travelling transnationally, with varying geographical scope and
cultural significance. In the British case, such travel has entailed a powerful national branding. In
contrast, Australian television has not built a commensurable national brand of TV, especially
not in terms of quality TV. At the same time, due to its relatively smaller domestic market size,
Australian TV has been under more pressure to seek internationalization. As I demonstrate, the
transnational mobility of television—whether that of the strong British or the more modest
Australian one—cannot help but entail the close intertwinement of the national and the
34
transnational in creative-cultural as well as financial-industrial-institutional terms. That is, the
opportunities of international recognition and economic success enabled by the cultural export of
“local” productions operate as a double-edged sword vis-à-vis the “national” if the latter is
supposed to signify a unique, authentic culture and community. Transnational and international
engagements and export can elevate the “national” and the nation’s soft power, on the one hand.
On the other, however, these engagements simultaneously threaten the ideally sovereign, unique
“national” with diluting it through its mingling with the “foreign” and “transnational.”
8
As much
or even most of the transnationally mobile programs, whoever their commissioner is, are from
the start conceived with transnational travelling in mind, and as such, necessitate the opening up
for “foreign” cultural, industrial, financial, and institutional resources and influences.
Importantly, the international prospect of elevation-through-recognition and dilution both feed
into cultural nationalism and nationalist identity politics. The UK and Australia exemplify the
strained relation between the national and the “national.” In these contexts, while the practical
division between the national and the transnational in the area of television has become blurrier
and blurrier, the cultural-moralistic divide discursively constructed between them has sharpened.
As mentioned above, in the British and the Australian contexts, there is a strong line of
discursive, binary pairing of domestic broadcasters with the properly “national” in opposition to
the global SVOD. This nationalist binary discursive strategy is applied despite the close
transnational intertwinements of domestic broadcasters, and, perhaps unexpectedly, the often
more locally specific texts commissioned by global SVODs.

8
To reiterate, in contrast to the politicized group identity of the “nation,” in my definition, the term nation, without
quotation marks, can only stand for a public consisting of the local inhabitants of an institutionalized territory,
without any preconceptions regarding cultural or ethnic identity.
35
In contrast, Post-Socialist Hungary’s television has been characterized by transnationally
immobile local productions (that still, naturally, absorb and embody various processes and
attributes of transnationalization
9
). Post-Socialist Hungarian television has had no detectable
export activity and no national brand that would be internationally identifiable. Local TV content
has been stuck to/in its national location. Thus, foreign content and Hungarian content have
constituted a quite clear practical division, though the presence of a variety of (mostly highly
localized as in dubbed) foreign content has been very much normal and naturalized not only on
cable and satellite but on free-to-air television, state and private, too. In turn, however, the
emerging local quality TV drama via HBO Hungary has raised hopes, underlain by cultural
nationalism, of transnationally mobile and recognized, local original Hungarian content.
Crucially, in this Post-Socialist country, there has been no discernible cultural-moralistic division
constructed between national TV companies and programs in opposition to more obviously
transnational television networks, productions, and content. In fact, for one, domestic TV
productions have been the common subject of widespread cultural contempt—similarly to many
national contexts with relatively underdeveloped and underfunded TV industries. Accordingly, in
Hungary, premium television and global SVODs have been more potent subjects for positive
cultural nationalist identification and aspiration in the area of travelling quality TV than domestic
broadcasters, especially the public service broadcaster. Until the most recently emerging right-
wing discourses, Netflix and other, conspicuously US-originating transnational media companies
had not been subject to any notable, culturally motivated attack or challenge in Hungary—
neither in the period of Netflix’s non-localized version (2016-2019) nor around its localized
relaunch in 2019. At the same time, similar to the British and Australian national contexts, and

9
Such as the impact domestic broadcasters’ transnational corporate parents have on local broadcast scheduling
strategies (Havens 2007).
36
following the global trend, original and preferably high-end “quality” drama series have been
placed at the center of cultural national(ist) aspirations, as expressed by Hungarian industry
professionals, creators, cultural experts, and fans, and, increasingly and alarmingly, by the
authoritarian government and its media machine. In a way similar to many national governments,
the FIDESZ party has recognized the nationalist and commercial currency of quality TV drama
and has started to construct its specialized state subsidy system. They have been doing so in
association with what looks like an explicitly nationalist ideological-propagandistic project of
celebrating the national past and thus reinforcing nationalist myths in a way that serves their rule.
Grand-scale projects are also expected to go to the same few media companies under the
ownership and control of the FIDESZ oligarchy that most public commissions and state support
go to. That is, high-budget Hungarian quality drama series as commissioned by the state is
synergistic with the further entrenchment of the political power and economic colonization of the
country by FIDESZ’s “Mafia State” as Bálint Magyar (2016) refers to the current Hungarian
regime.
The rising international currency of “local original” quality drama, and big legacy
broadcasters’ related ambitions demonstrate the deepening neoliberal-nationalist logic
underlying PSB operations in the UK, Australia, and other countries across the world, as their
struggle for legitimacy, relevance, and financial resources continues. Such tactics are not without
historical precedence; for instance, in Australia, public service broadcaster ABC, starting in
1986, increasingly withdrew from one-off programs and turned to local drama series and
miniseries in an attempt to gain back viewers (Jacka 1991: 29). Important to the overarching
arguments of my dissertation, I will argue that internationally mobile high-profile drama series,
including ones with considerable social realism and criticism, and, even, nationally specific
37
historical or contemporary settings, have been among the cultural forms and commodities that
enjoy great diversity and accessibility by and through fully commercial media companies. If
anything, there has been considerable overproduction of high-budget, spectacular drama projects.
Thus, the public service remit, neither the more restricted market failure variation nor the more
comprehensive remit of “distinctiveness” would indicate the need for and legitimacy of PSBs’
recent high focus on quality drama at the expense of other functions. Instead of aspiring to and
being enabled to focus on market failure filling or distinctiveness, my case studies on the PSBs
of the UK, Australia, and Hungary demonstrate the growing attempts at directly competing with
fully commercial, private media at the expense of attending to areas where public service media
would be most needed for providing essential and corrective services. That is, through the
examination of PSBs’ “local quality drama” agendas in three countries, my examples affirm that
instead of functioning as the builders and watchdogs of democracy, and “drivers of innovation,”
PSBs are becoming “mere imitators of commercial conglomerates” (Bania 2012). In other words,
it is the unfortunate logic of neoliberalism combined with a likewise ubiquitous and recalcitrant
nationalism that underlies the disproportionate and unnecessary focus on high-quality drama
series at PSBs, at the expense of actually serving national communities where it would be most
needed: the areas of authentic and balanced news and investigative journalism while remaining
independent from both corporate-commercial and political forces; and programs that are indeed
highly specific locally and temporarily and as such have low if any potential for transnational
syndication and travel.
Overall, my dissertation argues against the ideologically nationalist as well as practically
neoliberal normalization of high-profile “local original” national quality dramas on multiple
grounds. I refute claims on the importance of producing such series by supposedly proper
38
national representatives. Such appropriative claims are necessarily embedded in particular
private interests (of production companies, creators, or broadcasters), which are
disproportionately prioritized over the national interest as the interest of the general public. Part I
and II both argue against the unquestioned desirability—embedded in competitive cultural
nationalism—of more as well as more expensive, “local” but mobile content. The protection of
the “local”, and often times, of “diversity” even can provide a politically correct façade for, and
feed into, chauvinistic and imperialistic nationalism. The straightforward prioritization of one’s
own nation and its supposed uniqueness and contribution to diversity is exemplified by the
opinion of high-rank public figures such as ITV chairman Sir Peter Bazalgette. Instead of taking
for granted the unlimited value of “local content” as an expression of cultural specificity and
authenticity, I argue for a re-examination of what kind and just how much “local” content,
especially high-budget, grand-scale project can be seen as serving a (national or other)
“location.” As Part II will underline, nationalist rhetoric especially combined with familial
metaphors about the nation help push to the background the need for concrete data and analysis
that might not provide proof for the implicit idea that “the higher the quantity and budget of local
production, the greater the service of the public/nation.” My dissertation questions the
predominance of high-scale, internationally mobile quality television in terms of local cultural
expression and value. In my upcoming project, I will put forward an argument for the greater
local specificity and cultural, public relevance of the largely immobile, and often, ephemeral
hyperlocal content produced and disseminated both professionally but also increasingly semi-
and non-professionally. This is the type of content that could most fairly be deemed as locally
specific and relevant—while keeping in mind that such specificity and relevance may fade away
or transform with time.
39

40
Chapter 1. Authentic” “Local Originals” in a “Global Catalog” “Available To
Everybody:” The Future of Global TV and Nationalist Identity Politics
Introduction
Netflix as the global market leader subscription-video-on-demand provider has had
exceptional leverage for orienting discourses on streaming and television—scholarly, trade,
popular, and political and policy ones alike
10
—on an increasingly global level. Consequently, the
company’s heavy promotion of their twin agendas of the “local original” and the “global
catalog” have landed these concepts in mainstream public consciousness. I want to break down
the politics of these powerful constructions that sprang from corporate PR and came to blossom
in cultural discourses worldwide. On the one hand, the global catalogue stands for the universal
equality of individual viewers regardless of their geographical, national, or cultural “location.”
On the other hand, the practice of producing and distributing local originals is posited as the
recognition, support, and representation of unique “local cultures,” in harmony with “cultural
diversity” as a dominant contemporary ideal and guideline for international and national cultural
policies, also prescribed by UNESCO (e.g., 2015). These two pillars of Netflix’s corporate brand
bolster a vision of a diverse and equal global multicultural community of television. Though
Netflix’s marketing discourse is anchored in cultural notions, we could translate their ideal into
economic terms: under the comprehensive banner of globality, the global catalog stands for
equality on the demand side, indexing the equality of all individuals across the globe who all

10
See e.g., in Novak 2016. I also want to call attention to the mushrooming of scholarly publications on streaming,
digitization and the changing ecology of global television that incorporate Netflix (instead of Amazon Prime, Hulu,
or others) in their title, usually in a more generic way rather than meaning Netflix only, e.g., The Age of Netflix:
Critical Essays on Streaming Media, Digital Delivery and Instant Access (ed. Barker and Wiatrowski 2017), Netflix
Nations: The Geography of Digital Distribution (Lobato 2019), The Netflix Effect: Technology and Entertainment in
the 21st Century (eds. McDonald and Smith-Rowsey 2016), Journal of Cinema and Media Studies’ 2020 Spring In
Focus dossiers Global Netflix edited by Ramon Lobato and Amanda D. Lotz, and their multinational Global internet
TV Consortium, “A network for research on Netflix and other internet-distributed TV services “(https://global-
internet-tv.com/).
41
should have equal access to “good television” regardless of their location on this “planet” that
“we share”—to borrow Netflix CEO Reed Hastings’ terminology (quoted in Johnson 2016). On
the supply side, the “local original” performs the equality of cultural creators and creations from
across supposedly unique locations. It implies that geographical-geopolitical location equals
irreducible cultural specificity; thus, “local originals” from different locations comprise a diverse
catalog of representatives of local cultures.
The discursive, ideal subjects of the “local original” (creators) and the “global catalog”
(viewers) complement each other: the stories by creative talent from any “location” from around
the world are discovered or sought after by the “curious” viewers (Hastings in Zang 2019) who
are into good programs either regardless or especially because of their foreign origin and cultural
difference. According to Netflix’s self-branding and much of industry and popular discourse
consistent with it, this complementarity between the supposedly “specific, authentic, and local”
stories from across the world and appreciative and adventurous viewers with a planetary mindset
is realized by Netflix as a truly “cosmopolitan” global studio and platform (e.g., Manjoo 2019,
see also Elkins 2019). Netflix’s identity-based, such as racial and ethnic, gendered, and, foreign-
language/origin diversity practices have been favorably evaluated, at least in contrast to the
mainstream film industry and big networks, by many commentators in the US (e.g., Brown 2020;
Kilson 2016) and other national contexts, such as the UK (in Spanier 2020). Casting director
Emrah Ertem says, “platforms like Amazon Prime and Netflix are way ahead of German TV
when it comes to diversity," (quoted in Deutsche Welle 2019). A Hindustan Times publication
praised Netflix’s first Indian local original’s authenticity and the generally “realistic”
representations of “American TV” in contrast to “[m]ost Indian TV [that] remains years behind,
…continuing to be shadowed by the drama and glamour of Bollywood” (Gabriel 2018). Netflix’s
42
global/local production and distribution practices have been triumphantly constructed as the
company’s signature agendas. The company’s success in orienting the industry is reflected by the
tendency of other media companies with globalizing SVOD platforms following suit swiftly,
eager to emphasize their own version of cosmopolitan mediation between local cultures and
worldwide audiences.
This chapter argues that the “global catalog” and “local original” together build an ideal
vision of a global multicultural TV community. Multiculturalism is a democratic model based on
the politics of difference, which grants an equal recognition of and sustaining support for
different cultures within the same society and polity.
11
Multiculturalism needs to balance
between the claims on universal equality (as the core idea of democracy) and the recognition of
particular differences—a major “challenge… endemic to liberal democracies” (Gutmann 1994:
3). That is, despite their being marketed and building the frame for an ideal global TV
multiculturalism together, the agendas of the “global catalog” and the “local original” dictate
transverse directions. This conflict at the heart of modern democratic politics has surfaced with
regards to Netflix’s corporate politics, too. Namely, the popular demand for equal and
simultaneous access for hit shows (instead of more local or diverse content) in more peripheral
territories are clashing with forms of cultural localism. The first initiative entails individuals
across the world claiming the equal rights of the global citizen as per Netflix’s “global catalog”
agenda. In contrast, cultural localism most commonly taking the form of nationalism, entails
protectionist policies, sharing the ideology behind the politics of the “local original:” they

11
Initially, such recognition used to pertain to relatively large, nationally, ethnically, or religiously based groups;
however, “soon it became a vision of a society fragmented into many small groups with distinct experiences, as well
as groups defined by the intersection of different forms of discrimination (Fukuyama 2018).
43
normatively bind local culture to local people. Protectionist measures include local content
quotas increasingly applied to online VOD platforms, too.
The rest of the chapter zooms in on how and with what consequences the successful agenda
of the “local original” taps into the logic of identity politics as the common embodiment of the
politics of difference. The “local original” suggests that nations as cultural communities should
be recognized for being uniquely different from other nations and emancipated as equally
valuable members of the diverse world community. Assigned to be the nation’s representative
and made to function as the token of inclusion into the international culture and business of
mainstream global television, the “local original” reinforces the nationalist structuring of the
world and individual national cultural identities. National identity as any politicized identity is
inclined to essentialize and conserve difference; take a defensive position of unjust injury and
moral superiority; and, crucially, shift from class politics and the examination of the social order
toward claims for equal inclusion into and representation within an existing system (Brown
1995; Fraser 2000). “Local originals’” reactivating nationalisms entails drawing upon the
neoliberal subject’s inclination to ressentiment and “wounded attachments” to grandiose group
identities (Brown 1995). The propelling of nationalist framing and attempts at the cultural and
economic inclusion of the nation practically reiterates a nationally based competition through
adjustments to the global order. Thereby, the “local original” helps conceal and divert from
addressing inequality as a globally structured class divide that is further increasing through
global corporate capitalism. The seductive abyss of nationalist identity can be cultivated by
crafty, opportunistic agents who would claim to represent the national public and interest in a
nationally based, international, and competitive order while practically benefitting the few at the
expense of equality. “Local originals,” combining popular appeal and the idea of artistic
44
excellence are highly potent subjects for such nationalist appropriations; as high-budget
productions, they can also bring relatively large economic gains for those orchestrating their
production and trade.
Universal Access and the Global Citizen-Consumer: The Ideal of the Global Catalog
“Still prisoners of territorial licensing—moving quickly to have global availability of all
content on Netflix” (Netflix US tweet on the day the service went global with the
exception of four territories, January 6, 2016)
“There are so many great stories around the world . . . we want to make them available
to everybody.” (Reed Hastings, quoted in Garrahan, 2018)
Netflix has framed the goal of the global catalog——all content made simultaneously
available in every territory—as a matter of global equality of access regardless of geographical-
territorial location. This democratic framing of equal access to all “great stories around the
world” has been positioned against the established practices of media distribution: territorial
licensing and the traditional favoring of bigger and more affluent markets over less profitable
territories; and also, windowing (e.g., Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s Chief Content Officer in Curtin,
Sanson and Holt 2014: 133)
12
. According to this early, anti-corporate corporate brand image,
they are a young and innovative company that fights against the old corporate establishment of
cinema and TV (Lobato 2018: 163-180). The company presented itself as successfully paving the
way for a new world of global trade in the spirit of putting the user first—each and every user
anywhere across the world. As Ted Sarandos put it in 2014:
“(…) we’ll make the viewers’ dreams come true. We connect people to media in a way
filmed entertainment has lost to video games and the web. We are restoring a sense of
connection between consumers and content. I think audiences have lost that emotional

12
I argue that thereby, Netflix has facilitated the destruction of long-established hierarchies of audiovisual
entertainment and art: it has been undermining the prioritization of theatrical exhibition and the exclusivist notion of
“cinema” in contradistinction to “television” in favor of a flexible notion of the screen accustomed to viewers’
mobile, individualized, and extended media consumption. Certainly, this de-hierarchization is in their own interest
as a company originally specializing in “home entertainment” and developing into a global provider of media
content to be primarily consumed on private screens in, and increasingly beyond, the home.
45
investment in content because television can no longer provide them access in the way
they want it, or in a way that matches current lifestyles. Restoring that sense of
connection is the biggest shift in the economy of entertainment.” (in Curtin, Sanson, and
Holt 2014: 135)
Paralleling Netflix’s global expansion, notions of global simultaneity and equality have taken
the front seat of the company’s self-branding. The global expansion was presented as the
extension of the “immediacy of delivery” of desired content at the core of the company’s brand
(Havens 2018: 326) to all individuals around the globe:
“Today you are witnessing the birth of a new global Internet TV network (…) With this
launch, consumers around the world -- from Singapore to St. Petersburg, from San
Francisco to Sao Paulo -- will be able to enjoy TV shows and movies simultaneously --
no more waiting.” (Reed Hastings, January 6, 2016, quoted by Netflix Media Center)
13

The company’s global expansion and branding centering on the notion of globality were
anticipated by their early libertarianism toward viewers’ piratic behavior of accessing Netflix’s
bigger catalogs through VPN, which contributed to Netflix’s progressive image and facilitated
public discourses on the unevenness of global windowing and access to cultural goods,
popularizing the ideal of limitless mobility of and simultaneous access to cultures (Lobato 2018,
163-180; Sarandos in Curtin, Holt, Sanson 2014:135). Such anticipatory strategies culminated in
the company’s 2016 global expansion:
"When we started Netflix nearly 20 years ago [as a DVD-by-mail online subscription
service in the U.S.], we dreamed of the day when the Internet would enable us to
deliver TV shows and movies to the billions of people with whom we share the planet
with" (Hastings in a keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas
where he “flip[ped] the switch” and launched Netflix in 130 new countries; in Johnson
2016).
Hastings perceived the popular demand for Netflix “when travel[ling] the world” as a
cosmopolite himself, configuring the global expansion as a gift to viewers and a step toward a
planetary community of equals. He concluded:

13
As Tim Havens notes, Hastings’ announcement of going global at CES was accompanied by the actual starting of
the service in several countries, “[r]einforcing the centrality of immediacy in [Netflix’s] brand” (2018: 326).
46
“Whether you are in Sydney or St. Petersburg, Singapore or Seoul (…) you can now be
part of the Internet TV revolution. No more waiting. No more watching on a schedule
that is not your own. No more frustration. Just Netflix … wherever you are in the world.
Today, you have witnessed an incredible event.” (quoted in Cook 2016)
In Hastings’s formulation, Netflix basically transgressed “the tyranny of” “geography”
(Iordanova 2010: 35, borrowing from Anderson 2008:162), “distance” (Goldsmith, Ward,
O’Regan 2010: 13-5), and “place” (Cowen 2002:5), practically realizing the foundational and
persisting fantasy at the heart of communication and media technologies about the liberation
from physical constraints and temporary delay. As it is implied, the inequality entailed by global
locality is transgressed both in the sense of the globally mobile travelling of programs around the
world and of the equal access for the viewers who inhabit territories that had not been properly
served before due to the de-facto hierarchies of media trade.
14

Presenting global expansion as global equalization harbors some controversies. For one,
Netflix does not have the global license to all the titles included in some of its local catalogs.
Another can of worms lies beneath Netflix’s pricing across countries that largely ignores
territory-based economic inequalities (e.g., Glenza 2015). Tweeters of the global public tend to
bring Netflix to book for not fulfilling their grandiose promises. Netflix’s tweet announcing their
global expansion “…Netflix is now global.” (January 6, 2016), for instance, incited the
resurgence of comments such as BeatleJohn’s: “Congrats, but I cannot say you are global while I
don´t have all the content to watch here in Brazil. That´s the reality for now.” Nevertheless,
Netflix actively works to appear an ally rather than an enemy in the fight to reconfigure the
power relations between viewers and corporations. To CasperOlsen’s tweet “@netflix and same
content everywhere…?” Netflix US replied: “Still prisoners of territorial licensing—moving

14
Scott Kirkpatrick offers an informative and compact insider overview of global media distribution in his 2019
book Introduction to Media Distribution. Film, Television, and New Media.
47
quickly to have global availability of all content on Netflix,” their rhetoric obliterating the fact
that Netflix had traded in the distribution rights of its own shows before going global (and since,
in China’s case).
The Impossibility of the Multiculturalist Global Catalog
Ted Sarandos also habitually presses the agenda of the “global catalog:” “Nearly every new
dollar we spend is for global content and global rights,” and regional differences between
libraries “will narrow out of existence over time” (quoted in Harwell, 2016). Sarandos’s
prediction seems, at the present moment, even more unlikely than it did in 2016, not just because
of the continuing force of territorial licensing and platform-based windowing, but also because of
territory-based content regulations. These include censorship (e.g., Pak and Danubrata 2016) and
policies prioritizing local content such as catalog ratios. As part of the tightening policy grip over
the digital space after the initial years of oversight and confusion, protectionist content quotas
quite normal for broadcasting has been expanding to SVOD platforms. Besides the European
Union (García Leiva and Albornoz, 2020), local content ratios have been of national concern in
many Latin American countries (IABM 2020). Mexico, for example, has already accepted a
domestic quota of 30% for OTTs (Bnamericas 2020). Quotas have also been called for in
Canada, the UK and Australia (Arthofer 2016; Pinto 2019; Taylor 2019; Wagman 2020) and
discussed but not expected to be implemented in certain Asian countries (Alphabeta 2018;
Minehane 2017). In general, however, even if there are no local content quotas in operation,
national policies tend to prioritize domestic content and support it through tax incentives and
subsidies in contradistinction to the production and dissemination of content deemed foreign.
Such policies favoring “local culture” are underscored by the politics of difference, similarly to
the celebratory notion of the “local original.” As such, they harbor an inherent tension with the
48
idea of the “global catalog.” This is because in contrast to the normative tying of local national
cultures to the people inhabiting the location, the “global catalog” is bolstered by the principle of
individual equality as non-discrimination based on any biological, social, or cultural
particularities including national belonging and location. The corresponding direction dictated by
popular viewer demand across the world is the equal, simultaneous access to the same shows
people in certain territories have access to: usually global mega-productions with substantial US
input (like Stranger Things or Game of Thrones) rather than more diverse, cosmopolitan, or
locally specific content. Balancing between honoring “national cultures” and identities, and
promoting a cosmopolitan-enough mindset and diverging consumption habits is a challenge not
unique to globalizing transnational media companies. The vision of a global catalog filled with a
diverse set of unique but equally valuable “local originals” struggles with the same conundrum
any modern democracy does: how to maintain the essential equality of all and properly recognize
and fairly consider differences among people (Gutmann 1994: 3).
The simultaneity of content quotas of considerable percentages in various territories
precludes the idea of the globally unified catalog. Nevertheless, the agenda of global availability
stays strong, and it is synergistic with what seems to be Netflix’s and other content providers’
long-term strategy: the focus on “original” content and IP that is fully owned and controlled by
the distribution company. Original programs can be distributed globally with the least
complication and given the affordability of online on-demand distribution, with minimized risk.
That is, fully owned IP can maximize the potential return on investments in production. Local
originals are preferably produced in a wide-enough variety of countries to immediately attract
new local subscribers in the widest possible range of territories. Crucially, they are not simply
49
consistent with the affordances of digital distribution—the probable reason for their
emergence—but they can be marketed as the realization of the ideal of global diversity.
The “Local Original” as Representing Authentic Local Cultural Difference
“At a time when minorities and vulnerable communities are demanding their space in
the mainstream, it is the responsibility of the media to represent them in true light and
right spirit. If (…) Sacred Games, Netflix’s first Indian original, is any indication, the
company has got it right. The series shows the viewer (who could be anywhere in the
world) an authentic representation of Mumbai in all its paradoxical glory.” (Gabriel in
Hindustan Times, 2018)
“…what we see on Netflix… is our members’ willingness to explore other cultures by
sampling shows in languages other than their own. Netflix connects teens all over the
world because some rites of passage are universal, such as self-discovery, identity, first
relationships, and testing limits — but the stories need to be specific, authentic and
local.” (Bela Bajaria, Netflix’s Vice President of Local Language Originals, quoted by
Ramos in Deadline, 2020)
La Casa de Papel, La Casa de las Flores, Shadow, Shadows, Kingdom, Queen Sono, The
Valhalla Murders, Ragnarok, The Woods, The Silent Valley, 1983, Deutschland 86, Dark or
Blinded by the Lights—these are a few among tons of (originally) non-English-speaking TV
series recently produced for and transnationally distributed by subscription-video-on-demand
services Netflix, Amazon, and HBO Go. Crucially, the production and distribution of such
“international series” constitute a core part of these companies’ corporate brands. These shows of
various nationality are habitually referred to in trade and journalistic discourses as “local
originals.” This is a category of television and film productions that pertains to programs created
by “local talent,” produced locally, and bearing locally specific cultural attributes (notably,
language), the primary commissioner of which is a transnational company based in another
territory, notably the US. “Local originals” are primarily associated with global, studio-like
SVODs originating in the United States, first and foremost the digital era’s new entrants into the
sphere of media entertainment like Netflix and Amazon Prime (Roxborough 2017), but also with
50
the new SVOD platforms of more established media companies such as HBO. As such, “local
originals” are routinely understood to be synonymous with “non-US,” “international,” or
“foreign(-language)” shows, signaling the emergence of a new trend beyond the established
norms and hierarchies of the hitherto US-dominated global TV trade
15
.
“Local originals” are not without antecedents. In fact, transnational TV networks have been
for long practicing various levels of localization, including its most resource-intense form, the
production of local content, especially since the 1980s (Chalaby 2005a; Straubhaar and Duarte
2005). Hollywood studios have also embedded themselves in the local production and
distribution of films in many foreign territories since the 1990s (Donoghue 2017). However, the
“local original” as a specific type of production and text came to be known by its name in the era
of the digital distribution revolution, originally attached to the corporate brand of innovator
SVODs. It was the breakthrough into the international, and especially the American TV culture
and popular consciousness on part of some non-English-language productions that skyrocketed
the “local original’s” global buzz.
The agenda of “geography”-related cultural diversity (e.g., Brennan 2018), just as several
other flags of progress and disruption in the US and the global media ecology, has been most
vibrantly assigned to and most successfully appropriated by Netflix. While being notoriously
sparse with sharing data, the company recently promoted the transnational appeal of several non-
US-originating programs, such as the Turkish The Protector, the German Dark, or South Korean
Kingdom, including in countries without significant diasporas (Bylund 2019). Netflix’s

15
Thus, the “local original” propagates itself as the representative of a new cultural era and business strategies that
divert from US-centrism, while, at the same time, it implicitly reinforces the invisibility or unmarkedness of the US
as a specific national location, thereby maintaining America’s central symbolic position. (Certainly, the term is open
for resignification.)
51
representatives habitually emphasize the authenticity of the local quality of such well-travelling,
globally appealing productions:
“Netflix connects teens all over the world because some rites of passage are universal,
such as self-discovery, identity, first relationships, and testing limits — but the stories
need to be specific, authentic and local.” (Bela Bajaria quoted by Ramos 2020)
Ted Sarandos has repeatedly promoted the following generalized version of the idea:
"The more authentically local the show is, the better it travels” (quoted in The Motley
Fool, Bylund, April 17, 2019; also, in interview with Aago, 2020)
Importantly, local cultural difference as implied by the “authentically local” original
production is most commonly understood as having national units. That is, “local originals,”
though never referred to as such, are practically “national originals” at best. Thus, the kind of
globality, cultural diversity, and ultimately, TV world community that Netflix has been
performing and elevating into the mainstream of the international television trade and discourses
on culture are bolstered by and reiterate the ubiquitous cognitive and affective structure of
nationalism. More concretely, “local originals” function as the promise of the nation’s cultural
recognition in the sphere of global TV by the international community posited as horizontal and
engaging in mutually benevolent interactions. Netflix has even addressed the issue of cultural
imperialism, homogenization, and the deterioration of local national cultures and industries at
various occasions:
“What’s in the back and front of my mind is sharing the world’s best content, whether
that’s Japanese anime, Turkish telenovelas, the film noir of the Nordics. I’ve never been
very Hollywood-centric. (…) There are so many great stories around the world . . . we
want to make them available to everybody.” (Hastings quoted in Financial Times by
Garrahan, 2018)
“Interviewer: One of things I did want to talk to you is the international market, because
that’s where you think the growth is gonna come. It’s sort of a geopolitical issue right
now and we’re talking freedom of speech. Hollywood, for very long time… there was a
view that we were exporting our values around the world. How much do you think about
Netflix now in that context about exporting values? Or do you think that as you become
52
a more and more international company as opposed to a domestic company that will
change?
Reed: I think about it as mutual sharing you know. When there’s a great French show
like Family Business, people all over the States enjoy it and it spreads and there’s we
serve [sic] a hundred and ninety countries and we try to think of them you know all on
the same footing.” (Hastings quoted in Karthik 2020, emphasis mine)
“In every nation there’s [a] great tradition of storytelling and if you can capture it on
film then we can really share it with the world.” (quoted in an interview Hastings gave
to English-language Filipino ABC-CBN News in 2019, Zang)
Along the same lines of affirming national talent and a mutual and balanced relationship among
“local” national cultures, Ted Sarandos, following his business tour in Africa, said at an event in
Lagos:
“I’ve learned so much in the very short time we’ve been here…(and) I’ve just been
thrilled to be surrounded by some of the most creative and successful creators in the
world here in Nigeria, telling your stories to the world” (quoted in Vourlias 2020)
Netflix’s investment in African countries like Nigeria or South Africa has been quite welcome by
local producers, though questions have arisen about just how “authentically” or specifically local
those stories that are granted worldwide mobility are. South African filmmaker and creator of the
successful independent web series The Foxy Five Jabu Nadia Newman, for instance, appreciates
the new Netflix local originals’ “duality” in terms of entertainment and the loyal representation
of some local experiences (in Koku 2020). At the same time, in contrast to Hastings’ embrace of
national storytelling traditions, Newman also feels “like Netflix was taking American storytelling
and placing it in a South African context” (quoted ibid). The takeaway, I argue, should not be
that there is a specific South African way of storytelling that Netflix originals fail to incorporate.
It is reasonable to consider, though, the extent to which narrative and aesthetic trends of
mainstream global TV in a given period spread transnationally. Impressions like Newman’s
strengthen my argument that the Netflix-type internationalization of mainstream TV could be
more appreciated as the geopolitical dispersal of opportunities for local talent to break out, and a
53
general de-hierarchization of imagined nations rather than a global cultural diversification in
terms aesthetic and narrative formations. “Local originals” can be assumed to embody
hybridized forms of storytelling, which are, however, largely under the supervision and
motivated by the business strategies of, dominant transnational companies. The latter may be
based in the US and thus, the dominant cultural forms could be referred to as American,
“Western”, or “Hollywood,” but even if so, they are less tied to any unified national and
imperialist cultural essence than to an originally as well as increasingly globalizing neural
system of media industries (e.g., Goldsmith, Ward, and Reagan 2010). In other words, culturally
speaking, Hollywood is American only insofar American is recognized for its dynamic
imaginary comprised of myriads of ongoing cultural re-appropriations. As I argued a few pages
before, the only certain unified local-national markers of cultural difference are the very practical
ones such as locally written script, locally based performers, a diegesis set locally and so on.
16

Anything beyond such relatively superficial markers, that is, the hermeneutical terrain is
inescapably diverse, ambiguous, and dynamic. No location, national or else, can be identified
with a stable and authentic cultural identity.
Such complexities notwithstanding, Hastings’ and Sarandos’ publicity work exemplified by
the above quotes performs a simplistic politically correct rhetoric that seamlessly assigns an
equally valuable difference to every abstract nation and treats nations as the units from which
cultural artifacts originate. The naturalizing entanglement of basic sociological concepts such as
culture or society is at the core of banal nationalism (Billig 1995: 52-54). The rhetoric takes for

16
What would be part of such practical markers are references to local (cultural, political etc.) affairs; as these are
usually less easily understandable and/or less relevant to non-local audiences, not many of them would make it into
a high-budget show that is expected to travel transnationally. In contrast to nationalist arguments, often in favor of
domestic broadcasters and against transnational streamers in contexts such as the UK or Australia, such obliteration
of local specificities or watering down of the local is not the attribute of texts made by foreign companies. When
texts are meant to travel far transnationally, they can hardly ever afford to incorporate a lot of such truly (because
practical) local specificity, even when they are commissioned by more domestic companies.
54
granted the general nationalist notion that a “people, place and state should be bound in unity”
together with a unique, authentic, shared culture (ibid 77), and ignores the intense processes of
deterritorialization as “the loss of the ‘natural’ relation of culture to geographical and social
territories” (Canclini, quoted in Chalaby 2005:8) and the overlaps and disjunctures among the
various, constantly changing landscapes of global flows (Appadurai 2003). Thus, what Hastings’
universally applicable flattery implies about the value of the national is retrograde yet tempting
as it activates national identity and pride as a source for grandiose identification that is potential
but threatened by increasing globalization. In fact, I am about to argue that the very conception
of the “local original” is inseparable from nationalism; it is the love child of the nation and the
transnational corporation.
The “Local Original’s” National Container
The ur-example of Netflix’s “local original” and its emerging politics is Lilyhammer (2012-
2014), the company’s first venture into original production. Reflecting on the initial doubt as to
how Lilyhammer as a Norwegian show could have an appeal beyond its home country, the
show’s main star, co-writer and co-director Steven Van Zandt noted:
“I said to people, ‘The way to make this more international is to make it more
Norwegian – as Norwegian as we can make it. I want to know every nuance, detail and
eccentricity that people might find interesting or different.’ I also said, ‘I want to make
Norway a character in this show, because it’s a complete mystery to most people.’ No
one knows a thing about it, so I wanted to reveal it in the best way I could.” (quoted in
Greene 2013)
As per the politics of difference and more specifically, an act of Norwegian identity politics
in the international arena of national states, one of the show’s main creators framed Lilyhammer
as the courier of a theretofore unrecognized, unique Norwegian identity to be finally seen by the
world in its true being. As I will explicate in later chapters on Australia and Hungary, in cases of
countries that have been marginal in the arena of global television (effectively, most countries),
55
“local originals,” already existing or yet to be made, are potent objects for cultural nationalist
projections: artefacts that could embody and show off the nation’s real talent that has hitherto
been unable to blossom and recognized by the world; or, conversely, framed as false images of
the nation appropriated by illegitimate commissioners.
Van Zandt practically put forward the formula for the new “local original” Sarandos has used
since, according to which local authenticity directly propels global mobility. I cannot help but
take Sarandos’ assertion as the pinnacle of the celebratory rhetoric of abstract cultural difference
and local authenticity. The PR pearl posits a seamless cosmopolitanism among global audiences,
enthusiastically catered to by Netflix’s own cosmopolitanism, where quality “local originals”
embody the specificity of local cultures imagined as unique snowflakes that never melt. The
slogan simply naturalizes the idea of distinct and authentic local-national cultures, completely
circumventing the intricate issues of who is to tell, and how, to what extent a cultural product is
an accurate representation of local specificity, of national or other locality-based identity. I want
to ask: beyond the most practical markers—such as a local script written by talent of local origin,
local performers, a story set locally, the dialog spoken in a local language—can anything really
be said, with confidence and wide agreement, about authentic local specificity? Who is in the
position to identify what the “authentically local” might be among the necessarily diverse and
dynamic cultural formations to be found in one “location” at a given time?
Such intricacies notwithstanding, the ideal of borderless cultural exchange and audiences’
being down for foreign-language (or, foreign-originating) content has actually consolidated as a
powerful marketing slogan and truth claim in the wider industry well beyond Netflix.
17
Notions
like that of Reed Hastings—"People are curious. Everyone wants to understand other parts of the

17
And even beyond the SVOD marketplace, as I will further discuss in Chapter 2.
56
world” (quoted in Yang 2019)—has been vocally propagated by other giant media companies.
Jennifer Salke, head of Amazon Prime Video said that “[t]he way we are looking at content, it
doesn't matter where it has come from. If it's great content we are going to get behind it in a
global way,” and that in contradistinction to Netflix, Amazon is more about “curation” and “a
customer-focussed strategy, delivering shows to our customers that are about quality and not
quantity” (Shashidhar 2019). In the words of the company’s head of international originals
James Farrell: “We've found if a show is very specific, very local and it is well made, it will
travel” (quoted in Roxborough 2019b). Georgia Brown, Amazon’s European originals director
stated that “language is kind of irrelevant now,” and “audiences are very open – they just want
fantastic content and to fall into those worlds” (quoted in Clarke 2019a). These PR moments on
part of one of Netflix’s biggest direct competitors should demonstrate the close similarity of
rhetoric centering on globality and local specificity, and the attempt for the brand to somehow
still stand out.
I want to stress that the point is less about language’s supposed irrelevancy for audiences and
more about normalizing the idea that valued TV (including the most prestigious kind, “quality
television”) can come from anywhere in the world; that recognizably “foreign” content even in
hitherto self-sufficient and self-absorbed TV cultures such as mainstream US TV, can be part of
the mainstream. Thus, the trend of dubbing, including the English-language dubbing of non-
English originals (Roxborough 2019b) does not contradict the argument about the international
de-hierarchization of cultures—if anything, it strengthens it. The dubbing revolution indexes the
profitability of investment in the localization of “international” programs as their consumption
has become (or is expected to become) mainstream enough. The trend implies the rising cultural-
57
symbolic prestige of “local” content and the progress toward a more balanced international
cultural hierarchy in the sphere of TV.
Celebratory journalistic discourses on streaming and the new SVODs posit “local originals”
as resulting from the cooperation between the national and the corporate; as uniting the input of,
a nation, including its culture and talent, on the one hand, and a media company, on the other.
This underlying discursive construction is made unusually explicit by New York Times’ publicist
Mike Hale (2012), according to whom Lilyhammer comes “From Netflix and Norway (…).” The
prominence of constructing the “local original” in terms of a cooperative encounter between
national and transnational corporate brands is exemplified by the common, basically naturalized
practice of noting the national origin and the main distributor media company as the main
identifying attributes of a title upon its short introduction. For instance, The Hollywood
Reporter’s article on HBO Europe’s local originals mentions “Czech political drama Burning
Bush,” “Hungary's Golden Life,” or “Polish police thriller The Pack”, when arguing for the
company’ accomplishments in the midst of “Netflix and Amazon …grab[bing] all the headlines”
(Roxborough 2017). With regards to Netflix’s projects in South Africa, Nigeria, and elsewhere,
Dorothy Ghettuba, the head of African Originals called attention to the long-time struggles and
adaptability of local producers to the lack of capital and government funding and affirmed that
“now we give them the opportunity with this platform and this backing from this company to
really do their best” (quoted in Vourlias 2020). Such branding of media companies as cultivators
or emancipators of unique cultural difference and the thriving of local national talent, as being
cooperative partners with if not patrons of national talent and art, help further reify the symbiotic
relationship between global neoliberal capitalism and nationalisms. The “nation” as a locative
subject awaits cultural self-realization and international recognition. Its authentic identity can
58
realize itself in the form of universally valuable cultural artifacts that are conceived through
encounters with the transnationally mobile agent of capital: the corporation. I argue that the
“local original” implies a myth of origin that is charged with gendered symbolism related to the
feminized notions of home and place (the nation and its culture as an immobile essence), and the
masculinized concepts of activity and mobility (the corporation) that are in a symbiotic,
complimentary relation.
The Cult of Local Originals Gives Television’s Historical National Container a New Shine
The idea of unified and unique national cultures may have been refuted in critical media,
communication, and cultural studies; however, it seems to stay strong in political and popular
discourses. Though in different ways, television and cinema have been long intertwined with the
national. Cinema has been tied to a discourse of artistic-intellectual excellence and to the image-
brand of a nation, co-constructed by national institutions (such as film boards and funds,
curriculums, and scholars and critics) and international ones (such as film festivals). In turn,
television used to be imagined as the much less prestigious but essential backbone of the
everyday, banal life of a nation and its people, as an index of national sovereignty. According to
the traditional logic of cultural nationalism, while national cinema should perform the nation and
make it proud both at home and abroad, television as “the private life of a nation state” (Ellis
1982: 5) was generally not expected to travel but to strengthen national identity and community
through its domestically produced and culturally relevant programs.
18
Television’s, and
especially entertainment-oriented TV’s, fraught relationship with art- and excellence-oriented
cultural nationalisms has been shifting, however, in many national contexts, to a significant

18
In practice though, both finished programs and formats had been circulating internationally, formally, and
sometimes, informally, way before the emergence of satellite TV and the truly transnational era of television (see
e.g., Imre 2016; Moran 2013).
59
extent thanks to the trending localization of HBO-type quality drama television (Imre 2018).
Indeed, the category of the “local original” has overlapped with the current normative notion of
“quality TV”—a marketing category appropriated for, and value judgment bestowed upon, a type
of serial television that is supposed to represent the best of fiction TV through its sophisticated,
intellectual, complex, original and artistic approach. It implies a high-budget, limited series
associated with drama (especially crime, and period or epic drama) as a genre and, often times, a
form of “realism,” and executed in a cinematic visual rather than classic televisual style
19
.
Combining attributes of the popular and elite-artistic excellence, “local originals” thus constitute
all too prominent sites for cultural nationalist projections. While their embeddedness in
transnational trends and often, formats, they remain framed in terms of national specificity in a
range of discourses, including popular perception and scholarly-critical analysis (e.g., Batori
2018). The nationalist evaluations they invoke can be both positive (satisfied, aspiring and
proud) and negative (dissatisfied, anxious, and hostility-prompting). This seems to depend, to a
great extent, on the verdict on the “authenticity” and legitimacy of the stakeholders behind it, as I
will explicate in later chapters. Thus, “local originals” tend to function as the subjects and the
means of cultural nationalism. I argue for their recognition as an enticing cultural-nationalist
fetish. As such, they enable stakeholders with particular political and economic interests to make
claims in the name of the nation and the protection or emancipation of its culture. The cultural
nationalist fetish of the “local original,” whether as a good or bad object for nationalism, has
considerable force to define local concerns in cultural rather than economic terms, and,
furthermore, to define cultural and economic concerns in national rather than global terms, where
national states are in a comparative-competitive rather than shared and interdependent position.

19
See e.g., Buonanno 2013; Creeber 2015; Mittel 2015; Nelson 2007; Ribke 2016.
60
While “national interest” is nominally derived from the will and needs of the public, it tends to
be appropriated for narrow particular interests. In the coming section, I will break down how the
agenda of the “local original”, due to its being a prominent currency of nationalist identity
politics deters from investigating global capitalism as an unjust global economic order, in the
name of global cultural diversity. Cultural nationalism, rather than a politically innocent attitude
in contrast to hot and chauvinistic nationalisms, should be charged as the legitimizing ideology
of neoliberal nationalisms serving the interests of national elites and transnational corporations.
The Curse of Politicizing Difference as Identity
The politics of difference is a manifestation of a postmodern consciousness which
simultaneously rejects Eurocentric modernist universalism and Enlightenment metanarratives
while it also builds on these (Dirlik 1996). It “presupposes local differences (literally, or
metaphorically, with reference to social groups) both as a point of departure and as a goal of
liberation” (ibid 35). In parallel, political theorist Wendy Brown argues that the propensity to
politicize identity—related to gender, race, or sexuality, etc.—in late modernity’s liberal states is
“both a production and contestation of the political terms of liberalism” (1995:54).
The politics of difference branched out from “the modern preoccupation with identity and
recognition” in egalitarian, democratic societies that are opposed to and replace premodern rigid
social hierarchies (Taylor 1994: 26). It is closely related to the modern subjective turn with its
solidifying ideal of the authentic self: the idea that every individual has a deep-seated, unique
self, to which one must be true, and that needs recognition by others for the individual to live a
meaningful life (Taylor 1989; Trilling 1972). In its emphasis on “recognition,” the ideal of
authenticity and the politics of difference draw on the Hegelian premise of subject development
theorized in The Phenomenology of Spirit: that the individual’s sense of self, i.e., identity can be
61
achieved through the mutual interaction with and free recognition of, the other (Fraser 2000:
109). In Nancy Fraser’s formulation, advocates of the “identity model” of the politics of
recognition “transpose the Hegelian recognition schema onto the cultural and political terrain,”
arguing that being a member of a group “devalued by the dominant culture is to be
misrecognized, to suffer a distortion in one’s relation to one’s self” (Fraser 2000: 109). In
relation to the difference represented by minority identities, the politics of difference posits that
“this distinctness that has been ignored, glossed over, assimilated to a dominant or majority
identity” has to be finally properly recognized as the key to equality for the minority in question
(Taylor 1994: 38)
20
. These groups then may claim their right to their difference and protection
from being negatively discriminated against. That is, the particularity tends to be posited not only
as the basis of the historical discrimination and suffering of the minority group, but it is also
reframed as a valuable attribute—a particularity that thus deserves to be sustained and
celebrated
21
.
The idea of the human subject with inner depth can be traced back to Saint Augustine, but it
was the prominent thinkers of the Enlightenment and the Romantic tradition who brought it to its
full bloom: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his concept of morality as a voice within, and Johann
Gottfried von Herder (Taylor 1994: 29-30). The German philosopher foregrounded the notion
that each person “has an original way of being human”—which engrained itself into the modern

20
As the activist group Radicalesbians put it in the concluding paragraph of their 1970 manifesto “The Woman
Identified Woman: “… We see ourselves as prime, find our centers inside ourselves. We find receding the sense of
alienation, of being cut off, of being behind a locked window, of being unable to get out what we know is inside. We
feel a real-ness, feel at last we are coinciding with ourselves. With that real self, with that consciousness, we begin a
revolution to end the imposition of all coercive identifications, and to achieve maximum autonomy in human
expression.”
21
Sonia Kruks explains the shift from a universalist politics of equal recognition to the politics of difference through
the example of the 1960s’ Black movement in the US: in contrast to earlier advocates of the full integration of
African Americans into the majority white society, it highlighted the value of a distinctive Black culture succinctly
expressed by the slogan “Black is beautiful” (2001:85).
62
Western consciousness (ibid 30). Crucially, Herder applied “the principle of originality” not only
to individuals but to “the culture-bearing people among other peoples”, planting the seed
doctrine of modern nationalism (31). The Herderian view of distinct national cultures interacting
in and making unique and complementary contributions to a diverse world also lays down the
conceptual seed for the nationalist notion of cultural diversity and for cultural relativism (e.g.,
Barnard 2003: 131-160). In fact, I argue to consider nationalism as an ur-model for identity
politics. Nationalisms—while sometimes forming in opposition to domination that entails
economic subjugation—should generally be considered as projects of symbolic unification and
the formal declaration of the equality of all members, despite vast in-group inequalities in terms
of status and material resources. I want to emphasize that in a similar way, various embodiments
of identity politics posit the existence of a unique community, in which the shared experience,
interests and “being” of the members unify them, regardless of differences in economic class,
level of education, occupation or social status. Not coincidentally, the term “nation” has been
appropriated, whether seriously or ironically, by a wide variety of politico-cultural movements.
As Wendy Brown put it in the mid-nineties:
“…nation formation—loosened from what retrospectively appears as a historically
fleeting attachment to states—is today fervently being asserted in cultural-political
claims ranging from Islamic to deaf, indigenous to Gypsy, Serbian to queer.” (1995a:
53).
Besides its philosophical roots going back to the Enlightenment and beyond, there are also
more proximate reasons behind identity politics’ trending in post/modern democracies. Brown
points to liberal humanism and the revisions of the category of the human as discriminative; and
to a set of Foucaultian forces producing and regulating the social categories of humans:
consumer capitalism and the excessive production, commodification, and marketing of desires as
63
identities, and a range of bureaucratic-disciplinary orders medical, psychiatrically, and legally
categorizing the human subject (1995:58).
Many groups across the world but especially in the United States since the 1970s, associated
with the struggles of women, religious communities, people of color, national, ethnic, and
indigenous groups, non-normative sexualities etc. have deployed what has been called identity
politics, the conventional embodiment of the politics of difference. Identity politics is
traditionally associated with the political left as it originally addressed forms of systematic
domination over “minority groups”. As such, the political right has been especially active in its
berating—at the same time, however, they also appropriated the logics of identitarian politics for
their own goals (Kumar et al. 2018: 11). In fact, according to Francis Fukuyama, the worst
among the proceeds of “identity politics as currently practiced by the left” may very well be “that
it has stimulated the rise of identity politics on the right” (2018). As he observes, “[a]ll over the
world, political leaders have mobilized followers around the idea that their dignity has been
affronted and must be restored,”—a practice that has been routine in authoritarian countries but
clearly on the rise in traditionally more democratic ones, too. In various national contexts with
vastly different histories, from India through Hungary to the “world’s most durable liberal
democracies” (the UK and the US, in Fukuyama 2018), identity politics provides the seamless
suture between chauvinistic nationalisms and the re-strengthening of neoliberal capitalism.
Rightist identity politics tends to blame what are the deep-seated issues of capitalism on liberals’
favoring of national minorities (Kumar et al. 2018: 19). Nigel Farage’s Brexit campaign
exemplified, for instance, a “[f]lip-flopping between post-colonial immigration threats and those
from Continental Europe,” and reassured that ‘white British’ was an identity of which to be
proud, and importantly, an identity under attack” (ibid).
64
In many liberal democracies, economic inequalities have escalated, and large segments of the
society have experienced downward social mobility and loss of income, and/as a loss of status
and public invisibility. These developments provide a fertile ground for “nationalist and
religiously conservative” rhetoric that appeal to a sense of community that has been betrayed,
robbed, and taken advantage of by foreigners, immigrants, (liberal) elites, or non-believers
(Fukuyama 2018). Likewise, Donald “Trump ran and won on identity politics,” becoming
“The First White President” of the United States insofar as explicitly representing a white
supremacist ideology instead of simply benefitting from “the passive power of whiteness” as
his predecessors had done, with one exception (Coates 2017). According to Ta-Nehisi Coates,
the blame of dogmatic identity politics is often falsely assigned to the political left and
traditionally marginalized groups.
22
At the same time, Coates argues, acts of white supremacist
racist identitarianism have been covered up as legitimate class rage against capitalist
impingements. That is, while classical forms of minority identity politics have been rightfully
critiqued for its deteriorated class politics (Brown 1995), conversely, white working-class racism
has been able to pose as protesting economic deprivation. All in all, contemporary US politics
and global affairs in general, are filtered by identity politics through and through across the
political spectrum (Fukuyama 2018). In contrast to the focus on economic matters in the 20
th

century —workers and redistribution on the Left, and the reduction of the state and expansion of
the private sector on the Right, —contemporary Leftists have focused on the marginalization of
an ever-widening variety of specific groups, while the Right has returned to the agenda of the
“patriotic protection of traditional national identity” (ibid 91).

22
For similar arguments about the unmarkedness of whiteness and the pretenses of “anti-identity identity politics,”
exemplified by the All Lives Matter movement, see Walters (2018) and Paul (2019), respectively.
65
Even before identity politics became a ubiquitous concept in political and popular discourses
in the US, there had been manifold pitfalls assigned to it by prestigious theorists. Scholars of
psychoanalysis and poststructuralism pointed to the false essentialization of identity; the
mistaken construction of the human subject as a cohesive and self-transparent entity; or taking
the subject’s (narratively constructed) experience as a guarantee of authenticity and truth (Fuss
1989; Butler 1990; Scott 1991). Defying its stated goals, identity politics is a potential source of
oppressively disciplining and dividing the very subjects it is supposed to liberate and
emancipate—resulting in "one kind of tyranny [being replaced] with another” (Appiah 1994:
163). In more Foucaultian terms, “identity categories tend to be instruments of regulatory
regimes,” whether of oppressive authorities or the very resistance to those (Butler 1993: 308).
Taking to the extreme the feminist postulate “the personal is political,” identity politics hollows
out the very notion of the political (Bourne 1987:1, quoted in Fuss 1989: 100-1). Tending to
reduce individual deliberation, complexity and diversity, identity politics improperly links
identity and politics “causally and teleologically” (Fuss 1989: 99), and it divests the person from
individual autonomy (Appiah 1994: 162-3). In Nancy Fraser’s view, identity politics’ fight for
recognition tends to “drastically simplify and reify group identities” (2000: 108). It thereby
promotes “separatism, intolerance and chauvinism, patriarchalism and authoritarianism” (ibid).
23

Fraser’s concern about group “reification” can also help us take the step toward understanding
Wendy Brown’s metaphor for the politicized investments in identity as “wounded attachments,”
as identity’s reification of its own being rooted in injury (1995: 52; 73). Brown debunks the

23
Indeed, contradictorily, as per cultural relativism and some versions of multiculturalism, groups affiliated with
marginalized, minority, non-Western and formally colonized “cultures” can sometimes be argued to represent not
only some unique but necessarily legitimate and valuable difference, regardless of potentially significant
transgressions of the value system of the culture of the one who argues and commits herself to such version of
valuing “cultural diversity” and the politics of difference. For some discussions on the dilemmas related to
multiculturalism and core “majority” values, or Occidentalism, colonialism, and feminisms with regard to Third-
World cultural traditions, see e.g., Narayan (1997), Song (2005).
66
politicization of identity as a “moralizing politics” that seeks the inscription of past and present
suffering into the political registers such as the law (66). Such striving for “the codification of
injury and powerlessness” takes precedence over the pursuit of liberation and power (1995b: 27).
Embedded in Nietzschean ressentiment, identity politics embodies the case when the “instinct for
freedom turned back on itself” due to the ascendance of anxiety in our fundamental ambivalence
vis-a-vis freedom (1995c: 26). Identity politics entrenches itself in the “morally superior
position” of the injured; it seeks revenge and “the triumph of the weak as weak,” blaming and
recriminating privilege instead of taking on the challenge and burden of freedom and “its
demanding invocation of power and action” (1995c: 45 1995a: 67, 70; 1995c: 26). In Brown’s
approach, the proper recognition of the pain and suffering inflicted on discriminated and
marginalized groups should result in the overcoming of pain and the release of the identity that is
rooted in it instead of its reification: “in its attempt to displace its suffering, identity structured by
ressentiment at the same time becomes invested in its own subjection” (1995a: 74, 70). Vulgarly
put, politicized identity gets hooked on its own victimized and morally superior position, which
also exempts the subject from assuming (contextual and limited but real and all the more
burdensome) “responsibility for oneself” (Nietzsche, quoted in Brown 1995a: 25). Though
Brown’s concerns addressed identity politics as practiced by the political and academic Left at
the time, her argument portends the rise of rightist identity politics insofar as she identifies
Nietzschean ressentiment as the dynamics to which “all liberal subjects, and not only markedly
disenfranchised ones” are prone to. Namely, the propensity of the liberal subject to withdraw
from the project of freedom and get stuck with their victim identification is due to the
individual’s escalating dependence on a variety of pervasive and complex social, political, and
economic powers, on the one hand, and the normative myth of the self-reliant, self-made
67
sovereign liberal subject, on the other (1995a: 67-8). Indeed, as Davina Cooper puts it in 2004,
“…what has been evident in more recent years is the collective self-interpellation of seemingly
powerful groups through discourses of vulnerability” (6). A relevance of this in the context of the
SVOD revolution and TV’s internationalization is that nations quite powerful in the sphere of
culture and TV, even benefitting from historical and remaining colonial ties like the United
Kingdom, are as prone to entrench themselves in the defensive position of the victim engaging in
a heroic struggle against “foreign” powers as more dependent, unrecognized, postcolonial
nations such as Australia. Claiming cultural oppression and national vulnerability, and the appeal
to national dignity and uniqueness are far from being the exclusive arguments of cultural
nationalists in realistically marginalized national states—I will demonstrate this in the chapter on
Netflix’s British national life. In general, the critique about identity politics’ (unwitting) tapping
into the normative myths of the self-made sovereign liberal subject invoked by the capitalist
order is crucial for my critical argument against the politics of the “local original.”
Economic Injustice in Identity Politics
Though identity politics has been criticized for its favoring of the “metaphysical” and
cultural over the material (Bourne 1987:1, quoted in Fuss 1989: 100-1), it certainly cannot be
charged with obliterating the issues of economic inequality and injustice as such. In fact,
economic-material dispossession as the consequence of group identity-based discrimination,
institutionalized and non-official, are often in the center of identity politics’ attention. Thus,
“identity politics concerned with race, sexuality, and gender”—or other marginalized identities—
may seem to be consistent with the classical Leftist baseline of redistribution, to be “a
supplement to class politics, …an expansion of left categories of Oppression and emancipation”
(Brown 1995a: 59). However, identity politics is also bolstered by “bourgeois cultural and
economic values” and abandons the fight against capitalism and contributes to its
68
“renaturalization” (59-60). It does so insofar as it frames its claims as a protest against the unfair
exclusion from the existing social order, thereby reinforcing the underlying universalist
community and ideal into which it demands inclusion (65). As such, identity politics as normally
practiced could even be seen “as a configuration of …neoliberal rationality” on part of a
professional middle class the main goal of which is to gain proper representation of minorities
within the capitalist class (Kumar et al. 2018: 8-9). Polemically put, “capitalist society is
faultless for as long as, within the 1% that controls 90% of all resources, there is a proportional
representation of women, racial minorities, and LGBT people” (8). That is, identity politics tends
to trivialize the politics of difference, through collectives who attempt “to win concessions under
capitalism for the groups they represent” (9). Examples also used by Francis Fukuyama (2018)
include campaigns against the gender remuneration gap among the highest paid professional
groups such as stars of Hollywood or professional sports. Such campaigns often refer to some
indexes of market value as a basis for legitimacy of claims for the equalizing pay or prize
increase for female A-list actresses or tennis players (see Doward and Fraser 2019). These
instances should help us understand Nancy Fraser’s formulation, according to which the problem
with the approach of economic distribution on part of identity politics is that it tends to treat
economic inequality as the superstructure or effect of cultural inequalities, where the elimination
of the latter will sufficiently address the former (2000: 110-111). Basically, if gays and lesbians,
women, people of color, etc. can finally gain proper recognition and inclusion into the same
rights and opportunities as their majority identity counterparts, justice will be restored. Thereby,
Fraser identifies identity politics and Marxism as making the inverse mistakes of displacing the
politics of redistribution and the politics of recognition, respectively. The philosopher presses,
instead, that the “structures of prestige” or Weberian status, on the one hand, and class as
69
corresponding to economic structure, on the other, though indeed intertwined, are nevertheless
analytically distinct categories under capitalism (118). Class inequality cannot be addressed as
simply derivative of the misrecognition of certain groups; inclusive measures and
representational equality may, regretfully, help build the pretense of social justice.
Local Originals as Nationalist Identity Politics: An Argument Against the Neoliberal-
Nationalist Synergy of Multiculturalist Quality TV
Wendy Brown’s and Nancy Fraser’s theories and materialist criticism against identity
politics provide me with the basis for my argument against getting too comfortable with the ideal
behind Netflix’s global-local strategies. I argue that the internationalization of global TV in the
form of “local originals” or quality TV series as representatives of the “local”-national may
impede the cause of global economic equality. The agenda of cultural diversity and multicultural
international equality, as performed by transnational media companies such as Netflix, is
complicit in omitting redistributive concerns that transgress and defy the nationalist frame, as
they pertain to transnational operations of corporations, the relations between corporations and
states, and a more thorough redistribution of resources. In lieu of taking a global perspective on
inequality in association with corporate capitalism, the “local original” and the recognition and
emancipation of a wider range of national territories within the international community
embodies divisive national identity politics. This serves national elites complicit with
transnational corporate elites over general publics.
The centralization of “local originals” reinforces nearsighted nationalisms; whether banal or
immediately recognizable as chauvinist does not matter insofar as these two share the same
cognitive and affective structure. Namely, if all identity politics, as Nancy Fraser (2000) or
Wendy Brown argue (1995), tend to congeal into a dogmatic project of authenticating and
conserving difference and entrenching into the position of resentment and moral superiority, then
70
it follows that banal and culturally oriented nationalisms share a strong cognitive and affective
basis with explicitly chauvinist, far-rightist nationalisms. Tapping into banal and seemingly
harmless cultural nationalisms makes the ground more fertile for explicitly exclusivist
nationalisms. The appropriation of any nationalism facilitates proceedings and policy orientation
underscored by the prioritization of the in-group over consideration of larger, broader, more
mixed units—such as the national unit in contradistinction to other territories over considering
the global system.
Alarmingly, the diversification of global mainstream television through the inclusion of
“local originals” into a “global catalog” can make the limited project of international
diversification look like a thorough redemption of global justice: all local cultures are recognized
in their equally valuable contribution to global diversity and all local industries are included into
the global trade as the producers of universal good TV, right? However, cosmopolitan
multiculturalism as a politics of recognition for all “unique” nations/“locations” is a politics of
displacement of economic justice and the politics of reification of separatist group identities in
Fraser’s term (2000); a politics of ressentiment in Brown’s formulation (1995); and what I would
christen the politics of narcissistic concession, as it gives in to the Siren song of nationalist,
myopic pride—whether conceited or wounded. The “local original” implies the emancipation of
nationally based “cultures” as the goal: it entails the ideal of the nation’s inclusion into and more
proper representation through a system the terms of which are thereby accepted. Global
television is systemized, of course, by global corporate capitalism: this is the system into which
national territories are both forced and enticed to enter. Framed as an issue of recognizing a
hitherto ignored or misrepresented, valuable and unique identity, nationality lays the basis for
craving and demanding to be included among other nations. The logic of nationalist identity,
71
recognition and inclusion helps reinforce the system, yet again, as natural and legitimate: as
something that may bestow the recognition on its subjects rather than being itself the object of
recognition by the participants. That is, the identifying subjects of states, national territories, and
their policies, local companies and so on, are made to strive for the equal inclusion and success
within the world imagined as an international community, controlled by corporate capitalism.
The promise of inclusion, recognition, and “well-deserved” success and benefits, on part of
representatives of global corporations like Netflix, is immediately seductive and deterring from
considering the terms of inclusion.
Conclusion
I have argued that Netflix’s innovative mainstreaming agendas of equal global access, and
“local originals” tap into the inherent tension of modern democracy, between the politics of
difference and identity, and foundational universal equality. This tension within the imagined
multicultural global TV community has surfaced in the clashing of cultural protectionism and
popular demand for equal access to global hit shows.
It is of major concern that “cultures” as implied by the flagship production practice of the
“local original” and the imagined global community Netflix claims to authentically represent and
facilitate are nationally based. This practice reiterates nationalism in the sphere of culture,
especially as “local originals” are aimed at a combination of popular success and artistic
excellence. When Netflix or other transnational media companies promise the cultural
recognition of the nation and its competitive economic success through inclusion into the
mainstream global TV trade and culture, they actually rely on the logic of displacement and
reification in Nancy Fraser’s terms. They coopt and play into the hands of nationalism, whereby
territories’ preoccupation with their own relative position and dignity, cultural-identitarian and
72
economic-practical, in comparison to other national territories, is reinforced. Such preoccupation
with nationality deters from attending to the very landscape of the global and how and by whom
it is structured, and its dynamics determined. It does not matter so much whether Netflix’s or
other companies’ “local originals” are deemed as good/authentic or bad/fake national
embodiments by significant stakeholders, as long as the debates reinforce the national frame and
stakeholders’ focus on getting a proper piece of the international pie on par with other
competitors’ slice instead of questioning the rules of global baking.
The national framing of cultures through “local originals” entails specific ways of enabling
and limiting “cultural diversity.” Netflix as the current leading representative of the market-
strong global SVOD facilitates a specific form of global cultural diversity instead of many
possible others: the internationalization, that is, the diversification of territorial origin and textual
marks (such as original language), of mainstream TV, including, notably, quality series. While
arguing against the validity and normativity of the national framing of cultures, I maintain that
facilitating international diversification is still meaningful and beneficial compared to what has
come before. However, in order to save the progressive potentials of internationalization from
being subsumed by the siren song of nationalist reification and displacement, it has to function
and be recognized as a temporary step rather than an ideal end in itself. This is because
international diversification entails severe limitations and even potential threats when our
ultimate longer-term goals are redistributive and globally based rather than focusing on locally
based cultural specificity and driven by nationalist identity politics. That is, the agenda of
internationalization through “local originals” threatens with the nationalist reification of group
identity and the displacement of a global materialist perspective in favor of a competitive,
defensive-protectionist nationalist identity politics. The latter can be tapped into and actively
73
promoted by both transnational corporations but obviously, various local-national agents, too.
These stakeholders have particular political and economic interests that can be served while
masking and validating them as being identical to those of the “nation”, the “public”, or the
“local.” The capitalist order as a context with predefined agents, a set of rules, and the basic
dynamics of competition, can become further entrenched as the agent or source rather than the
object of legitimation. That is, it is this capitalist competitive order into which national states
strive to be included, their dignity reinstalled, their authenticity recognized, their economic
success measured against, now to be on par with if not better than other nations. If these pitfalls
of the intertwinement between nationalism and capitalism are kept at bay, the international
diversification of global mainstream TV can be beneficial. It can help the symbolic de-
hierarchization of imagined nations in the sphere of mainstream TV and contributes to the
progressive equalization of practical professional and job opportunities across territories, ideally
as intermediary steps toward more substantial economic justice.

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Chapter 2: Cultural Diversity, Globalization and Digitalization: How
Platforms Like Netflix Impact Global Culture
Introduction
In contrast to much anticorporate cultural criticism against transnational media companies,
this chapter argues that Netflix and similar global SVOD behemoths contribute to one important
aspect of global cultural diversity. Their configuration of globalization and localization practices
facilitate international diversification, which entails the levelling of the playing field for quality
and popular TV production among territories, and the symbolic hierarchies of nationally framed
cultures and languages in the sphere of TV. I will argue for Netflix’s heightened potential for this
specific diversification in contradistinction not simply to traditional forms of distribution and
earlier paradigms of localization practices on the part of US-based conglomerates such as the
“local language productions” of Hollywood studios, but also to other forms of online on-demand
distribution. I will break down the configuration of characteristics that add up to the strong
global mainstreaming potential Netflix and similar giant studio-platforms can bestow upon
content from hitherto peripheral territories. The partially counterintuitive attributes that together
enhance global international diversity are online and on-demand digital distribution;
transnational operation; the vertical integration of production and distribution; a large, curated
library aggregating cultural hits and a wide range of niche content; a strong market position and
brand; a multiple and dynamic taxonomic and recommendation system; and a flat fee in a
subscription-based direct-to-consumer business model. Next, I discuss Netflix’s pushing the
innovative agenda of “globality” as the main frame of corporate diversity politics in the US,
where globality refers to the variety of geographical-territorial locations as structuring culture.
This elevation of globality as an umbrella rather than additive term to the dominant axes of social
difference indexes going beyond US-centrism toward the cultivation of a world community of
75
different but equal cultures. Such global consciousness has made it to the forefront of the
corporate diversity politics of the largest US-based transnational media companies beyond
Netflix and can be expected to solidify even further as the established players of the film and TV
industry are increasingly concentrating their attention to the global SVOD marketplace. Lastly,
the chapter discusses the celebratory perceptions of the SVOD revolution and Netflix’s
multiculturalism on part of cultural commentators in the US. It ends on a note of the apparent
tension between the rising cosmopolitanism indexed by the internationalization of TV and the
simultaneous resurgence of chauvinistic nationalisms (Imre 2019). The conclusion prepares my
approach to address this contradiction in Part II of the dissertation.
Qualifying Cultural Diversity
Cultural diversity is a normative term widely applied in assessments of the social and cultural
standing of media ecosystems, sets of or even stand-alone representations and programs, or
individual media companies and platforms. Despite theorizations of cultural diversity (e.g.,
Cowen 2002; Napoli 1999; Parekh 2006), the notion’s ubiquity still goes hand in hand with its
taken-for-grantedness: when applied and argued about in practice, cultural diversity tends to be
treated as a self-understood, monolithic entity. However, in fact, not only can cultural diversity
be conceptualized as having various possible measures, but many of these meaningful aspects do
not even necessarily correlate with each other or do so negatively. In the US context, for
example, it is the gender, racial and ethnic, or sexual identities of subjects in front of and behind
the camera that have constituted the leading measures of media’s cultural diversity, while other
possible measures of cultural representations—based on, say, narrative, audiovisual or thematic
variables related to something other than the aforementioned axes of social difference—have
hardly been examined or even just come up as alternative approaches to the hermeneutically
spacious concept of cultural diversity. Another common, implicit approach frames cultural
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diversity as indexed by the relative presence of “niche”, “minority,” “marginal”, and
“alternative” media in comparison to a mainstream (e.g., Iordanova 2010). Studies with a focus
beyond the domestic-national context of the US and working with a global perspective often
seamlessly derive the notion of cultural diversity from the theory of cultural imperialism. As
such, they take the national origin of cultural products as a proper and sufficient index of cultural
diversity, and equate the “mainstream,” the “mass,” and homogenization with American
nationality, while other national origins are presumed to represent “alternative,” “minority,” and
“diverse” content. This common approach to global cultural diversity regards the minority
market position of local-national cultural products within their own territories as necessarily
signifying a loss in terms of cultural diversity, and the presence of US-originating items as
essentially harmful, not simply economically but culturally as well. That is, such studies on the
cultural effects of globalization tend to take the “nationality” of cultural items/representations as
the natural container and unit of global cultural diversity. They imply the normative nationalist
expectation of national difference and focus on investigating cultural diversity as difference
across territories without making this specification explicit (see in Cowen 2002: 15). When
cultural diversity is operationalized as national specificity, globalization is indeed easy to be
evaluated as harmfully reducing cultural diversity. However, if diversity is conceptualized as the
cumulative variety of cultural representations accessible within territories, at a given location at a
given point in time, then globalization will likely reveal itself as a facilitator of cultural diversity
(ibid).
In general, arguments on the beneficial or harmful social and cultural impact of media rarely
mark the categories and context of their comparison in terms of cultural diversity as contingent
and constructed. I want to argue for the importance that studies on cultural diversity clarify their
77
way of constructing the normativity of the concept and its operationalization within the frame of
the given study in order to provide valid and meaningful evaluations. Otherwise, when treating
cultural diversity as a monolithic concept or as if constituted by variables that are necessarily
positively correlating with each other, the normative argument will represent a case of
overgeneralization of judgment. The current chapter can be framed as an execution of a
normative-evaluative argument about the cultural impact of Netflix. My focus on this company is
due to its status as a global mainstream quasi-aggregator-type
24
subscription-video-on-demand
platform that targets mainstream audiences and a wide range of niches simultaneously, currently
leading the online on-demand market and orienting trade as well as popular discourses on global
TV. I want to explicitly delimit the scope of this examination on cultural impact to one particular
kind of “source diversity”
25
based on the main creators’ assigned territorial origin/affiliation: in
short, “nationality.” I want to stress that this evaluative argumentation will be thereby limited to
this one notion of cultural diversity—it cannot be treated as a comprehensive or final sentence on
how the strategies innovated and mainstreamed by Netflix impact global cultural diversity.
The Digital Distribution Revolution and Its Cultural Effects
The emergence of the online distribution of audiovisual content has incited high hopes for
what Dina Iordanova enthusiastically referred to as the “rise of the fringe”: the challenge posed
by hitherto marginal agents to the predominance of “big players” who “have no efficient way of
barring alternative content from seeking exposure on the Internet” (2010: 36). The film scholar
welcomes the “growing alternative channels of distribution” (24) that should enhance the traffic
of cultural goods from the periphery to the center, strengthening what Daya Kishan Thussu has
called counter-flows (2007)—among them the “Internet-enabled channels” (Iordanova 2010: 25).

24
See Anderson 2008: 85-97.
25
Napoli (1999) differentiates between source, content, and exposure diversity.
78
The critical film theorist relies on Chris Anderson’s theory of the long tail (2008) when she
asserts that “peripheral cinema”—cinema originating from countries without considerable world
political and trade power—is now finally able to thrive in the digital online space instead of
being suppressed by blockbuster culture and the limitations of brick-and-mortar distribution. As
writer, entrepreneur, and at the time, editor-in-chief of Wired Anderson argued in 2006 that
digitization radically transformed the economics of distribution of cultural goods, benefitting
cultural variety through greatly enhancing the economic viability and frictionless virtual mobility
of even marginal and niche cultural products. According to his original theory explicated in his
2008 book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, cultural diversity
(as the easy and wide availability of a wide range of content from different sources) shows
exponential growth in the digital space thanks to innovative technological affordances that
facilitate new business practices and audience behavior. In contrast to brick-and-mortar and
physical-copy-based forms of distributing entertainment, digitization entails the dramatic drop of
the costs of production and distribution and thereby enables the economic viability of making
available a far greater variety of media than before, in ways accessible to audiences across
territories and non-urban areas. This entails the liberation from much of the constraint of
physicality of cultural creators, products, and audiences alike. Furthermore, adding proper means
such as multiple search filters and recommendation systems to organize and navigate such wide
variety results in people “increasingly revel[ing] in their differences rather than settling for their
commonalities as in traditional blockbuster culture” (Anderson 2008: 253). People’s relatively
restricted cultural choices have been, argues Anderson, simply derivate of the predigital era’s
economics of scarcity and its low efficiencies related to the restrictions of physicality: the
tyrannies of the hit, the new, shelf space, locality and geography, and time (or schedule), among
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others. These tyrannies used to cut short the consumption curve of cultural goods, making it very
difficult for the products sitting along the “long tail” as opposed to the short head to be
disseminated and thus survive, let alone thrive. Such confining factors meant for brick-and-
mortar-based distribution that a great deal of the long tail of cultural products were largely
“uneconomic to offer” (6). In contrast, digital distribution enhances the economic viability of
cultural products from the cultural margins and niches, among others by making possible to
aggregate audiences without geographic-spatial restrictions (9-10). Anderson also assumes that
audiences’ tastes and interests are basically essentially diverse and what the digital distribution
of audiovisual works enables, simply put, is a more efficient “connecting of supply and demand”
(55). In other words, from the enhancement of supplied diversity follows increased consumed
diversity (Ranaivoson 2016).
Other researchers have made similar arguments to those of Chris Anderson’s on the digital
revolution with regards to cultural diversity and thriving, such as Joel Waldfogel in his 2018
Digital Renaissance. What Data and Economic Tell Us about the Future of Popular Culture.
According to Waldfogel’s cultural revival argument, online and on-demand platforms have
revolutionized the movie industry and film culture through the “evaporation” of distribution
bottlenecks—one major traditional bottleneck being screen availability and the consequent
domination of a small number of large-budget productions (Waldfogel 2018: 73). Importantly,
the distribution system largely based on prediction (guessing) and pre-filters used to exclude the
greatest proportion of works from being circulated or even made; in contrast, in the digital era, a
much larger part of evaluation and selection happen after “things get to market” (Anderson 2008:
122). This means giving more opportunities to a much larger pool of cultural creators and works
to be made and circulate than before. As Waldfogel points out, the reduction of the distribution
80
cost of cultural products via digitization also entails easy long-distance including cross-border
cultural trade, the only remaining “obstacle” being regulation, such as content quotas and
domestic subsidies (2018: 220-221). The easier cross-territorial travelling of cultural goods has
contributed to levelling the international playing field insofar as the country of origin of creators,
and the established export power of their relevant home country’s cultural industries could
become less and less decisive for the chance of transnational success— “a streaming-dominated
market is helping artists break out of any territory” (music executive, quoted by Waldfogel,
2018: 225).
The theory of the long tail and the idea that the digital space fulfills its original promise of
bringing greater cultural diversity have met with considerable criticism. In fact, the supposedly
diminishing cultural diversity in the digital era continues to be at the forefront of national and
international, such as UNESCO debates, especially since the 2005 Convention for the Protection
and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. Much of such criticism emphasize the
limited “potential for true diversity, despite the endless [technological] capacity for variation and
diversity” that is entailed by capitalism, pointing out the domination of large corporations and
their ultimate goal of profit maximization to be the root of the problem (Wasko 2020: 81). In
Philip Napoli’s terms (1999), Janet Wasko implicitly connects ownership-type source diversity
with program-type (and perhaps, idea/viewpoint-type) content diversity, and takes these as the
implicit measures of cultural diversity, when she argues that the…
“…proliferation of media giants may tend to limit choices and contribute to a
homogenization of culture, especially through the recent development of franchises,
synergistic practices and more formulaic programming.” (ibid 77)
Wasko presses that despite extensive criticism on the theory of cultural imperialism, media
conglomerates’ effects on “local and national cultures” never ceased to be a worldwide concern.
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Indeed, while some believe that the political economy and cultural imperialism approach has
suffered “a scientific dispossession” in studies on media internationalization due to the
domination of cultural globalization theories (Mattelart 2008: 57), I perceive the attribution of
specifically cultural problems to business concentration by transnational corporations and
intensifying commodification a prominent concern in both academic and policy discourses. For
example, according to a 2013 report by Members of the activist group International Network of
Lawyers for the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, presented at the seventh session of the
Intergovernmental Committee for the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural
Expressions, there is a…
“…small number of global companies, such as Google, YouTube, Netflix, and Amazon…
that increasingly control access to cultural works in various markets [which] makes the
visibility and promotion of cultural works in underrepresented languages and/or from
countries that are already underrepresented on the market even more problematic.”
(Guevremont et al. 2013:6)
Notably, the report’s authors do not provide any concrete data or details as to how such
processes run their course in context. Media conglomerates are faulted for a monolithic kind of
cultural homogenization, the pertinent criticism bunching together a variety of online platforms
with quite different functions and business models. Moreover, the above quote referring to
Netflix and others is included in a chapter that primarily addresses the digital divide and the very
lack of popular access to digital technologies in developing countries—that is, in a context where
the domination of marketplaces such as the SVOD marketplace could only bear a limited
relevance. This exemplifies how the blame of cultural homogenization in general terms, due to
transnational corporations is habitually evoked even in the absence of any elaboration.
Evan Elkins’ study (2019) on Spotify and Netflix and the cultural ramifications of their
corporate activities is also structured along the lines of anticapitalist critique on large
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transnational corporations. With regards to Netflix, Elkins argues that the corporation’s branding
as cosmopolitan and as such fostering “intercultural connection and affinity” actually “seek[s] to
put a positive spin on a global uniformity that has long been associated with capitalist empire”
(377, 384, my emphasis). That is, Netflix’s discourse on “taste clusters” and “taste communities”
that span “across geographic distances and cultural differences” connecting people on a global
basis is evaluated by the author as not simply strategic but straightforwardly false (2019: 377),
equating transnational corporate functioning with the destruction of diversity in the cultural
sphere.
Philip M. Napoli, a well-recognized scholar in the subject of cultural diversity (e.g., 1999)
has recently argued (2020) that Chris Anderson’s theory of the long tail in the digital space,
despite its wide appeal, does not enjoy consistent empirical support. More specifically, he
demonstrates that the two digital newcomers, Netflix and Amazon, upon growing into media
giants have actually moved away from long-tail strategies back to focusing on the head of the
distribution curve. Contrary to the long tail theory’s assumptions, the affordances of digitization
have often been put to use to enhance “’blockbuster’ strategies” and the reinforcement of the
most popular as opposed to peripheral and niche content (Elberse 2013, in Napoli 2020). Netflix,
for instance, when migrating to purely digital distribution from its DVD-by-mail online service
has actually moved backwards in terms of several aspects of the diversity of content: the number
of titles, the average age of the titles, and higher-grossing productions, ultimately tending
towards “a scenario that bears a striking resemblance to the traditional video rental stores that
[the company] effectively eliminated” (Napoli 2020: 89). The underlying factors include: the
licensing costs of programs for digital distribution (in contrast to the lack of licensing fees and
the first-sale doctrine in the US pertaining to physical copies of media IP such as DVDs); and
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content owners’ preference for individual pricing instead of being included in a subscription
library offered to viewers by the content aggregator, and the consequent increase in selectivity in
licensing affordable content by the aggregator platform. In turn, the complications related to
licensing digital content for distribution facilitates vertical integration, argues Napoli, which
further disincentivizes content licensing in favor of creating and distributing one’s own content
(that is, US and “local” Netflix originals). In Napoli’s view, original content production can be
expected to undermine content diversity, as the distributor’s interest will be to push the viewers
towards its own original content rather than down the long tail. The search and recommendation
system, relied on by many users, can now be appropriated in a way that curtails rather than
facilitates diverse content consumption
26
. The collection of detailed information on consumption
patterns that is enabled by digital technologies, says Napoli, can also be expected to deter
aggregators from diversity towards greater selectivity. These developments have brought about
the fragmentation of the niches of the long tail and its reallocation into the specialized libraries of
a number of smaller aggregators. Not being forced to offer the widest variety of content on the
market also means, however, the lowering of entry barriers for these smaller and more
specialized platforms. However, this fragmentation leads to enhanced search and other costs for
the consumer, which should result in a diminished audience attention to the long tail (Napoli,
2020).
In the coming paragraphs, I would like to clarify the apparent contradiction between the two
clashing lines of arguments about the ways in which large transnational companies have

26
Opposing Napoli’s assertion that the close monitoring of audiences by digital platforms like Netflix would lead to
diminished content diversity through an enhanced focus on popular programs and dropping more marginal content,
Ceren Kaysadi argues that the company’s customization strategies have a beneficial effect on diversity as local
audiences’ preferences are actually diverse (2017, in Ranaivoson 2020: 111-112).

84
practiced digital distribution and their consequent impact on cultural diversity. The seemingly
contradictory arguments on diversification versus homogenization can, in fact, be integrated.
One part of this integrative move is to dissect the matters of economic justice related to
ownership-type “source diversity” and the diversity of cultural representations and content,
because these indexes of diversity have been diverging in global corporate capitalism. Also, with
regards to cultural matters, a reminder is in need of the cultural mixing and reappropriation
arguments when discussing Hollywood as culturally homogenizing imperialistic texts.
Furthermore, I will differentiate among different aspects and indexes of cultural diversity, and
point out the crucial fact that these aspects, while all meaningful, may simultaneously be in
conflict with each other. I will then narrow down the framing of the question how Netflix
impacts global cultural diversity for my present investigation: I will zoom in on the territorial
origin or nationality of content offerings in terms of the demographics of their main creative
creators and usually some major attributes of the text such as setting or original language, and
the significance of the growing international diversification of original content, which is always
highly promoted and distributed worldwide. While Philip Napoli criticized platforms’ biased
promotion of their own content as a factor of homogenization, I will point out an important
aspect in which these “original” programs and their biased promotion on their home platforms
contribute to greater global cultural diversity.
When recounting the homogenizing factors of online platforms like Netflix, Heritiana
Ranaivoson (2020) discusses how, in a given segment of the market, cross-sided network effects
can generally lead to the massive domination of one or a few players, resulting in high entry
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barriers and market concentration
27
. For instance, Netflix’s growing popularity on part of
viewers makes it a more desirable outlet for content producers to license their work to, which
leads to a wider and better library that further enhances the platform’s appeal to subscribers, and
so on. The baseline for platforms dominant in their market segment, such as Netflix, is survival
and profit maximization; consequently, they will apply business strategies to further cement their
market hegemony. All these attributes tend to incriminate powerful corporations in terms of
cultural homogenization. However, Ranaivoson usefully complicates arguments that would
equate market concentration as a form of limited source/supplier diversity with content diversity.
Instead, the author points out the ambiguous relationship between these two sites of diversity. In
fact, as Philip Napoli emphasizes in 1999, assuming a positive correlation between source
diversity and content diversity, and between content diversity and exposure (actually
chosen/consumed) diversity is far from well-grounded (18). Thus, the concentration of corporate
ownership and final control of media outlets does not necessarily entail the cultural
homogenization of media content in any sense of diversity, such as program-type, demographics,
idea/viewpoint (Napoli 1999) or other aesthetic attributes; likewise, a greater variety of
ownership does not in itself guarantee the cultural diversity of content. Indeed, I argue that the
increasing conglomeration as the reduction of ownership-type “source diversity” is more a direct
matter of economic inequality than it is of cultural diversity. Media companies’ conglomeration
is compatible with the aspects of cultural diversity of end products as well as of their workforce
and creative input.

27
The network effect entails that the more popular a platform as connecting sides of a market becomes, the more
attractive it gets for further participants on both sides, both suppliers and consumers. For instance, the number of
drivers on Uber reduces waiting time for riders, which attracts more riders, which attracts more drivers as their
downtime is reduced, and so on—which in turn makes it harder for emerging companies to compete with Uber
(Parker, Van Alstyne, and Choudary 2017: Ch.2).
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Ranaivoson’s important distinction between the concentration of capital and the diversity of
cultural characteristics of their media output should be further supplemented by a perspective
that does not focus on a single corporate outlet to evaluate the standing of cultural diversity but
takes into account the operations of the surrounding media ecology as a whole. The presence of
an oligarchy at a media market segment does not preclude the economic viability of alternative
competitors not directly competing with the most dominant services but complementing their
offerings
28
. For instance, the market presence of a handful of dominant transnational aggregator-
like SVODs (Netflix, Amazon Prime, and others) at a given territory is compatible with the
burgeoning of smaller, more locally oriented services (see e.g., Szczepanik 2017) as well as more
niche-oriented, specialized ones. In fact, the territorial expansion and vertical integration of
transnational companies have been accompanied by the expansion and transnationalization of
local small- and medium-sized companies (including those distant from Los Angeles) whose
work is typically outsourced to by the larger companies (Goldsmith, Ward, O’Regan 2010: 17).
Importantly, contemporary media conglomerates have been increasingly relying on the
workforce of smaller, local media companies for creativity practiced in great autonomy from the
conglomerates that operate more and more as “large bureaucracies” (Hesmondhalgh in Pinón
2016:132; also Miller 2016). Such transnationalization of and diversifying co-operation among,
media companies of various national affiliations and varying sizes also contribute to the
dissolution of firm borders between national industries, and national industries and Hollywood

28
It should also be mentioned that a given company’s market domination can be challenged and eventually,
overtaken by others, even if only by a limited range of capital-strong agents. In Netflix’s case, for instance, the
newly launched, giant aggregator SVODs such as WarnerMedia’s HBO Max or Comcast’s Peacock, Disney as the
grandiose legacy player’s exclusive service, eventually, Apple’s studio-platform, and Facebook’s hypothetic future
ventures onto content production are all assumed to be potential gamechangers threatening Netflix’s long-term
hegemony (e.g., Poletti 2019; Shapiro 2020).

87
including the greatest studios specifically. Thus, it is necessary to review the persisting
arguments that posit a simple connection between Hollywood blockbuster culture and cultural
homogenization as such (when the latter is routinely implied to be nationally framed). As I have
pointed out, the strengthening of a global popular culture most visibly present in the form of a
few globally popular, mostly still English- though increasingly multi-language blockbusters and
a handful of the most grandiose TV series is still often posited as an index of a global cultural
homogenization (e.g., Wasko 2020). I contend that Hollywood’s blockbuster culture, and the
textual tendencies of the biggest studio projects are surely a concern in terms of cultural impact
including some aspects of uniformity in textual-representational and aesthetic tendencies
29
.
However, in many other aspects, such superproductions also harbor a great deal of cultural
hybridity and diversity. They are arguably becoming even more dynamically so in terms of the
racial and ethnic diversity of creators, cast, spoken languages, and settings. This is due to
Hollywood as a system of representations and a material network of financing, production and
distribution undergoing more and more intense and intricate forms of globalization (Goldsmith,
Ward, O’Regan 2010: 7; Klein 2004: 363).
Furthermore, while the most popular mainstream culture may be globalizing, cultural niches
have also been burgeoning transnationally, to a great extent thanks to digitization. As argued by
authors such as Arjun Appadurai (2003[1990]), Roland Robertson (1992), and Stuart Hall
(1997), cultural homogenization and heterogenization are parallel processes. To put in economic
terms, the expansion of the market for mass cultural hit products simultaneously facilitates the
expanding trade in niche products catering to smaller audiences: the market growth for mass
culture simultaneously enables an “infrastructure to peddle niche products to smaller numbers of

29
We could potentially think of motifs of exaggerated individual heroism or guilt at the expense of more socially
complex analyses; the hyperbolic representation of physical violence; and many more.
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consumers” i.e., “creates the conditions necessary for diversity to flower on the micro level”
(Cowen 2002: 16). Blockbuster culture certainly exists and may be becoming fully global, yet it
does not suppress the (similarly transnationalizing) channels and sources of a great variety of
more niche cultural formations.
Economist Joel Waldfogel (2018) celebrates the positive effects of digitalization in terms of
cultural products’ transnational mobility. He also readily acknowledges the potentially
problematic implications of the growing intensity and frictionlessness of cross-cultural trade that
big transnational companies (such as SVODs like Netflix in the sphere of global TV) facilitate.
One such concern is that domestically produced cultural goods may lose their domestic market
share (228); and another one that countries seem to converge in their consumption patterns, that
is, are becoming more and more similar to each other. Such convergence provides the basis for
the perception, usually framed as regrettable and harmful, that the world as such is becoming
more homogeneous (231-2). However, as Waldfogel rightfully points out, while countries may
indeed be getting more similar to each other, their internal cultures are actually becoming more
diverse—an individual inhabiting a certain territory encounters and gets easier access to a
diversifying set of cultural products including in terms of their geographical-territorial origin.
That is, arguments about cultural homogenization and about cultural diversification are rooted in
their different implicit conceptualizations of cultural diversity itself. In his 2002 book Creative
Destruction. How Globalization Is Changing the World’s Cultures, economist Tyler Cowen
offers some distinctions useful for cultural diversity discussions. He asserts the difference
between “diversity within society” that “refers to the richness of the menu of choice in that
society,” on the one hand, and “diversity across societies” on the other (Cowen 2002: 14-5). If
the world is imagined primarily as a set of national states, it is indeed becoming more
89
“homogeneous” as the “diversity across [nationally based] societies” is necessarily decreasing
while the cultural diversity within individual national societies is increasing. Cowen’s decidedly
consumerist terminology notwithstanding, I concur with his critical grasp of cultural diversity’s
nationalist-territorially based implicit understanding, and his argument against prioritizing
diversity across societies, national states, territories etc. over diversity within territories. Giving
further nuances to why the growing international cultural convergence should not simply be
taken as homogenization, Waldfogel serves up data indicating that digital globalization does not
simply reinforce the traditional dominance of globally powerful territories like the US; instead,
cultural “consumption is growing more balanced across origin countries” (2018: 232). The
economist provides examples where frictionless cross-border trade has benefitted cultural
producers from smaller countries when streaming is compared to physical sales (233).
Conversely, Jiyeon Jang (2017) highlights the larger “producer diversity” in the South Korean
Netflix library compared to the country’s linear TV channels (in Ranaivoson 2020: 107).
These positive assessments on the recent developments on digitalized cross-cultural trade
operationalize global cultural diversity on a territorial basis yet they ignore the normative notion
of national cultural difference. They frame source diversity as a matter of opportunity for cultural
production, dissemination and trade that should be more equal to people across territories. While
conceptualizing cultural diversity this way allows for cultural differences (whether across or
within territories), it does not presuppose and prescribe cultural difference based on national-
territorial location or origin, as much political and policy discourses do. The suggested basis for
comparison for these non-nationalist but territorially based studies on digital cultural diversity is
usually other forms of existing distribution (such as theatrical distribution or linear TV), rather
than nationalist and elitist cultural ideals. I want to identify the territorial origin/affiliation of
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programs as one albeit important aspect of global cultural diversity that I want to make an
argument about in this chapter with regards to Netflix’s global-local practices. While this
attribute may conventionally be called “nationality,” I am excluding any cultural nationalist
presumptions or expectations about the authenticity and specificity of the textual-representational
properties of content coming from a given territory. Furthermore, it is crucial not to equate or
slip back and forth between one index of cultural diversity and another. After reviewing studies
arguing for the diversification of content in Netflix libraries based on territorial origin and
compared to linear TV providers, Ranaivoson concludes that Netflix’s audience monitoring
should thwart the “thriving of surprising content:” “in the trade-off between diversity and profit,
the latter remains more important” (2020: 112). Instead, I want to reaffirm, first, that diversity is
not antagonistic with the capitalist baseline of profit-making. Secondly, I want to emphasize that
national origin and innovative characteristics are two completely different aspects of cultural
diversity. Netflix’s library may be becoming increasingly diverse in terms of the territorial origin
of programs, yet those programs may indeed be quite similar in other aspects. In general, I argue
for the need for explicitly defining the aspect of cultural diversity under investigation, as this
broad concept has various meaningful aspects that do not necessarily correlate. It follows that
there cannot be any general, conclusive evaluation to be provided on how a corporate entity
affects cultural diversity through any single approach. Thus, my upcoming argument does not
address Netflix’s impact on cultural diversity as such. Rather, it zooms in on one important
aspect of it. Identifying one specific notion of cultural diversity entails a restriction of scope yet
enables an internally coherent argument. I argue that Netflix has been enhancing the global
cultural diversity of mainstream TV in the sense of internationalization specifically: that
transnationally travelling popular programs are increasingly coming from a widening pool of
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national states. Culturally speaking, this international diversification entails the de-
hierarchization of nationalities and nationally framed cultures in the sphere of TV. In more
practical economic terms, this internationalization equalizes the opportunities for high-budget
screen production and transnational success for individuals inhabiting various territories. As per
my arguments made in Chapter 1, this internationalization should by no means be equated with a
thorough democratization of global television. On the contrary, the marketing surrounding this
internationalization reinforces the notion of authentic local cultures that “local originals” are
supposed to represent. Such discursive reinforcement of a unique national deserving to be
recognized (and compete) in the international arena is synergistic with neoliberal nationalisms
and thus further reinforces global economic inequality.
This positive effect related to international diversification as a specific aspect of global
cultural diversity is logical almost to the extent of being trivial, as it is derivative from the
economic efficiencies of digital distribution. What is more provocative about my argument is the
positive correlation I posit between Netflix being a giant transnational company that also trades
in highly popular content, and an aspect of global cultural diversity. More concretely, I argue that
Netflix’s international diversification effect gains much of its potential from Netflix’s current
worldwide market dominance and brand strength. Netflix’s internationalizing force comes from
its global (rather than monoterritorially or regionally based) operations, and its wide but
ultimately limited libraries that mix content from the short head and the long tail of distribution
(that is, programs that are very mainstream as well as relatively niche ones). Basically, the
studio-platforms has functioned as a curtailed long-tail, global aggregator of content. Its much-
criticized algorithm-based taxonomy and recommendation system serves the purpose of drawing
connections between the most well-known and the less known programs, orienting viewers
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toward further content exploration as underscored by the goal of keeping them subscribed.
Netflix as a market-strong quasi-aggregator global SVOD is endowed with a heightened
potential for enhancing the international diversity of global mainstream TV, compared not only
to theatrical distribution or linear TV but, importantly, other forms of digital distribution. The
favorable comparison includes platforms that focus on the long tail and have much larger or
open-ended transaction-based video-on-demand
30
libraries.
The trivial and non-specific basis for Netflix’s potential for internationalization as an aspect
of global cultural diversity comes from the affordances of digital distribution and the wide-
enough transnational operation of the company. I use Joel Waldfogel and Luis Aguiar’s study to
demonstrate this. The economists focus on Netflix’s film catalogs worldwide in comparison to
theatrical distribution, identifying the (primary) national origin of all titles distributed at least one
way. The authors investigated the “repertoire reach on Netflix with an analogous measure for the
repertoire’s reach via theatrical distribution” of films at the time of their research (Waldfogel
2018: 238; also, Aguiar and Waldfogel 2018). Among their findings was that Netflix did
generally prioritize U.S. products in the sense that the majority of titles originated in the US.
However, this favoring of American movies was less overwhelming compared to the patterns of
international theatrical distribution. In my view, this finding is consistent with common sense,
considering the advantages of online on-demand distribution to the highly uneconomical
properties of theatrical distribution. Namely, on-demand digital distribution has enormous
capacities for storage, traffic, and exhibition, including the simultaneous and economic
exhibition of an incredibly wide range of material potentially customized to a vast array of

30
In the TVOD business model, consumers pay the price of singular items that they wish to rent or buy, instead of
the access to a catalog. TVOD is thus more similar to theatrical distribution or physical copy-based consumption,
which also means paying a higher price per item; the overall price paid for media consumption paid by the viewer
may be lower than paying for a subscription but most likely only if a very low number of programs are purchased.
93
individual end users. Accordingly, in Aguiar and Waldfogel’s diagnosis, “Netflix makes many of
the works from a wide variety of countries available in many other countries” (2018: 419). More
particularly, films originating in smaller countries tend to gain more expansive international
presence through Netflix than through movie theaters. The authors also point out the relative
scarcity of the highest grossing U.S. theatrical blockbusters (that is, the most mainstream of
global popular culture) on the platform. Countries that relatively benefitted the most from being
distributed by Netflix at the time were Hong Kong, Norway, Chile, Colombia, Brazil, Thailand,
Switzerland, the Netherlands, Sweden, China, South Korea, Denmark, Mexico, Australia, while
relatively disadvantaged by the SVOD (compared with the U.S.) were some other large countries
with relatively strong movie industries like the UK, France, Germany, and Spain (Waldfogel
2018: 242). In Waldfogel’s ultimate assessment, Netflix does promote, to some extent, “David
(and Sven) over Goliath in the movie market” (ibid
31
).
Notably, the vertical integration of online distributors and the increasing reliance of these
platforms on producing and promoting original content have been regarded as a factor that
reduces the original diversifying, long-tail-related potential in favor of pushing a limited range of
content onto the user (e.g., Napoli 2020). However, I argue that in terms of opening up
mainstream global TV for increasing international diversification, the trending agenda of “local
originals” on part of popular studio-platforms like Netflix is actually beneficial. High-end
original productions certainly receive extra promotion, showcased precisely as must-see
programs. As more local originals are getting made, it is economical for the studio-platforms to
try and disseminate these beyond their local territory, as widely as possible. This interest in
global distribution and promotion comes from the fact that “original content” entails the full

31
where “Sven” metaphorizes the Nordic countries, which have enjoyed a significant global cultural ascendance in
the digital era, encompassing several cultural fields.
94
ownership of intellectual property
32
, which is combined with digital on-demand distribution’s
frictionlessness and minimized risks. Accordingly, globalizing studio-platform SVODs have
endowed productions from hitherto peripheral and small territories in the sphere of mainstream
TV with global mobility under highly visible media company brands—an unprecedented
potential for mainstream transnational success for local creators at these locations traditionally
marginal vis-à-vis the few global production centers.
Netflix’s recommendation system has been criticized for its supposed impact on culture,
national community, the familial community, and individual subjecthood and agency (e.g.,
Alexander 2016; Arnold 2016; see also in Theodoropoulou 2017). However, I argue that because
of its hybrid function balancing between treading a well-known path and opening up the library
for the viewer. As Daniel Smith-Rowsey argues (2016), one portion of Netflix recommendations
are aimed specifically at diverting the user from what they have so far preferred to watch—an
algorithm-based diversity enhancing mechanism I would say. It is, in fact, logical to assume that
Netflix’s best interest is to open up its library to every individual user as much as possible,
though based on the help of its continuous monitoring of user data and dynamic
recommendations, in a way that is organically connected the viewer’s assumed interests and taste
expressed in past choices, In general, I assert that SVODs’ algorithmic interest is to cautiously
but constantly diversify the subscriber’s consumption based on calculations of taxonomic
affiliations to already watched programs, while always giving preference to their own original
content. As such, the recommendation system can perfectly serve the mainstreaming of
international local originals that are taxonomically connected to globally well-known US

32
In case of co-productions between a transnational SVOD like Netflix, and a local media company such as a
broadcaster, the arrangements usually entail that the SVOD gets the global streaming rights with the exception of the
co-producer’s home territory while the local co-producer retains the domestic rights.
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programs. Relatedly, as Chris Anderson argues, “[s]uccessful Long Tail aggregators need to
have both hits and niches” in order to disseminate niche products with the greatest success, as
such mixed libraries can help viewers with categorizing less known and completely unknown
titles by drawing various connections with more popular, more well-known content in their
taxonomy (2008: 148-9). Netflix has an abundant microgenre system, with independent
categories for “region [territorial origin]”, “adjectives [related to tone and mood]”, “set in…
[location setting]”, “from the… [period setting]”, “About [themes]”; thus, any category value can
recombine with any other category value (Madrigal 2014). Through such manifold and
essentially juxtaposition-based taxonomic connections drawn between cultural items from
different territories that have hitherto been hardly treated as belonging to the same category, the
global mainstream centers and globally niche margins of television can now increasingly be
recognized in their shared cultural space and blend together based on attributes such as genre,
period setting, auteur directors, representations of specific themes and identities, and more.
Besides helping draw connections and building expectations regarding less known niche
content, the most popular kind of content
33
helps attract viewers to the platform in the first place,
increasing the potential audiences for more niche content that is also available on the platform.
Offering a library that contains both various high-demand mainstream titles (such as popular
American series and movies) and peripheral content is especially advantageous to the latter when
they are included in the same financial subscription package. Subscription-based catalogs
heighten the chances of such peripheral content to be tried by the subscribers. The flat
subscription fee means that viewers can try any content with as little risk as possible, enabling

33
Importantly, as Chris Anderson points out, while the watercooler era of hits is over thanks to the diversifying and
fragmenting effects of digital distribution, there always will be hits as in a limited set of products that are the best-
sellers in their category at a given time (2008: 148).
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frictionless cultural experimentation and trips. As Chris Anderson argued before the period
Netflix started streaming: “all-you-can eat subscription services… offer risk-free exploration
down the Tail. You’re likely to consume more if it doesn’t cost you more to do so” (2008: 138).
My argument thus diverges somewhat from Joel Waldfogel’s, according to whom “[p]robably
even more than Netflix, à la carte services like Amazon hold the promise of facilitating global
trade (and developing Viking export markets) in movies” (Waldfogel 2018: 242, my emphasis).
While à la carte services can have a way greater library, including a much greater diversity of
titles in terms of national origin, this supplied diversity, I argue, does not necessarily turn into a
drastic increase of consumed diversity and public visibility. The latter two are greatly facilitated
through the status and promotion that is provided by being included in a more exclusive library
of a market- and brand-strong SVOD, and the low-risk option for consumers to explore titles
without extra cost. A strong market position and powerful brand is key to the potential to
mainstream types of hitherto niche and peripheral content through such media company’s force
to orient discourses on TV and culture and thus bestow great public visibility on certain
programs. While less dominant, and more alternative, niche platforms often offer a much wider
range of content along the long tail (and parallelly, a greater diversity of content in terms of
national origin), their limited power to create buzz also limits their potential to change the status
of content. The centrality of branding over actual local specificity for the local originals’
distinctiveness and internationalizing power can be demonstrated by its comparison to an older
paradigm of localization strategies on part of large transnational media corporations: the “local-
language productions.”
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“Local-Language Production” vs the “Local Original” as Globalization-Localization
Strategies
The “local-language production” (LLP) emerged in the 1990s when the major US studios and
their subsidiaries established new “strategies of localization” upon considering the successes of
insurgent local-national film media industries (Klein 2004: 371). The model for local language
production in the conglomerate era came from transnational companies’ initial venturing into
satellite television in Latin-America, and later on, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East (Donoghue
2017: 37-9). As the newly arriving transnational giants often had to face strong competition with
companies who had deeper roots in the local and regional context, they started to shift towards
the greater localization of their programs (Chalaby 2005b). Studios and their local language units
established in the 1990s have engaged in localization on various levels, including its most
intense form: local-language film and TV (co-)productions in cooperation with independent local
production companies, usually aiming at local national, or regional audiences (Donoghue 2017:
3, 52; Klein 2004). Significantly, there have been some instances where large foreign-language
productions with considerable Hollywood involvement surpassed their home territory and
culturally proximate regions and became global hits. Examples include Ang Lee’s Hong-Kong-
Taiwanese-Chinese-USA co-production Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, distributed by Sony
Pictures Classics and produced by, among many others, Sony’s Columbia Pictures Film
Production Asia (372-3; also, Donoghue 2017:46-7). Crucially, however, glocal blockbusters and
well-travelling local-language productions with Hollywood studio involvement were the
exception rather than the rule. For instance, it is only 10, that is about 2% of the 475 Warner
Brothers local-language co-productions between 1999-2013 that were distributed outside their
home territory (Donoghue 2017:49; 46-7). Instead, local-language production in general
comprises “a strategy for co-producing and distributing content on a specialised and limited scale
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for a particular market”, with relevant films constituting hybrids between studio movies and local
independent cinema (73-4). The typical LLP tends to “reflect topical local trends, production
cultures, and blockbuster cycles,” such as the “cycle of successful religious or spiritual dramas”
made in Brazil in the later 2000s and early 2010s (Donoghue 2019: 74). Importantly, local-
language productions are radically different in scope and scale, and they are produced a lot
cheaper and faster compared to the Hollywood studios’ typical English-language productions.
Studios also tend to be minority producers only, providing less than the half of the film’s budget,
often times between 10% and 30% (ibid). These productions backed by the local territory units
of Hollywood studios are, in general, unambiguously perceived and categorized as local national
productions. Biographical drama Chico Xavier (2010), one of the highest grossing movies ever
in Brazil, for example, can be fairly seamlessly identified as local Brazilian, an arguably
mononational film, despite its being co-produced by Sony (Donoghue 2019: 74). Crucially, in
my view, not only was this locally successful movie’s transnational mobility limited, but the film
was also not visibly branded as a Sony production, either. That is, Sony did not elevate this
production and most other LLPs into its brand. Thus, I argue that the typical local-language co-
production by Hollywood studios constitutes an obscure part of the transnational company’s
image. This obscurity is in a sharp contrast to the high-visibility “local originals” are granted by
and to the central role they fulfill in relation to, the brand identity of global SVODs such as
Netflix, Amazon Prime, or HBO.
LLPs functioned to facilitate the long-term co-operation between, and even integration of
Hollywood and local industries. Concurrently, the studios had considerable leverage to refute
accusations of cultural imperialism (Donoghue 2017: 46; Klein 2004: 372). I want to point out
the persistence of this issue in today’s global media environment, in which the most prominent
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US-based media companies, old (such as Warner Media) and new (such as Netflix or Amazon
Prime) are busy accentuating their sensitivity to and appreciation for local cultures. The stakes
are not simply their popular legitimacy—in many territories, Hollywood seems to have a secure
place with audiences. Rather, such culture-focused arguments and branding constitute an
important part of policy discourses, impacting restrictive measures such as import quotas as well
as supporting schemes such as tax rebates and direct subsidies given to qualifying productions.
Arguments on cultural imperialism embedded in cultural nationalisms, or, conversely, on
cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism have severe material consequences for local and
transnational producers and distributors alike.
Thus, Hollywood studios’ libraries may have increasingly been comprised of titles that are
conspicuous either in their inter-, multi-, and transnational nature (such as glocal blockbusters) or
in their local specificity (like LLPs), both as productions and as texts and representations.
However, the relevant global-local strategy is still significantly different from the strategy
revolutionized by Netflix as a vertically integrating SVOD. In contrast to the pre-SVOD-era
international Hollywood, the model and accompanying trend of “local originals” receive
transnational distribution by default, and, crucially, they are collectively, and sometimes,
individually, elevated into the global brand and spotlight by the transnational media company.
The production and global distribution of “local originals” are promoted among the central
(rather than obscure) assets of the SVOD, and even on an equal footing, at least in principle, with
US productions. Crucially, “local originals” as foreign productions are marketed as culturally
specific and authentic artefacts from a (nationally defined) “location” while having universal
appeal. The issue of the validity of claims on national-local cultural authenticity and specificity
are not even relevant here as long as the PR behind the idea is powerful. Besides the practical
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dispersal of opportunities, it is the performative force of the truth claims on cultural specificity
that matters in opening up the gates for diversification and the equalization of hierarchies of
global television.
Having established the innovative nature of the “local original” in relevance to the
internationalization of mainstream global TV, I would like to provide an overview of the factors
that together constitute the internationally diversifying power of Netflix as a vertically integrated
studio-like, global, market dominant and brand-strong, subscription-based platform aggregating a
wide variety of content in a nevertheless limited, curated library. Netflix’s (or similar current or
future platforms’) potential for internationally diversifying mainstream global and specifically,
quality TV, lies in the following factors: (1) Online, on-demand digital distribution, as this
enables the very economical storage, traffic, and exhibition of all content (instead of
necessitating a very selective focus) and highly customized consumption on part of each
individual viewer. (2) Transnational operation, as this is an important incentive for producing
“local originals” in the first place; and crucially, it motivates and enables the worldwide
distribution of individual programs from all or any territories. (3) Vertical integration into a
studio: owning IP is crucial for the economic and easy distribution of content globally, and for
branding through exclusivity. (4) Strong market position and brand. (5) Multiple and dynamic
taxonomic and recommendation system that serves the organization and opening up of the
library for the individual viewer. And (6) Subscription-based business model for consumers,
inviting for the risk-free exploration of (7) a broad but curated catalog that includes hits and a
wide range of niche content. All these characteristics contribute to Netflix’s heightened potential
to internationalize mainstream global TV. The attributes that currently make Netflix such a
powerful agent of international diversification of TV are, however, neither essential nor unique
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to Netflix as the individual company, even if it was Reed Hastings company that first developed
and started to realize their potential. Netflix as a corporation might change its strategies in the
future, and, already in progress, other transnational media companies have effected change that
make their global-local operations more synergistic with international cultural diversity. Thus, I
want to argue against any sharp discursive divide between Netflix and other new entrants in
opposition to “old Hollywood” sometimes constructed in industry and popular discourses. The
big studios have been increasingly prioritizing the SVOD marketplace, embracing the trend of
“local originals.”
In the coming section, I will present Netflix’s progressive centering of the notion of
“globality” in its diversity politics specifically. This new notion superimposes geographical-
cultural difference as an all-encompassing notion over the dominant identity categories of social
difference such as gender or race, instead of simply adding it to them. Thereby, Netflix’s
corporate diversity politics starts the performative work of decentralizing the US, including
showing up its way of categorizing social difference as locally specific itself rather than
universal as it is. Significantly, Netflix has been quite successful at mainstreaming this new
paradigm of diversity, with other corporate media giants following the innovator’s footsteps in
revising their corporate brand and policies, and their public communication. I will argue that in
the US, Reed Hastings company has built a strong brand of cosmopolitan multiculturalism, as
much of the company’s journalistic expert perception in its home country concurs with its self-
branding. I will actually argue that Netflix’s corporate brand is well-grounded considering its
shift towards “thinking global” and some important symbolic and practical positive impact on
international diversification of mainstream television. That is, instead of debunking Netflix’s
cosmopolitan brand for its ingenious but disingenuous nature due to its ultimate motivation for
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profit-making (vs Elkins 2019), I will argue that Netflix’s powerful corporate branding has
facilitated the international diversity of (A-listed and other) popular content and thus the
identities of the creators behind them, and it shifted US diversity discourses toward an explicitly
global perspective.
The Internationalization of Global TV and the Mainstreaming of the Global Diversity
Discourse AKA How Netflix “has become the internet’s most invaluable and intoxicating
portal to the parts of planet Earth that aren’t America”
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Netflix’s Multiculturalist Corporate Branding, and Trade and Journalistic Discourses
“Netflix continues to bring new and diverse stories from Europe, Middle East and Africa
to the world” (Netflix Media Center, April 18, 2018)
“When we think about non-English-language content, this is just the beginning” (Vice
President International Originals at Netflix Kelly Luegenbiehl on the company’s
widening repertoire of local original production, quoted in Variety, Clarke 2019a)
“What’s in the back and front of my mind is sharing the world’s best content, whether
that’s Japanese anime, Turkish telenovelas, the film noir of the Nordics (…) I’ve never
been very Hollywood-centric. (…) There are so many great stories around the world . . .
we want to make them available to everybody” (Reed Hastings quote by Garrahan 2018)
Interviewed by the Financial Times, Reed Hastings explicitly contrasted the geographically-
nationally diversifying space of global TV to US pop cultural hegemony and announced him
voting for the former. Indeed, “cosmopolitan brands [such as that of Netflix] offer an implicit
counterpoint to anxieties over platform imperialism, or the tendency of a small number of
mostly—though not exclusively—U.S. American digital platforms” (Elkins 2019: 383-4). I am
about to argue that this corporate branding device has actual grounds and corresponding effects
spreading beyond the corporate walls of Netflix itself.
Besides the main personal representatives of Netflix, the company’s Media Center has also
been active at cementing the SVOD’s image as spearheading global cultural diversity: “Netflix
continues to bring new and diverse stories from Europe, Middle East and Africa to the world”

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Manjoo 2019.
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(Netflix Media Center, April 18, 2018). Arguably, Netflix’s promotion of global diversity
practically based on territories defined on continental, regional, and most of all, national bases
has given rise to some overly liberal misleading statements
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. The above-mentioned press
release, for instance, proudly announces how the company “amplif[ies] local voices to bring
new, diverse and never-before-seen stories from Europe, the Middle East and Africa” and lists
the relevant countries, among others, Hungary. However, no actual programs could be deemed,
by any usual standards, to be Hungarian: the country only served as a place of production for a
program insofar as local companies and talent provided below-the-line services. While dominant
ideals of authorship and artistry may very well be disputed, defining production services as
manifesting “local voices” currently counts as confusing at best. Such abusive excess of PR does
not change the overall fact though that Netflix’s investment in local original programming in
terms of the number of territories, the increase of spending as well as the diversification of
genres has been progressively expanding. Kelly Luegenbiehl, Netflix’s head of international
originals confirmed in 2019, for instance, the coming up of non-English-language documentary
series, sketch and stand-up comedy and children’s programming; the first commissions from
African countries; and the preparations for a non-English-language interactive show similar to
Black Mirror’s “Bandersnatch” (Clarke 2019a).
Netflix’s self-branding as a pioneer of global consciousness “giving voice” to local cultures
has been convincing enough to be in a powerful synergy with trade and wider cultural discourses
in the US, signified by the mushrooming of headlines in leading American general news, trade,
business- and finance-focused, as well as popular cinema-, TV- and culture-oriented

35
in ways that are similar to the company’s controversially liberal practices of assigning the title of “Netflix
original” to programs, including those that Netflix did not commission but is merely the exclusive distributor of (see
e.g., Ball 2018).
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publications, such as: “Foreign Drama Enters ‘Brilliant’ Era as Global Giants Embrace Local
Stories” (Barraclough 2018, in Variety); “Netflix Drives Global Growth with Genuine Local
Content” (Bylund 2019 in the Motley Fool). The idea and terminology of the “local story with
global appeal” as championed by Netflix also appears in non-US English-language Indian
publications, such as “Netflix bets on stories with local voice but global appeal” in Mint (Jha
2019), or Nandini Rambath’s 2018 piece “‘Local story, global appeal’: Netflix’s strategy in India
with ‘Sacred Games’ and other projects.” Concurrently, best-of and must-see lists of foreign-
origin or “international” programming on Netflix and other SVODs have become commonplace.
Kaitlin Thomas, for instance, lists “The Best International Shows That Make Reading Subtitles
Worth It” available on Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon (Thomas 2020 on TVGuide.com); while one
2018 selection on Variety recommends 11 Netflix shows, 3 Amazon Prime shows, 2 HBO Go
series, and 1 Showtime show among “The Best Foreign Shows to Binge This Summer” (Clopton
2018). Another, end-of-the-year overview of “The Best International Shows of 2018” lists “a
dozen buzzed-about shows — some of which can be seen soon on Hulu, Amazon Prime and
HBO. As for the others — paging Netflix!” (Clarke 2018). In April 2020, Variety continued with
a selection of “The Best International Shows on Netflix,” introduced by two celebratory
paragraphs about the unexpected “depth” of the Netflix library and the great quality of shows
from across the world that should not be missed “just because their names aren’t familiar on first
glance” (Variety Staff, 2020). According to the piece’s strongly cosmopolitan spirit, “rather than
something to be avoided, subtitles are the gateway to a great big world of engrossing
entertainment,” which is further complemented by the opportunity to practice foreign language
skills and “develop some cross-cultural savoir-faire” (ibid). In April 2020, arts, entertainment,
and travel writer Elisabeth Vincentelli (2020) promotes subtitled foreign-language shows as
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especially attractive during the COVID19 crisis and the relevant “homebound self-containment”
due to their facilitation of “travel[ling] vicariously” and their commanding full attention on part
of the viewers who cannot simultaneously keep checking the news but instead can finally take a
“mental break.” In her New York Times publication, the author recommends 8 Netflix shows and
4 other ones available on Hulu, Amazon, iTunes, and/or Google Play. The ratios signal the
predominance of Netflix in the discourses on international TV. Further notable examples
include: “The 30 Best International TV Shows of the Decade” (Hale 2019 in The New York
Times); “The Best Foreign TV Shows on Netflix” (2020, Thrillist Entertainment); “The best
Netflix original TV show from 8 countries outside the US” (Wittmer 2018 in Business Insider);
“The 30 Best Foreign-Language Films on Netflix” (2019 Paste Movies Staff in Paste Magazine).
In the affirmatory and even celebratory trade and popular US discourses on “international”
and “foreign/-language” shows, Netflix has been given the most credit. Crucially, however, the
“international plans” or “non-English programming” strategies of large SVODs are much-
discussed topics in the industry in general (e.g., Clarke 2019a, 2019b; Keslassy 2019;
Roxborough 2017, 2019b). Importantly, the biggest competitors like Netflix, Amazon, and HBO
have been engaging in similar practical and branding strategies in terms of global expansion and
localization. However, they have been trying to posit the competitive edge and moral superiority
of their own version of the global-local game, primarily by outbidding the others in terms of the
supposed local authenticity and specificity of their programs. Amazon, for instance, has put
forward the idea of quality over quantity, and “hyper-locality” at the core of its comparative
brand regarding “local originals” in contrast to Netflix’s more expansive and massive
investments. They have basically tried to put a positive spin over what is often framed elsewhere
as Amazon being far outperformed by the global market leader. In the words of James Farrell,
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Amazon’s head of international originals at the 2019 MIPCOM at Cannes: “We don't do a ton of
originals, maybe 5 to 10, 15 at most in each territory… It's not a quantity play, it’s a quality
play” (quoted in Roxborough 2019b). Farrell further emphasized the supposedly distinctively
local flair of the programs they make. The company’s director of European originals Georgia
Brown stated that Amazon’s local original strategy is “hyper-local, with a spotlight on local
production, local language to drive subscribers in those territories” where heightened local
specificity nevertheless simultaneously facilitates the same programs’ transnational mobility as
all players in the game keep saying (in Clarke 2019b). Along similar lines, when Netflix’s head
of international originals Kelly Luegenbiehl mentioned Sky and HBO’s Chernobyl as a favorite
international show of hers, she noted that if the series had been made by Netflix, it would have
been made in Russian (Clarke 2019a), suggesting the greater local-cultural authenticity of
Netflix’s global agenda in comparison to HBO’s. In turn, HBO Max’s Chief Content officer
Kevin Reilly stated about the global strategy of the upcoming platform:
“Unlike some of our competitors – say, Netflix – where it is the same service in every
territory, I think we can anticipate that the HBO Max product and alliances underneath
it will likely take different forms in different territories. It won’t be one service,
necessarily, that is globally transported.” (quoted in Clarke 2019b)
Reilly’s formulation subtly assigns a sort of global homogeneity and lack of local specificity to
Netflix in contradistinction to HBO Max’s specified approach to different territories.
As these instances of competitive corporate PR demonstrates, international strategies and
local original programming have come to constitute a significant part of media corporations’
self-branding as companies that are attentive to and genuinely appreciating local specificity, very
much in contrast with concerns about cultural imperialism and U.S. centrism. In fact, led by
Netflix, the agenda of a global cultural consciousness and positive sensitivity has made its way
into the forefront of the giant transnational media companies’ diversity politics.
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The Centralization of “Globality” in Media Corporations’ Diversity Politics
“Vernā Myers Joins Netflix as Vice President, Inclusion Strategy -- Inclusion and
cultural expert will help guide the company’s global expansion” (Netflix Media Center,
August 29, 2018)
Netflix’s attention to and prioritization of diversity as such among its workforce and leadership
along the major axes of social difference, such as gender, race, and other forms, is nothing
new—it has been a common practice on part of US-based media companies. As an innovative
step, however, Netflix has put “globality” and the sense of the world at large in the geographical
and cultural sense in the driver’s seat of the company’s stated policies and underlying ethics, and
its branding and public relations management. As declared under “Inclusion & Diversity” on
Jobs.netflix.com:
“IT TAKES DIVERSITY OF THOUGHT, CULTURE, BACKGROUND, AND
PERSPECTIVE TO CREATE A TRULY GLOBAL STORYTELLING PLATFORM.”
Netflix is a global company, with a diverse member base, which is why the content we
produce reflects that: global perspectives, global stories. As we grow globally, we know that we
must have the most talented employees with diverse backgrounds, cultures, perspectives, and
experiences to support our innovation and creativity. We are an equal opportunity employer and
strive to build balanced teams from all walks of life.
We also understand that inclusion plays just as much of a role in our success as having a
diverse team. Inclusion is about authentically recognizing, understanding, and appreciating
differences, and being able to connect across these differences by being mutually adaptive rather
than insisting that everyone be, think, and act the same. Our goal is to create an environment
where people of different backgrounds can contribute at their highest level and where their
differences can make a positive difference for Netflix.” (at https://jobs.netflix.com/diversity, n.d.;
uppercase in original)
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Given the central framing-like positioning of this statement, it is all the more significant that
the notion of “global” has become the superordinated term comprising further, implicit aspects of
diversity, especially as it is the spatial-geographical sense of “global” included in the capitalized
sentence that leads the reader into the more detailed statement. This differs from the dominant
way of discussing diversity in the US: providing an open-ended list of social axes of difference
usually led by the notions of gender, race and ethnicity, and sexuality, a reference to disabilities,
and other terms in a random juxtaposition. Thus, Netflix facilitates a paradigm shift in US
diversity discourses by reconfiguring the US national context itself into an element of global
diversity instead of framing it as the final container for the recognition and respect of internal
differences as it has been done before. As a taxonomic and corporate political innovation, Netflix
performs a step where globality as the diversity of geographically based social-cultural
differences becomes an umbrella rather than an additive term. The discursive foregrounding of a
global consciousness and reformation of how diversity is conceptualized is especially significant
when considering Netflix’s power to orient discourses beyond its own self-branding (and the
SVOD or even the media marketplace, see e.g., Gibbons 2019)
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. The fact that the tech startup’s
progressive corporate policies (and publicity practices) have facilitated industry-wide changes
have not only been noted by insider media professionals (Hinrichsen 2020), but even
acknowledged by members of old Hollywood. This acknowledgment and PR-follow-up to
newcomer tech companies like Netflix is exemplified by the words of Christy Haubegger,
WarnerMedia’s Executive Vice President, Chief Enterprise Inclusion Officer:
“Our industry hasn’t been as transparent about these things as, for example, the tech
companies” (quoted in Ramos 2019)

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One famous example is Netflix’s corporate culture and HR policies centering on “Freedom and Responsibility,”
the PowerPoint deck of which going viral on SlideShare and been called as “one of the most important documents to
ever come out of Silicon Valley” by Facebook’s Chief operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg (McCord 2014).
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Accordingly, the Diversity page of WarnerMediaGroup’s website (as of April 2020) starts with a
statement that signals a reconfiguration of what diversity should entail for a studio in the digital
era that is more global than ever:
“At WarnerMedia, we believe that in an increasingly multicultural world, we must
expand our efforts to reach and understand the diverse people and cultures we serve. A
key to our success is hiring and retaining a staff that is as diverse as our audiences.
What's more, when we think about diversity, we must go beyond race, ethnicity and
gender to include all the things that make us unique, including life experiences,
geographic backgrounds, sexual orientation, skills and talents.”
(https://www.warnermediagroup.com/careers/working-with-us/diversity, my emphasis)
WarnerMedia currently defines itself as
“a leading media and entertainment company that creates and distributes premium and
popular content from a diverse array of talented storytellers and journalists to global
audiences… [a company who] aim to deliver the world’s best stories and most engaging
content from talented storytellers and journalists to audiences around the globe.”
(“About Us” and “Overview”, WarnerMedia, n.d.)
For now, the global diversity of content is less explicitly emphasized compared to the
discursive centrality of the globality of audiences, which converges WarnerMedia’s corporate PR
to a realistic evaluation. However, depending on the grandiose SVOD HBO Max’s development,
the company’s library may undergo some more intense internationalization in the future.
Notably, HBO Go has already been active in producing “local originals” and distributing them
transnationally. In the practical formulation of WarnerMedia CEO John Stankey, international
expansion “will drive economies of scale in content production and give us worldwide audience
reach to attract the best talent and creative projects” (quoted in Hazelton 2019).
While the perception of internationalization has been most prominent in the English-speaking
US context and with regards to the large transnational SVODs, it has been present beyond the
on-demand and the English-speaking markets. “Any seasoned buyer or seller attending MipTV
will tell you that the days of the U.S. and the U.K. being the dominant exporters of high-end
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programming to the world are long gone”—reports Cynthia Littleton for the Variety in 2016. She
quotes the president-executive of a major media group according to whom the sweeping success
of Turkish show Fatmagul on their Spanish-language channels in the U.S. and Puerto Rico
taught them “to keep an open mind on programming and acquisitions and not be culturally
biased toward a single language” and to gain “a much more global perspective on what could
work in our market,” making them actively turn towards “nontraditional sources” of content
(Alan Sokol quoted in Littleton 2016). Concurrently, at the 2019 annual Budapest trade market
and industry conference of the National Association of Television Program Executives, attended
by buyers and sellers mostly from Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe, as well as Western
Europe and the Middle East, one of the ideas repeatedly affirmed by creatives and managers in
production, acquisition and sales departments, and programming alike, was that TV shows can
now travel regardless of linguistic borders. At NATPE, “local originals” and “co-productions”
were discussed as the hippest types of productions comprising the present and the future of
global television.
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Significantly, in most territories, TV has practically been quite international for decades
though hardly ever celebrated for being so. In contrast, in the US, internationalization is not only
newly celebrated but is indeed unprecedented. Concurrently, prominent cultural commentators in
the U.S. have projected deep social-cultural implications onto the internationalization of
mainstream television and the rising awareness of a globally connected diverse cultural space.

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The legacies of old tensions constructed between supposedly monocultural and monolingual content versus co-
productions as threatening with cultural blandness and inauthenticity (e.g., Crofts 1993:63, 1998:391) were
sometimes reflected on by the participants. The dominant claim reaffirmed at multiple occasions by multiple
participants was that the present co-productions, as opposed to the old “Europuddings,” are not subject to the old
kind of compromising cultural modifications anymore, because, supposedly, authentic cultural difference originating
from other cultures or national contexts is actually welcomed by audiences. The celebratory idea that cultural
differences when represented in “authentic” ways, are welcomed by open-minded audiences across territories is the
central notion that underlies the discourses around the “local original” and its trend set by Netflix and other
innovative SVODs.
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Writers publishing in prestigious general publications such as The New York Times or The Los
Angeles Times think highly of Netflix for its contributions to a benevolent cosmopolitanism in
opposition to chauvinistic nationalism (Lloyd 2018; Manjoo 2019). While such projections may
be far too optimistic, their prominent presence in the US media signal the strength of Netflix’s
cosmopolitan branding and their power to orient discourses on TV and culture in general. As I
argue, such public visibility and discursive power do reinforce the company’s actual cultural
impact, including, most notably, the mainstreaming of “international” non-US-originating, non-
English-speaking programs.
The Sociocultural Significance of Globalizing Mainstream TV: A US Perspective
When Netflix went beyond its initial status as an additional window, a distributor-outlet for
older, licensed content, it was through a non-US production. The SVOD’s first exclusive content
and original production was crime drama series Lilyhammer, co-financed with Norwegian public
broadcaster NRK1. The show’s North American premiere on Netflix was in February 2012. The
event was widely reported in the US including the TV review section of The New York Times,
where the series’ significance was deemed nothing short of historical:
“’Lilyhammer’ is most distinctive simply for being a foreign show presented in its
original form, with subtitles (…) That’s something virtually unheard of on mainstream
American television. The possibility of increased access to current foreign-language TV,
beyond newscasts and Asian cartoons and soap operas, is a good reason to root for the
streaming services.” (Hale 2012)
Concurrently, Andy Greene bombastically titled his 2013 article in the Rolling Stone magazine
before Lilyhammer’s second season premiered on Netflix: “How ‘Lilyhammer’ Changed the TV
World. ‘Netflix is opening up a whole new golden era of television’ (…).” Greene attributes
Netflix’s first “experiment” investing in Lilyhammer to “pave the way” for a series of critically
acclaimed original shows produced by the company. He then details the aforementioned world-
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changing effect of the success of this foreign show away from its homeland. In the prescient
words of one of Lilyhammer’s creators and stars Steve Van Zandt:
“Netflix completely shook up the world. They’ve been willing to invest and it’s opening a
whole new golden era of television that I predicted back with The Sopranos. Now it’s
gone to another level with digital distribution. This is just the beginning. There’s going
to be Google TV and Amazon TV. People are going to start their own networks and it’s
going to be wonderful to have that much money coming into the creation of content. It’s
going to be very, very healthy for everybody.”
Creators’ and cultural commentators’ early celebratory perceptions of a new international era
of TV pioneered by giant SVODs have persisted, exemplified by opinion pieces appearing at the
end of decade. A retrospective piece from late 2019 in The New York Times overviewing “The
30 Best International TV Shows of the Decade” is introduced by the editor as following: “The
2010s saw a radical shift in the trade balance when it comes to television series. Our critic counts
down the finest imports, from ‘Fleabag’ to ‘Strong Girl Bong-soon’” (in Hale 2019). The matter,
however, goes beyond the issue of “trade imbalance” and is supposed to have deep-seated
cultural implications. According to some cultural commentators voicing their opinions in
prestigious publications, Netflix facilitates a benevolent cosmopolitanism in opposition to
chauvinistic nationalisms by bringing international productions to the US and global mainstream
culture (Lloyd 2018; Manjoo 2019). In his opinion piece for The New York Times, technology
and political expert Farhad Manjoo (2019) calls Netflix “The Most Intoxicating Portal to Planet
Earth.” He starts the personal narrative by a contrast between Trump’s America and The Great
British Baking Show on Netflix in which he found solace during the times of exacerbating
chauvinism. As Manjoo narrates, Netflix’s going global entailed the commissioning and
licensing of shows from around the world:
“…blend[ing] language and sensibilities across its markets… In the process, Netflix has
discovered something startling: Despite a supposed surge in nationalism across the
globe, many people like to watch movies and TV shows from other countries (…) The
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strategy may sound familiar; Hollywood and Silicon Valley have long pursued
expansion internationally. But Netflix's strategy is fundamentally different. Instead of
trying to sell American ideas to a foreign audience, it’s aiming to sell international ideas
to a global audience. A list of Netflix’s most watched and most culturally significant
recent productions looks like a Model United Nations” (Manjoo 2019, my emphasis).
Manjoo’s perception is perfectly consistent with Reed Hastings’ views on the relations between
nations that Netflix facilitates through its worldwide operation:
Interviewer: One of things I did want to talk to you is the international market, because
that’s where you think the growth is gonna come. It’s sort of a geopolitical issue right
now and we’re talking freedom of speech. Hollywood, for very long time… there was a
view that we were exporting our values around the world. How much do you think about
Netflix now in that context about exporting values? Or do you think that as you become
a more and more international company as opposed to a domestic company that will
change?
Reed: I think about it as mutual sharing you know. When there’s a great French show
like Family Business, people all over the States enjoy it and it spreads and there’s we
serve a hundred and ninety countries and we try to think of them you know all on the
same footing. (Interview of Reed Hastings by Andrew Ross Sorkin, The New York
Times DealBook Conference, November 6, 2019, quoted in Karthik 2020, emphasis
mine)
Manjoo explains this welcome phenomenon of diversification of national origin in terms of
Netflix’s business model: basically, the company relies on subscription fees and not advertising,
which gives it “a reason to satisfy every new customer, not just the ones in prosperous markets.
Each new title carries subtitles in 26 languages, and the company is creating high-quality,
properly lip-synced audio dubbing in 10 languages.” Indeed, Netflix’s translation project should
be acknowledged in its unprecedented enormity: as Ramon Lobato points out, while Netflix had
so far failed to satisfy the speakers of minor languages, it is probably already “the most
multilingual television service that has ever existed (2019: 120). Netflix’s heavy investment
across the world is motivated by the urge to extract as much value from a single show as
possible; it also needs to keep subscribers engaged, preferably indefinitely, which necessitates
large quantities of content one single subscriber would be interested in, to be facilitated by its
recommendation algorithms.
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Concurrently, according to Los Angeles Times’s television critic Robert Lloyd (2018), the US
has been, for the first time, opening up towards foreign-language and foreign-produced film and
TV—the pioneers being titles produced or picked up by Netflix and HBO. 2018 is assessed by
Lloyd as “the year American television went global,” opening the floodgates for foreign(-
language) programming that themselves constitute “too much good television,” signifying the
idea, arguably outside the established cultural horizons of the average American, that engaging,
quality programming can come from across the world and may speak foreign languages. This
contrasts the long-standing, “seemingly ineluctable one-way flow of American pop culture to the
world” that had been “swell[ing] the size of our national head” (ibid). “Television in its various
delivery systems has never been more cosmopolitan and international,” says Lloyd, in contrast to
the continuing power of “chauvinism, parochialism, populism and xenophobia” in the US and
across the world. This cosmopolitanism has been spearheaded by “Netflix, which rules the
streaming world,” with Amazon Prime and Hulu also getting some honorable mentions. Among
the reasons behind “[o]ur television” coming “to this smorgasbord,” Lloyd lists the enormous
space to be filled with content now, and the significance of original branded content for content
providers. In his assessment, the changing attitudes of viewers must also be among the factors of
growing internationalization: “we have become a little more open to otherness” and curious to
know “lands beyond the one we wake up in.” Through international TV boosted by the SVOD
disruption, argues Lloyd, the American nation is finally shedding its nationalist solipsism and
exceptionalism, realizing that screen talent and value can originate in other places. The idea that
new digital platforms play an important part “in opening up the longstanding ethnocentric
enclosures of American television” had started appearing in critical studies, too, before the
aforementioned LA Times and New York Times pieces, on part of prominent scholars such as
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Michele Hilmes (2014: 11). Hilmes notes the strengthening global tendency of domestic drama
production being increasingly framed “with a diverse global market—and, often, global
partnerships— foremost in mind,” which fuels the rebirth of international co-productions of
transnationally mobile quality drama TV (12). Hilmes’ assertion corresponds to the TV industry
discourses as I witnessed them at the 2019 NATPE in Budapest.
In conclusion, trade, marketing, and wider cultural discourses in the US posit the 2010s as a
revolutionary decade for global television and mainstream US TV specifically, in terms of their
international diversification. This was pioneered by and is most compatible with the business
models of large transnational SVOD companies, first and foremost, Netflix. One of the most
prominent and much-celebrated type of programs in this new era of global television is the “local
original” that is supposed to embody “local stories with global appeal”—a term that came up,
mantra-like, over and over at the 2019 NATPE Budapest. Crucially, the international
diversification of TV has been associated with the emancipation of hitherto disadvantaged
cultures lacking proper recognition, and the facilitation of benevolent cosmopolitanism over
chauvinistic nationalisms and ignorance. Certainly, the progressive social transformative power
of television is far from rapid, all-encompassing, and without seemingly contradictory
developments, as the persistence and flaring of chauvinism attest to (Imre 2019). I would like to
offer one approach to think further about such opposing developments between nationalisms and
TV internationalism in the chapters on Hungary and Australia. I will demonstrate how, in
contrast to the very special case of the US, in national contexts that represent the average country
with a long tradition of significant TV import and only modest if any televisual export, the
SVOD revolution is much less about the positive effects of internationalization of mainstream
TV but much rather about the renegotiation of the binary relation between national and foreign
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US culture and industry. In these globally typical contexts, TV had already been quite
international already, though hardly ever celebrated as such. Instead, big US programs have been
the subject of traditional concerns about mass culture and homogenization, while programs from
other countries have not figured prominently in discourses on culture, whether national or global.
In countries such as Hungary, the SVOD revolution has been framed by some as offering a
potential emancipation of national TV culture through revolutionary “local originals” to be
produced and transnationally distributed by SVODS. Elsewhere, transnational platforms’ local-
national conquests have often facilitated considerable fear of national culture’s deterioration due
to national audiences migrating more and more from national broadcasters to transnational
SVODs. That is, in many national contexts other than the US, it is precisely a renewed
manifestation of old nationalistic cultural preoccupations rather than a positive sense of
cosmopolitanism, which are triggered by the global SVOD revolution. Nationalistic concerns
and arguments are frequent among many interest groups, such as politicians, activist, public
intellectuals, as well as content creators and market competitors such as established TV
companies. To be sure, such nationalistic preoccupations are simultaneous with the local
popularity of the global SVODs, mostly due to the easy and globally equal access to the most
current leading US shows.
Part I has shown that Netflix has basically been true to the vision it has been marketing: the
ideal of a multicultural community of national cultures. However, I do not wish to promote this
vision as the final emancipatory ideal. The notion of the unique and unified nature of nationally
based cultures have been sufficiently debunked by insightful scholarship that should be kept in
mind when thinking about the current SVOD revolution, its cultural nationalist praise as well as
cultural nationalist opposition. I argue that the highly successful corporate agenda of the “local
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original” operates as a currency of nationalist identity politics; as such, it deters from a global
materialist perspective. The vision of TV multiculturalism seductively but falsely posits both the
equality and the uniqueness of national cultures. I assert that the idea that the equality and proper
recognition of cultures, societies, or countries are achieved by their inclusion into the global
mainstream of quality TV is false even if all countries get eventually proportional representation
in the global catalog. Such equal representation would still only parallel the logic of achieving
the proper representation of women/ sexual minorities/ or races, ethnicities or, indeed,
nationalities among, say persons in executive managerial positions at the workplace: the
inclusion of hitherto marginal identities into the narrow elite benefitting from the existing system
the unjust rules of which are accepted rather than questioned.
Consequently, I see the equalizing and diversifying projects of the SVOD revolution as led
by Netflix as positive contributions to cultural diversity which are, however, severely unfinished
and are only to be welcomed as temporary, partial, and strategically necessary steps—as all
identity politics should be. More concretely, the international diversification of global TV can
indeed work for the dehierarchization of national states in the sphere of TV and decrease cultural
contempt rooted in racist and ethnicist misgivings. As such, it can also speed up the geopolitical
equalization of opportunities for professional and high-budget cultural production, currently in
progress to a great extent thanks to the trending of the “local original.” The opportunities for
cultural production should be framed as not necessarily giving way to or being foreclosed by
“national cultures” the creators are affiliated with and located in, but rather, open-ended and
potentially very diverse individual cultural expressions embedded in their social context that is
shaped but not determined by nationality as territorial belonging. Opportunities for professional
and high-prestige cultural production (such as those related to quality TV series production) are
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certainly valuable as they usually bring significant material and symbolic rewards. Such
opportunities for individuals are still vary greatly across geopolitical territories—thus, their
equalization across these national territories is a positive contribution to global economic and
cultural equality. However, as the capitalist connotations of “opportunity” warn us, a simple
inclusion into the preexisting game of global media production and trade without making the
subject of reconsideration the very rules of the game cannot help but be limited. Dangerously,
the logic of identity politics and the neoliberal subject’s massive propensity toward a grandiose
group identification helps veil such limitation through the promise of recognition—like the
global rehabilitation of the nation and its unique talent.

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Part II: The National Lives of Netflix: Global SVOD Localization and
Disruption in The UK, Australia, and “Small-Nation” Hungary
Introduction to Part II
“Netflix is global but is not a ‘wraparound’; it does not evenly envelop the world. (…)
Perhaps it may be better to imagine Netflix as a kind of loose mesh, one that is full of
gaps, that comes into contact unevenly with local and national surfaces.” (Ramon
Lobato 2019:71)
“…there is some evidence that Netflix promotes David (and Sven) over Goliath in the
movie market.” (Joel Waldfogel 2018: 242)
“As is the case with public service broadcasting news, I’d argue that British originations
are more important today, as we graze internationally, than they were in the past. If we
ever became ‘citizens of nowhere’, we’d be lost.” (ITV’s executive chairman Peter
Bazalgette, 2017)
“Is Netflix shrinking Australia’s film and television industry?” (A Deakin University
publication, n.d.)
“[Netflix] provides us [Hungarians] with a huge opportunity, [this] birth of the
international [SVOD] platforms [does]” (Eszter Angyalosy, scriptwriter and story editor
at Joyrider, formerly at HBO)
“It would be, of course, damn good for us if AMC would also come out with a
[Hungarian] local original—or Netflix, too” (Hungarian screenwriter István Tasnádi,
2019)
Netflix conquered the VOD market in many countries across several continents, taking over
market leader or prominent positions, with overall user penetrations recently exceeding 30-60%
in international markets such as Brazil, Mexico, Canada, the UK, Australia, Germany, the
Netherlands, or the Nordic countries (Cornelio-Marí 2017; Gruenwedel 2019; Lobato 2019;
Lynch July 18, 2018; Stiegler 2016; Ward 2016). While the majority of its national libraries is
still constituted by US fare, the platform also carries a great variety of international titles, and it
has been increasingly pressured as well as incentivized to raise the ratio of local national content
in many territories. This entails the growing investment in “stories with local voice but global
appeal” (Jha 2019). Concurrently, the company has been at the forefront of appropriating the
agenda of global cultural diversity into its corporate brand. However, in many thoroughly
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Netflixed countries, despite some high-budget “local originals” going global through the SVOD,
the company’s dominance and overall effect have been contested in the name of protecting
national culture, cultural diversity, and the local media industries. Broadcasters have been at the
forefront of pressing for regulatory changes due to their declining ratings and advertising
revenues, which thwart their ability to produce local content especially high-end drama. In
contrast, in many other countries, some small and others large, Netflix and other transnational
SVODs have remained a niche phenomenon, hardly present in mainstream political and cultural
discourses, or figuring differently in relation to the nation. That is, up until recently, in many
“small nations” (Hjort and Petrie 2007) with low-levels of English proficiency, both free-to-air
and pay-TV broadcasters have remained unbothered by the SVOD revolution disrupting other
national media ecologies, partly due to the lack or shortcomings of localization of OTTs. Picking
up titles for international distribution, however, Netflix has been significant for a small selection
of small-country producers. Its current operation in these small national markets mainly as a
niche distributor of English-language US fare while exporting some programming may be more
unequivocally perceived to be beneficial to “the nation” than cases of intense local engagement.
Other factors, such as a country’s international cultural status and its traditional balance of media
export and import, the types of TV programs that have been available in the relevant regulatory
and cultural context, the historical and present status and operation of public service media, and
how transnational SVODs’ interfere with these issues, also matter greatly in how Netflix and
other OTTs come to figure in discourses on the national.
Key Concepts & Theoretical Background
Small Nation, Small Market
I regard Hungary as a “small nation” that entails not only population size and territory, but
also the matters of economic strength, linguistic loneliness, and histories of domination by
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imperial powers (see Hjort and Petrie 2007: 1-19). Small nation is a relational (and somewhat
dynamic) concept. In the contemporary context, its correlation with being Netflix-niche instead
of Netflix-dominant is clear. Notably, when smallness is defined more liberally, this correlation
disappears. For instance, in Denmark, Netflix had a 37% market penetration in 2017, disrupting
the established media order and the domination of linear, free-to-air-broadcasting especially
among young audiences, raising nationalist concerns (e.g., Dixon 2017). Although Denmark has
a population of a mere 5.8 million and does not have English among its official languages, it is
an affluent country, with one of highest levels of English-as-a-second-language proficiency in
the world—similarly to its linguistically and culturally proximate neighbors Norway and
Sweden, with whom Denmark has established systems of media cooperation. That is, not only is
Denmark in need of little if any linguistic localization of English-language programs and
interfaces, but it has also practically been functioning as part of the Nordic countries as an often
joint territory for media distribution (as “Scandinavia”, see Kirkpatrick 2018: 124) as well as co-
production (Danish Film Institute, n.d). With an exceptionally high level of fixed broadband
penetration, these Nordic countries have shown stable growth in SVOD usage, Netflix being
reported to be the market leader with a 58% share in 2017 (Thomson 2018). Compared to
Denmark, Hungary represents a strong contrast and exhausts Mette Hjort and Duncan Petrie’s
category of “small nation” more adequately despite its larger size of territory and population.
National & Local
Focusing on Hungary in contrast to the UK and Australia, with a few additional references
from other national contexts, I will examine and compare how Netflix and other transnational
SVODs as distributors and producers figure in relation to things “national,” “domestic” and
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“local” in political, trade-industrial, and journalistic and popular discourses.
38
Participants in
such discourses on the “national” and related concepts are politicians, managerial members of
broadcasters and other platforms, production companies, filmmakers and other media workers,
and cultural experts and publicists; secondly, lay members of audiences who express their
opinions on social media and in the comments on professional media, in surveys, or (my own)
interviews. Such discourses evolve, among others, around the cultural nature, significance, and
value of foreign and domestic film and TV program production, distribution, and consumption-
reception, and existing and prospective regulations of media ownership, taxes, and content and
production quotas as part of conceptualizing the relation between representations, cultural
producers and traders, and the greater national and international public. My examination will
demonstrate the fragmentary and conflicted nature of being “local” or “national,” as claimed or
perceived by different practical and affective stakeholders. I argue that local and national identity
should be interpreted as the strategic positioning of the self and others in discourses on culture,
cultural production, trade, and consumption. Multiple claims on and in the name of the national
made by different stakeholders can be similarly well-grounded while conflicting at the same
time. This approach, while treating the nation and locality as performative and situational, does
not by any means preclude the potentially genuine affective dimensions of nationality,
identifications and performances, at least on part of some of the stakeholders. When used without
quotation marks, I understand the national to be something bound by a local territory defined by
official borders. That is, as a more objective category, I regard the national as a legal-territorial-
institutional term, irrespective of ethnic or cultural considerations—basically, as a close

38
In the Hungarian context, I translate the “national” as “magyar” (“Hungarian”) or “nemzeti”; while the terms
“hazai”, “itthoni”, and “magyarországi” (attributed to Hungary as a country) come closest to the English terms
“domestic.” Hungarian expressions “helyi” and “lokális” are seamless equivalents to “local.”
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synonym to the term domestic. Correspondingly, I conceptualize national interest without
quotation marks as local public interest: as the interest of the general population residing within
the borders of a territory. This approach still entails multiplicity, conflict, and situational and
relational dynamics; however, it dismisses claims on racial or ethnic authenticity, or the tying of
cultural legitimacy to such authenticity or tradition or history.
Cultural Nationalism
In John Hutchinson’s approach, the main subject of cultural nationalism is “the meaning and
the identity of the nation as a distinctive moral community” (2013: 77). Cultural nationalism can
thus be distinguished from political nationalism, the latter being concerned with the
establishment or defense of a sovereign national territory, the nation state. While cultural
nationalism is sometimes regarded as preceding political nationalism, Hutchinson takes it as a
recurrent movement aimed at national “regeneration” in established states (75). Cultural
nationalism has also been contrasted to political nationalism by the much-criticized work of
Hans Kohn, according to whom certain Western European nations are characterized by a
voluntarily, civic kind of political nationalism, while Eastern Europe and the former colonies are
hotbeds for a more essentialist, ethnicity-centered cultural nationalism (Kohn 1946). In contrast,
what Miroslav Hroch (1985) emphasizes with regards to Eastern European cultural nationalism
is the orientation toward modernization.
In Anthony Smith’s approach, modern nationalism idealizes an autonomous and united
nation with a unique identity (Smith 2010: 50). For Smith, nationalisms always entail cultural
elements. The romantic idea of a deep-seated, unique, and authentic identity of nations—an
essential national culture—was influentially propagated by 18
th
-century German philosopher
Johann Gottfried Herder, who regarded the nation as “a primordial, cultural, and territorial
people through which individuals developed their authenticity as moral and rational beings”
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(Hutchinson 2013: 76). Herder imagined humanity to be a diverse world of unique nations to
interact, prosper and progress (ibid). While as a movement and institutionalized function,
cultural nationalism is intellectual in its origin and coordination, it usually entails an engagement
between high-elite art with “folk” art and culture. It propagates an egalitarian notion of potential
for artistic talent in the sense that any member of the national community (rather than the upper
classes only) may be blessed with the ability to make great contributions to national art and
culture, the value and pride of which is, in turn, shared by the national community as a whole.
I regard cultural nationalism as a widespread, often banal (but potentially hot) form of
nationalism (vs Billig 1995). Not only does cultural nationalism vary tremendously in terms of
its affective intensity and the specificity of its cognitive components, but it can also have great
flexibility and complementarity with a wide range of political ideologies, including relatively
liberal as well as authoritarian and chauvinistic-ethnic nationalisms. In its loose form, cultural
nationalism takes for granted the existence and significance of a special national identity and
culture—however, crucially, it does not necessarily attempt to define these. In fact, I argue that
the power of national identity and culture as mythical constructions works best when left
somewhat vague. Cultural nationalism entails the potential for a positive identification with and
community-based or vicarious sense of pride in, things cultural, artistic, performance- and talent-
related that are subsumed under the umbrella of the nation. I assert that cultural nationalism in
this sense is generally considered to be a politically harmless and normal attitude in the
contemporary global political and everyday context, hardly raising suspicion of being politically
regressive and threatening to the (idea of a supposedly) democratic order.
Indeed, cultural nationalism is often considered to be a moderate ideology as opposed to
ethnic-chauvinistic kinds of nationalism—however, its political innocence, progressivity, or
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ultimate compatibility with liberalism have been rightfully debated (e.g., Gerson and Rubin
2015). Concurrently, I argue that the widespread acceptance and embrace of cultural nationalism
is intertwined with the currently hegemonic notion of the value of “culture”, and “culture’s”
simplistic but powerful association with things “authentic” and essentially beneficial to society
and its individual members. That is, nationalism can keep going largely unnoticed when applied
to the area of culture and art partially because of the latter’s established normativity. As such,
“culture,” “art” and “talent” provide a safe haven for nationalist attitudes that explicitly
chauvinistic politics can actually tap into.
The entrenched normativity of cultural nationalism and the dominant ideal of global cultural
diversity correspond to Herder’s Romanticist concept about the uniqueness of individual nations
in a diverse world community of nations. Importantly, film and television are burgeoning sites
for cultural nationalism. As I will explicate further, contemporary “quality television” especially,
as an enmeshment of cultural formations traditionally deemed high-artistic and popular, has
functioned as a prominent site for nationalist identification and as such international aspirations
and concerns. In other words, “quality TV” and its dominant contemporary embodiment, the
“local original quality drama series” has been increasingly operating as a prominent global
currency of national identity politics.
Public Service Broadcasting & Neoliberalization
It was the British Broadcasting Corporation that served as the model for many public service
broadcasters in other national contexts, among others, the Australian one. The BBC was founded
on the principles of institutional sovereignty separate from the government, “to inform, educate
and entertain” the national public through “quality” programming that would uplift it morally
(see Debrett 2010: 34). Among others, this traditional PSB remit has been criticized for its
paternalism and elitist prioritization of high culture, as well as its nationalist, mono-culturalist
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underpinnings (ibid; Bourdon 2004: 285-6). The elements generally constitutive of public service
broadcasting charters have been: universality [in terms of geographical coverage and free
access]; independence from both government interference and from vested interest; servicing
minority and underserved groups, as well as mainstream audiences; the cultivation of national
culture and identity [often paired up with or translated into the more recently prescribed
guidelines of “multiculturalism” or “cultural diversity”]; and provisions related to quality,
innovation and distinctiveness (my categorization based on Debrett 2010: 186). There are
various PSB models in terms of their scope of programming, their assigned role vis-à-vis the
media market, their production and distribution activities, their funding, and other aspects. The
involvement of public funding is usually among the definitive features of PSBs. There are
notable exceptions, however, such as the UK context where the definition of PSB encompasses
all free-to-air broadcasters regardless of private ownership and fully commercial functioning—
which in turn would, in some other national contexts, fall under the category of “public
broadcasting” that is commercially funded but still answering to a governmental remit in
exchange for the license to use the public’s airwaves (ibid). The main point here is that television
broadcasting in general has often been accompanied by some legal obligations to the national
public in terms of content production and dissemination; in some cases, even for service
providers that are not publicly owned and managed—as it is the case in the UK, Australia, and
Hungary, for instance. In other words, the public service remit is not a fully exclusive terrain of
public service broadcasters narrowly defined.
An important differentiation among PSBs refers to their overall offering in comparison to
that of the market. In contradistinction to the market failure model, the comprehensive remit—
exemplified by the BBC or the Australian ABC—entails a wide range of informational,
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educational, and entertaining programming, the kinds that may be available commercially, too,
though distinctiveness would still underlie the goal and legitimacy of the production and
broadcasting of such programs on public service television. Some broadcasters’ activities include
in-house program production (e.g., BBC, ABC, or Hungarian MTV [Magyar Televízió=
“Hungarian Television”]) while others follow a publisher-only model (e.g., commercial FTA
broadcaster Channel 4 in the UK or multicultural SBS in Australia; Debrett 2010: 25).
Part of the public service broadcasting remit quandary has been the changing position of
broadcasting as such in the digital era: how public service media should be transformed, how
they can remain socially relevant, and what “constitutes a fair investment of public money in
digital technologies given the existence of the digital divide and its conflict with the principle of
universality” (Debrett 2010: 23-4). Some think that the remit of public service media requires the
accommodation to a context dominated by fragmented and on-demand forms of media (ibid 24;
also, Bania 2012). Importantly, in many countries, such as the UK, for example, PSB was at the
forefront of the analog-digital switchover, leading innovation and driving audience take-up
(Debrett 2010: 37; 46; 52; 185). In fact, as Mary Debrett argues, the need for proper public
service media escalates, rather than disappears, “in the online environment where unaccredited
and unreliable information proliferates” (24). Conversely, recent multi-platform reforms of
traditional broadcasters—the shift from public service broadcasting to public service media—
have been regarded by some as unnecessarily and illegitimately crowding out commercial
players (see in Cunningham 2015: 211) and constituting “spillovers of public money to
commercial operations” instead of serving the public (in Bania 2012). Fiona R. Martin criticizes
the widespread normalization in the European and US contexts of PSBs going mobile (2016:
331). According to Martin, the domination of such strategies “have been shaped by the less
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transparent logics of informational capital, during the evolution of ubiquitous commuting, online
surveillance and the industrial internet” (ibid). The author reveals mobile PSM to be underscored
by “a thoroughly commodified idea of instantaneous, personalized access to knowledge”
antithetical to both the classic Reithian vision and the more recent agenda exemplified by
[Graham Murdock’s] digital commons” (ibid; vs Cunningham 2015).
The public service remit is necessarily contextual and thus dynamic in nature, and its mission
and legitimacy have been under constant re-negotiation or often times, attack. In Konstantina
Bania’s view, if PSBs are considered within the market failure frame, their legitimacy has
become increasingly questionable, as the television market has been going through immense
diversification (Bania 2012), especially since the distribution revolution and blooming of niche
and quality content (Trevisanut 2019: 376). Bania argues that following a market failure model
tends to marginalize PS providers who would be limited to cater to needs of cultural elites and
linguistic minorities (see also Debrett 2010:25). In my view, the increasing globalization and
diversification of television would more strongly question the comprehensive rather than the
more complementary or market failure type of PSB remit. Namely, more and more types of
programs are becoming ever more widely, steadily, and relatively easily available with diverse
variations; at the same time, in certain functions the market will necessarily fail or at least
underperform. Furthermore, similarly to Debrett (2010: 24), I also argue that the fragmentation
of media not only entails beneficial diversification and the greater availability of niche and
minority content, but it also simultaneously makes a specific range of public service functions
even more desirable: those related to providing authentic information and thorough and
multifaceted contextualization comprising a thriving public sphere, essential to practicing free
and responsible citizenship.
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Now, Bania, relying on the directives of the World Radio and Television Council (2000: 11),
posits “distinctiveness”—next to “universality, diversity” and “independence”—as an essential
principle to underlie public service broadcasting. In her view, “distinctiveness” should bridge the
perceived gap between the embraced PSB ideals and more recent conditions of the media
ecology. Namely, according to the principle of distinctiveness as opposed to the market failure
model,
“[i]t is not merely a matter of producing the type of programs other services are not
interested in, aiming at audiences neglected by others, or dealing with subjects ignored
by others. It is a matter of doing things differently, without excluding any genre. This
principle must lead public broadcasters to innovate, create new slots, new genres, set
the pace in the audiovisual world and pull other broadcasting networks in their wake”
(ibid 13, quoted by Bania 2012)
I want to question the oppositional construction of the market failure principle in
contradistinction to the one about distinctiveness (as exemplified by the above quote). In my
view, at most, they constitute different degrees of the same thing. Significantly, in today’s
immensely diverse and often times quite universal and affordable media market, clear-cut
examples of market failures are surely hard to identify. This is why “distinctiveness” may be a
strategically more adequate term. Nevertheless, the underlying idea of both “models” is that
public service broadcasting or media, constantly monitoring the dynamic media ecology, should
provide programming and services that are, in some significant ways, “different” from what is
widely available in the commercialized market and the ways in which they are available. Such
significant ways have been variably identified to be related to citizenship (in contradistinction to
consumerist notions) and democratic and community-related functions; innovation and artistic-
cultural risk-taking; and, finally, free and universal access—that is, PSBs’ normative functions
encompass political, cultural-aesthetic-innovative, and economic balancing and social equality-
related goals. I would argue that some parts of commercial media, due to the affordances and
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business models of the post-network era, and, to a great extent, niche-oriented independent
cultural producers taking advantage of digitization, have taken up much of the task of innovation
and risk-taking. That is, the innovative function of PSB is getting less distinctive a function of
PSBs in contradistinction to commercial high-professional and, significantly, bottom-up forms of
popular as well as niche media production and dissemination. Likewise, I argue that the notion of
universality/accessibility have also become less distinctive and less potent features of PSBs. For
one, a significant part of non-publicly funded media comes with the potential for ubiquitous
and/or free access, with the requirement of Internet access only. Accordingly, the provision of
digital access and literacy on part of the wide public seems to be a greater priority than the
maintenance of a separate public media with a comprehensive remit. At the same time, the
ongoing or even intensifying need to promote citizenship and democratic functions is undeniably
relevant today, and it is this area where public service media could make essential contributions.
The direct service of a democratic public sphere and citizenship is a need that is often
compromised in multiple ways in today’s media ecologies, including much corporate,
government-controlled, and grassroot and amateur media. This is where media associated with
the PSB ideal—politically and commercially independent, well-funded, universally and freely
available, and properly promoted—could serve publics the best. As I will show, in contrast,
much of contemporary public media is engaging in more direct competition (as well as business-
oriented cooperation) with fully commercial media companies, joining the global business
founded on national identity politics: they are focusing on the production and transnational
circulation of high-end drama series or “local original” “quality television.”
In any case, independence from market logic, from corporations, and from political parties
and governments, as well as adequate funding hardly overlap in any real-existing case of PSB.
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Mary Debrett, for instance, while seemingly promoting a comprehensive PSB remit, also argues
with regards to PSBs’ being ever more pressurized to compete:
“With the spread of narrowcasting, the comprehensive remit became increasingly
anachronistic as the audience fragmented. Since the 1980s in the UK and US, and the
mid 1990s in Australia, increases in the numbers of commercial competitors for
specialist minority audiences prompted mainstream PSB channels to pursue a populist
approach in an effort to shore up dwindling audience numbers (Born 2004: 64;
Biltereyst 2004: 344; Murdock 2005: 190) … Diminishing its potential to contribute
public value and driving the marketisation of the media, audience fragmentation has
been a considerable threat to PSB (Murdock 2005: 190)” (Debrett 2010: 197)
Integrating the thoughts and assessments presented in this section so far, I argue that the
insistence on the comprehensive remit on part of PSBs in the age of immense fragmentation and
the increasing dominance of on-demand media consumption is retrograde: it may reflect either
rigidity and a lack of realistic adjustment to a globally intertwined media ecology, or political
cynicism and opportunism where huge public monies can be colonized for producing
unnecessary, wasteful programs—more on this when discussing the Hungarian case. Whether
rigidity or opportunism, nationalism can be a powerful mediating affect and political strategy for
legitimization. Accordingly, in practice, out of political opportunism and economic necessity,
such insistence on the comprehensive domestic PSB may entail the bending of public service
toward populism and commercialization, respectively. I argue that such insistence is often
(strategically) underlain by a backward cultural nationalism as nationalist identity politics, which
posits the “national” in a largely fabricated but at least biased opposition to “the global” and “the
foreign” while simultaneously pressing the necessity and desirability of international recognition
and competitiveness. This emphasis on competitiveness and the feeding of populist demands
actually compromise the public service functions of cultural, informational, and educational
complementarity, innovation, and the non-commercial orientation of PSBs. Perhaps the most
well-known and idealized of PSBs, the BBC has also been, to various extents, compromised,
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historically and contemporarily, by corporate and political forces. In fact, with probably the
globally strongest national PSB brand, it has been at the forefront of a hybrid strategy driven by a
symbiosis between neoliberalism and nationalism. Such hybrid, nationalist-neoliberal strategy
entails outward expansionism combined with inward protectionism, both bolstered,
ideologically, by nationalist exceptionalism, and practically, by commercialization.
The neoliberalization of public service broadcasting— “the impetus toward rationalization of
public resources and the facilitation of commercial sustainability”—across the world after the
1970s, including that of the BBC has been widely documented (Trevisanut 2019: 375; see also
Tracey 1998; Mills 2015; Steemers 2017). In fact, sometimes, neoliberalization goes as far as to
entail the privatization of the insofar public institutions: the selling of ABC in Australia, for
instance, has been on the agenda of the rightist Liberal-National Coalition, just right next to
company tax rate cuts and the withdrawal from the Paris agreement on climate change (Crowe
2019). Neoliberalization can be processed, however, through different measures that are:
“…less dramatic and more hidden: the emergence of an internal market, the
deployment of new management techniques, the growing emphasis on value for money,
the introduction of public value tests and service licenses and, above all, the
determination to tie public service media to the needs of their commercial rivals.”
(Freedman 2020: 224)
Due to the largely rightist opposition to the remit for public service broadcasting, and
measures to freeze or cut back on public subsidies, in many countries, PSBs have shrunk in size
and their operations have been ever more closely tied to market logic (Freedman 2020: 225).
That is, they have been both “encouraged and compelled” to make up for budget cuts through
commercial activities (Murdock 2010:35), notably, the burgeoning of public-private partnerships
and the establishment of PSBs’ commercial enterprises (Trevisanut 2019). That is, public service
specificity vis-à-vis commercial and profit-oriented activities has been diminishing.
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PSBs have been struggling with “a loss of place” in the midst of the digital distribution and
technological revolution, and “a loss of legitimacy” being immersed in neoliberal common sense
and policies (Ouellette 2009: 181). In fact, the public service remit has always been endangered
by influence by and dependency on political parties especially when in governance, as well as by
private corporations. Australia’s number one public national broadcaster ABC, for instance, has
enjoyed a generally “high level of public trust”, with its news and current affairs programs
delivering consistently good ratings “arguably due to [ABC’s] independence and freedom from
commercial interests” (Debrett 2010: 83, 96-8). At the same, as Debrett shows, the television’s
history has been tainted by occasions of party-political influence as well as proactive timidity
and self-censorship aka the “”’pre-emptive buckle’” (97) the problem of which lies in the
consequent “’careful blandness’” and “lack of enough rigorous analysis, resourceful reporting
and fearless exposure” (in Debrett 2010:211; and Dempster 2005: 106, quoted in Debrett 2010:
97). In the BBC’s case, not only is the growing tendency of marketization and competitiveness
too true; rather, despite its common reputation and successful brand as a truthful source of
information, the BBC has, in fact, also been compromised by its affiliation with the Conservative
Party, deference to the government as well as to big business (Mills 2017). By the mid-1990s,
there was a significant expansion of business programming on its way; and the news and
coverage on the economy had taken a corporatist turn while the labor perspective had been
obliterated (ibid 176). Signifying the commercialist turn of PSBs, after its “first statutory review
of public service broadcasting,” the British communications regulator the Office of
Communications structured its 2005 final report around the themes of “competition for quality”
as they…:
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“…believe that a competitive broadcasting marketplace is a good starting point in the
quest to ensure that citizens and consumers are able to benefit from a wide range of high
quality programming and other content.” (Ofcom 2005: 2-3)
Concurrently, by the time of its 2006 Charter renewal, the BBC had been heavily criticized
for “distorting media markets and producing popular television lacking in PSB distinctiveness”
(Hills 2014: 3). For instance, while the BBC Worldwide was intensely investing in the global
brand of its hit show Doctor Who, “the BBC was undergoing a period of retrenchment following
the freezing of the license fee by the Conservative-led coalition government elected in 2010’
([Chapman 2013] 269–70)” (in Hills 2014: 170). In Matthew Hills’ assessment, the seemingly
contradictory tendencies of expanded revenue generation through popular programming and
budget squeezes are actually organic elements of BBC’s neoliberalism (ibid).
Similar to the UK, the Australian context has been characterized by “neoliberal
‘deregulatory’ policies requiring public institutions to rationalise resources, form industry
partnerships [primarily with the private sector] and improve commercial viability” (Trevisanut
2019: 377). Crucially and implying further controversies, private-public partnerships tend to lead
not only to the commercialization of public service broadcasting but also to the consolidation of
commercial enterprises’ dependency on public funding even in cases of commercial success. As
Amanda Malel Trevisanut demonstrates, Screen Australia’s Enterprise program (2009-2013) for
instance, was aimed at helping businesses to achieve commercial viability and financial
independence through scaling up and slate diversification and thereby increasing international
competitiveness. While the program has been successful in making local screen businesses
sustainable, “it has not mitigated a reliance on systems of local [domestic] public support” (374).
In turn, in some other countries, like Hungary or Poland, instead of severe austerity measures
widespread in various national contexts, PSBs’ budgets have been bloated and their operations
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drawn closely under the control of authoritarian populist governments (Kerpel 2017).
Significantly, while “[t]he levels of public funding for state media [have] exceed[ed] anything
seen before by a large margin” in Hungary under the FIDESZ government since 2010, “the role
that state media have assumed in this process is reminiscent of the darkest periods in history”
(Mérték Médiaelemző Műhely 2016). As I will show, while the workings of the very well-
funded Hungarian state television are largely independent from market pressures, such liberty
has not been in the service of the public but rather a national oligarchy who have thoroughly
captured the public media as well as a large and growing part of the private media in the country.
A circle of loyal business elite has been increasingly taking over privately owned newspapers
and TV channels, which help disseminate the government’s propaganda while receiving very
generous state support in various forms, among others, from state advertising placements,
massive overpayments, as well as direct state support. In the FIDESZ version of “crony
capitalism” (Mérték Médiaelemző Műhely 2016; see also Macey 2016), the audiovisual industry
is also thoroughly globalized, with state subsidies being in place to attract productions from
abroad. In short, Orbán’s rule embodies the alliance between the “autocratic state and
neoliberalism” (Antal 2019). In contrast to the Hungarian Mafia State, the conservative
autocratic PiS government in Poland, lacking the kind of loyal business oligarchy the FIDESZ is
well-equipped with, has been much less effective at taking over the private media; accordingly,
they have promoted “re-Polonisation” by buying out foreign-owned media outlets with public
money (Kempel 2017: 76-7). Nevertheless, in the Polish context as elsewhere, “[p]opulism,
nationalism and [global] neoliberalism can happily co-exist” (Shields 2015: 659).
Indeed, in contrast to classical liberalism, neoliberalism does not necessarily entail the
project of shrinking the state and deregulation; instead, the state is “‘being reimagined,
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redesigned, reoriented’ (Jessop 2002, p. 9) in order to facilitate and extend the rule of capital”
(Freedman 2020: 225). In other words, neoliberalist “disciplinary forms of state intervention” are
means to “impose market rule upon all aspects of social life’ (Brenner and Theodore, 2002: 352).
Similarly, Kean Birch argues that the neoliberal state is crucial for facilitating and guaranteeing
asymmetrical “contracts” as the key structuring form of relationality; Michel Foucault also
emphasizes the state’s active role as opposed to its withdrawal (in Dawes 2020: xiv-xv; ix). So
high is the relevant variability and “hybrid nature of actually existing neoliberalisms” and
neoliberalism’s globally ubiquitous force that these include neoliberalism’s enactment by center-
left governments as well as its sitting well with far-right agendas (ibid ix, xiii; also Redden,
Phelan and Baker 2020). Instead of chauvinistic populist nationalisms being antithetical to
neoliberal globalization, their escalation actually follows from the processes of world market
capitalism and the radicalization of economic inequalities within societies (Gonzalez-Vicente
2020). As Simon Dawes points out, among the hybrid embodiments of governance, authoritarian
and neo-fascist forms can also be perfectly compatible with the logics of neoliberalism (Dawes
2020: xx). In general, a growing and ever-more ubiquitous emphasis on competition and
economic growth, and the naturalization of corporate power and a corporatizing logic
characterize governmental forms across the world, where the state is supposed to invite and
provide good conditions and safety nets for private corporations as the indirect way to
supposedly enable the stability and well-being of society. Relatedly, part of the national film and
increasingly television industries, the state subsidization of high-profile productions
particularly—first and foremost, local quality drama series—has been a growing trend. My
argument offers an interpretation of this trend within the integral frame of cultural nationalism
and identity politics, and practical neoliberalism.
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The Case Studies of the UK, Australia, and Hungary: Generalities and Particularities
Picking up where Chapter 2 left off, Part II of this dissertation addresses the unsettling
tension between TV internationalism and resurgent chauvinistic nationalisms and the rise of
illiberal governments (Imre 2019: 4). The chapters of Part II also contribute to the project of
exploring the globally uneven development of Netflix as put forward by Ramon Lobato (2019).
Furthermore, following the work of Aniko Imre (2018, 2019) and Petr Szczepanik (2017), my
project represents an answer to the question of how the recent changes related to digital
distribution, transnational streaming platforms, and “quality” drama production relate to cultural
nationalisms, especially how these play out in the Postsocialist Eastern European context.
Configured differently, I will break down the concrete embodiments of Michael Curtin and
Kevin Sanson’s 2016 general assessment according to which “both private and public media
systems around the world are driven by market imperatives that foster intense competition
between transnational services and local providers” (6), in three national contexts, with a
practical focus on transnational SVODs and an analytical focus on nationalism as a mediator and
legitimator for these processes of neoliberalization.
While I will reconstruct a complex picture of the SVOD revolution and Netflix’s national
dynamics in three national contexts, my most extended attention will be aimed at Hungary. I
intend to prioritize Hungary as an example for a hitherto non-dominant, “small” media nation
and a member of the Postsocialist region, and a country characterized by a “retreat into
defensive, ‘illiberal’ modes of governance” that is simultaneous to its openness to transnational
media content, capital, and trade (Imre 2019: 4). Certainly, there has been considerably less
scholarly light shed on Hungary and other small, Eastern European countries than territories of
the Western and English-speaking world, when exploring digitization and the ongoing SVOD
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revolution. I as a Hungarian subject have excellent access to one of the member states of this
relatively underresearched geopolitical-cultural context.
As I will demonstrate shortly, my analysis will be relevant to various other national contexts
beyond the three countries under close scrutiny, as the main stakes are not the developmental
idiosyncrasies of just one albeit powerful media company, Netflix, in three concrete territories.
Rather, my concern is how strands of nationalisms (that both overlap and are in tension with
each other) are reconfigured in the context of television in this era of the digital distribution
revolution and the gaining of global ground on part of a few, transnational giant streamers like
Netflix. In the coming paragraphs, I will identify a list of important factors through which
parallels and contrasts between various national contexts can be constructed. Two main axes of
difference among territories will structure my argumentation. First, I will consider the extent of
disruption of national television ecologies by transnational giant SVODs as a central variable: I
will differentiate between Netflix-dominated and niche-Netflix countries. Second, the distinction
between national contexts with a largely properly democratic public service tradition versus an
authoritarianism-inclined state television will structure my analysis. Concurrently, chapters 3 and
4 will comprise of the national lives of Netflix in the UK and Australia, two countries with a
strong PSB tradition that also are both thoroughly Netflixed. The UK is a country with an
exceptional cultural status and history of export in the sphere of television. Australia, in contrast,
represents the common example of a “developing,” import- rather than export-dominated but
maturing television industry. As such, Australia lacks a significant international national TV
brand despite having engaged in some outward flows and the significant foreign involvement in
much of nominally local national Australian productions. While in the UK, the BBC can be
considered as market dominant, the main Australian PSB ABC has “not [been] dominant, but
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yet… sufficiently effective” (Cunningham 2015: 217). In turn, the Hungarian PSB’s audience
shares have been notoriously low. Besides the matter of unusually low popularity, in this niche-
Netflix country, PSB had a severely compromised past. Furthermore, its contemporary status and
functions vis-à-vis a democratic public sphere have also been thoroughly impaired and turned
upside down.
I want to make a basic (though far from fixed) distinction between Netflix-dominated (such
as the UK or Australia) and niche-Netflix (Hungary) countries. Netflix-dominated countries have
been swiftly and thoroughly disrupted by the transnational OTT conquest. Looking at data on
market penetration and share, English native or English-proficient countries, and countries that
are part of greater linguistic territories comprise this group. In contrast, small-size and small-
language countries with less affluent populations generally lacking English proficiency have
been the least disrupted by Netflix and its likes. However, most recently, Netflix has made
considerable progress with localization even in small and generally less significant (less affluent
and smallish) markets. This extension of Netflix’s localization practices is arguably due to the
stagnation or even slight decline of subscriptions in its home US market, the growing
competition by other global SVODs in its large markets, and the consequent exigency to tend
more carefully to small territories as well (e.g., Roxborough 2019a). These most recent
developments serve as a reminder that the categories “Netflix-dominated” and “niche-Netflix”
are not pure or fixed—and nor is Netflix’s long-term existence. However, regarding the first
decade since Netflix’s streaming platform was split from its DVD rental services, the company
started original production, and began its global extension beyond North America in 2011, I take
the “Netflix-dominated” and “niche-Netflix” orientational binary as meaningful and instructive
in the context of globally uneven development.
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I will consider Netflix’s national lives in three quite different territories—the United
Kingdom, Australia, and Hungary, mostly focusing on 2019-2020 and the latest developments
leading up to these years. My case studies will offer up themselves for reasonable generalizations
about how the SVOD globalization has affected different kinds of countries: Netflix-dominated
(the UK; Australia) versus niche-Netflix (Hungary); with highly developed and export-oriented
(the UK) versus developing televisual industries characterized by the long-standing trade deficit
of the screen industries (Australia with a more “mature” developing TV industry; and
postsocialist Hungary that has largely lacked, up until very recently, outward flows of local
productions); in authoritative countries with limited media freedom (Hungary) versus more
democratic though hardly flawless countries (the UK; Australia). Admittedly, due to their unique
combination of characteristics and ongoing dynamics, these cases ultimately stand alone and
could never be straightforwardly and as a whole applied to other contexts—but there are still
significant grounds for drawing reasonable parallels. The UK, for instance, surely shows
similarities with other affluent and language-compatible markets where Netflix has had a
sweeping success; it is to some extent similar to most Western European, the Australian, and
some other media ecologies in the sense of a significant public service presence in a mixed
media ecology, and the high significance of public funding and subsidies. At the same time, its
unique position is highlighted by BBC’s historically providing the worldwide model for PSBs
and continuing to be widely regarded as a prominent representative of “quality.” Likewise, the
case of the UK is unique as far as the country’s historically established and quite exceptional
position goes as an exporter of media.
In turn, Hungary shares attributes with many niche-Netflix countries, especially postsocialist
ones. As such, it is a not-so-affluent country with generally low English proficiency, where the
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privatization and commercialization of television, and the multichannel era with its
fragmentation of the market only shot up in the 1990s, backed significantly by direct foreign
investment. Furthermore, in this small-size, small-language (thus, small-market) country, capital
for media production has generally been limited. Also, there has been very little tradition or
expertise, and not enough financial basis to produce certain kinds of audiovisual programs. In
this sense, the Hungarian television industry has been, at least until recently, a developing one
with high levels of cultural import. Its simultaneous uniqueness, even compared to other
postsocialist countries of similar size, is that its state television has been lagging way behind the
popularity of the big private commercial broadcasters (Bayer, Urbán, and Polyák 2019 #322).
Moreover, the Hungarian television landscape is also a particularly fragmented one even without
taking SVODs into account: there has been about 130 Hungarian-speaking linear channels in this
country of 9.78 million people.
Australia is an interesting mixture of characteristics mentioned so far. Similar to Postsocialist
countries, the multichannel era hit the country fairly late: cable and satellite only entered a
market of 5 TV channels in the 1990s—and up until now, the majority of Australians have not
subscribed to them; however, they do take advantage of legal and illegal “digital services”
heavily (Lobato 2019: x). In contrast to Hungary, however, Netflix swiftly took the market
leader position after its long-awaited entry into the country in March 2015—despite the prior
launch of Australian streaming company Stan by Nine Entertainment Media that also owns
commercial free-to-air network Nine, in January the same year. Notably though, this English-
speaking, affluent country has lacked proper broadband infrastructure: “Australia's broadband is
slower than Kazakhstan's”, reports The Sydney Morning Herald in January 2018 (Duke 2018).
Australia’s television landscape was historically dominated by cultural imports from the US and
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the UK, amounting to a 99% ratio of foreign programming in 1961. Certainly, the proportions of
imported and locally produced content since the “barren decades of Australian film and
television from the 1940s to the mid-1960s” (Gibson 2014: 576) have changed significantly.
Similarly, there has been sporadic cases of successful export of finished Australian programs,
usually to the UK (due to the close historical, cultural, linguistic, as well as institutional and
industrial links, see e.g., Craven 2008), and sometimes, even to a wide range of countries
[including Hungary] across continents (see e.g., Gibson 2014). However, abroad, the relevant
finished programs have often occupied the space outside prime-time schedules, the quality
television tradition, and critical cultural acclaim. Undoubtedly, in contrast to the exceptional case
of the UK and its BBC or Channel 4, neither Australia as the country nor any of its public or
commercial broadcasters managed to build a comparably strong internationally acknowledged
national brand and quality reputation. That is, Australian television’s stance and status is far from
being on the same level, either domestically or globally speaking, with those of the UK. Similar
to both the UK and Hungary (and many countries across the world), Australia’s film and TV
production has received significant public funding. Just like Hungary, the Land Down Under has
had a burgeoning service industry catering, among others, to big Hollywood productions. In
contrast, the UK also engages in a high amount of, and often, large scale, US-UK co-productions
and a more mutual exchange of finished programs and formats. In general, the United
Kingdom’s culture and industry bear a much stronger status of national sovereignty and
international influence than those of Hungary or Australia.
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Chapter 3: Netflix in the United Kingdom
2012-2019: Becoming a “Nation of Streamers”
The UK has been one of the territories where Netflix has been impressively swift and
successful in negotiating a new national market that had already been quite mature in terms of
video-on-demand: Hastings’ company gained 1.2 million subscribers just in two months after its
launch in January 2012 (Ofcom 2012 in Ward 2016: 219). As Sam Ward shows, the company’s
approach was cautiously orchestrated along the lines of “assimilation and integration with the
existing local television ecosystem” (220)—rather than disruption, which is an essential part of
Netflix’s identity in its home US context (Havens 2018: 325-6). Notably, when the company
entered the British marketplace, the latter had not only been quite saturated, but the largest
similar service Lovefilm (acquired by Amazon in 2011, Bradshaw and Birchell 2011) was
actually losing rather than gaining viewers (Ward 2016: 219-220). At the time, Internet-based
on-demand television was still relatively marginal to broadcasting in the country (ibid).
Accordingly, Netflix’s biggest competitor was identified to be pay-TV provider Sky instead of
Lovefilm; especially the Sky Atlantic channel launched in 2011, which branded itself as “The
Home of HBO in the UK,” available as a scheduled channel and as a VOD service (Ward 2016:
220, 223-4). Signifying the rapid growth of SVOD in the UK,
“the three most popular online streaming services – Netflix, Amazon Prime and Sky’s
Now TV – reached 15.4 million
[4]
in Q1 2018, overtaking, for the first time, the number
of pay TV subscriptions, at 15.1 million.” (Ofcom July 17, 2018)
According to the 2019 report on “The UK VoD market” by Ampere Analysis and
commissioned by British broadcaster regulator Ofcom, it is the broadcasters’ VOD services that
are the most commonly used VOD platforms in the UK when considering the proportions of
users who access a VOD service at least once a month (in Q1 2019, Ampere Analysis 2019: 7).
Using this measure, BBC’s iPlayer is the most popular online video service reached monthly by
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60% of the UK population, followed by (the add-supported tier of) YouTube, Netflix taking third
place followed by ITV Hub and All4. In terms of SVODs specifically, by the first quarter of
2019 Netflix had the most subscribers (9.9 million). It was also Netflix and Amazon Prime that
had driven audience growth (8). According to Ofcom’s second annual “Media Nations” report in
2019 “UK becomes a nation of streamers”, the viewing platform all adult viewers spent most
time watching was BBC One, ITV coming in second, followed by YouTube, and Netflix coming
in fourth (Furness 2019). Importantly, among 18-34-yos, YouTube was the winner and Netflix
the runner-up, indicating the dominance of streaming among younger adults. While upon
Netflix’s entry into the UK the country was still dominated by traditional broadcasting, this 2019
report by Ofcom points out the decline of broadcasting: in 2018, people spent 49 minutes less
watching linear services compared to 2012. Demonstrating, again, the rapid loss of young
audiences for broadcasting, traditional viewing among 16-24-yos fell by 50% between 2010 and
2018 (Clarke 2019). Such decline is occurring “despite British public service broadcasters
showing more than 100 times the original, UK-made shows than their global streaming
competitors” (Furness 2019). According to Ofcom strategy and research group director Yih-
Choung Teh, “The way we [the British] watch TV is changing faster than ever before. In the
space of seven years, streaming services have grown from nothing to reach nearly half of British
homes” (quoted in Ofcom 2019). For now, “Netflix remains by far the most popular SVoD
service” (Ofcom 2019: 59). It was reaching 11.8 million British household by Q3 2019, with
subscriptions showing a steady growth in each quarter since 2014 (Statista Research Department,
Dec 6, 2019).
We can reasonably assume that the exceptional relationship and linguistic closeness between
the U.S. and the U.K. media, together with the United Kingdom’s high level of broadband
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penetration, have played a significant role in Netflix’s success story. However, given the
presence of considerable competition that could not even come close to Netflix’s success story,
these factors cannot fully explain the company’s glorious conquering of the British market. For
one, one should pay attention to Netflix’s integrative and adaptive (as opposed to disruptive)
strategies in the territory (Ward 2016). In ways similar to Sky Atlantic’s strategies, Netflix
promoted its service primarily in terms of the exclusivity of some of its flagship, mainly
American (but also UK) quality shows (Ward 2016: 226). To Netflix’s advantage, its launching
in the UK soon after it had begun producing original shows made it possible for the distributor-
come-producer to leverage the publicity around these series—in contrast to other countries
Netflix entered a few years later, where it had already licensed many of its own original shows to
other providers (ibid 226-7; effectively having to temporarily compete with itself upon its
eventual entry into the territory). Relatedly, just like Sky Atlantic in their promotional discourse,
Netflix foregrounded the idea of abundance, and constructed an image of itself as the provider of
global mobility and connectedness between consumers’ home and the media universe (227). It
made British comedian Ricky Gervais the face of its local campaign, making Netflix ad spots
what I would want to call quality TV advertising. Furthermore, Netflix also partnered up with
domestic TV services such as BBC Worldwide, ITV, and Channel 4 in order to localize its
catalog. This localization process reached a new level when Netflix commissioned its first
original UK series in 2014 [The Crown, 2016-]. The streamer also sought out partnerships with
telecommunications companies like Virgin Media in order for its software to be an integral part
of established services (such as games consoles and smart TVs) and thus, visible and easily
accessible to consumers (who have often paid for it as an add-on service to an existing non-
Netflix subscription, rather than a sovereign, stand-alone platform, ibid 229). That is, argues
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Ward, through its infrastructural-technological integration—together with its popular, localized
self-representation—Reed Hastings’ company proactively adjusted itself to the British context
and swiftly overtook the SVOD market, that eventually started to disrupt the whole media
ecology with viewers, especially younger generations increasingly migrating from broadcasting
to online on-demand media.
The UK should certainly be considered as a special case of the current distribution revolution
and global diversification of television: it is a country among the very few who has traditionally
had a strong export television industry at place, led by its public service broadcasters. I assert
that “alternative”, low-friction on-demand channels of distribution and the rise of visibility of a
wide range of countries in the sphere of television necessarily means a relative loss to the UK as
a traditional leader nation of the TV trade. I will demonstrate this in the coming sections.
National Storm Clouds and the “Streaming Wars against Netflix and Amazon”
39

In this subchapter, I will demonstrate the discursive construction of a nationalist-moral
binary between global streamers and domestic broadcasters by representatives of the latter. This
nationalist-moral binary contrasts the practical intertwinement between these two types of
producer-distributors. In turn, Netflix has tried to over/state its complementarity with the
broadcasters. Hastings’ company has been keen on performing appreciation and respect for the
nation and pressing its beneficial impact on social progression and cultural diversity.
In the construction of the antagonistic, morally charged binary, British free-to-air domestic
broadcasters have been posited (by themselves and some others) as the exclusive source for
properly authentic “local” programs. According to such arguments, the rising tide of the global
streamers entails that the production of authentic, culturally specific “local” content, in terms of

39
Sweney (2019), emphasis mine.
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quality and quantity, is endangered. Strong voices in policy debates state that “SVOD players
target the global market and prioritise content that lacks national specificities” (Michalis, quoted
in Final Report, §100 p31). The same voices then foreground high-profile quality drama as the
normative focus of broadcasters that should serve their chances for remaining competitive. Such
expensive programs by traditional broadcasters are, however, also expected to travel and serve
British economic and cultural interests through their export to the global market. The latter
expectation and positive value attribution make the argumentation as a whole self-contradictory
or being grounded in the arbitrary notion that travelling UK programs are nationally specific
when commissioned by PSBs but not so when commissioned by SVODs. Indeed, it has been
argued that SVODs are “interested in using British talent to make American programming”
(Callender, quoted in Final Report §101 p31). It is notable, however, that the BBC’s hit shows
under director general Tony Hall have also been criticized for being “mass-market” (Foster
2016). This signals that the main PSB itself has been orienting more toward mainstream trends
than unique quality or cultural distinction, and the sort of cultural attenuation supposedly
exemplified by programs commissioned by global SVODs would not be unique to them.
Importantly, under Lord Tony Hall (2013-2020), the BBC has “disproportionately protected”
scripted drama in times of severe budget cutting at other sectors (Becker 2019: 76). Among
others, the corporation funneled BBC Three’s £30m budget into the drama department (Foster
2016). In my view, the public service broadcaster thereby disproportionately invests in what is
already dominating the field out there and is done very well by other, non-PSB players: high
quality series, including socially relevant, historical and contemporary prime dramas. One very
recent example for the latter is the highly acclaimed miniseries Chernobyl, a co-production
between HBO and Sky UK. Chernobyl is but one example for the trend of high-quality TV
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drama co-productions involving premium TV companies including the dominant global
streamers such as Netflix. Admittedly, co-productions have become quite important to the BBC,
too. BBC One’s 2016 hit show, The Night Manager, was co-produced with US-based AMC (also
the program’s primary distributor in the US) and Ink Factory, for instance. The BBC thus
embodies a self-contradictory set of strategies and rhetoric. It constructs Netflix and Amazon as
clearly oppositional and threatening to “the national” due to their global orientation while itself
intensively engaging in co-productions with fully commercial media companies from outside the
UK. In fact, in a nationalist rhetorical move drawing on mythized history and heroism, Tony Hall
likened the BBC’s fights against global streamers to Sir Francis Drake’s glorious victory over the
prepondering Spanish Armada (quoted in Foster 2016). Being outnumbered by global SVODs’
capital is defensively metaphorized, too, but with a great corporate PR twist: as driving the
“flight to quality” (quoted ibid).
Simply put, the BBC as a nominally public service broadcaster keeps struggling to mimic
and compete with the likes of Netflix, these global platforms of the biggest size that are fully
commercial and private. I want to make two critical points here. First, I want to criticize the
Corporation for trying to beat Netflix and other global SVODs on the latter’s terms rather than
focusing on serving democracy and manifold diversity, complementing and reorienting the
market where there is a considerable lack or limited availability. Secondly, I want to pose a
question that has to lead my investigations: why should the most expensive kind of drama
programming (that almost always entails the expectation of international mobility and a long
shelf life) constitute a core function of PSBs in the name of local specificity and national
authenticity? Especially amongst the worldwide tendency of co-productions, how could the idea
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still be promoted that it is the domestic broadcasters who are in the exclusive or at least best
position to commission properly “national” prime drama?
Notably, the new strategies on part of the BBC, while being introduced in the name of local-
national culture and interest, actually bring forth domestic tensions and clashes of interests
within the nation. One relevant issue is the terms of fair competition between free-to-air
domestic broadcasters. According to a senior executive at ITV, for instance, the BBC is
“smashing us”, their “drama budget [reaching] beyond anything which the commercial sector
could justify” (quoted in Foster 2016). There have also been significant clashes between the
BBC and British independent producers in terms of streaming rights and compensation.
Keyword “Local”: Where National Specificity, Cultural Diversity, and Old-Fashioned
British Imperialism Meet
BBC’s general director (2013-2020) Tony Hall argues for leveling the field for traditional
players seriously challenged by global streamers. He stresses that the importance of local content
lies way beyond commercial and institutional interests: it has a social impact which is underlain
by the idea of “share[ing] a common national story” (quoted in Waterson 2018). Crucially,
however, Hall’s culturally inward-looking nationalism is paired up with a strong emphasis on
competition and growth, which includes an expansionist and cultural nationalist-imperialist
export politics. When outlining the new baseline to regulate the UK’s television economy in
2014, Hall laid out three principles any exact model should follow (BBC Media Centre 2014).
As proclaimed in Hall’s “competition revolution” speech, the first principle pertains to “brilliant
and innovative” programs, among them ones that “don’t have global commercial appeal as well
as those that do.” In the relevant section, he highlights the BBC’s task to provide “challenging
factual programmes that over time the market may no longer find it attractive to supply.” This is
one rare place where the reference to the public service function to fulfill the gaps of the market
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comes up in an approach that is otherwise thoroughly structured by the idea of competition. In
between programming guidelines and the third principle of “value for money”, the honing of the
license payer, and “challeng[ing] the ‘managed’ part of managed competition” comes the
principle addressing the importance of intellectual property (IP):
“…we must grow this country’s creative sector, right across the UK. We are world-
beating at television and I want us to stay that way. I’m not interested in dividing up a
smaller cake in different ways. I want a bigger cake for us all.”
Here is where Hall’s rhetoric most openly taps into an overtly competitive and expansionist
nationalism, illuminating how the logical gap between simultaneous cultural protectionism and
expansionism is bridged through nationalist exceptionalism.
Along similar lines, Peter Bazalgette, the executive chairman of ITV argued in the November
27, 2017 edition of The Guardian that the era of the global streamers renewed the relevance of
Reithian principles of public service broadcasting (which, in the UK, strongly frame commercial
TV as well) to “the national culture.” After emphasizing the importance to democracy of
trustworthy news production and circulation by broadcasters in contrast to algorithm-based
narrowcasting radicalized by Facebook and Google, Bazalgette’s opinion piece shifts to a
contrast perceived between high-budget drama aimed at global circulation characterizing
Netflix’s and Amazon’s agenda, on the one hand, and home-made British series, on the other.
Supposedly, the former is less daring, less socially relevant and exploratory in terms of themes
such as “sexual grooming, miscarriage, Muslim homosexuality, gay adoption, multiple sclerosis
or recreational drugs (…) [o]r dementia, breast cancer, child abuse in the family, postnatal
depression, acid attacks, heroin addiction” than UK soaps like Coronation Street or Emmerdale.
These long-running British soaps, beyond the aforementioned social functions also “celebrate a
slice of British life and people that would otherwise be lost” as Barbara Ellen had put it in the
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Observer. Bazalgette acknowledges the entertainment value of “dead bodies on Scandinavian
bridges, or crystal meth manufacture in Albuquerque”—referring, presumably, to Danish-
Swedish global hit show The Bridge (also remade as the British-French The Tunnel by Sky
Atlantic and Canal+) and to Breaking Bad, a US drama that originally aired on AMC yet really
made it on Netflix. Bazalgette presses the importance of “nurtur[ing] the shows that are about
us” meaning the British people. In my view, in order to bring home his agenda, Bazalgette
exaggerates the extremity or limited social relevance of top international crime shows, and he
also obscures other well-travelling Netflix and Amazon shows that explore social issues in a
more everyday-like way. He prescribes local (as in “national”) content to be specific to a
nationally based society:
“As is the case with public service broadcasting news, I’d argue that British originations
are more important today, as we graze internationally, than they were in the past. If we
ever became ‘citizens of nowhere’, we’d be lost.”
According to this view, too much “international grazing” threatens with a loss of proper
orientation – the citizen’s proper place. That is, in Bazalgette’s argumentation, the possibility of
participation in public life and democracy is tied back to the national. Consuming globally
travelling media weakens or even pulls up the roots of the subject of the polity who cannot help
but be at home nationally and nationally only. “If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you
are a citizen of nowhere,” as former British Prime Minister Theresa May put it (quoted in Taylor
2018). Bazalgette applies May’s anti-cosmopolitanism to the case of the nationality of news
production which is then swiftly (and arbitrarily) paralleled to fiction drama in the supposed need
for their relevance, authenticity, and ultimately, legitimacy, to be secured through British
origination.
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So far, Bazalgette’s view is decidedly chauvinistic-nationalistic and strongly protectionist—
as such, it is easily put in contrast to proponents of (operational) global diversity (Cowen 2002)
who foreground the values of global cultural exchange and the mutual appreciation of foreign
cultural products. Bazalgette’s nationalism seems to imply that every nation should stick to their
own local culture, so to speak, as per an inward-looking nationalism or even cultural separatism.
Then there comes a British imperial twist: Bazalgette suddenly shifts to the economic benefits of
public service broadcasting and other UK channels in the sense of British export power. He
highlights the supposedly extraordinary creativity and originality of the UK TV industry relative
to the size of the country, implying the exceptional nature of the British as a matter of national
pride. “TV shows and formats are cultural exports that harness soft power: where British culture
goes, wider commerce follows,” says Bazalgette. Thus, his call for locally tied content ultimately
merges into a call for a British counter-offensive to the intrusion by the transnational, according
to which it is actually (genuine instead of Netflix-commissioned) British media content that
should be circulated more globally. In sum,
“Public service broadcasting is more important today than ever. It generates the trusted
news that informs our democracy in an era of widespread fakery, the original
programmes that help define our national culture, and the economic growth and
international influence that flow from our creative excellence.”
Bazalgette’s argumentation also demonstrates that by the post-broadcasting era of the West,
television, once considered to be “the private life of a nation state” (Ellis 1982:5) has become an
acknowledged symbolic and cultural part of internationally oriented, competitive, commercially
oriented cultural nationalisms. More concretely, I argue that in the contemporary context, the
transnationally mobile “quality drama” has come to be treated as national regalia.
Now, the UK is a traditionally exceptional country for its history of considerable media
export and a strong national TV brand. Thus, its media industries can be assumed to be among
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the relative losers of the recent international diversification, as the country has lost from this
exceptional position and status due to the emancipation of other countries’ TV industries and
cultures from where newly successful “local original” series originate. Accordingly, as
Bazalgette’s opinion piece published by The Guardian or Tony Hall’s 2014 metaphor of the
world as the “world-beating” UK’s cake indicate, the global SVOD revolution and the rise of
“international” content has already incited retrograde imperialistic-nationalistic reactions.
Controversially, such voices can still seamlessly appropriate the widely normative rhetoric of
diversity. This is due to the ambiguity and spaciousness of the term diversity that could refer
both to diversity within and diversity across national territories (Cowen 2002: 15). Importantly,
nationalists tend to take diversity across “nations” as the measure for cultural diversity, which
entails the claiming and protecting of a supposedly unique and essential national identity and
culture. In such nationalist discourses, the “American” or even the “foreign” as such is often
seamlessly to be taken as a mere threat, as the very opposite of cultural diversity—instead of also
being a part of it. For instance, Bazalgette’s argument was welcomed by Carole Tongue and
Holly Aylett, the Chair and the Director of the UK Coalition for Cultural Diversity. In a letter
published in The Guardian on December 1, 2017, the two authors propagate the UK follow the
EU and its quota system, as well as France, Poland, and Germany with regard to the levy global
VOD platforms are forced to pay into national film funds of the respective countries, ultimately
in order to protect “our democracy and cultural diversity.” They argue that “[w]e must see
ourselves on screen in an ongoing national conversation that underpins our democracy and
values all our citizens no matter where they live,” confirming a stubbornly national frame for
culture while at least acknowledging the increasing dissociation between geography and national
identity.
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Total “Streaming Wars” and “Total TV Experience:” The BBC Fights Back
Based on an industry report, Tony Hall predicted in 2017 that spending on local programs
would fall by 500 million pounds (about 20%) a year over the next decade due to the rise of
global streaming services and the fall of ad revenues for broadcasters, putting stricter quantity
and quality restrictions and thwarting innovation (in Ruddick 2017). As The Guardian journalist
Graham Ruddick puts it, “new streaming services such as Netflix are focusing on finding
international hits rather than investing in domestic markets” (ibid). In my interpretation, Ruddick
suggests that Netflix is mostly interested in a necessarily low number of expensive local
programs with global appeal as opposed to the production and distribution of mostly smaller and
largely immobile productions of a higher number and wider range. In agreement with Tony Hall,
Ruddick foregrounds the issue of how the growth of global SVODs is at the expense of
traditional commercial broadcasters such as ITV—that is, nationally based channels. What
Netflix, Amazon or others spend when producing a few, however hip and glossy, productions in
the UK will not make up for the overall loss suffered, only half of it or probably much less. The
argument is that the global appeal sought for by global SVODs necessarily comes with losses in
national culture and proximate social relevancy (Waterson 2018). Consequently, according to
Tony Hall, a broadcaster-like regulation of streaming services should be introduced to eliminate
unfair advantage that has been significant in terms of “prominence, competition rules,
advertising, taxation, content regulation, terms of trade, [and] production quotas” (Waterson
2018). At the same time, and quite contradictorily, Hall also argues that the spending on super-
high-budget productions should be increased in order to compete with the global streamers in
their game (ibid). Concurrently, BBC chair David Clementi has been pushing for lifting policy
restrictions on the BBC iPlayer (formerly aimed at equalizing the domestic playing field for the
sake of BBC’s commercial competitors, Waterson 2019). Clementi argues that restricting the
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availability of programs on BBC’s iPlayer for 30 days is becoming untenable vis-a-vis audience
expectations and the new media ecology of “the global, digital age” where younger audiences
turn away from linear television and where “the BBC itself is massively outspent by the likes of
Netflix”, no longer being the top dog (ibid; see also Waterson and Gayle 2019).
In August 2019, British broadcasting regulator Ofcom lifted the 30-day availability
restriction (Bakare and Waterson 2019). They did so in the name of enabling BBC “to fight back
in the streaming wars against Netflix and Amazon” but nevertheless predicting the worrisome
decrease of audiences for the online platforms of commercial UK broadcasters such as Channel
4’s All4 or ITV Hub (Sweney 2019). Thus, the current version (as of January 17, 2020) of
iPlayer informs us that, while most programs are still only available for a month after their
broadcasting, they aim to extend this period for as many programs as possible; some of them can
be watched within a year or even longer after their broadcast (iPlayer Help). What is more, the
BBC is planning on a complete relaunching of the iPlayer that is supposed to deliver a “‘total
TV’ experience” as BBC’s director of content Charlotte Moore put is (quoted in Bakare and
Waterson 2019). These moves are aimed at giving new momentum to Britain’s once pioneering
streaming service, the market share of which drastically fell from 40% in 2014 to 15% by 2019,
especially at a time when more US-based giants—Disney+ and Apple’s streaming service—have
already announced their UK launch (ibid). Interestingly, part of the new direction the BBC is
aiming for includes the promise of “unprecedented levels of creative freedom” for talent (Tony
Hall, quoted ibid)—a practice transnational OTT services and particularly Netflix is famous for
(Sinha-Roy 2015; Erbland and Kohn 2017; Johnson 2017; Griffin 2018).
Demonstrating the fragmentary and contradictory nature of what comprises “the local” or
“the national” and the relevant interests, several other parties in the UK have raised concerns
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about the reforms and further aspirations of BBC’s iPlayer. The trade association of British
independent television producers (PACT) accused the BBC of trying to force the extended
streaming rights out of them without adjusting the license fee paid; they also noted that the
longer availability on iPlayer depresses the prospect of landing other licensing deals (Sweney
2019). Furthermore, as Lanre Bakare and Jim Waterson call attention to, the BBC’s heightened
aspirations can be perceived to be in conflict with the BBC and ITV’s joint venture and
nationally branded streaming service Britbox—indeed it was perceived so by Ofcom although
not by ITV (Sweney 2019). The accusation that the BBC is attempting to secure an unfair
advantage for Britbox over Netflix at the expense of independent producers also demonstrates
the complexity of who can claim to represent British interests. Following the effective lobbying
of policymakers by PACT as part of the negotiations of the 2003 Communications Act, UK
independent production companies were granted beneficial ‘terms of trade,’ so they can retain
and can profit from back-end rights to their own productions. Now, as already mentioned, British
producers would only be able to sell rights after the exclusive year on iPlayer, and, significantly,
they would only be allowed to sell rights to specifically defined broadcasters or platforms that
practically exclude Netflix and the like; producers would only be allowed to sell rights to anyone
after an additional half a year, that is 18 months (Sweney 2019). The BBC tried to refute such
concerns by claiming that the commercial opportunities for production companies should be
heightened by their success on BBC (ibid).
While I have demonstrated the partiality of broadcasters’ claims on representing national
interests, one should not just buy into the idea that it is the independent producers who more
accurately represent the local and national, either, for their closer relation to the British national
public in opposition to larger corporations. Importantly, despite the common connotation of the
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trade term “independent,” British independent companies are regarded independent simply in the
sense that they are separate entities from the domestic broadcasters. British FTA broadcasters are
obliged to commission a significant amount (25%) of their programming from independent
producers instead of filling their schedules with in-house productions only. Similar to many
countries, the point is to limit oligarchic power and gatekeeping and facilitate source diversity
instead. However, though independent from the BBC and other broadcasters, many of the British
independent producers are actually part of larger multinationals like Endemol or Time Warner.
The transnational ownership and management of many, mostly larger independent production
companies in the UK (as well as in Australia and many other countries) yet again demonstrates
the impossibility of constructing any clear binary between the national versus the transnational.
Carnival Films, the production company founded in 1978 and famous for British-branded shows
such as global hit Downtown Abbey, for instance, was acquired by NBCUniversal (a subsidiary
of telcom behemoth Comcast)—just like Working Title Films (that co-produced The Tudors with
Showtime), or Monkey Kingdom, the production company behind award-winning reality shows
such as Made in Chelsea or The Real Housewives of Cheshire. The independent production
sector in general “has become more concentrated following consolidation, which has included
the acquisition of UK companies by overseas media corporations” (Ofcom, quoted in the Final
report, Box 3 on p29; see also Lee 2018). This consolidation was addressed by Tony Hall in his
2014 speech that outlined the plan to switch from “managed competition” to a “compete or
compare” approach. The “compete or compare” plan entails, primarily, the extension of
competition where possible, and, in cases where this is inappropriate, the BBC will “compare
what we do with the best practice in the market” (Hall 2014). What Hall foregrounds with
regards to the emergence of “super-producers” is how under the “managed competition”
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approach, their dominance ultimately thwarted creative innovation and the opportunities for
small independent producers. Instead, these small independent producers should be helped with
“grow[ing]”; and that BBC producers should also be able to compete more freely—especially
globally.
Commercialization and British-US Business Entanglements
Responses to the recent challenges to the TV industry in the UK include widening
commercialization, such as the launch of BBC Studios (Waterson 2019). Examining this
commercialization, especially due its close intertwinement with US-based, fully commercial
companies helps us further deconstruct the oppositional moral binary constructed by PSBs as
properly national and servicing the nation, in contradistinction to global streamers invested in
private profits and addressing a global audience and thereby diluting British national culture.
BBC’s commercialization, and their investment in the binary construction of national versus
the global/international had begun significantly before the SVOD disruption came close to hit
with full force. Using Doctor Who’s 50
th
anniversary and the BBC’s related domestic and
international programming and marketing choices as an example, Matt Hills demonstrates how
“the contemporary BBC displays a doubled attention to public service television, seeking
discursively to separate public value from exchange value” through binary constructions of
UK/domestic versus global, and past versus present (2014: 159). Namely, the increasing
commercialization of the PSB is necessarily a compromising factor vis-à-vis public service:
among others, because “[b]y introducing calculations around the potential for commodification
into institutional strategies (…) they compromise the moral economy of public goods.”
(Murdock 2010: 35). Hills argues that it is “neoliberal ‘common sense’’ that helps the tension
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between their public service remit and the heavy commercialization be overlooked (Hills 2014:
159).
Starting with its 2004 manifesto Building Public Value, the BBC began justifying itself and
its operations through the blurry notion of “public value” that is supposed to distinguish the
BBC’s commercial activities from being just those (160). Notably, “economic value” is among
the stated constituents of the compound term “public value” in BBC’s “evidence-based”
argumentation (“Building Public Value” 46, in Hills 2014: 161-2). Besides the concept of
“public value” helping to mask commercialization, the latter is “also surreptitiously shifted into
the discourse of ‘global value’ – a coding of market forces held at a symbolic distance from the
UK context and glossed as ‘showcasing the best of British culture to a global audience’
(“Building Public Value” 8) without substantive discussion of the fact that ‘global’ audiences are
consumers of BBC shows rather than licence-fee payers” (Hills 2014: 162). Importantly,
commercial activities have been posited as necessary supplements to the license fee, and
ultimately subordinated to domestic public service. (Here we can catch the smooth naturalization
of the neoliberal logic.) Thus, Hills convincingly shows that it is this discursive distancing
between the national and the global, and public service and commercial activities that underlies
the choice of BBC Worldwide as a name for BBC’s commercial arm responsible for selling
programming abroad. That is, “BBC’s preferred discourse of British–global [is] mapped onto
PSB–commercial television” (ibid). I argue that this binary pairing up of the domestic British
with public service in contrast to the global commercial is consistent with the cultural
nationalism and exceptionalism, and the clear remnants of cultural imperialism that I have
discussed in the earlier section with regards to Peter Bazalgette’s and Tony Hall’s
argumentations. There is an important notion in operation here according to which the global
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market or the international community of foreign countries is ultimately up for grabs, free for the
taking and be subjected to the British commercial interests in contradistinction to the distinctive
national space where different, higher moral rules should be in place. According to BBC’s recent
general director Tony Hall’s 2014 metaphor, the global is basically a “cake for us [British] all”
(BBC Media Centre). Such subjection should not be mutual: the British media and cultural space
should be protected in its local specificity—it cannot be (imagined and accepted as) the “cake”
or prey of (foreign) commercial interest. The simultaneity of keeping the pretense of the sanctity
of public service in the domestic context while constructing the world which the UK should
cultivate for profit-making exemplifies a British imperialist nationalism in the sphere of TV—
arguably a powerful approach in institutional practices and policy debates in the UK. The
combination of national protectionism with international expansionism is ultimately consistent
with the fabricated discursive-moral opposition between nationally based broadcasters and
transnational streamers.
In 2018, BBC Worldwide merged into BBC Studios. The 2015 foundation of the latter was
“one of the biggest shake-ups in [BBC’s] history,” which entailed the creation of the new
division responsible for drama, entertainment, comedy and factual program production, and this
division’s becoming a separate subsidiary apart from the publicly funded parts though not
purchasable by other companies (Conlan 2015). BBC Studios can produce programs for other
broadcasters, the trade-off for which was offering more tenders open for producers outside the
BBC for the BBC’s own schedule (ibid). The new system is the realization of Tony Hall’s vision
of a “competition revolution” and “compete or compare” strategy (BBC Media Centre 2014;
Plunkett 2014).
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Importantly, US basic cable channel BBC America (launched in 1998) is now co-owned by
BBC Studios (50.1%) and US-based AMC Networks since the latter’s acquisition of a 49.9%
stake in October 2014. Significantly, AMC Networks enjoys “full operation control, including
advertising and distribution sales” (Becker 2019: 73). As Christine Becker demonstrates,
“BBC America’s prime-time scripted drama strategy is driven accordingly by the
overarching goal to reach upscale, engaged viewers on both linear TV and video-on-
demand platforms, in line with the global aspirations of its corporate parent.” (69)
The primary role of the BBC and Britishness has basically been reduced to a general
branding, with a growing reliance on non-British productions in the channel’s primetime lineup.
Concurrently, the recent goal of BBC’s commercial arm has been the co-production and co-
ownership of programs “with culturally proximate industry partners” such as Canada (72-3),
signifying a loosening national and growingly international frame, and an increasing orientation
toward profit-making through commercial entertainment.
The current emphasis on part of the BBC and others on the importance or even exclusivity of
producing and distributing drama supposedly authentically British and produced locally by
British broadcasters and not by global streamers also obliterates the fact that, not too long ago,
even some PSBs in the UK (notably, Channel 4) used US quality drama and quality import as a
branding tool (Ward 2019). The changing strategies centering on “the local” can also be
attributed to the weakening position of British domestic broadcasters to import a wide range of
expensive high-quality programs. The import of high-budget quality dramas is increasingly done
instead by global streamer giants.
The immediate prehistory of the 2013 introduction of the High-end Television Tax Relief
supporting big budget shows calls attention to the tension between proximate financial and
commercial interest and the national and public service remit of the PSBs. One of the main goals
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of the TV drama tax credit system, similarly to the older state supporting system for feature
films, is to lure and keep big budget productions in the UK (Kemp 2015). As such, it is a typical
measure in the contemporary context of the growing competition between (national, regional, or
sometimes, also municipal) locations to attract film and TV production, and their “race to the
bottom” in terms of offering bigger and bigger tax rebates. As mentioned by The Guardian
article reviewing the balance of the first year of the system, the High-end Television Tax Relief
“came in the wake of shows such as BBC1’s Merlin, ITV’s Titanic and the BBC/HBO adaption
of Parade’s End (2002) travelling to continental Europe rather than being made in the UK
(Kemp 2015). In other words, it was some of the prominent domestic shows of the British public
broadcasters that actually “ran away” from their national context and were shot in foreign
countries. The case of Parade’s End helps me further demonstrate the close practical ties rather
than opposition between PSBs and US-based global media companies. More concretely,
Parade’s End exemplifies the trend of co-producing high-end drama on part of fully private and
commercial, and public service broadcasters: it is a quality period drama by BBC and HBO.
Further examples for such co-productions include super-production Rome (2005-2007), which is
another HBO-BBC co-production, or Top of the Lake (2013, 2017) and The Honorable Woman
(2014), jointly commissioned by BBC and AMC Networks. As Robin Nelson points out with
regards to Rome and Parade’s End, these high-end miniseries exemplify the type of co-
productions that have a strong financial motivation—as the partners benefit from pooling
resources and better accessing wider markets (Nelson 2019: 149). Furthermore, as runaway
productions leaving the UK as the main location of production, they also benefit from European
tax rebates; all the while emphasizing the more cultural cause of “prestige branding and learning
from one another” (ibid). In Nelson’s assessment, through these co-productions with HBO, the
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BBC “sought to restake its claim under ever-increasing competition both from home and
overseas” (ibid). Notably, the welcoming critical reception of Parade’s End in the UK at the
time went as far as The Independent’s denoting the series as “one of the finest things the BBC
has ever made” (Dent 2012, quoted in Nelson 2019: 157)
40
. That is, the co-produced show’s
domestic reception runs counter to the value binary entailed by authentic British and
transnational companies’ productions posited by Bazalgette and others.
“Public Service Broadcasting: As Vital as Ever” – But Why for High-Budget Drama?
In the following section, I will discuss the 1
st
Report of Session 2019 published by the House
of Lords and its Select Committee on Communications and Digital on November 5, 2019. The
report summarizes the investigations about the relation between the UK, its television ecology,
and transnational SVODs. Given the report’s high political profile and public visibility, and its
central, explicit engagement with transnational SVODs and especially Netflix, I find it necessary
to provide a close reading of the report’s crucial parts, particularly its brief executive Summary.
This discussion will further address the value-loaded binary between free-to-air broadcasters and
transnational streamers constructed by nationalists in the British context, represented by the likes
of Peter Bazalgette or Tony Hall. As I have argued, in their discursive distinction, FTA domestic
broadcasters stand for the “national” and the properly “local,” even when their programs travel
internationally. In such cases, these programs are seen as benefitting Britain by financial returns
and symbolic profit and soft power. In contrast, transnational global streamers and their “local
originals” are supposed to compromise national culture and talent and disorient the British
national subject.

40
Notably though, for the foreseeable future, there will not be any more co-productions between HBO and the BBC
or other free-to-air broadcasters because HBO signed an exclusive UK deal with pay-TV Sky Atlantic in 2011,
which was renewed and expanded to co-productions in 2015 (see also Ward 2019).
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The very existence of the Report and the extensive hearings behind it attest to the perception
of the thorough disruption by the SVOD revolution in the British media market, ecology, and
cultural space. The first publication by the Committee received the telling title “Public service
broadcasting: as vital as ever,” suggesting that the report’s primary—and perhaps, foregone? —
conclusion is the affirmation of the importance of free-to-air terrestrial PSBs. The latter are, in
the very first paragraph of the little-over-two-page executive Summary, distinguished from
“other channels and online services” (3). The next three sentences could have come from a
research sponsored by SVODs themselves, as this passage positively affirms the SVODs’
success, affordability, and personalization. Netflix and Amazon Prime are explicitly named here,
with YouTube (more strongly representing a different kind of VOD than professional-content-
only SVODs Netflix and Amazon) is also thrown in as another “major competitor” (ibid).
Consistent with the dominant line of Tony Hallesque nationalist argumentation, the report
foregrounds a moral binary and war fought between heroic UK PSBs and all-too-powerful
Netflix and Amazon Prime as global SVODs:
“This is at a time of widespread distrust of news, with digital technology playing an
increasing role in public life. SVODs operate globally and have enormous resources,
leading to concern that PSBs are priced out of the market for making high-quality
television—limiting their ability to create drama and documentaries which reflect,
examine and promote the culture of the UK. We sought to understand the contemporary
role of public service broadcasters, the financial pressures that they face, and whether
the PSB compact—the obligations they take on in exchange for privileges—is fit for the
age of the video on demand.”
In this second paragraph, similarly to Bazalgette’s opinion piece, the matter of fake news
(and the affordances of digital technologies) is meshed with the case of SVOD providers, the
profile of which, I find it necessary to stress, hardly overlaps with news production or news
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curation.
41
That is, the first, quite inorganic sentence seems to serve the purpose of implicitly—
and quite illegitimately— associating global SVODs with a sense of threatening epistemological
uncertainty. The paragraph also implies a binary between SVODs and UK PSBs in the form of
global as opposed to British national, and high-capital as opposed to less resource-rich—sort of a
David against Goliath situation that suggests the moral superiority of the weak (British FTA
broadcasters). Note how from the alarming issue of authenticity and trust of news, the reader is
made to jump to the matter of drama. Such a conflation, just like when we saw it happening in
Bazalgette’s argumentation, is not warranted. First, Netflix or Amazon do not produce news;
and, in contrast to social media platforms, they do not circulate uncurated content including those
of questionable real vs fictional status such as deep fakes. They do commission and acquire
documentary programming, however, as of today, they have not been the subjects of major
exposures or accusations of distorting reality. Secondly, and conversely, while the production
and dissemination of authentic and balanced news constitute a crucial function of democracy, it
does not follow that it is the very same institution (let alone people) attending to that function
who should also provide fictional drama programming; that they would do it best, let alone the
implication that they are the only legitimate sources who are able to provide suitable
embodiments of this type of fiction.
PSBs are still posited here as functioning as the producers of such fictional programs as
specifically aimed at an authentic (“reflect”), critical (“examine”) and promotional/celebratory
(“promote”) representation of the country’s national culture. The representation of nationally

41
Netflix, Amazon Prime, or other major, subscription-based OTT streamers have some minimal social media
functions built into their platforms, but they certainly have not taken up the role of news selection or production.
Even if, as many have prognosed, platforms like Facebook whose primary operational nature is social media,
venture onto TV content production and distribution, the indeed alarming digitization-related issues of fake news
and filter bubbles cannot simply be assigned to SVODs. In turn, free-to-air including public service broadcasters in
various national contexts (such as Hungary) have been compromised by the dissemination of inauthentic and
misleading information.
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framed culture is also naturalized as the primary goal of television production. While PSBs are
posited as the right agents for this goal, SVODs are implicitly understood as compromising
factors. In the last sentence of the second paragraph, the nominal goal of the investigation is
presented: it is to review the PSB proviso in an age that is presumed to be dominated by VOD
(the essential form of distribution of transnational OTT services, in contrast to the traditionally
linear broadcasters). Thus, for my project examining the ways in which the “national” figures in
discourses on television and SVODs, the most relevant underlying messages of this paragraph
from the Report are the framing of culture in national terms, and its naturalizing connection to
national PSBs in contrast to global and threateningly powerful SVODs. In the spirit of nationalist
identity politics, the binary between the in-group, national PSBs and the out-group, transnational
SVODs is implicitly framed as a moral one (see Brown 1995): between the supposedly
powerless and defensive (e.g. the BBC) and the stably powerful and threatening (such as
Netflix).
§3 begins with: “Our evidence overwhelmingly indicated that public service broadcasting is
as important as ever to our democracy and culture, as well as to the UK’s image on the world
stage,” and continues with listing what PSBs do well, in terms of cultural and economic matters.
That is, it is not only the nation’s domestic life anymore but also its international “image” that is
taken for granted as a goal put next to the essentiality of democracy: to hone the UK’s
international image is normatively subsumed under PSBs’ main functions. Local specificity for
locals is combined here, without any hesitation, with representing the nation worldwide as a
performative/competitive act (“on the world stage”). More concretely, PSBs fulfill their
functions insofar as they “reflect the UK’s cultural identity and represent a range of people and
viewpoints.” This sentence cleverly combines a classic nationalist idea with the more recent
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political normativity of the acknowledgement and appreciation of (intranational) “diversity”.
Importantly, the Report as a whole confirms the suspicion that is being raised when reading the
Summary: that expressions like “UK’s cultural identity” are never specified. Indeed, it is fair to
assume that references to a nation’s identity work best when left largely implicit—which can
nevertheless be coterminous with rejecting specific instances of what should not be accepted as
part of it. Notions of national culture or national cultural identity are powerful signifiers that are
in need of remaining vague due to their necessarily highly contested and controversial nature.
Any serious consideration of diversity, or the struggles and vicissitudes of national history would
compromise such unifying nationalist notions. My question: is there anything more beyond
either descriptive-factual (such as diegetic setting or language and accent) or, perhaps,
stereotypical-caricatural marks in a televisual or filmic representation that can convincingly carry
a national cultural identity?
Beyond national PSBs, “other channels and services” are acknowledged as also offering
“high-quality UK programmes.” Thereby, in my understanding, the report indirectly reveals that
the existence of valuable functions and beneficial impact on part of PSBs, in themselves and
without comparative considerations, does not constitute sufficient evidence for the PSBs vitality.
Two attributes are then presented as supposedly specific to PSBs: “availability and affordability
… through digital terrestrial television” and their ability to “provide ‘event television’: moments
which bring the nation together such as major sports events and landmark drama and
documentary series” (my emphasis). The first attribute serves the emphasis put on the
supposedly distinct compatibility of free-to-air PSBs with democracy in its sense of general
equal access to information and culture. Though the two services are far from equivalent in
function, nevertheless, as of January 2020, UK’s yearly TV license fee is £154.50, while £72
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pays a year of basic Netflix subscription, even though the latter requires paying for Internet
service as well (which has, however, become an essential infrastructure anyway). My point is
that the claim of the greater affordability of PSBs in the UK is losing ground. The second
distinctive attribute (event television) assigned to PSBs foregrounds the ideal of a unified
national public as a naturalized goal. Consistent with this assertion of PSB-specificity is Netflix’s
own effort to present itself as “fundamentally collaborative and additive” (Netflix—written
evidence, §9)—in order to plead for advantageous regulation. This also includes Netflix’s (well-
grounded) emphasis that it “does not offer user-generated content, live programming, sports, or
news” (ibid §29). In other words, the streaming company tries to demonstrate, in various points,
how it does not aspire to appropriate the remaining unique functions of PSBs. In this regard,
Netflix attempts to emphasize its own practical difference from, yet common moral standing
with, domestic PSBs. However, the various stakeholders differ in how they perceive the issue of
“local drama” production and distribution. In fact, I argue that despite the appearance of
concerns about the democratic functions of the media and the alarming phenomenon of fake
news, the real stake of the SVOD disruption for broadcasters, and of the cultural and regulatory
debates around this, is high-budget, high-prestige, and high-business “quality drama.” Local
“quality drama” tends to involve either large amounts of direct or indirect state and other types of
public support and/or profitability through international distribution. Framing local quality drama
in terms of national cultural specificity and authenticity, and producer-distributor legitimacy,
enables the relevant stakeholders (with particular interests) to seemingly address the interests of
the national public.
§3 of the 1
st
Report of Session 2019 published by the House of Lords and its Select
Committee on Communications and Digital praised the diversity of viewpoints and people
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represented. In a self-contradictory move, §4 practically points out how PSBs’ lack in terms of
serving “younger [16-34-yo] people and people from BAME [Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic]
backgrounds” – though it introduces this problem as related to “increased competition and
changing viewing habits.” Thus, the report attributes the problem with appealing to young
audiences and racial and ethnic minorities—as one important factor of diversity—to external
factors, notably, other services, such as Netflix. The Committee then recommends rectifying
these issues through “tak[ing] creative risks” and the monitored involvement of people from
diverse backgrounds in development and production. Importantly, Netflix quite convincingly
emphasized its focus on [racial and ethnic] diversity both on- and offscreen during the hearings,
which should further call attention to the blurring dividing line between PSBs and transnational
SVODs in terms of the ways and extent to which they serve a democratic public and social
diversity specifically.
The Report’s §5 continues with another aspect of the diversity problem: it concedes to the
“concerns about representation of the nations and regions of the UK” in the sense that TV
production and the consequent economic benefits have largely been limited to a few hubs in the
UK. The summary then calls attention to PSBs’ quota obligation to commission programs from a
diversity of regions and nations outside the greater London area: “This is crucial to building a
skills base in different areas and ensuring that viewers see their locality represented on screen.”
For the sake of helping continuous production and relevant benefits outside London,
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commissioning returning rather than one-off series from companies headquartered outside
London is recommended
42
.
According to §6,
“The UK TV production sector has enjoyed impressive growth in recent years, including
in exporting programs around the world. SVODs and other commissioners such as HBO
and AMC have driven significant investment, encouraged by the High-End TV Tax
Relief.”
The paragraph then affirms the continuing importance of the mixed media ecology and
highlights that PSBs “spend considerably more than SVODs and other broadcasters on original
UK programmes” and are therefore not replaceable but are only complemented by “new
entrants.” This paragraph altogether affirms the success of UK TV. Importantly, while the
argumentation nominally emphasizes the essential primacy of PSBs, perhaps inadvertently, it
practically suggests an amiable and complementary relation between SVODs and other non-
PSBs, and public service broadcasters.
In the next paragraph, the report summary alarms about the rising costs of high-end drama and
skills shortages, and recommends, among others, “the continuation of the regulated Terms of
Trade between PSBs and independent production companies”, and overall, the greater support of
and considerations for small and medium-sized production companies and PSBs instead of the
practical benefits “large international companies” have been able to take advantage of. The
financial vulnerability of PSBs in the new media economy is further explicated in §8, with
recommendations for regulatory relief for broadcast advertising. §9 continues the discussion
about the balancing of privileges and responsibilities PSBs have had and how these should be
updated to enable their financial viability.

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I will further address the related tension between the agenda of diversity-oriented geographic dispersal of high-
budget professional media production, on the one hand, and, on the other, the very logic of resource concentration of
resource-intense media production in an upcoming project, as part of a critique on the normativity of “local content.”
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The last paragraph of the report summary displays a spectacular example of competitive and
exceptionalist nationalism:
“If the UK is to continue to be a world leader in the creative industries, public service
broadcasters must be enabled to thrive in the digital world. They provide a stable flow of
investment for a wide range of content, made for UK audiences, and available to all.
They must be held to account for their obligations, afforded full access to the
commensurate privileges, and supported to ensure that the important work they do
remains financially viable in an ever-more competitive environment.”
Shortly put, PSBs’ competitiveness in the digital world needs to be supported so the UK could
remain a “world leader.” This concluding goal is then supported by the argument that based on
PSBs’ unique role in diversity of representations, and their being tailored for and widely
accessible for domestic-national audiences, they should be helped to remain financially viable.
What is missing here is an explicit link between the domestic importance of cultural production
and the unexplained aspiration to distinguish the nation on the world stage: in the end, why is
confirming national excellence in an implied international competition of nations a national (as
in general public) priority? I want to argue that the setting of goals of social diversity (in terms of
intranational racial, ethnic, regional, and other differences) is in an unstated, unreflected tension
with the continuing nationalist concern with “the UK’s image on the world stage,” and what is
more, its being “a world leader,” and the celebration of cultural export as the subject of British
pride. One potential link could be the need to boost revenues through export to be used as
resources for domestic production. Ideologically, however, the embracement of cultural
diversities could be made compatible with the insistence on cultural export only through an equal
celebration of cultural import. Even with such insistence though, it could not be made
compatible with the aspiration to be “a world leader.” Significantly, however, no positive
mentioning of the wide accessibility of non-domestic programs is ever mentioned in this report
by the House of Lords Committee on Communications and Digital. As such, it exemplifies a
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nationalist residue present in much national and international discourses on the value of cultural
diversity: while “national culture” is protected in the name of cultural diversity, cultural forms
originating from or assigned to outside the nation (as being performed in imported media) are
either obliterated or figure as a threat to cultural preservation. The export of domestic cultural
products is celebrated while the import of cultural products from other nations is presumed not to
bring any cultural gains such as contribution to intranational diversity. This strong line of
nationalist exceptionalism and solipsism is a prominent attitude in UK cultural discourses further
reaffirmed by its inclusion into the Report on the changing media ecology, the rethinking of PSM
and transnational SVODs’ impact. Despite being historically positioned significantly differently
on the colonizer-colonized spectrum, Australia and Hungary (and presumably many other if not
most or even all national context) also display a good deal of such nationalist solipsism—
regardless of the formulaic embrace of cultural diversity in their official cultural policies.

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Chapter 4: Netflix Down Under: “Make it Australian”?
After its 2015 launch, Netflix as a global “game-changer” penetrated the Australian market
swiftly, thoroughly transforming consumption habits and expectations, especially on part of
younger audiences (Turner 2018: 129). The SVOD revolution lead by Reed Hastings’ company
has entailed the significant decline of linear TV in a national broadcasting ecology that has been
particularly strictly regulated, among others, in terms of (an intensively subsidized) local content
production. In contrast to the tight regulatory context for broadcasting, Netflix and other
streamers have been operating without any similar duties and constraints for half a decade now.
This regulatory haven has been increasingly challenged by Australian commercial free-to-air
broadcasters who argue for the outdated and unviable nature of local content quotas they are
obliged to fulfill. In turn, local independent (commercial) producers lobby for the continuation
and expansion of the content quotas, while also demanding the further increase of production
incentives provided by the state—something that is also in the interest of global streamers.
The historical and recent regulatory tendency in Australia has been to increase, from time to
time, the local content quotas of premiering and rerun programs for commercial linear TV,
instead of reducing them. If this tendency were to continue, it would suggest the potential for a
growing division and complementarity between nationally based Australian channels versus
global streamers (with local content production probably in continuous need of state subsidies).
However, as I will demonstrate, the formation of such a division is certainly not among the stated
goals of the relevant policies and it is definitely not embraced by all the prominent stakeholders.
Furthermore, as in the UK, insistence on a certain quantity, origin, and distributional
environment for local content and for quality drama production especially constitutes a
prominent site of debates in Australia, generally underwritten rhetorically by cultural nationalism
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and practically by private interests. There have been heated discussions on content requirements
that are especially straining to commercial free-to-air broadcasters (potentially to the extent of
unviability), such as the obligation to produce and transmit a certain amount of originally made
children’s content including children’s drama. Such challenging duties have raised the question
of the actual public service impact of such mandatory local programs commissioned and
distributed by the commercial broadcasters. Ultimately, what has been disputed is the very
relevance of such content in a media environment and context of viewer habits that have changed
dramatically since the network-type era. Independent content producers, in turn, strongly insist
on the supposed national need for and benefit from the quotas for newly produced children’s
content.
Significantly, as of March 2020 there has been no regulatory breakthrough. Rather, the
debates have reached an “impasse” as the Australian Labor Party put it when they commented on
the long-awaited report on the Economic and cultural value of Australian content on broadcast,
radio, and streaming services.
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The 2019 report documents a government-commissioned
inquiry into the regulatory environment, needs and functioning of the Australian film and
television industry, in consideration of the recent shift to SVOD services, the content quota
system and production offsets. One of the few outcomes of the report that has already been
materialized is the updating of the scope of some public subsidies to include streamers as their
potential beneficiaries: the Location Offset and the Post, Digital and Visual (PDV) Offset. In
contrast to the Producer Offset, prior to their modification on April 11, 2019, the wording of the
Location and PDV Offset provisions entailed that these tax incentives were made available only
to free-to-air and pay television companies but not to online streaming platforms such as Netflix,

43
“Labor Senators' additional comments” in Australian Senate’s Environment and Communications References
Committee (2019: 104).
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Amazon, or local SVOD Stan (Robertson and Butler 2019a). Importantly, the former
interpretation of the rules and the consequent ineligibility of the two offsets for SVODs were
considered by the Report as divesting the domestic screen industries from opportunities coming
from “a rapidly expanding section of the global film and television industry (Robertson and
Butler 2019b). Certainly, the modification is beneficial not only to local producers, but it is also
in line with Netflix’s agenda. In my view, the reform entails a fair lack of differentiation among
the agents who can commission content that is acknowledged as properly “local.” Whether the
national status of the commissioning entity (not equivalent to the nationality of the creators)
makes a difference in terms of the local vs foreign status of the produced content is, however,
still a contested matter. I will demonstrate how normative claims for being properly local are
intertwined with strategic negotiations motivated by private and particular interests. I argue that
in debates on normative localness and eligibility for public subsidies, we should take into
consideration the extent to which direct and indirect public funding has become a significant and
permanent factor maintaining the size of and level of activity on part of this local screen
industry, despite the nominal function of such subsidies to facilitate the financial autonomy of
the private and commercial local production industries (Burns and Eltham 2010; McKenzie and
Rossiter 2018; Trevisanut 2019). To put shortly, the Australian local screen industries exemplify
the case of significant financial reliance on public resources on part of private and commercial
media companies in their maintenance of production scale. Importantly, all the while
proportionate audience demand for local film and TV content seems to be lagging behind
(McKenzie and Rossiter 2018: 227) especially at the box office (Burns and Eltham 2010: 104).
The diverse claims recently made by different domestic stakeholders in Australia—all in the
name of national culture and industry—reveal the complex, contradictory, and partially
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overlapping nature of the various fractions of “national interest,” and global SVODs’ relation to
it. Some creative and industry stakeholders’ notion on the desired level of volume and
production value of local national content, largely enabled through public subsidies, appears to
be in disjuncture with audiences’ receptive interests.
A Fast Win for Netflix?
As Ramon Lobato observes in the “Preface” to his foundational book Netflix Nations: The
Cultural Geography of Digital Distribution, “the demand for Netflix in Australia has been
remarkable,” including the period before Reed Hastings’ company officially entered the market
in 2015 (Lobato 2019: xi). In late 2014, about 200,000 Australians were using VPNs to
circumvent geoblocking and access the US service (Lobato and Ewing 2014, in Scarlata 2015).
Before and beyond that, younger Australians had been seeking out Netflix and HBO titles (never
available on free-to-air broadcasting in the country) via torrenting (Turner 2018b). Three months
into its launch, Netflix captured 10% of the market (Thomsen 2015, quoted in Turner 2018b).
Within a year after Netflix’s official entry, the SVOD had gained as many subscribers as Foxtel
had at the time—a pay-TV company majority-owned by News Corps Australia, which had been
operating over two decades in Australia (Roy Morgan Research 2016, in Lobato 2019: xi).
Netflix’s market penetration then quickly overrode that of pay TV as such (Turner 2018:132),
despite the SVOD’s initial local catalogue carrying “7000 fewer titles than the US version”
(Grubb 2015). By 2017, one third of the population had Netflix access, which increased to 11.2
million (about 46%) by early 2019 (Roy Morgan Research 2017; 2019). As a comparison, by the
latter date, Australia’s second most popular SVOD, domestically owned Stan is accessed by 2.6
million people (about 10%) after a 45.2% increase since February 2018. YouTube Premium (1.2
million users), Fetch (760k users), and Amazon Prime (570k users) had way smaller market
shares, however, they were all still showing significant growth (Roy Morgan Research 2019).
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In the classic broadcast era, weekly ratings were steadily dominated by Australian news and
current affairs, high-profile US dramas, and live broadcasting such as that of sport events—with
pay TV’s entry in 1995 not making too much of a difference (Bennett, Gayo, and Rowe 2018:
127). The late 90s’ broadcasting was characterized by public broadcasters ABC and the SBS
reaching about 12-15% and 2-3% market share respectively while the three commercial networks
occupying the rest; while “[i]n addition, the penetration of Australian homes by the three pay
television services (Foxtel, Optus Vision and Austar) [was] reaching 15 percent” (Cunningham
and Flew 2000: 213). That is, while pay television had existed for about two decades when
Netflix entered the country, it brought about only moderate changes in consumer habits,
especially when compared to the thorough disruption by the SVOD (Turner 2018b). As Graeme
Turner emphasizes, the claim that “access to [the Australian television] market has been highly
restricted would be an understatement. Granting a new license is a rare and major political event”
(2018a: 132). Netflix’s sneak entry was, in the Australian case, without precedence. As in most
national contexts, the company entered without prior negotiations and practically circumventing
national media regulations. Nominally, the SVOD was subject to regulations as a
telecommunications service only, despite actually functioning as a content provider (Turner
2018: 133)
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. Concurrently, Netflix’s Australian catalogue in August 2018 carried a humble
1.6% Australian content, while the domestic SVOD Stan—also immune (as of March 2020) to
local content regulations—did 11.1% (Lobato and Scarlata 2018b). This stands in stark contrast
to the detailed and increasing local content commission and transmission requirements that
Australian commercial free-to-air broadcasters have been obliged to fulfill, with increasing
difficulty, since 1961.

44
On another case of Netflix’s regulatory advantage upon its entry into a new national market, see Cornelio-Marí’s
2017 piece on the Mexican market.
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Traditional Local Content Quotas Meet the Global SVOD Revolution
Netflix’s entry facilitated an unprecedented major shift toward the more comprehensive
transnationalization of the Australian broadcasting economy, argues TV scholar Graeme Turner
(2018). Quite unique compared to most countries, Australian TV had hitherto been strictly
regulated according to “a form of cultural nationalism” that included the maintaining of domestic
ownership and local production—a commercialized media environment that had largely resisted
the global tendencies of the fragmentation of national markets (130). Television viewing used to
be sturdily and overwhelmingly dominated by free-to-air-broadcasting consisting of three major
commercial networks—Seven, Nine, and Ten—and two public national broadcasters, ABC and
SBS (130-1), comprising a hybrid public-private broadcasting system established in 1956
(Cunningham and Flew 2000: 212-3; Park et al. 2015: 9). Pay television was introduced in 1995
(Bennet, Gayo, and Rowe 2018: 127). Since the digital conversion in 2013, the broadcasters have
been operating up to four channels each (Park et al 2015:10) and established significant online
presence (Cunningham 2015). Importantly, Australian commercial free-to-air broadcasters have
been obliged to fulfill content quota requirements, progressing since 1961 (Park et al 2015: 13).
Relatedly, the current agenda of the Broadcasting Services’ Australian Content Standard by the
Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA, 2016) is…
“…to promote the role of commercial television broadcasting services in developing and
reflecting a sense of Australian identity, character and cultural diversity by supporting
the community’s continued access to television programs produced under Australian
creative control.” (Part I §4)
The primary channels of commercial FTAs have to transmit at least 55% Australian content
between 6 am and 12 am, with further specifications on premiering new children’s programming,
documentaries, and drama; these have to further comply with yearly and triannual quotas based
on a point system (Harris 2016; Park et al 2015: 14). There is a minimum Australian content
requirement on supplementary channels, too, increased to 1460 hours in 2015 from 730 hours
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before (ibid). Interestingly, ABC is not bound to comply only to “take account of” the relevant
standards, while SBS’s main function is to “reflect Australia’s multicultural society” without
being obliged to the content standard (15). Furthermore, subscription television channels, if
dominated by dramas, must invest 10% of their programming expenditure on locally produced
dramas (ibid).
Since the start of the Netflix-led SVOD disruption of the Australian television ecology, there
has been a steady decrease in free-to-air and linear television consumption, and the aging of FTA
audiences in contrast to Netflix’s customers’ skewing young (Bennett, Gayo and Rowe 2018;
Turner 2018b). As a result of linear TV’s decline and the broadcasters’ decreased means to
compete, the commercial broadcasters vindicated government intervention in 2017 (Turner
2018). They lobbied for lifting all the regulations that put them on a disadvantage vis-a-vis
Netflix, Amazon and other global streamers that may also enter the Australian market in the
future. Notably, they argued for the relinquishing of local content quotas and license fees instead
of pressing for the equally strict regulation of the streamers (133). The government, however, did
not relinquish cultural protectionism, but did liberalize somewhat the previous restrictions in
terms of ownership, reach, and the license fees paid by broadcasters—leaving ultimately
unsolved the unbalanced regulation of traditional television vs new OTT services with regard to
content quotas and local investment (134).
Meanwhile, local production companies’ push for the extension of content quotas and, in
agreement with Netflix, for more production incentives (137). They are aimed at a more levelled
playing field for local producers, and the facilitation of long-term partnerships with VODs that
should ensure continuous industrial activity (Harris 2016). In fact, in September 2017, Screen
Producers Australia and several other trade organizations founded the “Make it Australian”
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public campaign. Australian “[p]erformers, producers, writers, directors and crew” started
“joining forces to campaign for the future of the screen industry” (MakeItAustralian.com). They
are lobbying, in opposition to commercial free-to-air broadcasters, for “local content obligations
to be evolved to include new market entrants (Netflix, Amazon, telcos, ISPs)”; the significant
increasing of tax incentives for Australian TV and foreign productions to restore Australia’s
competitiveness vis-à-vis other countries with higher tax rebate offers
45
; and to secure more
sufficient public funding for public broadcasters and screen agencies (ibid). The “Make It
Australian” campaign revived the mid-century movement of the same name that addressed the
1% local content level on Australian television at the time. The campaign has been widely
promoted by high-profile stars such as Cate Blanchett (Broinowski 2018). The current situation
regarding the streaming revolution has been posed as threatening to the extent of returning the
industries to their status in the 1960s: “’The industry will be gutted’: why Australian film and TV
is fighting for its life”, alarms The Guardian Australia (ibid). In contrast, commercial networks
Seven, Nine, and Ten argue that the current local content quota is untenable given the decreasing
viewership and advertising revenues, and the (escalating) costs of original productions,
especially drama (ibid).
In terms of local production requirements, the European Union’s 30% requisite functions as a
prominent example in many national discourses on local quota regulations, including the
Australian context (e.g., Taylor 2019; Broinowski 2018; Carmody 2019; Lobato and
Cunningham 2019; Lobato and Scarlata 2018a). In Australia, however, minimum expenditure

45
A 40% tax rebate is suggested by the Australian Greens (The Senate’s Environment and Communications
References Committee 2019: p97), as “[i]t is clear that Australia's tax incentives—in particular, the Location Offset
of 16.5 percent—have not kept pace with international developments and are no longer competitive. For example,
jurisdictions such as the United Kingdom, Canada, South Africa, Hungary, and the US states of Georgia, New York
and Massachusetts offer location incentives of between 25 and 40 per cent” (ibid p98)
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requirements would be preferred by most over minimum percentages of libraries. According to
this argument, expenditure requirements, potentially supplemented by promotion requirements,
should facilitate the production of new and specifically high-quality productions, while also
acknowledging the difference between schedule-based appointment and on-demand viewing
(e.g., “Australian Greens’ additional comments”, 94, see also in Pupazzoni 2019). Despite the
ongoing discussions for years, as of March 2020, no new local content regulation has been
introduced in Australia, letting SVODs, transnational and domestic alike, off the hook, while
commercial FTAs have been under growing pressure. I want to call attention to how the
extension of local quota requirements and transnational SVODs’ growing involvement in local
quality series production may inadvertently facilitate the further strengthening of transnational
SVODs’ Australian vogue, market position and essential status in contrast to domestic FTA
broadcasters. From my argumentation it would not follow at all that this outcome would
necessarily be culturally detrimental to Australians, but it would most certainly clash with a good
deal of cultural nationalist claims. Such considerations should call attention to the less than
straightforward and consistent potential implications of policies to be introduced in the name of a
narrowly defined national. The following section is aimed at presenting the nuances of the
Australian debates on local content quota requirements and platforms, focusing on the case of
children’s programs. Children’s content is a traditionally specific subcategory in the Australian
regulatory context, with particularly strong implications related to the SVOD disruption as well
as to the nationalist imagery of television and culture in general.
“Think of the Children”
Among the numerous and intricate content quota requirements, it is children’s programming
that has been particularly burdensome to Australian commercial broadcasters, due to the
commercially unfortunate combination of high production costs, the strict through complete
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restrictions on advertising (Park et al 2015: 18), and the fundamental shift of child audiences’
viewing habits. Debates have involved the commercial broadcasters and their industry lobby
group Free TV, independent children’s content producers, the Australian Children's Television
Foundation (a non-profit public organization providing funding and other support for writers and
producers), the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), and Screen Australia
(the comprehensive funding agency for Australian television, film, and digital original
programming). The discussions among these parties have been active since 2016—and as of
March 2020, there has been no regulatory changes enacted (Quinn and Samios 2020). Every
broadcaster is still required to transmit 390 hours total of children’s and preschool children’s
programming per year, out of which, in the case of commercial free-to-air broadcasters, 26 hours
should be original releases of domestic drama and an additional 8 hours of domestic reruns of
children’s drama (ibid). Audience needs and demand seem to be in tension with these
requirements, and so is the extent to which such needs and demand are fulfilled already and
perhaps more effectively by a variety of alternative platforms. Namely, commercial networks
have dedicated children’s channels and recently launched online applications (as filled with
reruns and foreign content as these might be); while PSB ABC has the ABC Kids channel and
the iview Kids app (Quinn 2017). Perhaps even more importantly, there is “swathes of free, on-
demand content on YouTube, or at a price on subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) services,
such as Netflix and Amazon Prime, who are ramping up commissioning of children’s
programming to attract subscribers (Potter, 2017)” (Steemers 2017: 299; also, Potter 2018: 112).
Indeed, challenging “for all broadcasters,” underage audiences have been considerably turned
away from linear television as such toward on-demand online platforms (Steemers 2017: 301,
original emphasis). In the words of Tim Worner, Chief Executive Officer at Seven in Australia:
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“We're spending millions of dollars on children's content for just a few thousand viewers"
(quoted in Quinn and Samios 2020). The focus on broadcasting content quotas in the context of
the distribution revolution and children’s preference for on-demand viewing has been criticized
by Free TV’s CEO Bridget Fair as anachronistic, irrealistic, and ultimately missing their claimed
target: “It’s astonishing that in 2020 we are still subject to last-century rules that force us to make
programs that no child is watching.” Similarly, Nine’s CEO Hugh Marks thinks that “to continue
to expend our money and taxpayers’ money on making content for which there is no audience
makes no sense” (both quoted ibid). These statements may be less hyperbolic than they first
might seem. For instance, according to Seven’s CEO James Warburton, some children’s contents
were watched by so few in February 2020 “that it falls under ratings measurement thresholds”
(ibid). Indeed, it has been argued that children’s programming is among the types of content that
particularly work well on and for SVODs, who thus can be valuable platforms for content
producers (see Pooter 2018: 115-6).
Expectedly, the Australian national commercial broadcasters are not alone in trying to
withdraw from producing original children’s content as much as possible: similar tendencies
occur in neighboring New Zealand, as well as the United Kingdom, Denmark, and Ireland
(Steemers 2017: 299). As Jeanette Steemers points out, while one has not been able to talk about
market failure of children’s content in general, “[w]here the children’s market is often deemed to
fail is in supporting sustainable amounts of domestically produced first-run children’s content,”
except for the US (301, original emphasis). Not surprisingly either, the Australian commercial
broadcasters’ lobbying for abolishing the specific quota regarding this type of programming has
raised a great deal of controversy, exemplified by the content of Karl Quinn’s 2017 article
published by the Sydney Morning Herald “Think of the children: Fighting words from kids TV
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creators as inquiry heats up.” Quinn quotes children’s content producer Jonathan Shiff, according
to whom occupying the broadcast spectrum entails the obligation to the public to produce
children’s programming of the proper kind:
“…stories of national identity, that celebrate who we are, that engage kids and
encourage them to show leadership, to be the heroes and heroines of their own lives, to
not be bullies or sexist or racist (…) not American stories, not violent cartoons.”
On the one hand, Shiff indirectly acknowledges the impossibility of arguing that there is a
shortage of (or limited access to) children’s content in general. On the other hand, however, he
tries to foreground homegrown children’s content as distinctive via-a-vis what dominates the
market. From this it would follow that, according to the public service remit, this special kind of
content should be helped be made and distributed. Shiff implies that “American stories” as/and
“violent cartoons” are programming that should not be present if there were proper “negative
regulations” in the service of protecting this audience segment generally regarded as especially
vulnerable (Steemers 2017: 302). In contrast to such improper texts, Shiff posits content
produced by Australian independent companies as exemplifying a merit good as having
distinctive positive effects—often in terms of the encouragement of awareness and behavior
related to good citizenship and other social values or health (see Steemers 2017: 303). More
specifically, in Shiff’s notion, such positive effects are subsumed under a national framing: it is
“stories of national identity” that are needed for structuring narratives provided for children.
While I would certainly agree that local cultural specificities can comprise a progressive part of
much children’s programming, I want to also argue that it is far from essential for a children’s
show to be nationally tied and specific in order to convey positive values including citizenship-
related ones. In turn, a program strongly undergirded by national specificity and identity is by no
means necessarily beneficial and progressive in its representations. As Jeanette Steemers also
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argues, the widespread view fueling policies on local content’s essentially preferable nature is
questionable:
“Even if there is little quantifiable evidence that watching domestic content is more
beneficial than watching imported content (Buckingham, 2009), what matters is whether
governments are actually prepared to intervene to reinforce the perceived cultural value
of particular types of domestic content in society’s interest, even if the arguments are not
necessarily backed up by incontrovertible evidence.” (2017: 303)
In agreement with Steemers’ reservation, I would further point out that while Shiff’s
emphasis on “multicultural[ism]” and anti-violence may be worthwhile guidelines for children’s
TV representations, his implying that (his or others’) Australian productions were unique in this
sense would be easy to refute. Likewise, the themes of encouraging children to become leaders
and “heroes and heroines of their own lives,” for example, sound uncannily like mainstream
American narratives including much of those aimed at the youngest audiences. That is, even if
we accept such narrative centrality as generally characteristic of Australian productions, one
could hardly make a case either for national specificity or a contrast to a great deal of US
children’s programs.
Perhaps even more discrediting to Shiff’s and other local producers’ arguments on the
supposed national specificity of their programming and the essential nature of the latter for local
children’s identity development is that some of the local producers have been actively seeking
out transnational opportunities. In the case of 2012 Australian children’s animated series The
Adventures of Figaro Pho by Sydney-based Cheeky Little Media, for instance, besides the
involvement of a free-to-air broadcaster, direct public funding and an indirect tax rebate,
investments were made on part of international children’s channels: the BBC and Nickelodeon
(Potter 2018: 113). Arguably, Nickelodeon is among the globally most dominant, US-based
children’s channels—as such, it would nominally be dismissed by arguments like Shiff’s as
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something essentially different and even antithetical to Australian children’s productions. In
fact, as Anna Potter puts it, relying on Cunningham and Jacka (1996): “Despite the
acknowledged importance of the local, children’s television in Australia … has always relied on
international sales for the majority of its production budgets (Potter 2018: 115). This orientation
toward selling a program abroad and related co-productions agreements, as well as other forms
of cooperation and exchange have been strong tendencies, which aptly demonstrate the close
actual intertwinement of the Australian national and the transnational in the area of children’s
TV. This intertwinement certainly contradicts the stated commitment to the national on part of
domestic producers lobbying for the continuation of broadcasters’ quotas. Relatedly, American
dominance is criticized by Gill Carr, Managing Director of Moody St Productions, according to
whom the relevant representations, in contrast to properly national content, will incite the sense
of irrelevance in Australian children. Carr says: “Homegrown content shows Australian children
their roots, their culture, who they are … If everything comes from the US, what are we showing
our children – that they’re not relevant in the world?” (quoted in Quinn and Samios 2020). The
child subject, as imagined here by Carr, needs recognition and affirmation as a national-
geopolitical being; thus, children’s content is framed as a battlefield between unwanted US
superiority and proper national “relevance.” At the same time, Carr’s plea for the quota and her
protest that domestic commercial broadcasters simply do not choose to promote children’s
content should be juxtaposed by the example of the worldwide success of her very own most
recent program, Kuu Harajuku. The animation series was sold to 40 countries, and it was co-
created by American singer and pop idol Gwen Stefani. It is astonishing how the plea for the
strictly local and locally specific representation of Australian identity and cultural specificity and
against oppressive US imperialism, on the one hand, and, on the other, the celebratory report on
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the success of a highly transnational program by an independent Australian company with a
prominent Japanese flavor and a US popstar co-creator can seamlessly follow one another within
the same article, without at least some minimal reflection on part of the publicists (if not the
involved local producers). In my understanding, the ideological-affective bridge between the
protectionist and national purist concern and the celebration of the transnational success of a
culturally hybrid show is the solipsistic exceptionalism of nationalism.
That the Australian specificity of many children’s show would be hard to pinpoint in practice
is, I argue, far from being a problem—if anything, it is the opposite that could constitute a
problem, as it could signal a lack of diversity. TV content, including children’s programs can be
very much valuable culturally without being embedded in the national. However, it should also
be noted how the actual characteristics of content categorized as local/domestic severely question
a great deal of nationalist claims about local productions supposedly authentically representing
the nation. The critically praised Australian series The Adventures of Figaro Pho, for instance,
does not contain dialogue (as many animated children’s programs do not, to make production
easier and less expensive, and to facilitate the option of international distribution). The show falls
into the animated children’s sci-fi-fantasy-adventure genre; more concretely, it features a main
character living in a mansion, burdened by multiple phobias and “afraid of vampires, toilets, mad
dogs, aliens, and … of being alone”—the reason for him to create a robot dog for companion (as
its “Plot summary” on IMDb explains). While I do not doubt the presence of some locally
specific cultural references, my sampling of the program as well as its distribution history
confirm its broad potential for the transnational appeal also strongly suggested by its concept.
Conversely, Anne Potter points out the unusual local, nationally specific attributes of
Bottersnikes and Gumbles, a critically acclaimed 2015 Australian-British-American co-
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production. The series is based on the books of Australian author S.A. Wakefield, and involves
Australian production company Cheeky Little Media, who managed to secure the support,
among others, of Australian FTA commercial network Seven, the BBC, and, significantly,
Netflix (Potter 2018: 114). Actually countering the general tendencies of Australian-made
children’s animation, the show is grounded in classic Australian children’s literature, and
features Australian landscapes, animals, and plants, and, in its original dubbing, Australian
accents (that were re-dubbed with local accents both for the UK and for the US market, ibid 119;
115). In Potter’s assessment, “[i]ronically, … [this] rare occurrence in contemporary Australian
children’s television was only possible because US-based SVOD Netflix, an increasingly
effective instrument of media globalization, was persuaded to invest in the series by its UK
distributor” (ibid).
46

The practical intertwinement of the Australian national and the transnational in “local” kids’
content can be obliterated with the help of reductive moralization about who acts and who does
not act in the service of the local children. Importantly, nationalisms are traditionally bolstered
by familial metaphors about the nation and its subjects (see e.g., Lakoff 1996; Lauenstein et al.
2005). Political claims can be rhetorically strengthened by tapping into the moral centrality,
powerful affects, and inescapable bond and determinism associated with the family.
Consequently, things related to children are easy to appropriate for making moralizing arguments
against anyone who does not submit to a totalizing, unconditional serving of what is constructed
as the children’s interest. “Reproductive futurism” (Edelman 2004) is certainly a close natural

46
Notably, in contrast to my point here, Potter’s ultimate point in the article is to argue for the need of national
quota requirements aimed at “Australian cultural representation,” which, in synergy with the needs of global SVOD
Netflix with a cosmopolitan brand, have enabled the production and “rapid international distribution” of
Bottersnikes (116). Nevertheless, I find her points particularly useful in supporting my main arguments in this
section.
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ally with nationalisms. Concurrently, in his argument for maintaining high children’s content
quotas for commercial broadcasters, children’s content producer Jonathan Shiff compares
commercial networks’ efforts to abolish their obligation to neglectful parents trying to dump
their children off to someone else in the form of an alarmist populist metaphor:
“You can't defray your responsibility by saying, 'Let's send our kids to the people across
the road – they've got kids, they can raise them'. It doesn't work like that. If that's how
the networks are thinking, then don't be parents. Don't have a channel. Get out of the
business.” (quoted in Quinn 2017)
The producer appropriates the common tropes of family in relation to the nation. His
offensive applies a hyperbolic metaphor that narrows down the complexity of the issue to a
binary comprised by a public-interest-fueled parental care-as national obligation versus a private,
commercial and private-interest-fueled parental neglect-like failing the nation. Children’s TV
creators, though their private livelihood and prosperity are clearly at stake, are metaphorized
exclusively under the former, i.e., as agents of proper national parenting. In contrast, commercial
networks are rhetorically subsumed under the latter category, that is, as neglecting the nation’s
children who are posited as their natural responsibility. Importantly, concrete questions such as
the issue of already existing diversity and proper representations, the reasonable amount of
continuous new programming actually needed, and the actual reach of children’s programming
through the primary channels of the commercial networks and radically transformed place of
free-to-air broadcasting in the recent television ecology are obliterated. This obliteration of the
concrete and complex in favor of the abstract and binary is performed with the help of nationalist
rhetoric especially as it is filtered through the powerful metaphors of the family. I do not argue
that there has necessarily been an overproduction of children’s content that disproportionately
relies on public funding. I recognize that I do not have sufficient information at hand. I argue
precisely that claims that there is not enough new domestic children’s content being produced, or
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that domestically produced children’s content are distinctive and positively so vis-à-vis what is
distributed online, are not sufficiently backed by evidence and careful analysis. Nationalist
symbolism and generalizations are prone to take precedence over more complex analyses.
“Independent” producers can also gain uncritical sympathy through their association with their
supposed serving of children, and even through their juxtaposition to (factually or
phantasmically) larger corporations. The general normative standing of things “cultural” also
predisposes one to rush to the side of creators and the quota, despite the practical bind and
necessary limits of (resource-intense) cultural production—it just cannot be limitless in quantity
and production values. Rather, the task should be to delineate how much, and at what expense,
society can and should require, and subsidize, cultural productions. I have argued that the
simplistic rationale of national identity or culture, or even “local” specificity, should be
recognized in their insufficiency for claiming legitimacy for the legal requirement and/or public
subsidization of more numerous and/or more expensive productions.
This section has highlighted that the ethical binaries often constructed between different
players in the media industries are often based on a reductive, self-serving binary of cultural
versus commercial, national-public versus private, or essential livelihood versus superfluous
profit. In reality, these factors usually mix in the concrete situation of stakeholders instead of
them being positioned on one end of the above listed, morally loaded spectrums. In the debates
on children’s programming in the Australian contexts, content creators have overwhelmingly
framed what is in their own interest as consistent with national identity and culture, and, in terms
of livelihood and survival. The financial matters of what sort of livelihood working in the
industry enables are not concretized—instead, it is the total collapse and complete loss of
financial viability that is posited as the threat, in a black and white manner. “[I] ndustry
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representatives are adamant that the livelihoods of an entire industry, from its technicians to its
directors, are at stake,” as it is included in the Sydney Morning Herald article (Quinn, 2017).
While the local production industry either lives or dies, supposedly, competing agents such as
commercial broadcasters are framed as selfishly and coldly following business interests ignoring
culture and the nation. In the quota debates, voices arguing for the interests of local producers
have posited free-to-air commercial networks as merely abstract business entities (rather than
populated by an actual local workforce) whose interests are fully commercial and separate from
that of the national public. In other words, local and independent producers construct a better
position for themselves as ethically superior in connection to national identity and public interest,
in contrast to “private”, “commercial” broadcasters. (The latter could alternatively be referred to
as “local distributors,” too, but that would work against their one-sided representations in the
debate.) Such binary constructions go regardless of the qualifying facts that local and
independent producers may prioritize their own financial interests, and that the commercial
broadcasters’ interests are also related to the livelihood of local workers who are members of the
national public; that commercial broadcasters’ activities could serve the public in ways other
than offering children’s programming; the likely possibility that a sufficiently wide access to a
diverse range of proper representations already exist; and, relatedly and most importantly, that
“an industry-focused, broadcasting-led stance rather than a child-centered discourse” that largely
ignores the changing reality of media consumption habits is unlikely to identify the right
direction toward industry health and the proper service of child audiences (Steemers 2017: 311).
As Jeanette Steemers argues in relation to the relevant UK policy debates very similar to the
Australian one, broadcasting quota requirements “could create obstacles to innovation because of
an overemphasis on the problems of domestic children’s TV rather than those forces that are
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driving a new media eco-system in the children’s content market” (2017: 298). Steemers’
criticism demonstrated that:
“[a] key factor …was the perception of market failure that mixed both normative and
emotive arguments about the need to provide U.K. children with U.K. content, and less
transparent arguments about a section of the production industry that was facing
terminal decline. These rather than managerial concerns drove stakeholder debates.”
(310)
Steemers’ account of the UK policy debates can to a large extent be transported into the
Australian context, and it affirms my main arguments in this section. First, that some parts of the
public service remit traditionally attributed to PSBs, including commercial ones, have largely
been made redundant by the highly accessible, often free or relatively affordably priced, and
diverse content distributed on an on-demand basis, including, significantly, by global SVODs
like Netflix. Consequently, content regulation should not deploy a broadcaster-focused approach
as the latter is inadequate in the contemporary media ecology driven by on-demand online
distribution. More reasonable regulation could be based on a holistic approach to the local media
ecology, which should be considered in its dynamic nature. Second, I want to underline that that
local producers’ (often, monopolizing) claims on their national specificity and cultural loyalty to
their location/nation (as opposed to domestic commercial broadcasters who want to shed local
content obligations), should be recognized in their opportunistic aspect, especially as their own
textual representations and business practices often undermine their nationalist rhetoric. Just as
global streamer Netflix’s support can actually enable greater perceived local specificity, so may a
project involving less global entities be thoroughly transnational, for instance, in its
representational nature due to its practical orientation toward a market beyond the local. Instead
of applying moralizing arguments with binary reductionism where “the nation” and “children”
stand for untouchable totems, “national interest” should always be pressed in its fractured and
conflicting nature. Thus, construing national(ist) cultural binaries between global SVODs versus
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other, more nationally based entities is an ideological project refuted rather than confirmed by
practical evidence. Likewise, the pressure to be limitlessly generous to “children” should be
consciously resisted, and the relevant issue (children’s content quotas) broken down into its
elements. The value-heavy terms of the nation, national culture, identity, specificity or
authenticity, and likewise, “children,” still harbor a great deal of power to bestow legitimacy and
discourage from detailed analysis, potentially obliterating the very need for more transparent,
complex, and practical inquiries for the sake of grounded public debates and cultural policies.
I have argued that in Australia, there has been a significant stream of nationalist claims on
national specificity of TV texts, how “local” programs should travel internationally, and who the
proper agents of the creation of and trading in such “local” programs are. Consequently, while
the practical divides between the transnational and the national have been closing, the discursive
moral division constructed between the “national” and the “transnational” is quite sharp. This
discursive opposition entails the contested status of the global SVODs primarily exemplified by
Netflix as the market leader in Australia. On the one hand, “national exceptionalism” (Moran
2006: 176) and national cultural sovereignty have been for long important underlying themes of
the domestic discourses on Australian television, which has historically been characterized by a
close and submissive-like connection with the UK and, however differently, with the US. On the
other hand, to a great extent due to these same strong, mostly subordinate ties to the British and
the American cultures and industries, Australian programs and talent have enjoyed some
transnational mobility and success compared to most countries without comparable ties with
such powerful television nations, including Hungary. In the coming subchapter, I want to outline
the historical and ongoing embeddedness of Australian TV nationalism in geopolitical
specificities and Australian television’s contemporary international status. I will consider how
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these characteristics factor into the specific perception of and debates about the SVOD
revolution, and how the relevant, conspicuously transnational studio-like companies are
considered in terms of their relations with and impact on the “national.” The section is
underscored by my comparative approach distinguishing between the UK as an international TV
authority and exporter thoroughly disrupted by the SVOD revolution; Australia as a maturing
developing TV nation where the SVOD disruption has been accompanied by both the
emancipation and the crisis of “national culture;” and finally, Hungary, the smallest and only
small-language and low-English-proficiency country among my cases, with negligible export
during postsocialism, where the global SVODs’ entrance into the national space has taken a
significantly different path. Namely, in Hungary, Netflix and other new transnational entrants
have not been challenged by nationalist claims—despite the country’s widespread cultural
nationalism and chauvinist-populist nationalist authoritarian rule. That is, perhaps seemingly in
contradiction to what could be expected, in Hungary, while the country being on the almost
exclusively receiving end of the global TV trade, the discursive divide between the “national”
and the “transnational” in the sphere of television fiction has been much less accentuated than in
Australia or the UK.
The Non-Conspicuous but Forward-Looking “International Face of Australian
Television
47
”: A Comparison to the British and the Hungarian TV Ecology
This section addresses the specificity of the domestic and international status and identity of
the Australian screen industry and culture—especially of television—in contradistinction to the
British and the Hungarian cases, in order to provide further complexity to the issue of how the
national and nationalism figure in the age of globalizing transnational SVODs. Importantly,
Australia is characterized by a “large and ongoing trade deficit in film and television media”

47
The quoted part of the title is a reference to Moran (2006).
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(Burns and Eltham 2010: 104). While the UK has had an ongoing, long tradition of cultural
export and international recognition of “quality” in the television trade
48
, Australia lacks a
comparably established national brand in the global TV ecology—similarly to most countries,
including Hungary. However, this arguable lack of a strong national TV brand is coterminous
with the growing practical internationalization of the Australian television industry since about
the 1980s. In terms of flows of transnational exchange, while Australia has been a “deficit”
industry and culture, its economic and cultural export in the global television arena has been still
more significant than that of Postsocialist Hungary. That is, some Australian formats and even
finished programs, often co-produced with producers and distributors from other countries,
notably the UK, have travelled internationally. However, until most recently, the exports
generally lacked cultural prominence. The maturing television industries and export to the US,
the UK, European and Asian countries; the Australian origin of certain global media companies;
and the long-standing high visibility of global Hollywood talent from Australia are all aspects
that arguably contribute to a stronger sense of national self with regards to audiovisual culture
and industry compared to the detectable national Hungarian self. Such a stronger sense of
national self has been a nationalist goal historically, which has been embedded in the powerful,
simultaneously beneficial and conflictual close cultural ties between Australia and the UK and,
in a different way, between Australia and the US.
Scholars such as Albert Moran, Elizabeth Jacka, Stuart Cunningham, Ben Goldsmith, Susan
Ward, and Tom O’Regan have been at the forefront of approaching Australian TV with
international and transnational perspectives, urging more complex and multisided investigations

48
One relevant indicator for this is that the UK was the #1 European origin country for linear television and VOD to
target foreign national markets in 2016, reported by the European Audiovisual Observatory (Scnheeberger 2017,
p2).
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of the Australian media landscape that had been for long dominated by a national/ist framing.
Indeed, as Alan McKee in Australian Television (2001) shows, academic studies on Australian
TV “has tended to be preoccupied with issues of national identity and the survival of the
Australian television industry, in a context where successful American and British television
series may be perceived to be a threat” (in Turnbull and McCutcheon 2019: 398). This type of
scholarly writing tends to posit Australian broadcasting as uniquely different and autonomous,
undergirded by “an Australian exceptionalism” as Albert Moran critically notes (2006: 176). In
contrast, more attention to globalization facilitated “a more nuanced understanding of the
changing place of Australian television within a more international system” (ibid). In fact, Moran
stresses that internationalization is far from being recent, “instead [it is] part of the sine qua non
of a native television service” (175). Australian broadcasting can be characterized by an ongoing,
and mutually transformative relationship, with “[w]hat was ‘foreign’ [being] absorbed and
reconstituted as ‘native’”; likewise, Australia’s television has been subjected to cultural
colonization—being most closely affected, in different ways, by the UK and the US system
(176)—while simultaneously it is itself colonizing others within and beyond its national borders
(175).
As the main subject under the current section is Australian TV’s nationally framed face
toward the international markets and community, I will only include here issues of outward
flows, and I largely take for granted the historically as well as contemporarily very significant
importation of institutional structures and finished content and formats into the Australian
cultural market. In this overview, I will engage, first, with format export and localized
production of national remakes, exemplified by the international expansion of Grundy’s;
secondly, with the service industry catering to off-shore productions, exemplified by Village
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Roadshow and their studio on the Gold Coast; and thirdly, the (service and other) post-
production industry exemplified by animation and visual effects company Animal Logic,
originating in Sydney. I aim to show that Australia, indeed, has been from the start intertwined
with the global television ecology despite its atypically long sustainment of a network-like era
under close regulation. Simultaneously, I demonstrate that, in contrast to the UK, finished
content explicitly marked as Australian has had moderate mobility and humble cultural status,
and, accordingly, Australian intertwinements with global television have not entailed a
construction of a strong national brand. Thirdly, I want to show that the national perception of
the film and television service industries have been fraught, from the second half of the 1980s,
with conflicts in terms of cultural objections and anxieties. Very importantly, the Australian
audiovisual industry and culture have been struggling to develop a distinct and autonomous
identity separate from the UK and Australia’s colonial ties to it, as well as from the US and its
flood of pop culture all the more frictionless in spreading due to the two countries’ sharing of the
English language.
This historical struggle has been quite successful, making nationalist claims and aspirations
toward an acknowledged international national brand less irrealistic as it is the case with
Hungary. This has entailed the growing tendency that some of the “local” programs primarily
deemed to be Australian have actually been conceived with the international market in mind and
involved various contributions from decidedly foreign producers and distributors. Emerging
international success entails a double impact on the “national,” however: it elevates it through
international recognition while it also threatens to taint and dilute it through its mingling with the
“foreign.” Accordingly, the discursive division constructed between the “national” and the
“transnational” among some Australian interest groups and moral communities has been sharp.
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This grounded nationalist rise of TV and the concurrent, sharper contrasting of more properly
national versus the conspicuously transnational in the Australian context stand in contrast to the
Hungarian case. The global flows of television in Postsocialist Hungary, until very recently, have
been one-sided: locally made finished programs have been truly local in the sense that they have
not targeted audiences beyond the nation. That is, in the textual and distributive sense, the
transnational has been practically neatly separated from the national. National local programs
could not have any realistic expectation to travel internationally, at least officially and beyond
Hungarian ethnic minorities in the neighboring territories such as the Ukraine, Romania, or
Serbia. Arguably, this more clear-cut practical division is the reason behind the lack of moral
binary construction between the “national” and the “transnational”, including the lack of cultural
resistance to global SVODs in the name of local productions in the Hungarian context. Relatedly,
following the historical period of international service jobs provided quite invisibly during
socialism, the transitional years of early postsocialism brought about the collapse and
transformation of the audiovisual sector that struggled with the severe lack of financial resources
and outdated infrastructures (Varga 2016: 26-46). The 2004 film law that thoroughly reformed
the system and introduced tax rebates and attract foreign productions to Hungary was perceived
as a belated and long-awaited reform similar to the measures already in place in other
postsocialist countries (notably the Czech Republic), expected to fuse capital into the
impoverished economy and reinvigorate the industry and thereby, domestic production as well
(ibid 46-7). The service industry in Hungary has been able to enjoy a stable, generally positive
cultural standing. I assume that factors such as the economic crisis and the desperate need for
investment; combined with the national identity crisis burgeoning after the regime change; the
regional national competition with other postsocialist countries such as the Czech Republic; and
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the complete lack of an international national brand of TV relevant to the new world system may
have all contributed to such good standing that has remained unchallenged across the political
spectrum.
Tracking the history of Australian-born media executive Reg Grundy, Albert Moran (2006)
reveals the “international face of Australian television” through developmental moments of
Grundy’s TV empire—a global company of Australian national origin. Exemplifying Australian
television’s “two great poles of …association …the United States and the United Kingdom”
(176), the first of Grundy’s relevant moments was the domestic remaking of US game shows in
the 1960s and 70s in; and the second the importation of an expert creative team from the UK for
the purpose of making drama serials in Australia in the mid-1970s. Restructured as Grundy
World Wide in 1984, the company’s headquarters moved to tax haven Bermuda, coordinating
several local subsidiaries across the world (182). Thus, the third developmental moment revealed
by Moran involved the export rather than the importing of formats: the setting up of “wholly
owned local production companies to do ‘shows that feature local people and are made by
Grundy personnel who are nationals of the country in which the show is made’ (Reg Grundy,
quoted in Jacka and Cunningham 1993: 17). Though they did remake some game shows, their
“most valuable intellectual property lay in the copyright of its Australian-originated drama
serials” (Moran 2006: 182). In Moran’s assessment, “[b]y the early 1990s, Grundy was a highly
significant Australian executive figure in international television, second only to Rupert
Murdoch” (177). The “process of trans-production” Grundy’s engaged in was referred to as
“parochial internationalism” by Reg Grundy himself (182). Grundy managed to make his
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company a “truly transnational operation” after its “modest Australian beginning” (183).
49
What
really made this possible, its “multi-domestic strategy …emerged from the failures of global or
world brand advertising (Jack and Cunningham 1993: 17). The point important for my
argumentation here is that while Grundy was able to license some of its finished content abroad
(Cunningham and Jacka 1996, in Moran 2006:18), the company was not able to build a strong
brand for its Australian content based on a national and/or quality basis that would have enabled
a healthy and stable flow of cultural exports. Instead, according to Jacka and Cunningham (1993:
19), Grundy “recognised that exporting from Australia into foreign territories is at best a hit and
miss affair, with long term prospects for stability of sales dependent on others' readings of
viewer preferences and a relatively accommodating regulatory and industry environment,
together with a preparedness to dub material into several European languages.”
In contrast to Grundy’s “parochial internationalism”, Australian film, television and
entertainment conglomerate Village Roadshow’s elevation was based on “its strategy to attract
overseas or off-shore productions” mainly from the US, based on lower wages, less strict union
regulations, the weaker Australian dollar, location, and the local workforce’s expertise (ibid 20-
22)—that is, many of the general characteristic making a location compatible with the underlying
logic of the audiovisual service industries. Importantly, Village Roadshow has had a long-term
cooperation with Hollywood major Warner Brothers, which started with the 1970’s exclusive
deal to distribute the US studio’s fair in Australia. Later, the two companies purchased the studio
on the Gold Coast built by Dino De Lauretis with the help of the Queensland government. The
Gold Coast was “in the first wave of places which combined film studios and a new whole of
government approach to attracting film and television production to a location,” and one among

49
Grundy’s was sold to UK-based Pearson International in 1995, now known as FremantleMedia (Moran 2006:
184), which is part of RTL Group, which is, in turn, part of Bertelsmann.
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several such locations that was initially “brought into being by a key figure in the contemporary
internationalisation of film and television production, Dino De Laurentiis” (Goldsmith, Ward,
and O’Regan 2010: 33). In 1986, De Laurentiis established his local production company DEL
enjoying guaranteed distribution through De Laurentiis’ parent company in the US—on which
De Laurentiis’s international ventures’ competitive edge relied—and started to build a studio that
“would undergird the Gold Coast’s status as a destination for film and television production”
(55). As Ben Goldsmith, Susan Ward, and Tom O’Regan write, this “new internationalism”
incited “predictions of cultural calamity all but drowning out celebration of the project’s
contribution to cultural exchange or industrial expansion” (57). Sandra Hall film correspondent
used the term “soulless internationalism”, for instance; while for film scholars Jacka and Susan
Dermody, the new studio to cater for off-shore productions targeting foreign audiences signified
“the time [when] national culturalism has rarely looked more impotent, fragile or anachronistic”
(quoted ibid). Culturally based opposition was complemented by the concerns of labor unions, as
De Laurentiis would try and circumvent union agreements as he had done at Wilmington, North
Carolina; a further concern was the prospect that he would employ imported workforce. The
resistance on part of the screen industry and the public notwithstanding, the Queensland
Government generously supported De Laurentiis’s project (58). However, as the releases by
Laurentiis’ American company DEG flopped in the US, its share price declined steeply, and his
executives left during a US Securities and Investments Commission investigation, he was
ultimately forced to withdraw from his Australian business in 1987 (Goldsmith, Ward, and
O’Regan 2012: 5). Afterwards, Australian company Village Roadshow in partnership with
Warner Brothers took over.
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In 1988-89, the newly built studio managed to attract two television series productions by
Paramount: Dolphin Bay and Mission Impossible. The history of the latter show is already
closely intertwined with changes in the Australian content regulation at the forefront of debates
on Australian versus foreign productions. Controversially, the first season of Mission Impossible
had to be accepted as “Australian drama” counting toward content quotas for commercial free-
to-air broadcaster Nine, due to the wording of the official definition at the time. The Australian
Broadcasting Tribunal (the predecessor of the current comprehensive audiovisual agency Screen
Australia), however, subsequently rushed to set up a new standard in 1989, preventing Nine from
receiving quota points for the second season of the US show (23). That is, Village Roadshow’s
operations were key in escalating the conflictual and controversial status of the service industries
in Australia, and the debates on the goals and functions of Australian local content regulations
where economic and cultural arguments can clash (22). In 1993, Elizabeth Jacka and Stuart
Cunningham listed the relevant divisions among the film and TV community along the lines of
those workers who can expect benefits from this sector and those who would largely be marginal
or obliterated (e.g. Australian actors’ opposition due to little opportunities vs some below-the-
line workers whose chances to get more work increase); “the contentious issue” of the threat to
indigenous projects as argued by “the ‘culture lobby;’” the Queensland government’s (and some
sections of the Commonwealth government’s and the federal bureaucracy’s) support to whom
catering to offshore productions is a boost to regional industrial development (25). Ultimately,
Jacka and Cunningham reinforce the distinction between economic and cultural considerations,
including the idea that the national content quotas on FTA commercial TVs are not supposed to
simply deliver industrial benefits. At the same time, the authors ultimately suggest the
complementarity between the two sides: “indigenous” cultural works and service jobs both
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contribute to “a needed diversity in the audiovisual landscape in Australia” and these two poles
may have to be subsumed under “the single corporate umbrella” for the sake of “a continuing
slate of production,” as it is the case within the Village Roadshow conglomerate (26). Such
confirmation of the complementarity of the service industry and the more narrowly defined
culturally national, creative, and IP-involving industry is a common view in national contexts of
smallish domestic markets where the commercial viability of much film and television
production is a basic issue.
The local post-production industry focusing on animation and visual effects represent another
strand of the “international face” (Moran 2006) of the Australian screen industries. As Ben
Goldsmith demonstrates, Australian companies such as Rising Sun Pictures, Cutting Edge Post,
or Animal Logic “carv[ed] out a new export industry in the early 2000s, independent of other
film production and post-production activity (2019: 151). Animal Logic’s 1995 Babe boosted
international interest, and the company soon became a global leader in animation and CGI for
film, TV, and new media (150). Following their contributions to mega hits like The Matrix
(1999) or Zhang Yimou’s Hero (2002) and based on their successful work on commercials and
their in-house development and modification software, they managed to shift from being a fee-
for-services company to one that takes IP stakes in its projects (151). Goldsmith’s reflection on
the nationality of the hit The LEGO Movie makes illuminating contributions to the nationally
framed cultural debate on the service industries. On the one hand, Goldsmith points out that The
LEGO Movie as a text does not bear any particular markers of Australianness (162). At the same
time,
“[f]rom Village Roadshow’s contribution to the financing of the film, to the vast majority
of the production work that was completed in Australia by heads of department
including cinematographer Pablo Plaisted, editor David Burrows and production
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designer Grant Freckleton, and by a crew composed principally of Australian animators
and visual effects artists, the film has an obvious Australian heritage.” (ibid)
Thus, the movie should certainly be recognized as part of the Australian national—while its
case also instructs us to relinquish the normativity of national cultural distinctiveness.
Alternatively, Goldsmith himself ultimately rejects nationality as a primary frame for audiovisual
works in favor of the awareness of the “interlocking parts that collectively comprise the
contemporary global film industry” (ibid). In my understanding, his sober argument helps reveal
the difference between the national as a practically significant, descriptive term, in
contradistinction to “the national” a seemingly descriptive yet, in reality, prescriptive notion that
normatively assigns a fictional essence, an authentic difference to the national. The LEGO Movie
has a significant Australian input due to part of its main behind-the-camera talent being
Australian locals from a locally based company. This Australianness is in no necessary
correlation with an immediately recognizable, essential “Australianness” of the text, the
representation as an output to the Australian input on part of local media professionals.
It is not only the cultural implications but in fact, the seemingly more clear-cut issue of the
economic effects of the film and television service industries on the home location and country
that are still being debated. On the one hand, the service industries have been regarded as
offering “valuable experience to local crews” (Broinowski 2018). This is an argument Village
Road also applied vis-à-vis Australian creative personnel working on Hollywood productions
since their setting up the service industry on the Gold Coast at the end of the 1980s (Jacka and
Cunningham 1993: 23). Such “knowledge transfer” is something Petr Szczepanik (2016) also
highlights in the case of the Czech service industry and what Hungarian professionals also
strongly confirm (own research; Berkes 2018). In the Australian case, due to heightened
linguistic and cultural proximities, working in the service industries has meant, from the very
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beginning, the chance of getting jobs and making it in the US (Jacka and Cunningham 1993: 23;
Newman 2008). The international sampling of talent by Hollywood has arguably been expanding
and intensifying since, partially by the normalization of English as a second language worldwide,
and partially by the changing nature of original language as a limit for audiovisual productions.
Furthermore, from the perspective of “location interest” (Goldsmith and O’Regan 2008), the
service industries can provide not only work experience and developing expertise but, more
basically, continuous job opportunities for professionals. This can be crucial in smaller markets
where the number and scale of domestic productions are limited (Berkes 2018). Notably, the
largely invisible service jobs during the socialist era, catering to Western European and even US
productions, fulfilled such important functions in Hungary (Varga 2016: 94). “[I]njections of
cash” are also welcome—many national governments have been arguing that the escalating tax
rebates notwithstanding, servicing runaway productions ultimately pays off. According to the
2016 estimation of the British Film Institute, for instance, every pound rebated by the High-end
TV Tax Relief generated value worth 6.10 BP to the British economy, with production spending
generating close to 27k jobs directly and indirectly (Final Report, §97 on p29). The Hungarian
National Film Fund
50
reported that every 1000 HUF provided in the form of the tax rebate
increases the national GDP by 3240 HUF (NFI 2016).
Ben Goldsmith’s approach to the local-global dynamics, and the questioning of the supposed
binary between the properly national versus international/foreign content certainly do not
represent the dominant view in contemporary cultural debates on the screen industries and

50
The Hungarian National Film Fund was the central state organization responsible for the selective support of
developing, producing, and distributing movie feature films, documentaries, and animation films, in Hungary
between 2011 and 2019. At the organization’s foundation, Andy Vajna, Hungarian-American film producer and co-
owner of Korda Studios in Etyek was appointed the Government Commissioner for the national film industry
(Kozlov 2011), working as the head of institution until his death in 2019.
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representation in Australia. These debates are strongly underlain by nationalism and what Moran
would call “Australian exceptionalism” (2006: 176). Such nationalist views perceive and
prescribe a uniqueness to Australian content proper in contradistinction to the “foreign” and
inauthentic sources for domestic national production. Accordingly, the service industries have
also figured in the recent heavy disputes on how the national is and should operate in the current
Australian media ecology thoroughly disrupted by global SVODs. In my view, it is questions of
economic impact due to the considerable involvement of public money that should be in the
center of debates—including how the benefits the state supposedly gains get reinvested or
redistributed. Cultural concerns, while potentially relevant, unfortunately tend to be undergirded
and limited by nationalism. As demonstrated, nationalism has very little if any grounded claim at
its disposal due to the inextricably intertwined industrial and cultural-textual nature of screen
productions. Still, the tax offsets as national public support for foreign, especially gigantic studio
productions have raised concerns that are sometimes framed as less of a matter of economic
inequality and injustice benefitting giant companies but rather as a cultural, and ultimately
nationalist identity issue:
“...the prospect of Australian taxpayers subsidising US mega-films hits a cultural nerve.
Playwright David Williamson questions why Queensland should be a “backlot for
Hollywood” when it could support local Australian films. (..) ‘if all we’re doing is
creating tax incentives for international companies to come here and make whatever
they want, we might as well be investing in cars.’” (emphasis mine, Quinn 2017)
In a similar vein, the Australian Senate’s committee also approaches the apparently
complementary combination of domestic-creative and service productions in the country in a
way that quite arbitrarily foregrounds the essential quality of domestic-creative content and the
insufficiency of international productions: “Without [locally produced Australian content], the
Australian screen industry would collapse—international productions filmed or post-produced in
Australia, whilst important to the ecosystem, are insufficient to sustain the Australian screen
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industry” (Committee View, 91). I want to point out here that the same general statement could
be made with the places of the two entities switched; the current positioning serves to
discursively construct domestic content as essential and endangered and to be defended, and
foreign productions as associated with deficiency.
Alternative Cosmopolitanism
As I demonstrated in the previous sections, the SVOD revolution has given rise to a great
deal of alarmist concerns regarding national culture and industry in Australia. In contrast to
broadcasters and their 55% quota of local content, Netflix, Amazon, or domestic SVOD Stan are
currently not obliged to produce and/or distribute a certain amount of Australian programming.
Recent numbers—1.6% Australian content on Netflix’s national library and 11.1% on Stan
(Lobato and Scarlata 2018)—feed easily into the idea that Netflix is corrupting the Australian
TV landscape, threatening the local industry and “national” culture and identity. This
construction of Netflix as leaching away national authenticity and industrial muscle from
Australia, however, is significantly complicated by the ideas presented in several, joint and
separate academic and journalistic publications by Ramon Lobato, Alexa Scarlata, and Stuart
Cunningham (Lobato and Scarlata 2017; 2018a, 2018b, Lobato 2019; Lobato and Cunningham
2019; Scarlata 2015). In Lobato and Cunningham’s recent assessment, the streaming revolution,
most notably, Netflix and Stan, have brought about the following advantageous changes:
“[they] have introduced welcome competition into broadcast and pay-TV markets;
provided the production industry with another distribution and funding source; picked
up and revived series dumped by broadcasters; addressed underserved viewing
communities; contributed to more cosmopolitan popular culture consumption; and
provided a global platform for select Australian content.” (emphasis mine, Lobato and
Cunningham 2019)
Lobato and Cunningham’s piece is a rare example of a local-national approach to examining
the SVOD revolution and Netflix specifically, in which the adjectives “cosmopolitan” or
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“global” are used in positive-affirming arguments, and where global SVODs are praised for
catering “underserved… communities,” i.e. for their contribution to a significant factor of
cultural diversity.
In their scholarly and journalistic publications on the Australian SVOD context, Lobato and
Scarlata repeatedly highlight that “Netflix… plays a big role in promoting Australian content
overseas” (Lobato and Scarlata 2018b). This distribution, given Netflix’s close-to-global
coverage and its high market penetration in many markets, arguably entails unprecedented export
and visibility opportunities for the Australian screen industries and talent—in contrast the UK’s
case where significant international presence and soft power had been the norm way before the
SVOD revolution. For instance, stand-up comedy constitutes a fast-growing niche genre on
SVODs, including Netflix (Lobato and Scarlata 2018a). Relatedly, Hannah Gadsby’s 2018
Netflix original Nanette has been watched in more than 190 countries, facilitating 270.9K
Twitter references, and catapulted the seasoned Australian comedian onto the global arena, The
New York Times welcoming her as a “major new voice in comedy” (ibid). Notably, there has
actually been more Australian programs available and a higher percentage in the US Netflix
catalog than in Netflix’s domestic Australian library (Lobato and Scarlata 2018a). Australian
content only available in foreign Netflix catalogues include co-productions and acquisitions that
are domestically distributed by other players (2018b). Thus, I argue that focusing exclusively or
even primarily on the local catalog content of SVODs can only constitute a partial and
potentially misleading inquiry into the relationship between the platform and the national.
Equally importantly, the authors have done some very reasonable reassessment of the issue
of local content. For one, while the local content ratio seems radically low when compared to
regulated broadcast TV, Lobato and Scarlata argue that the numbers are actually quite consistent
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with other segments of the audiovisual landscape: in theatrical distribution, domestic films have
constituted about 9% of releases and only 4% of box office revenues (Lobato and Scarlata
2018b). Furthermore, while the percentages of 2018 showed a slight decrease from the year
before, this was caused by the enlargement of the Netflix library as a whole (Lobato and Scarlata
2018a). Importantly, the 82 Australian titles of August 2018 took place in a sizeable catalogue of
some 5000 programs, directing one’s attention back to the skewed comparability of scheduled-
based programming against SVOD, and, furthermore, the potential of the manifold diversity of
available programs. Lobato and Cunningham’s aforementioned assessment about Netflix
addressing “underserved viewing communities” is consistent with the report that “British BAME
viewers are leaving PSBs in their droves and going to SVODs in far higher numbers than their
white counterparts” (Sir Lenny Henry, quoted in House of Lords 2019: 21). In both national
contexts, Netflix contributes to the diversity of representations in the important sense of racial
and ethnic identities, thereby performing a public service function, potentially better than public
service and private commercial FTA broadcasters. This example strengthens my argument that
cultural diversity as a national value is not exclusively or even best served by local content or by
national (public or private) broadcasters. Relatedly, Lobato and Scarlata list “cosmopolitan
popular culture” as facilitated by Netflix as one of the main benefits of the streaming revolution,
implying appreciation of cultural diversity that looks beyond the national. Indeed, the frictionless
availability of a wide range of content from around the world that Netflix also offers besides
significant US programming hardly figures in high-visibility political and expert debates on
Netflix’s effect on the “local”. This underlines that, regrettably, notions of cultural diversity in
policy debates on media tends to reinforce nationalist notions of cultural diversity: the latter is
misconstrued as something nationally unique and only addressable from within the nation, while,
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at the same time, domestic audiovisual works are welcome or expected to represent the nation,
its culture, identity, and talent internationally. The various other particular members of the
international community are in turn expected to appreciate one’s national culture, while their
cultural products do not figure as welcome cultural guests in the domestic media space. Let me
underline this unfortunate cultural nationalist exceptionalism as myopic identity politics, which
foregrounds Australia’s screen cultures’ need and merit for recognition and its supposedly
exceptional and unique national talent, while ignoring the implication that other nations would
want and deserve the same. According to the official view of the Australian Senate’s Committee,
for instance:
“Australian screen content informs our sense of who we are, offers unique forms of
cultural expression, and provides culturally significant experiences shared by millions of
Australians. Quality Australian content travels the world, shaping our view of the world
[unexplained], and shaping the world's view of Australia.” (my emphasis, 91)
As TV presenter Julia Zemiro puts it in The Guardian Australia’s piece “'The industry will
be gutted': why Australian film and TV is fighting for its life”: “We can’t simultaneously rejoice
in being recognised overseas, have the world fall in love with our stories and then not make
more” (quoted in Broinowski 2018). In a news article about the initiatives to introduce local
production quotas for streamers on Australian PSB ABC’s website, actor David Lyons’
supporting words are quoted: "We have some of the most gifted creatives and storytellers here,
why not try to push some of the money into that" (Pupazzoni 2019).
There is nothing new about culture operating as a nationalist currency for identity, pride and
aspiration. However, I want to argue that quality television drama series have recently become
one of the hottest performative sites for cultural nationalist identity politics. This tendency
includes local-national players who are relatively new to the game of global TV—this new door
to global inclusion has been opening up thanks to the affordances of the distribution and business
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models entailed by the streaming revolution and, I want to stress, the global giant, market- and
brand-dominant SVODs specifically, as elaborated in Chapter 2.

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Chapter 5: Streaming Revolution in an Authoritarian National Media
Landscape: The Local Series Boom, Nationalism, and Hungarian Netflix
Introduction
Netflix, the Dark Horse of the Hungarian TV Ecology?
The first two decades of postsocialism in Hungary, the 1990s and the 2000s have been
retrospectively regarded as a period of destitution in terms of domestic TV fiction. This dark age
of Hungarian TV series was characterized by low-quality daily soaps and weak or even
catastrophic attempts at developing or even just adapting weekly series. It was a large US-based
transnational media company’s regional subsidiary, HBO Europe and their local company HBO
Hungary, which started the ongoing “series revolution” generally perceived as the long-awaited
renaissance of national TV in postsocialist Hungary. The present is widely considered to be the
dawn of a new, unprecedented era of Hungarian quality TV aspiring for international recognition
by various domestic stakeholders. In fact, I argue that the expectation for a truly high-quality
drama series, completely local in origin, to come out and travel internationally is so high and
widespread in the industry and fan discourses that it is reasonable to identify it as the current
Holy Grail of Hungarian television. Crucially, the anticipation and aspiration for such an
internationally recognized masterpiece TV series are dipped in the widespread sensibility of
cultural nationalism. This banal kind of nationalism fuels the image of the blooming of national
talent, which is all the more glorious due to the country’s small size, grievous history, and paltry
geopolitical position—or so the popular narrative of Hungarian national identity goes.
HBO Hungary has been celebrated for igniting the TV series revolution with format
adaptations Terápia (2012, 2014, 2017), Társas Játék (When Shall We Kiss? 2011, 2013), and,
especially, Golden Life (2015, 2016, 2018). Up until recently, HBO has been the only company
who has produced domestic series that are widely deemed as living up to the standards of the
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current global quality series boom. The Hungarian HBO series of the 2010s have also prompted
other local industry players to up their game. Thus, the Hungarian series revolution has been
arguably joined by the market-leader domestic private commercial free-to-air broadcaster RTL
Klub, with second largest national commercial broadcaster TV2 lagging significantly behind.
The state public television has been playing a role that is much less prominent and more
ambiguous, at best, in terms of quality TV production than in most Western or Northern
European countries.
The dark age of Hungarian TV series meant that original domestic TV fiction in general has
had a low cultural status. Importantly, postsocialist Hungary is a country that went through a
radically swift capitalist “shock therapy” (Bakos 1994: 1189) and got struck by “unemployment,
poverty, and inflation” (Klaudt 1995: 314-5) upon the fall of socialism. Given its non-affluent,
small-sized market, it is small wonder its TV industry is still decidedly a “developing” one. In
this context of low cultural prestige TV, especially in the area of serialized fiction, premium
cable and OTT HBO’s established presence and local productions, and global streamer Netflix’s
developing local operations provide a considerable site for positive cultural nationalist
identification and aspirations without any noticeable protest against such transnational media
companies as detrimental to local content and industries.
Indeed, in a strong contrast to the UK and the Australian contexts, neither Netflix, nor HBO,
nor any other, much less visible OTTs or premium channels have facilitated any considerable
sense of threat to the national culture and the audiovisual industry to any significant stakeholders
in Hungary: neither business competitors nor political parties, not even the culturally
conservative-populist-nationalist government or the self-identified far right—at least not in the
sense they did in the British and Australian context. Concretely, on in Hungary, Netflix or even
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HBO has hardly figured in high-profile political discourses or cultural policy debates at all.
Accordingly, there has been no regulatory pressure, political or industry initiative, popular
movement, or related high-profile public debate under way with regards to OTT services or
premium television more broadly in Hungary. Netflix’s revenues are booked in the SVOD’s
Dutch headquarters that bill Hungarian customers, and the company pays the VAT (Value Added
Tax) to the Hungarian state (Kovács 2019). Hungarian Netflix has been considered by its
nominal competitors to remain a niche service and a fairly insignificant factor in the cultural and
industrial ecology of Hungary, at least for the foreseeable future. According to this view, the
country is too insignificant a market for a global company like Netflix to invest in serious
localization that would make it an essential service that would be in competition with the largest
domestic content providers. At the same time, the actual as well as the expected local activities
of these global companies have been surrounded by significant hype in popular, journalistic and
trade discourses on television and TV series specifically. Many industry professionals’ and fans’
aspirational fantasies about the Hungarian series revolution are strongly associated with HBO
and Netflix. Such appreciative and ambition-filled discourses project a new televisual golden age
in Hungary and the country’s cultural catching up and progress vis-à-vis Europe and the world:
in general, a kind of national revitalization through the emancipation of hit quality television.
Existing and expected local originals on part of HBO and Netflix, but even locally shot, high-
profile service jobs have generally been the subject of affirmation and enthusiasm on part of
commentators across the political spectrum and party affiliations. The main common
denominator among these otherwise vastly divided subjects is, I argue, a banal cultural
nationalism and an almost naturalized nationalist identity politics carried by the ideal of
transnationally mobile but authentically local original quality TV series.
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However, most recently and following sporadic and low-profile instances since about 2018,
by the second half of 2020 and intensely in 2021, for pro-government publicists and lay
commentators, Netflix and HBO have come to represent the “radical liberals” and their PC
“brainwash”, the “gay/LGBT propaganda”, and the “gender ideology” because of these media
companies’ foregrounded emphasis on the growing visibility of women, and racial, ethnic,
sexual, and gender minorities in their programs and among their creators. Netflix and HBO, after
a relative long period of cultural political dormancy, have been elevated into the Hungarian
culture war by professional and lay, rightist cultural commentators, who regularly identify the
wrongdoing of the US-based but global leftist-liberal side in the programs and corporate politics
of these two media companies. Their dismissal of Netflix and HBO and their shows does not
bear relevance to the Hungarian film and television culture and industry specifically; rather,
Netflix and HBO are identified as agents in a global, total culture war between the self-identified
conservative right and the socially liberal others largely equated with the political left, who are
seen by the right as having lost a sort of universal common sense. That is, the very recently risen
anti-Netflix sentiment in Hungary is an integral part of chauvinistic nationalism rather than the
kind of cultural nationalism that critiques on Netflix have been embedded in in the British and
Australian contexts. Also, while in the UK and Australia, discussions on Netflix prominently
feature the local national industries and economic effects, Netflix and HBO in Hungary are
evaluated negatively purely for their global politics of representation and perceived global
cultural impact executed through their programs.
In contrast to the UK and Australia, Netflix has functioned as a niche rather than mainstream
service in Hungary, at least until the 2019 relaunch of its linguistically localized version. The
latter may considerably boost its local uptake and assigned controversial political and cultural
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significance—as I described in the above paragraphs, Netflix’s increased visibility has already
given rise to its discursive inclusion into the culture war, as a perceived representative of
American PC and the LGBT and gender ideology. While in terms of market penetration,
Netflix’s numbers might have been modest, the global streamer’s power to orient cultural
discourses on television has been massive. Up until 2020-2021, the contemporary quality US
shows, and HBO and Netflix (as the two most prominent transnational OTTs in Hungary) have
had a dual status in the Hungarian context: mainstream insignificance, on the one hand, and
centrality among the professional, elite-intellectual and cultural expert, and TV fan discourses,
on the other. This duality should be illustrated by an interview series conducted by daily online
news portal 24.hu’s journalists Bence Inkei and Villő Jánossy between July 2019 and February
2020. Focusing on the Hungarian series revolution, Inkei and Jánossy’s special podcast was
called Sorozatlövő. Nincs tévém, de a sorozatok azért jöhetnek!, liberally translatable as
“SeriesHunter. I don’t own a TV but series are welcome!” The title signifies the widespread
intellectualist rejection of average broadcast TV, together with the contrasting embrace of recent
quality TV series. SeriesHunter’s interview series is introduced with the following fixed
headline:
“The domestic series boom is upon us, and at last, there is a growing number of quality
productions in the making here. We are discussing Hungarian TV with the producers
and the performers.”
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(Sorozatlövő, n.d.)
Inkei and Jánossy interviewed film and television producers, writers, directors, performers,
and programming directors, who expressed their views on Netflix’s current insignificance and
potential future role in the Hungarian context. Importantly, at the same time, these same creative
and industry professionals, when asked about their current favorite TV shows, listed HBO and/or

51
My own translation for “Nyakunkon a hazai sorozatbumm, és végre egyre több minőségi produkció készül itthon.
A készítőkkel és színészekkel járjuk körbe a magyar tévézést.” (Sorozatlövő, n.d.)
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Netflix shows (almost always only US ones), without exception. This basically indexes their
(implicit) perception of Netflix’s and transnational OTT’s dual status I also identify: they have
been relatively obscure in the mainstream but prominent among the highly educated and
professional classes. Concurrently, none of the interwiewees mentioned any local Hungarian
production by broadcasters as their personal favorite, despite the fact that many of these
professionals themselves have been working on such Hungarian shows and/or for the FTA
broadcasters. My own findings derived from my qualitative interviews with lay persons with a
tertiary educational degree are consistent with the quality TV dualism perceptible among the
industry professional interviewed in the podcast series. Namely, US “quality” shows accessed
through torrent or VOD services such as HBO or Netflix, take a central position in the media
consumption habits and cultural identities of these members of the professional and intellectual
segments of the Hungarian audiences. My interviewees often avoid broadcast television
completely, including its fiction, entertainment, as well as news and informational programs.
The current Hungarian series boom characterized by a “growing number of quality
productions” as Sorozatlövő’s headline puts it, was preceded by the wave of the US quality TV
around the new millennium. This reached the shores of the Hungarian TV landscape with a few
years of delay. Discourses of quality TV in Hungary started emerging at this time, that is, before
any local Hungarian series would have come close to being categorized as “quality.” On part of
filmmakers and the more vocal segments of the audiences, American quality series have strongly
figured as a subject of pleasure and admiration. The access to them provided by global streamers
such as HBO or Netflix has been a much-welcomed phenomenon. Hungarian audiences
traditionally constituted a disadvantaged segment of global audiences who generally had belated
and only partial access to the global hit TV series originating mostly from the US. Many among
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these dissatisfied fans became skillful at circumventing the temporal, territory-based hierarchies
of the corporate global distribution system through torrenting. Many Hungarian fans have
preferred the original, English-language versions of the programs in contrast to the dubbed ones
that sometimes appeared on Hungarian broadcast TV (if available at all), which also indexes
their distinguished cultural capital.
American quality television has functioned as the aspirational model for domestic TV,
though such ambitions for quality are usually tamed by the recognition of practical limitations
related to market size and financial resources. It is in such a landscape where HBO Europe’s
local commissions in Hungary (similarly to the case in other Eastern European and Southern-
Eastern European countries) intervened (see Imre 2018, 2019). Netflix entered this transforming
TV landscape—initially without any localized attention, including only very scarce subtitling of
programs.
In the coming paragraphs, I will offer an overview of Netflix’s history in the Hungarian
context. I will rely on both general and television-focused online publications, encompassing
news reports, essays and opinion pieces, and interviews on politics, technology, culture, and TV
series that discussed Netflix, streaming, and OTT, as well as statistical and other research
publications and press releases. 2016’s top 5 most popular online news portals Index, Nők Lapja
Café, HVG, Origo, and 24.hu (Kőműves 2016) will be among my main sources. To my
knowledge, the present study will be among the first academic historical accounts on Netflix in
the Hungarian market—a descriptive account that is necessary for my further analysis to stand on
solid grounds. Looking at Hastings’ company’s initial entry, I will argue that the case is not
simply that Netflix’s initial lack of localization resulted in a barrier to the platform’s local take-
up. On the one hand, the lack of linguistic localization was widely identified as the major
219
obstacle to wider audience take-up. On the other hand, however, as unusual as it may seem
compared to other national contexts, the initial lack of local Hungarian programs in Netflix’s
library did not figure at all in the journalistic, cultural expert or popular discussions on the giant
SVOD being newly available in the country. This glaring lack of contestation of or even taking
notice of, the lack of local content suggests the low cultural status and absence of audience
demand for more domestic programs or for their wider availability. Hungarian content is not
expected to be on a hype OTT transnational platform.
A Welcome American Guest Enters Through the Nation’s Back Door
Netflix entered the Hungarian market as part of its 130-country expansion on January 6, 2016
(Popper 2016, Szalay 2016). Like in most small markets including those in Eastern Europe, Reed
Hastings’ company did not pursue any marketing campaign before or upon its entry (Pintér and
Hack-Handa 2016). However, not only was the launch of their services widely reported in the
mainstream as well as more specialized media (e.g., Dzidzisz 2016, Sixx 2016), cultural and tech
columns and publications had already been regularly reporting on the SVOD years before its
entry into Hungary (e.g., akirály 2013; Sixx 2013, Czinkóczi 2015). Initial press reactions tended
toward qualified enthusiasm. Among the frequently criticized features were the small size of the
catalogue compared to its US and other national counterparts; the absence of a few hits such as
House of Cards
52
; and the lack of linguistic localization (dubbing or at least subtitling; e.g. Bátky
2016, winnie 2016). Referring to finder.com, online news portal 444.hu reported that in terms of
library size,

52
The first and second seasons of House of Cards, dubbed, first became available in Hungary on TVOD AXN Now.
Its Hungarian broadcast premier was on public TV channel Duna Television, which started to broadcast the dubbed
version of the first season in 2016. Notably, however, a segment of the Hungarian audiences had gained (and still
are getting) access to its original-language version via illegal torrent sites.
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“Hungary’s standing is very bad: among 184 countries it occupies #122; compared to
the American selection, only 14.7% of the television programs and 11.9% of movies are
available.” (erdelyip 2016, my translation)
Crucially, reviewers did mention let alone highlight the complete absence of Hungarian-
origin titles. This glaring lack of complaint about the absence of local content converges
with eNET’s 2016 research results, according to which only 16.1% of a sample of
Hungarian Internet-users representative of gender, age, and region consider the availability
of Hungarian series as an important or decisive factor when choosing a TV subscription
(Pintér and Hack-Hansa 2016: 75). This suggests that the majority of these users are either
content with the Hungarian content available on free-to-air broadcasters or they do not care
for it at all. In any case, the vast majority of them choose to pay for premium TV services
for reasons other than local content. Accordingly, around the time of its arrival, Netflix was
foregrounded by the press and television-related popular blogs as a service that would
provide comfortable, instant, and legal access to highly valued TV content that has generally
been equated with US content (though this equation is hardly reflected on). Significantly,
considering the typically low English-proficiency of Hungarians—about 1.8% of Internet
users stated they would watch content without dubbing or subtitles—Róbert Pintér and
József Hack-Hansa originally estimated Netflix’s potential subscriber base to be 80-100k in
the country (2016: 75). Indeed, based on this widespread dearth of linguistic skills and the
SVOD’s lack of paid advertising of the service, the platform practically targeted the niche
segments of English-speaking, up-to-date, tech-savvy users. Netflix’s spontaneous (10%)
and supported (28.5%) brand awareness just one month into their operation was thus
noteworthy (ibid).
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Hungary at the time of Netflix’s entry was also in an early phase of OTT penetration
even compared to other Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries (Dziadul 2017). At
the same time, and presumably further interfering with Netflix’s chances to expand, the
country’s online streaming, VOD and premium television market was already characterized
by multiple players and fierce competition (Pintér and Hack-Hansa 2016: 73). According to
the aforementioned 2016 eNET research, 42.2% of adult Hungarian Internet-users had used
at least one “competing service” within a year. The most popular among such services was
commercial FTA broadcaster RTL’s free catch-up service RTL Most (RTL Now) reaching
21.2% of Internet users who regularly watch television in some form, followed by premium
cable HBO and telcom company Digi’s multichannel video programming distribution
service Digi Online with 7.5% each (ibid 76). Other services, including HBO GO, had an
even lower user penetration at the time. Inquired by online news portal 24.hu, the two big
commercial broadcasters (RTL Klub and TV2), HBO, and telcoms (Telekom, UPC
Hungary, and DIGI) communicated their lack of (official) concern about Netflix and
basically asserted the SVOD platform’s irrelevance in the Hungarian context (Szalay 2016).
These more established providers used the occasion to promote their programming and
service being in native Hungarian or fully localized linguistically; the importance of
programming specific to linear TV (such as sports and other live events); locally specific
broadcasting-type programs (or in the case of HBO, the exclusivity of their quality
programming); and, furthermore, their own venturing onto the digital and online space in
accordance with the (anticipated) changes of audiovisual content consumption habits.
National and international commentators (e.g. Kishore 2018; Roxborough 2016) on
Hungary or Eastern European countries in general perceived the following factors
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interfering with the popularization of Netflix and other global SVOD services: (1) price, and
the comparable affordability of pay TV; (2) considerable preference for free services,
including the continuing strength of broadcasters and also piracy; (3) the supposedly
essential need for significant local original content to be present (which I, as already
signaled, consider to be highly debatable in the Hungarian context); and (4) the heightened
need for linguistic localization hindered by the smaller sizes of national populations. In my
assessment, it was Netflix’s lack of linguistic localization (of its existing library) that was
most commonly posited by Hungarian trade, journalistic, and popular discourses as the
primary obstacle to its wider uptake in the country. As RTL Klub’s creative director Peter
Herman put it in 2018:
“My realization about Hungary—which I honestly don’t get—is that even today’s 18-20-
year-olds do not speak English, which is chilling. So, they don’t watch Netflix because
they don’t understand it. Until Netflix provides dubbing, I gotta say it’s not really to
fear. To which I’d personally add: regrettably.” (quoted in Jánossy 2018, my emphasis).
It is notable how Herman, representing a commercial domestic broadcaster in a managerial
position, implies that the availability of Netflix would be something that is culturally desirable in
the Hungarian television landscape. Nominally representing the competition, Herman’s
expressed opinion on the value of Netflix in the Hungarian context is all the more telling. I argue
that his view is a representative example of a significant part of the professional-intellectual
classes in Hungary. A large ratio of these population segments distances itself from the current
rightist version of nationalism promoted by the Orbán government. Orbán’s agenda draws on the
myths of an ancient pagan Hungarian identity as well as Christianism, and has demonized not
only Muslims but, with great emphasis, the European Union and the “decadent,” socially liberal
“West”, too. Highly educated opponents of the government tend to take the side of the “West”
including its media and popular culture and oppose Hungarian backwardness and lack of
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linguistic and cultural savviness. Thereby, the Hungarian TV series boom reveals itself to be
embedded in postsocialist-postcolonial discourses with the structuring notions of “progress” and
“catching up” (see Böröcz 2001; 2012). Likewise, the educated classes in general tend to
criticize “lame” and “dumb” local Hungarian broadcast television exemplified by daily soaps,
and variety and talk shows. For the socially liberal, in contrast to typical domestic TV stands the
notion of higher-quality and smarter TV content usually represented by critically acclaimed
“quality series”. Many of such more sophisticated programs are distributed by, and typically
consumed on, online, on-demand and foreign platforms like Netflix. Online and on-demand
signify more sophisticated forms of media consumption, and Western “foreign” is associated
with culturally emancipated, higher-quality content. In Hungary as a relatively low-status and
less affluent country in the international context, where foreign-language competencies are
generally poor, watching TV in its original foreign, first and foremost, English language, and on
platforms outside traditional local Hungarian broadcasting indexes an elevated level of cultural
capital. Accordingly, Netflix operates as an embodiment of high cultural capital in the
contemporary Hungarian discourses, despite its lesser if any association with “quality” as a
studio and platform in many territories where it could more dominantly stand for the affordable
and the popular, or even “mass culture.”
The language issue seemed even more severe due to the long tradition of dubbing on
Hungarian television (Bella 2016), which makes the expected level of linguistic localization even
more expensive, time-consuming, and in need of special skills and local knowledge. It is worth
mentioning that the widely normalized practice of dubbing became a heated subject of public
debate in Hungary in 2018, after the Minister of Finance and Deputy Prime Minister Mihály
Varga and the National Competitiveness Council recommended the prioritization of subtitling
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foreign programs in order to facilitate foreign language learning (Index 2018). Hungary’s
perceived demand for dubbing stands in contrast to other CEE countries. For instance, in Croatia,
subtitles have enjoyed a wide acceptance; in Poland, voiceover is the dominant practice. The
normality of dubbing has also been identified as a heightened market entry barrier for OTT
content providers in Hungary by the National Media and Infocommunications Authority
53
’s
public, exploratory inquiry into OTT content providers’ effect on the Hungarian media system
(NMHH 7). Netflix’s localization in Hungary certainly lagged for quite a while, in contrast to
cases of other markets in the region, such as the much larger Poland, or the larger but even less
affluent Romania. Thanks to the swift operations of the global SVOD, compared to the 10% of
dubbed or subtitled programs available for Polish users in March 2016, by September viewers
could access the interface and 80% of the content in Polish—not to mention other forms of local
integration such as payment in local currency and through telcom bills, or the boosting of the
catalogue by local-national content (Dziadul 2016). No such local attention had been paid to the
Hungarian market until the fall of 2019.
X.IV.MMXIX. The Second Arrival
A minute after midnight on October 4, 2019, a newly localized version of Netflix launched in
Hungary, following the service’s similar adaptations in the region: not only Poland on September
20, 2016 (Netflix Media Center, 2016) but also, the curiously fast case of localization in
Romania premiering on May 23, 2017 (Netflix Media Center May 22, 2017; Marica 2017). The
global company’s intensifying attention paid to the Hungarian market was also signified by a
marketing campaign,
54
further strengthening the widespread and generally enthusiastic reports on

53
Nemzeti Média- és Hírközlési Hatóság, abbreviated as NMHH.
54
among them paid publicity, e.g., the same promotional article appearing in higher-class women’s magazine Marie
Claire October 17, 2019, and in trade journal MédiaPiac [MediaMarket] October 7, 2019)
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the new version mushrooming in mainstream and niche media on culture and media, technology,
and television. There was one common qualification to the generally celebratory tone: the
observation that with Hungarian settings, all the titles not available with Hungarian dubbing or
subtitles will disappear (and would only reappear when the site is reset to English, e.g., Zetas
2019). Again, no complaints about the low number or ratio of local-national content were made
in any single publication that I have come across.
Netflix’s Content Manager responsible for the EMEA region, Dorottya Székely, together
with Henning Dorstewitz , Director of Communications for DACH [Germany, Austria and
Switzerland] & CEE [Central and Eastern Europe] emphasized the following developments
besides the Hungarian interface: all Netflix originals will be dubbed (half of them were already
available as such) and all other contents were in the process of being subtitled; the goal of
picking up 50 Hungarian films until the end of 2019 among them Oscar-winning Son of Saul and
several other award-winning, independent as well as highly popular domestic movies, some of
them even getting worldwide distribution (Kovács 2019). Netflix’s representatives also
emphasized that the company had been shooting high-profile productions [as service jobs] in
Hungary (Andersen 2019). Netflix’s Content Manager for the EMEA region Székely expressed:
“as a Hungarian,” she “could not be prouder about the results” of the Hungarian localization of
the service (quoted in Marie Clarie) and about the Hungarian language joining the group of 32
languages spoken at Netflix (quoted in Andersen 2019). At the same time, Székely refuted the
rumors about a Hungarian Netflix original being in development, saying that the company is
currently not planning such a project (Szalai 2019).
Notably, a hypothetical Hungarian Netflix original has been the subject of growing
speculation, underscored by professional and cultural nationalist aspiration. Rumors have been
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circulating among Hungarian filmmakers and experts, and the question has occasionally surfaced
in the media on Hungarian television and filmmaking, too. Speculations have also appeared in
the high-profile international trade discourse: “Netflix May Target Russia, Eastern Europe,
Australia for Originals Next, Study Suggests”, reports Scott Roxborough (2019a) in the
Hollywood Reporter, referring to Ampere Analysis’ study. According to the research firm’s
director, “Beyond Netflix’s largest 30 markets, the next 10 biggest markets yet to receive
investment include major Central and Eastern European countries like Hungary and the Czech
Republic, and several Middle Eastern countries” (quoted ibid). Beyond the actual question of
when or whether a Netflix “local original” will become reality, what I want to emphasize about
such intensifying speculations domestically and internationally is the growing brand awareness
Netflix gains in this context, and the generally welcoming reception of the transnational
company in Hungary. In this national context, in stark contrast to the studio-platform’s divided
relation to “the national” in the UK or Australia, the idea of a local Netflix original has resonated
only positively with cultural nationalism.
The Status of Premium and OTT TV in Hungary as a Small and Non-Affluent Market and
Authoritarian Polity
Regardless of the iffy issue of just how many customers are subscribing to Netflix, “the
World’s Leading Internet TV” (Netflix Media Center 2019) has come to be the match of HBO
GO as leading the discourses on streaming since its Hungarian-language relaunch. HBO GO and
Netflix have been overwhelmingly paired up as the two rivals in the Hungarian “streaming war”
(Pénzcentrum 2019a). The discursive primacy of HBO GO and Netflix occurs despite RTL
Klub’s RTL Most platform already having launched their premium, pay-service RTL Most+ and
an SVOD exclusive original Nofilter (2019). That is, since its linguistic localization, Netflix can
be assumed to have gained enough new subscribers to be seen as prestigious HBO GO’s number
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one competitor in the Hungarian SVOD marketplace, with a strong practical division between
domestic broadcasters as providers and premium and OTT media companies.
There is no reliable data on subscription that would be accessible to the public or researchers.
Subscriber numbers, as it is the case with other territories, are not published by either Netflix or
HBO GO. Nonetheless, the latter recently announced that its Hungarian customer base tripled in
2019 compared to the end of the previous year, the platform attracting more users than in
Romania or the Czech Republic (Bujdosó 2019), and that its Hungarian subscribers constitute the
most loyal customer base among the 12 CEE countries, tying with the Czech Republic (Koós
2019). According to comparitech’s estimation, Netflix had about 122k Hungarian subscribers in
2018—significantly surpassing Pintér and Hack-Hansa’s 2016 original estimation; 139k in June
2019; and 157k by the end of that year (Moody 2019). Statista published radically different
numbers for 2018: 215k, increased from 138k in 2017 and 67k in 2016 (Statista Research
Department 2020). A recent Hungarian study by IDEA Institute—which used a sample of 2000
persons, representative of the adult Hungarian population in terms of gender, age, highest
educational degree, and type of settlement—taken after the launch of Netflix’s linguistically
localized version in 2019, reports that 25% of the population has a “streaming subscription such
as Netflix or HBO GO”, including 5% among them who are paying for more than one SVOD
(24.hu 2020). Persons who live in Budapest (39%); constitute the youngest, 18-39-yo age group
(33%); and have a higher-level educational degree (40%) are more prone to subscribing to at
least one such service. Only 7% of the adult population claimed they never watch films or
television series via streaming (or do not know if they do), which means that 93% are
(occasional or regular) users of some forms of streaming platforms. Unfortunately, IDEA
Institute did not gather data on the market share of different services. However, ad-hoc
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unrepresentative surveys published in the mainstream and specialized media generally indicate
the dominance of HBO GO on the Hungarian SVOD market, more recently followed by Netflix.
Financial news portal Pénzcentrum’s [Money Center’s] own survey (2019b) for instance, only
concretized HBO GO, Netflix, and the future Disney+ platform as options readers could mark as
subscribing or planning to subscribe to. 38% of their readers indicated that they subscribe to
HBO GO while Netflix came in second with 28%. HBO GO’s dominance is presumably due to
their established presence in the country, their fully and highly localized interface and catalogue,
their prestigious local original productions going back to 2011, and their cheaper price (HBO GO
in HD and on 2 screens is 1890 HUF, compared to Netflix’s Basic, Standard, and Premium
subscription for 2490/3190/3990 HUF respectively, though HBO GO’ s Hungarian library
currently consists of about 800 movies and 180 series while Netflix titles have been over 5000,
e.g. Pénzcentrum 2019a).
To sum up, in the Hungarian national context, while the actual market position and
subscriber numbers of the SVODs remains ultimately unknown to the public, the discourse on
“streaming” has definitely come to be dominated by Netflix and HBO GO. It is reasonable to
assume that these two SVODs are also the most popular paid services (most probably still less
widespread though than illegal and free forms of streaming and downloading audiovisual
content). In terms of SVODs specifically, both global (such as Amazon Prime or YouTube Red)
and domestic (like RTL Most+) seem to be lagging way behind HBO GO and Netflix in terms of
current subscriptions and, without a doubt, orienting public discourses. In the free, ad-supported
VOD marketplace, global platform YouTube, but also, the big domestic broadcasters’ catch-up
type services, especially RTL Most are significant.
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After demonstrating the status of Netflix and HBO GO as the leading SVOD services in
Hungary, my next step is to embed these providers in the context of television series production
and distribution in Hungary. I aim to illuminate their particular cultural potential due to their
transnational corporate and premium service nature in a national media ecology that has largely
been colonized by an authoritarian government and its business oligarchy. I will point out that
the relationship between transnational premium and OTT services (like HBO or Netflix) and
national (public or private commercial) broadcasters
55
is dominantly characterized by a deeper
practical division and complementarity, and no discursive war and moralistic binary
constructions between companies. These two types of services have enjoyed a quite peaceful
discursive co-existence in the Hungarian national context. Traditional national broadcasters’
greater practical division from and discursive amenity with Netflix is in stark contrast to the
British and Australian media ecologies, in which transnational OTTs and premium TV have been
practically more intertwined with traditional FTA broadcasters while also engaging in a quite
intense discursive war with them with regards to “national culture” and “national interests.”
Besides small market size and the general lack of English-language proficiency, it is the
relatively low socioeconomic standing of the majority of the country’s population that will be
discussed as underlying reasons for the greater peace between OTTs and domestic broadcasters
and their claims for regular eyeballs. I will propose that this is not only because of the lesser
financial affordability of premium and OTT services for such a population, but the lesser
affective affordability of watching “quality series.” Secondly, I will argue that in contrast to
many national contexts, public television in Hungary has not been and cannot be expected to
drive the contemporary quality TV and series boom. Instead, it is premium TV HBO that is

55
Their main, free-to-air-channels as well as most of their portfolio channels transmitted as part of cable and
satellite packages.
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widely perceived to have ignited the local “series revolution,” with the largest commercial
broadcasters, prominently RTL Klub having taken up the challenge posed by HBO’s new
standard. Netflix has raised hopes for creating outstanding local TV shows in future.
Notably, broadcast television in Postsocialist Hungary is arguably still in a “developing”
rather than “developed” phase; it lacks a quality tradition, and it does not export. The unusually
low cultural currency of the Hungarian public television, more specifically, as the creator of
high-quality, entertaining fiction worth of critical attention is related to several factors.
Importantly, the status of postsocialist public television has always been quite compromised, yet
it has reached unprecedented depths since the rule of the second Orbán government (2010-2014;
Polyák and Urbán 2016). The politically highly compromised status of the public television, and
its notoriously low viewership contribute to its obliteration from discourses on the Hungarian TV
series boom, even despite its incredibly bloated budget and its (disproportionately small but
existing) actual achievements in terms of original series production. I will demonstrate that there
has been an intense preoccupation on part of industry professionals, cultural experts, and fans
with the idea of a fully original local drama series being made and becoming an international hit.
This New Holy Grail of Hungarian Television, if you will, tends to be imagined to be backed by
either HBO or Netflix, or, perhaps, a domestic commercial broadcaster. Significantly, aspirations
related to the New TV Holy Grail, similarly to the case of the insofar most successful and
critically acknowledged Hungarian TV series, HBO’s Golden Life, are deeply embedded in a
banal cultural nationalism widely shared even by subjects who are critical about and vocal in
their opposition to the populist-chauvinistic nationalism practiced by the rightist FIDESZ
government. In fact, the emerging discourses on and concrete examples of Hungarian “quality
television,” as well as the service industries often catering to expensive and/or prestigious film
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and TV productions, have an appeal across the party political and ideological spectrum due to a
generally shared cultural nationalism centering on the ideas of exceptional national artistic-
creative talent. So much so that alarmingly, the FIDESZ government, with a proper sensibility
for global trends and the recognition of the compatibility between the globally trending quality
TV drama fetish and their own nationalist agendas, have further centralized the state support
system for film and television production and distribution and put a new focus on quality TV
series featuring national history. As a stated goal, such Hungarian historical series are supposed
to strengthen national identity. Quite likely, they could also help fuel nationalism in consistency
with right-wing populism, as well as affirm the government’s competency in the eyes of the
public. Through future successes in the area of quality TV series backed by the state, the
FIDESZ government may further serve the economic interest of their narrow business elite and
entrench their political power.
Globalizing Quality TV and Hungarian National Identity
Light Entertainment, Dark Quality: The Broadcast vs Premium TV Division
Because of radical global inequalities in terms of average income, “Netflix is a different
value proposition in each market,” notes Ramon Lobato (2019: 184). When I asked market-
leading broadcaster RTL Klub’s managing director Éva Kis-Bocz about the effects of global
SVODs on the Hungarian media landscape, she started her answer with stating that “Hungary is
a small country, a price-sensitive country, and a dubbing-sensitive country—these may be,
perhaps, the most important criteria” (personal interview, 2019). Kis-Bocz emphasized that in
Hungary, the price of Netflix is comparable to a cable subscription for 60-70 linear channels
together with their Internet service
56
, where everything is localized in contrast to Netflix and
Amazon. In RTL Klub’s managing director’s assessment in the summer of 2019 before Netflix

56
as some of the cable providers, especially the small ones like Digi sell surprisingly cheap services.
232
relaunched its localized version, the platform’s local insignificance was largely due to its
contextually high price and lack of linguistic localization. She noted the possibility of this
changing with the introduction of dubbing.
Indeed, Netflix’s roughly global pricing policy means that while the subscription is
considerably cheap in the U.S. or Western Europe, in other countries, the platform could only
serve the higher-middle classes and above, while in some countries, it can be de facto out of
reach except for a very few (e.g., Glenza 2015). Arguably, Netflix’s adjustment of its price has
been much more a matter of business strategy related to the saturation, competitiveness,
established consumer habits, and Netflix’s careful self-positioning in the context of a given
market than a fair adaption to average income. Notably, however, the importance of the
international market for Netflix has significantly grown and is expected to become even more
important in the future, among others due to the escalation of the streaming wars in the US and
the first decreases of domestic subscriptions (e.g., Mandavia 2019). For instance, while Netflix
used to operate with an absolutely elite price in India
57
, the company has recently introduced its
mobile-only, 2.8 USD-subscription to significantly widen its target audience in the country with
a population of 1.38 billion (Netflix Media Center 2019). The new plan’s success in India will be
followed by testing it in other markets (Mandavia 2019). In the Eastern European region, it is
only Romania where upon its market entry Netflix was priced cheaper than the standard fee—
though the company recently increased its prices for new subscribers (Alexe 2019). As of
February 2021, Netflix has not changed its subscription fees in Hungary since its 2016 entry.
Significantly, reports of the launch of its newly localized version in October 2019 often

57
For a while, Netflix apparently focused exclusively to capture India’s (still sizeable) transnational, English-
speaking elite: the basic subscription fee was equivalent to the general global pricing (about 7,5 USD that is about
500 rupees), whilst Amazon Prime Video’s yearly subscription went for 499 rupees/year equaling 42 rupees per
month (Lobato 2019:121-126).
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3. Figure: Precious Heirs
mentioned that there was no price change. That is, while the pricing may still be considerably
more expensive for Hungarians’ budgets, its value proposition has recently become more
advantageous.
Related to socio-economic issues is the TV industry truism that ultimately, light
entertainment including comedies or action- and spectacle-filled thrills always sell better than
dramas with dark and intellectually challenging content
(e.g., Herman in Herman, Inkei and Jánossy 2019). This
general idea is arguably more relevant in a national context that combine small population size
with the majority’s relatively low class standing. Hungarian TV and film professionals in
creative and managerial positions often reaffirm that what the Hungarian TV audience prefers
over anything else is laughing and vegging out (“kikapcsolódni” – literally, to “get switched
off”). According to prominent producer Gabriella Hámori
58
, the recent great popular success of A

58
Gabriella Hámori is a co-founder of ContentLab—a pioneering independent production company in the
Hungarian context, unique for its developing and producing projects without them being first commissioned by
broadcasters. As such, they follow “the American model” of developing a series and shooting a pilot through self-
financing, which they will present to broadcasters as potential buyers of whole series (Sixx 2019a).
2. Figure: Our Little Village
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mi kis falunk (“Our Little Village”, a weekly comedy series based on a Slovakian format) and
Drága Örökösök (“Precious Heirs”, a daily comedy series, the basic concept of which is based
on a Croatian series, but the Hungarian version is developed and produced by ContentLab)
delivered important insights to decision makers at TV channels. Namely, in producer Hámori’s
(certainly not impartial) assessment:
“…television should be brought closer to the viewer. Western European or American
formats and cultural references are often times not familiar, not close to [the viewers],
not friendly enough. Local flavor is needed much more than we would have thought. The
other big lesson is that the Hungarian people want to crack up. In the evenings, they sit
down, they watch [the programs], they crack up, their mood will turn better. This
country is so sad, we could use a little cracking up.”
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(quoted in Sixx 2019a, my
translation, my emphasis)
Likewise, in director Márk Radnai’s view, “Budapest is a different context” in contrast to many
small towns and villages, where Netflix or HBO do not even come up [as an option]” (Radnai,
Inkei, and Jánossy 2019). What many of these viewers use TV for, says the industry
professional, is “light entertainment:” what they want is “not to see stories but to forget what
happened that day, to relax for 40 minutes.” Now, the director argues, these expectations are
brilliantly met by predictable daily soaps or programs like reality show Love Island—in contrast
to grim shows about corruption like Golden Life. Thus, it is quite understandable that the large
commercial broadcasters keep scheduling light entertainment programs (ibid). The socio-
economic and consequential lifestyle-related reasons implied in such perceptions are sometimes
spelled out directly. Éva Kis-Bocz shares the view that the general preference for primetime TV
on part of mainstream Hungarian audiences is to laugh. Despite the major success of

59
My own translation for “Hogy közelebb kell hozni a tévét a nézőhöz. A nyugat-európai vagy amerikai
formátumok kulturális referenciák sokszor nem ismerősek, nincsenek közel hozzájuk, nem elég barátságosak. A
helyi ízre sokkal nagyobb szükség van, mint gondoltuk volna. A másik nagy tanulság, hogy a magyar emberek
röhögni akarnak. Este leülnek, megnézik, röhögnek, jó kedvük lesz. Olyan szomorú ez az ország, ránk fér egy kis
röhögés.”
235
Scandinavian noir across the world, series like The Bridge did not work on Hungarian
broadcasting, for instance; in fact, the whole Eastern European region resisted it. Instead,
“What we [Hungarians] like is when in our leisure time there is cheerfulness. So, we do
not like thinking about the big questions of life in the evenings ‘cause we got enough
problems already, and our financial standing isn’t that rosy either. Let’s take the
average, rural TV viewer, who is happy to get anything at 7pm—this is escapism,
practically. There’s still this longing [away from reality] going on here. (…) We devour
CSI Miami, in which everything is beautiful and shiny and detective women are
investigating in white suits at the Golden Coast. But we don’t like the kind of series
Deutschland 83 was a good example for. It premiered on RTL Klub 2 years ago and it
was a gigantic flop if I may put it that way. It is precisely about what we experienced in
the 80s and shows the Balaton [a lake and the surrounding popular holiday area in
Hungary] and the ugly apartment interiors and we are suffering and the East versus
West and so on. We don’t like that, we simply do not want to watch the things as they
actually happened. (…) We really like these feel-good, shiny, everyone-is-beautiful,
everything-is-bright, every-apartment-looks-good type of shows. Válótársak [a dramedy
based on Dutch RTL’s Divorce, the first weekly series on Hungarian broadcast that was
of higher quality] was able to set a great preference precisely for this reason: it depicts
a Hungarian reality that is only lived by very few people—nice cars, Buda side villas
(…) –viewers got the sort of longing fulfilled that they had not in Hungarian [TV]
productions before.”
What Kis-Bocz and other
professionals insightfully suggest is that
the consumption of dark, edgy, socially
critical, and intellectually challenging
fiction with a setting too close to (local)
social reality—arguably the prominent
embodiment of quality television in the platinum age—correlates with socio-economic status.
That is, the Bourdieuesque relationship between taste and class translates in the contemporary
context of quality television series that is associated, in general, with premium TV, notably HBO
but increasingly produced and carried by newcomer transnational SVODs like Amazon and
4. Figure: Divorce
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Netflix as well. Dark, edgy, critical intellectual as quintessential cultural quality, complemented
by production-value related quality, and a familiar social setting is the TV of the privileged not
only in terms of owning and operating advanced technology or linguistic proficiency as required
by the main distributors of the relevant content but also in terms of textual qualities.
Correspondingly, general broadcasters, following the multichannel era, have not simply lost a
great deal of their viewership who have started preferring a wide range of smaller thematic cable
channels mushrooming on the highly fragmented Hungarian market. Instead, presently, the
largest private broadcasters RTL Klub and TV2 are disproportionately preferred by older, 60+
people; the North-Great Plain region (the poorest region of the country); people living in small
towns; and people with the lowest educational levels (Illés 2017). While both RTL Klub and
TV2 are part of larger portfolios that also contain more niche-oriented channels with much lower
viewerships, given the small size of the Hungarian market, these smaller sister channels cannot
help but operate on small scales, usually characterized by cheap original non-fiction programs
and as outlets for reruns, or sports broadcasting, for instance. Furthermore, in the online on-
demand space, especially as SVODs, the domestic broadcasters have not built a strong presence.
Consequently, dark quality programs especially with a “local flavor” (i.e., set in a familiar
social setting that hits close to home), even when scheduled on the largest of the free-to-air linear
channels by RTL Klub or TV2, have failed to aggregate enough viewers. The only attempt so far
at a darker and deeper, locally produced weekly crime series on a broadcaster in Hungary,
Alvilág— “Underworld,” based on Dutch series Penoza—ended just after its 2-month run in
2019.
237
Despite its prime-time
scheduling on market leader RTL
Klub on Tuesdays, its A-list
screenwriters and critical and
popular success feature film Liza,
the Fox Fairy’s renown director
Károly Ujj Mészáros, Underworld
failed to attract audiences. The
show was hyperbolically deemed by a
high-visibility online publication to
make history as RTL Klub’s first original production that flopped
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(Origo 2019; TK 2020). The
show’s main actress, multiple award-winning Móni Balsai—well-known for her roles in theater
and in HBO Hungary’s Terápia and When Shall We Kiss?, and RTL Klub’s Divorce, who is also
Ujj Mészáros’s wife—questioned the categorization of Underworld as a failure, at least
according to what she thinks would be the realistic expectations based on scheduling, genre, and
the incredibly low budget and short production time they had at their disposal (Balsai, Inkei and
Jánossy 2019). According to Balsai, in fact, it is the Internet where everyone goes to watch TV
series, and here is where Underworld, too, has found its rightful place and audience since. That

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Factually speaking, this is a false attribution. Some earlier original series decidedly flopped or were deemed
underperforming at their time on RTL Klub. For instance, Casino produced by Filmteam and directed by Miklós
Szurdi, was cancelled after only 3 episodes in 2011 due to the show’s poor audience share. The latter sank to 19%
by the 3rd episode, which was considered inferior for its prime-time scheduling where US series habitually delivered
over 30%, according to RTL Klub’s programming director Péter Kolosi (Origo, March 2, 2011). RTL Klub’s boldly
new yet miserably failed attempt at a Matrix-inspired action series was Első Generáció [First Generation] in 2000,
which never continued after its 10-episode first season. Another clear case of failure was Limonádé [Lemonade]
(2002)—a sitcom that tried to ride the wave of Friends that had reached Hungary by the time, similarly to TV2’s
Tea. While there had been some attempts at situational comedies on public television in the preceding decade, the
poor quality of Limonádé and Tea were, at least partially, attributed to the lack of sitcom tradition and skilled
creators in the Hungarian context (Kalmár 2012).
5. Figure: “Underworld. The Family is Sacrosanct. But not Inviolable. New
Series from February 19, on Tuesdays at 9:10pm. Catch -up on
RTLMost.hu”
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is, the actress suggests that Hungarian linear television and the large broadcasters are ill-
positioned to produce high(er)-quality TV drama.
The Local Politics of Globalizing Quality TV: Is There a Nationalist-Cosmopolitan
Contradiction?
There is a significant divide in terms of everyday mass consumption and more expert,
industry, and cultural and TV buff discourses in Hungary. This is actually similar to other
national contexts. Much of what constitutes edgier quality drama today is consumed by
(transnational) niche rather than (national) mass audiences. However, in small markets such
as Hungary, the local niche may be too small to matter in itself and could only do so as part
of a wider transnational community.
One significant dividing factor between mass and midcult versus niche and edgy
“quality TV” content is perceived to be socioeconomic status (including factors such as
income, educational level, and occupation), as I have already argued. That is, in an already
small market, low affluence (even among the highly educated) may further shrink the size of
potential niche audiences interested in quality drama. Indeed, while the Hungarian series
boom and the developments related to HBO and Netflix have been widely and prominently
featured in Hungarian media and comprise a great deal of vibrant industry discourses and
speculations, there are segments of the Hungarian population that are more or less
unaffected by the recent cultural and technological trends of “quality” drama shows and
transnational SVODs. Naturally, the most critically acclaimed series or those deemed
significant for cultural, political, or economic reasons in the context of the Hungarian public
sphere are not the same as the ones most massively followed. The first season of Golden Life
started the series’ bathing in critical acclaim unprecedented for any local television shows:
HBO’s drama show was named as the best domestic TV series of the year by several
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professional and popular fan publications, including Origo (where the runner-up was RTL
Klub’s Divorce, Bella and Kalmár 2015) or Sorozatjunkie (Wallace 2020). At the beginning
of 2016, the well-known TV critic of one of the most popular news portals Index, Sixx
published a piece on 2015 that “was a big year for Hungarian series” (Sixx 2016b). He
reviewed 7 productions from 2015, and in the relevant survey, the readers selected Golden
Life as the best series (2236 votes), RTL Klub’s Divorce as the runner-up (736 votes), public
Duna Television’s Summer Fling as the third one (231 votes), while public MTV’s
Poppyseed Roll gained a mere 101 votes, coming only before two cheap and amateurish
series and an arguably obscure threepartite TV play. Around the same time, between
December 2015 and January 2016 (Golden Life’s first season ended on linear HBO by the
end of December 2015), a domestic telco company carried out a non-representative online
survey with 5000 participants. According to Intel’s research, the top 10 most liked TV series
in Hungary were: 1. The longest-running Hungarian daily soap, RTL Klub’s Between
Friends (1998-2021) 2. RTL Klub’s Turkish import soap Suleiman 3. TV2’s domestic daily
soap Jóban rosszban (“Through Thick and Thin”, 2005-) 4. Walking Dead 5. Game of
Thrones 6. The Mentalist 7. Bones 8. The Big Bang Theory 9. NCIS 10. Criminal Minds
(KTL 2016). This survey shows that in terms of everyday television consumption habits,
soaps, both local and foreign, keep enjoying widespread, perhaps even unbeatable,
popularity over content conventionally regarded as higher quality. It is also notable,
however, that despite only being distributed by HBO or illegally available via torrent sites,
HBO’s gigantic fantasy drama, and one of not the most popular global hits of recent years,
Game of Thrones came in fifth.
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Could we posit a political-ideological binary between the texts and the viewers of HBO-
type local drama series and other, internationally acclaimed “quality television”, especially
“dark”, “edgy”, and “socially relevant” shows, in contrast to the viewers and textual nature
of old-fashioned television dominated by local and foreign daily soaps, nationally based
talent and variety shows, and some mainstream imports? Between, on the one hand, pioneers
and close followers of the Hungarian series revolution and vehement critics of the public
television, and on the other, agents and viewers unbothered by or non-vocal about their
liking of, international-American quality TV and even less so, local quality drama series? If
so, how could one explain the quite unequivocal domestic acclaim of series like Golden Life
and the relevant emerging local trend being simultaneous with the entrenched power of the
culturally and ethnically chauvinistic FIDESZ government? How could it be that a
transnational media company’s local original show on the postsocialist criminalization of a
family man, with its saucy depiction of a fictional Budapest underworld, is celebrated across
a country otherwise divided and ruled by the chauvinistic-nationalist FIDESZ government
and their continuing colonization of the Hungarian media and the public sphere? What is the
unifying appeal of the emerging Hungarian quality television that bridges the political and
cultural canyon between pro- and anti-government forces? In other words, how are we to
understand the “glaring contradictions,” present in the countries of postsocialist Eastern
Europe, “between the unimpeded flow of international television and the retreat into
defensive, ‘illiberal’ modes of governance” (Imre 2019: 4) in the national context of
Hungary? Continuing Aniko Imre’s reasoning on the region-specific, strong connection
between “Quality [TV] and Nationalism” (ibid 9-11), I would like to further consider this
pondering nationalist-cosmopolitan contradiction. My contribution will be based on two
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pillars: first, the wide plasticity and compatibility of cultural nationalism with various
political ideologies and party affiliations; and secondly, my argument on “quality” drama’s
recent worldwide becoming a prominent site of cultural nationalist projections.
The emergent international visibility and consumption of “local original” shows from
territories have incited some optimistic speculations about “quality drama … fostering
political tolerance and open-mindedness” (Imre 2019: 9). However, as Imre argues, being
open for a globalizing television landscape and the travelling of shows and formats can sit
comfortably with retrograde ethnocentrism and other forms of chauvinism bourgeoning in
the same context. For instance, on the one hand, in Eastern European countries,
“HBO’s transnational aesthetic, production values, and filmic quality fulfill a high
cultural preference for art that has been a cornerstone of cultural nationalism in Eastern
Europe. However, parting with art film’s elitist address, HBO’s quality dramas offer
widespread access and a broad popular appeal—a kind of entertaining quality aesthetic
and language that had not existed before due to the cultural-nationalist value gap” (Imre
2018: 55)
On the other hand, however, this emergent trend of mobile quality TV tends to be subsumed
by “the ordering force of cultural nationalism” that entails the “possibility of its inadvertent
support for populist nationalism” (Imre 2019: 9). Concurrently, I argue that quality TV series,
much more potently than auteur cinema, embody an uncannily smooth compromise and potent
nationalist bond between the intellectual-elitist and the popular. As such, it can build a political
bridge between relatively progressive and liberal subjects who are also banal cultural
nationalists, and rightist populists embracing chauvinistic forms of nationalism. Such rightist
populists in power dexterously hybridize chauvinist nationalism and a neoliberal economic order
through building a culture industry that aims to strengthen a nationalist identity and reap the
fruits of commercial success, while granting abundant “support” for a narrow circle of oligarchs
trading in culture. More concretely, I argue that there is a state quality drama television project
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being prepared in Hungary, with a thematic focus on an idealized national history. This state
quality TV project exemplifies the threat that the worldwide trend of cultural (and economic)
obsession with local original quality drama entails as a magnetic site for cultural nationalist
projections. These threats include the ignition and mutual appropriation of nationalism and
neoliberal cultural policies. The synergy between nationalism and the globally trending quality
drama series entails a double effect on global cultural diversity. On the one hand, as I argued in
Chapter 2, global mainstream television is diversifying in the sense of internationalization. Hit
shows are diegetically set in and coming from a widening range of territories involving
individuals who inhabit a growing selection of countries. On the other hand, the policy,
industrial, and creative preoccupation with nationally framed “local originals” also entails
processes of cultural homogenization insofar as it pressurizes a high concentration of resources,
including public resources, on a limited number of very expensive large-scale programs that also
fit a relatively narrowly defined global trend.
In the first and second chapters of this dissertation, I discussed the current trending of
“locally authentic” and transnationally mobile quality drama as increasingly operating as a
prominent international currency of nationalist identity politics. The related multiculturalist ideal
of a global TV community comprised of equal but unique cultures has been successfully
marketed and mainstreamed by Netflix. In the words of Netflix’s Co-CEO (2020-) and Chief
Content Officer Ted Sarandos, “the most authentically local the show is, the better it travels
[internationally]” (quoted in Bylund 2019). Importantly, the basic units of unique and valuable
cultural difference are most often implied to be national states, reinforcing basic nationalist
thinking and affects compatible with hotter nationalisms. Such banal nationalism especially in
the sphere of “innocent” culture has a very wide potential across the political spectrum. For
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instance, oppositional television critics in the Hungarian context, who are very critical of the
current chauvinistic-nationalist government and their colonization of the media do express their
satisfaction at the thought of some Hungarian series finally living up to international standards.
They assess such TV shows as the proper subjects of pride on part of “us” Hungarians (Sixx
2016b) rather than simply representing and belonging to the relevant creators and other industry
professionals. That is, critics and experts such as Index’s Sixx perform cultural nationalism while
rejecting the chauvinistic-populist nationalism of the current government. Likewise, a
cosmopolitan sensibility in terms of TV consumption may very well go hand in hand with a
residual nationalism that cherishes the idea of unique national talent and excellence that would
deserve international recognition as per nationalist identity politics. Indeed, regardless of the
actual reach and popularity of the relevant shows, in Eastern Europe, the emerging HBO-type
local quality drama exemplified by Golden Life has come to be constructed as a matter of
national self-expression and a new forum for national art to circulate and be recognized by the
international community (e.g., Batori 2018). This new type of TV series stands in contrast to the
decades of locally confined national fiction television production, deemed to be of modest
quality and scale, and safely differentiable from cinema. It could be seen as paradoxical that the
local-national adaptations of an international trend and often concrete formats can smoothly
titillate nationalist sensibilities centering on exceptionalism and uniqueness. However, this
contradiction between the autonomous and unique nation and its very relational-contextual
nature sits at the heart of nationalism in general (e.g Anderson 1991: 5-6; Billig 1990: 61).
People’s relation to different categories of television helps us attend to the nuances and
ambiguities of national identity and cultural nationalism. For instance, the consumption of
darker, more critical, and edgier shows, especially when watched with its original, foreign-
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language (usually, English) soundtrack associated with torrenting and transnational streaming
usually entails a sense of distinction from a derogatory kind of Hungarian national identity.
According to such derogatory, negative national identity quite significantly present in
contemporary Hungary, Hungarianness stands for things like low quality TV (and the preference
for or acceptance of it), and the lack of linguistic and (inter)cultural skills. This construction of
Hungarianness is centered on backwardness and parochiality not simply geopolitically and
economically but in the cultural sense, too. However, aspects of a negative and as such, rejected
national self-identity may sit comfortably with expressions of a positive, aspirational national
identity attached to the subject of local original quality TV. Furthermore, despite right-wing
populism’s generally anti-elitist anti-intellectual stance, it usually works well together with
cultural nationalist aspirations built around ideas of national artistic-creative talent and
excellence. In fact, considering the image of TV as more commercial and more popular in its
address than art cinema, the current centralization of quality drama TV series for cultural
nationalisms makes TV a more potent ally and cultural nationalism a more potent synergistic
ideology with populist nationalisms than national auteur cinema. This greater bridging between a
ubiquitous cultural nationalism and a narrower, radical chauvinist-populist nationalism is what
makes internationally mobile quality TV drama a highly suspicious political object.
Not only is cultural nationalism as such ubiquitous and highly compatible with a range of
political commitments, but it is also the case that the textual nature of most quality drama series
is extra multi- and ambivalent due to its heightened “complexity” as “quality” content (see Mittel
2015). Such elevated polyvalency entails the text’s superhigh flexibility in terms of its implied
politics and ethics. This textual complexity and the basic interpretative liberty of audiences (see
e.g., Hall 1973) are especially relevant in the case of Hungarian quality TV because the series
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produced so far by HBO, though embedded in social realism and satire, are actually far from
being overtly politicized, especially not in contemporary party-political terms and powerful
references. One does not need to think about or even know much about Hungarian history or
contemporary political reality in order to make sense of and enjoy Golden Life as a text—though
knowing those certainly enrichens one’s interpretative horizons. Just because someone supports
the government, their colonization of the media and their particular cultural products, it does not
follow that they would reject HBO’s quite revolutionary and critical shows as “oppositional” or
too “liberal.” Not to mention that the personal enjoyment of certain cultural texts is not
equivalent to but may be in tension with once’s committed politics and the views one publicly
endorses. For prominent actor and activist Ervin Nagy, Golden Life was the bold project that
“dared to” approach the absurdity and adventurousness of the regime change and contemporary
Hungarian reality—due to the liberty of free speech provided by HBO’s position as a premium
commercial TV unbound by the necessity to be in line with the government’s agenda (Nagy,
Inkei and Jánossy 2019). However, Golden life may be enjoyed by someone who is also a friend
of the current government—especially if an avid crime series fan, to whom the main point
foregrounded by Golden Life could simply be national talent, or perhaps, an indirect
reaffirmation of family and Christian values through a detailed and colorful representation of
what could happen if they are forgotten about. That is, while in academia, HBO-type quality
drama is often associated with social criticism and thus, as a text of progressive political
sensibilities, such association is more than questionable in terms of their reception. Watching
progressive television, especially “dark” and “edgy” crime series, does not entail progressive
politics on part of the viewer; especially as revolutionary “local originals” can easily be primarily
framed in retrograde nationalist terms.
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Further highlighting the nationalist framing of the global rise of international “local
originals”, I want to emphasize that in Hungary, the rise of travelling, quality non-US
international shows as a phenomenon in its own right is not a detectable part of discourses on the
streaming or the series revolution. This obliteration of mainstream TV’s internationalization is
similar to the cases of the UK and Australia. By now, non-American TV shows and films make
regular appearances on Netflix’s “Top 10 in Hungary Today” lists; likewise, certain non-
American shows do appear in Hungarian discourses on streaming, quality TV, and the series
revolution occasionally but only as individual examples rather than signifying a comprehensive
diversification of global TV. Notably, in general daily news portal Index’s in-house mini survey
on the best TV series of the 2010s, Narcos came in 6
th
right after Game of Thrones and it was
named as the best Netflix series of the decade (Sixx, 2019c). TV critic Sixx introduces the series
as a “bold undertaking” on part of Netflix due to the show being partly Spanish-speaking and
featuring Latin-American performers. However, these comments stand alone in implying the
issue of nationality and that the greatest TV shows might be other than English-speaking at all.
Indeed, Narcos was the only non-English speaking series, and one among the two non-US series
(next to British Black Mirror) not only in the top 10 but in the top 30 named by the popular
publication. Notably, in his intro, Sixx reflected on the perhaps unfortunate overrepresentation
on the list of more recent series over older ones, and the greater ratio of streaming platforms
versus “traditional television” especially network TV. However, importantly, the issues of
national origin or language were not even mentioned as similar bias: that the “best TV” is
dominated by US shows is something that goes without saying. In Hungarian discourses in
general, the touchstone of quality TV and entertainment value have (still) been unquestionably
US-series. European quality TV, too, does come up sometimes in industrial and expert
247
discourses as a point of comparison and a more realistic level to which to aspire on part of
Hungarian shows as the standard of US-affiliated hit shows would be way too high to aim at.
Other continents, countries, or any other location do not figure in association with quality TV.
Industry, expert, and fan discourses on streaming, quality television, and TV series revolve
around the US and concrete American shows and the national self, with honorable but merely
general mentions of “Europe”.
One factor behind this obliteration of the international diversification of the SVOD and series
revolution should be, in Hungary and many other countries, the traditionally greater and
normalized presence of at least some (non-US) foreign content on TV. In contrast to the US as a
traditionally self-sufficient and closed TV market, the higher levels of a variety of international
imports entails a less radical contrast between the non-US foreign and the domestic, as well as a
lesser contrast between earlier and more recent levels of consumption of and familiarity with
non-American foreign shows. For instance, in Hungary, similar to other CEE countries, Latin
American telenovelas has been present for decades (Havens 2007: 226). This even included
examples like Brazilian telenovela Escrava Isaura (Isaura the Slave Girl) being scheduled for
prime-time and reaching 80% ratings on Hungarian state television in the 1980s (Biltereyst and
Meers 2000, in ibid). In Hungary, not only has been a significant amount of international content
scheduled on linear TV both in socialism and postsocialism, the high-level of localization (i.e.,
the normalcy of dubbing) of imported programs has also helped soften the sharpness of
domestic-foreign differences.
The Series Revolution and National Ambitions: The New Holy Grail of Hungarian TV
Speculations about the success or failure of past, current, and future local Hungarian series
and how those are related to the programs’ commissioners and platforms —such as actress Móni
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Balsai’s deliberation about the factors behind Underworld’s short life on broadcast television—
are embedded in the wider discourse on the ongoing “series revolution”
61
in Hungary. Indeed, it
is the widespread perception among industry players and cultural experts that there is a series
revolution on the rise in Hungary (Inkei and Jánossy 2019). Publications on this local “series
boom” started mushrooming in the 2010s with the prelude of the celebration of the new golden
age of US TV series reaching the shores of the Hungarian media landscape and public
consciousness. Hungarian fans accessed the new and hype “quality shows” (such as The
Sopranos, Sex and the City, or Breaking Bad) on premium TV HBO, free broadcasting, DVD
purchases, and to a presumably considerable extent via illegal services. Celebratory discourses
on a more narrowly defined, specifically local “series boom” of domestically produced shows
flared up around 2015. 2015 was the watershed year when Golden Life, the most critically
acclaimed Hungarian TV series in history until present, premiered on HBO. Both the quantity
and the quality of Hungarian series are seen as being on the rise after the first two poor decades
of postsocialism, the 1990s and 2000s. According to trade discourses, HBO Hungary’s local
originals, especially Golden Life, have raised viewers’ expectations and set rather challenging
new industry standards in the context of Hungarian television.

61
Terms such as “sorozatforradalom” [“series revolution”] or “sorozatbumm” [“series boom”] have become
ubiquitous in Hungarian professional and fan discourses on television.
249
7. Figure: In Treatment
HBO Hungary’s truly notable original local productions have been all adaptations. First came
Társas Játék (When Shall We Kiss? 2011-2013), a midcult piece focusing on the intertwined
romantic relationships of six characters, set in Budapest, and based on an
Israeli original. It gained some recognition as differentiating itself from
Hungarian TV series in general. Terápia (In Treatment, 2012-2017) is
more commonly mentioned as a significant milestone in local TV series
production. In Treatment is an episodic
show mostly using the single set of a therapist’s
office, based on the somewhat intellectual-elitist
concept of following individual sessions between a psychotherapist and
his patients. In Treatment is an adaptation of the globally successful
Israeli original BeTipul (2005-2008). And then came the much darker
and edgier Aranyélet (Golden Life, 2015-2019), a crime drama about a
con man, a sort of average Joe who wants the good life instead of what he would be predestined
to have in postsocialist Hungary—but then he gets entangled in the underworld. The series has
reached a new level of critical acclaim and gained unprecedented hype, widely perceived to be of
“quality” never seen before in Hungarian TV productions in terms of production values, writing,
explicit representations, and well-executed visuals. In other words, Golden Life, as a dark and
edgy drama associated with some sort of social realism vis-a-vis past and contemporary
Hungary, is regarded as the first Hungarian production that lives up to international standards of
[American] quality series. Concurrently, HBO is operating as the industry trendsetter and definer
of quality in the local context. Commercial broadcasters, especially RTL Klub, but also, Sony’s
6. Figure: When Shall We
Kiss?
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8. Figure: Golden Life
channel Viasat are also seen as trying to take up the challenge and boosting their original local
production in the territory.
HBO Hungary’s pioneering ventures onto higher quality fiction series have greatly facilitated
the emergence of what I want to call the New Holy Grail of Hungarian Television: the
preoccupation with the first, fully “original” as in locally developed and produced Hungarian
quality TV drama to reach popular success and sweeping critical acclaim, both domestically and
abroad, gaining international recognition for Hungarian talent. Those series that have been
deemed the best so far are also known to be based on a foreign series or concept, which still
signifies, to many, an earlier developmental phase of what should come in the future of
Hungarian series. This includes Golden Life: though seen as surpassing anything that has come
before it in the category of Hungarian TV series, it is still noted to be lacking in complete
originality as it was based on Finnish series Helppo elämä (2009-2011) instead of being HBO
Hungary and local talent’s “own development.
62
”
The category of adaptation seems to be a
sticky one; for example, it is only the very first
episode of Golden Life that is closely based on
the Finnish original; and from Season 2 onward
the Hungarian script completely abandons the
Finnish one. Adaptation implies a fixed and stably inferior position in the cultural hierarchy that
celebrates a specific construction of “originality” rooted in Romanticist ideals related to
authenticity and art, which were born together and are still intertwined with modern nationalism,

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“Own development” is a mirror translation for the Hungarian term “saját fejlesztés” (more properly translated as
“original development”) much repeated with regards to the New Holy Grail of Hungarian TV and in the context of
the series boom in general.
251
as I have explained in Chapter 1. This “format discount” and the idealization of a mythic
“originality” comprise an organic part of the strong cultural nationalistic framing of the series
boom and the New Holy Grail of Hungarian Television. That is, similar to the British and
Australian cases, cultural nationalistic fantasies and ambitions permeate the whole discourse on
TV and streaming, and, more specifically, on “quality drama series,” which are expected to
embody and bring recognition for the national cultural identity and talent. The Hungarian
discourses on the series revolution and streaming further strengthen my argument that
transnationally mobile local original “quality drama series” have operated as a prominent
international currency of nationalist identity politics.
Indeed, The Hungarian Holy Grail of an internationally mobile quality drama series is far
from being a nationally unique phenomenon. Contextual variations notwithstanding, I argue that
it can be assumed to be a general phenomenon across national contexts with aspiring but
historically humble TV cultural industries. Sue Turnbull and Marian McCutcheon (2019), for
example, characterizes Australian series from Tasmania, The Kettering Incident (2016) as being
“[t]outed as the first adult TV drama series to be conceived, written and filmed entirely in
Tasmania (…) hailed by the press as a ‘local’ triumph; an exemplar of a developing genre,
‘Tassie gothic’; and a boost to Tasmania’s economy” (2019: 407). The series was simultaneously
promoted, domestically and internationally, for its affinity with other “transnational crime
dramas” such as Top of the Lake and the Nordic Noir (ibid), which signifies the quality series’
operation as an international currency with national variations, rather than something truly
unique. In further accordance with the logic of cultural nationalism and nationalist identity
politics, Vicki Madden, the Tasmanian-born showrunner of Kettering said that the series would
“put Tasmania on the world stage” (quoted ibid 404). Notably, Kettering received support from
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Screen Tasmania, Screen Australia, pay-TV Foxtel and BBC Worldwide, and was later acquired
by Amazon Prime for the US. Thereby, Amazon Prime as a transnational SVOD contributed
greatly to the show’s international visibility and frictionless and risk-free sampling opportunity
by masses of non-domestic viewers. I argue that The Kettering Incident’s immersive national
framing and subjection to international aspiration in Tasmanian discourses exemplifies the global
currency of local original quality TV for nationalist identity politics. This very loud and proud
embodiment of nationalist identity politics is very much synergistic with the much more implicit
and surreptitious logic of neoliberalism and its imperatives to internationally expand and
compete for the sake of profit. Transnational hit quality TV series, when framed in terms of the
expression and recognition of national culture, talent, and pride, can serve nationalisms and
neoliberalism simultaneously.
Several players in Hungary emphasize the inescapable learning curve that should precede the
incredibly challenging endeavor of producing a high-quality and internationally successful drama
series from scratch. This is what actor Ervin Nagy emphasizes, who is arguably the most
prominent male actor of his generation in Hungary, famous for his roles in theater, film, and
television, including shows on HBO, RTL Klub, and MTV. He is also starring RTL Klub’s A
tanár [The Teacher, 2018-present]. a higher-quality weekly dramedy series and adaptation of the
German show Der Lehrer (2009; 2013-). The star actor considers this midcult series to be “a step
toward” a fully original Hungarian drama series to achieve domestic and international success
(Nagy, Inkei and Jánossy 2019). Along the same lines, RTL Klub’s creative director Péter
Herman, when asked about format adaptations—which has been a common practice at the
market-leading commercial broadcaster—in contrast to original script development, also
emphasized how adaptations are an essential part of a learning process that will eventually lead
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to a fully original series as the end goal (in Jánossy 2018). Notably, the creative director
highlights that while a fully original show is a more challenging venture it can also bring in
greater business:
“It is so much better to sell rather than buy a script. You get more money; it is not only
about happily checking off our Hungarianness and sense of self. Of course, you do check
those off, but we are doing business.” (quoted in Jánossy 2018)
The note on “checking off our Hungarianness” by the creative producer responsible for
drama and entertainment programming may be somewhat satiric but it nevertheless exemplifies
the pervasive implicit and explicit references to national identity, talent, and pride in relation to
quality drama aspirations. Herman’s thoughts do not only underline a connection between
positive national identity and film and television. Rather, his performance of RTL Klub’s brand
also entails the promotion of television as a medium with a larger, more popular appeal
compared to feature films:
“I consider national film production to be immensely important and I am proud of it,
too; however, we see our prestige in making series that are more and more up to par,
successful and Hungarian, which often reach more viewers than theatrical features”
(quoted in Jánossy 2018)
Crucially, such banal cultural nationalism generally underlies the expressed aspirations of
persons who are openly and vehemently critical of the nationalist FIDESZ government and the
political culture is Hungary. For instance, star actor and critic of the current regime Ervin Nagy
has talked about his current plans for a script he is preparing together with scriptwriter Márk
Bodzsár:
“…cause the pinnacle of everything, in my opinion, is developing an original script,
with our own Hungarian screenwriters, played by Hungarian actors, financed by a
Hungarian [private] commercial broadcaster, with a Hungarian breakthrough, reaching
28% [SHR], and making a series that will be then bought in Europe (…) My real desire
as an actor is this: that we produce something like this so we could say we are the small
little regional HBO and ‘look how talented the Hungarians are. They don’t only get the
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Oscar, and they don’t only give Europe their best actress
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, but they also do this well.’”
(Nagy, Inkei and Jánossy 2019)
Cultural powerhouse Nagy’s words help illuminate how the ubiquitous industry and popular
ideal of The New Holy Grail of Hungarian Television is saturated with a banal cultural
nationalism. Nagy envisions the first fully original, international breakout quality drama series
from Hungary as signifying a heroic national creativity that shines through the nation’s small
size and marginal geopolitical position. Intriguingly, in Nagy’s aspirational image, Hungary
itself becomes “a small little regional HBO,” metaphorizing the nation and its talent as a locally
specific but globally appealing transnational quality media company. According to this metaphor
of Hungary as a corporation, the nationally unique, authentic talent is already there yet it needs to
find its expression through transnational quality TV. This curious metaphor also signifies the
much-endorsed cultural status of HBO in Hungary.
Currently, it is mostly American TV series by HBO and some other, US-based transnational
companies such as Netflix that constitute the main positive models for Hungarian creatives to
aspire to. When asked about his future aspirations, director Márk Radnai said he would love to
approach the genre of youth series differently from how he was able to with Holnap Tali! [“See
ya tomorrow!” 2016-2018] a show commissioned by the Hungarian public television (Radnai,
Inkei and Jánossy 2019). The director mentioned Norwegian PSB NRK’s Skam and HBO’s
Euphoria as great examples in the teen series genre. Consistent with the general TV series fever
and envisioning the Holy Grail among local scriptwriters, Radnai, just like star actor Nagy, is
currently preoccupied with developing a fully original series. He wants to utilize both his
experiences of the past years and, as he put it, “foreign [“külföldi”] models.” Similar to Radnai’s

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Nagy is referring to Alexanda Borbély—his girlfriend—winning the European Film Award for Best Actress in
2017 for her portrayal of Mária in On Body and Soul (dir. Ildikó Enyedi).
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being inspired by the recent international developments related to the abundance of ever greater
TV series, TV scriptwriter, story editor and tutor Eszter Angyalosy also finds the international
TV series landscape replete with “experimental” shows to be “unbelievably exciting” (in
Angyalosy, Inkei and Jánossy 2019). Angyalosy had worked at HBO Hungary, before her and
another ex-HBO creative manager, Gábor Krigler went on to found independent TV series
development company Joyrider primarily oriented toward the international rather than the
Hungarian market. Angyalosy herself has currently three original series in development that they
are trying to sell—two among them for the international, and one for the domestic market.
Most often, it is transnational companies—first and foremost HBO, but also Netflix, AMC,
or Amazon—or the large private commercial broadcasters (most commonly RTL Klub), who are
thought to have the most potential for coming out with a much anticipated fully local original
quality drama series. Importantly, public television is obliterated as a potential candidate; with
some rare exceptions, when Hungarian Television (MTV) is mentioned at all it is its
compromised position that is highlighted. Prominent writer-screenwriter István Tasnádi (e.g., In
Treatment, Golden Life, or MTV’s television feature film Memo) is an exceptional example for
someone who gives more credit to the public media, instead of fully dismissing its role in the
context of the Hungarian series boom and its future (Tasnádi, Inkei and Jánossy 2019). At the
same time, concurring with a basically unanimous view of HBO’s pioneering the Hungarian TV
series landscape, Tasnádi credits the premium cable and OTT service with having been unique in
the Hungarian context as providing proper time and resources for long-term script development
necessary for great quality (Tasnádi, Inkei and Jánossy 2019). Writer-director Orsi Nagypál
(personal interview, 2019) also highlighted the “generosity” in terms of time and resources put at
the creators’ disposal during shows’, such as In Treatment’s developmental phases at HBO—
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which Nagypál finds to be in stark contrast to the rushing through writing and shooting that is
typical when working for the big commercial broadcasters. Just like screenwriter Tasnádi or
writer-director Nagypál, scriptwriter and story editor Eszter Angyalosy also finds such
generosity with time and creative support provided for scriptwriters developing series at HBO as
essential to reach high quality (Angyalosy, Inkei and Jánossy 2019). According to Angyalosy,
private commercial broadcasters in Hungary, understandably, work with a “very suppressed
budget” and are, consequently, forced to expect fast work on part of scriptwriters, like producing
8 scripts within three months. Such expedite development not only entails the necessarily limited
quality of the script but also means that private commercial broadcasters in such a small market
are not able to provide a stable opportunity to make a living for local scriptwriters who want to
specialize in TV series. Concurrently, in Angyalosy’s assessment, it is premium television,
especially transnational SVODs that are well-equipped to commission local prime drama. She
thinks that Netflix, Amazon, and other such players entering the European markets are not
necessarily interested in “us as Hungary, but as Central Europe or as Eastern Europe we can be
interesting.” Angyalosy firmly believes that what matters in today’s globalizing TV landscape is
good and internationally viable stories; “even Americans are willing to read subtitles (…) and
dubbing is also an option.” The challenge is to build a channel through which to reach those
transnational media companies with the relevant story, preferably with a good IP attached. The
Hungarian breakout “is going to happen pretty easily, and it is going to happen sooner than we
think”—says Angyalosy. As an alternative to the local-language series possibilities, she also
mentions that there are already a number of Hungarian scriptwriters who write in English and
who are very much in demand.
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Tasnádi’s, Nagypál’s, and Angyalosy’s experiences with HBO Hungary in contrast to
working for the broadcasters are consistent with the accounts of other local creatives: even in the
case of more recent, higher quality series made for commercial networks, production but
especially development still tends to be way too rushed for true quality to emerge (e.g., Balsai,
Inkei and Jánossy 2019). Therefore, Tasnádi and other professional have expressed great regret
about HBO’s taking a break of unknown length from producing new series in Hungary; however,
Tasnádi emphasizes the significance of the experience many Hungarian writers have already
gained in the writers’ rooms of the company. According to the scriptwriter, the knowledge
gained does transfer and spread across the local industry. As an example, Tasnádi mentions
Virág Zomborácz’s case whose experiences as a scriptwriter for Golden Life clearly affected the
quality of her work as the writer and director of public channel Duna TV’s Egynyári Kaland
[Summer Fling]. Tasnádi has doubts, however, whether there will be enough audience demand
for high-quality series in the long run, except for the case of cable channels that target niche
audiences. Significantly, a niche approach is quite improbable to affect private broadcasters or
even the public television in the Hungarian market. When asked about the expectation of a
Hungarian Netflix original, Tasnádi says he is “not well-informed” about “who will, emboldened
by the success of HBO’s original production” venture upon the same route. Regrettably, that is
not the tendency he is detecting “even though it would be, of course, damn good for us if AMC,
too, would come out with [a local] original or Netflix, too.” In Tasnádi’s relatively less
optimistic assessment, support for the kind of series he deems worthy could possibly come from
premium cable, commercial broadcasters, and public television alike—though all these options
appear to be improbable to him at the moment. More specifically though, it is affluent, niche-
oriented channels that are best positioned to help a truly good series to be born, given the need
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for long-time development and financial resources, and the orientation to address smaller
segments of the audience. Director Márk Radnai also has reservation about the private
commercial broadcasters’ ability to partake in quality TV production. While he is sure that
“among the Hungarian creators, the Hungarian filmmakers, there must be there, I’m sure, 8-10
stories of ours that could be shot within the next 5-6 years and which could be viable
internationally” (Radnai, Inkei and Jánossy 2019). However, he thinks it is a crucial question if
the relevant scripts could gain financial backing from those TVs whose audiences “may not be
there yet,” i.e., private broadcasters that first and foremost take into account ratings and shares,
that is, market relations and the need to address a mass audience.
Authoritarianism, Public Television, and the Future of Hungarian “Quality” Series
The Professional and Popular Discrediting of Hungarian Public Television
The above opinions of Hungarian industry professionals index a widespread appreciation for
transnational media companies in the country. Hungarian creators and other talent place their bet
on and invest their hope in platforms like HBO and Netflix, and niche channels, with regards to
the future of Hungarian quality series more than other players such as the fully localized
domestic private or public broadcasters. Significantly, the discrediting of the Hungarian public
television with regards to the future of prime drama rests, to a great extent, on MTV’s
colonization by the FIDESZ government entrenched in power since 2010. Correspondingly,
actor-creator Ervin Nagy regards HBO as a premium television’s liberty to be only and simply
market-oriented and remain unaffected by local politics to be a great advantage. In Nagy’s view,
HBO’s strength and local political independence make it prone to produce socially relevant and
critical quality TV:
By the way, our history, so to speak, and what is happening here [in Hungary] around us
basically predestines us [Hungarians] to be able to make fantastic absurd series, and the whole
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regime change is adventurous, and what has been happening since. Take Golden Life where they
did dare to do this. The good thing about premium commercial TV is, by the way, that it is free,
that is, it is market-oriented, instead of ‘what will they say upstairs, in the party center’—it is a
very important function of it.” (in Nagy, Inkei and Jánossy, 2019)
Crucially, as public figure Ervin Nagy’s words exemplify, in the contemporary authoritarian
“illiberal democracy”
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of Hungary, it is private commercial television, premium service HBO or
domestic private broadcaster RTL Klub, which comes to be seen as helping make up for the
severe democratic deficits embodied by the compromised functioning of the public media
including, very much, public and much of private television. As Aniko Imre has already argued
(2019), in the context of polities severely hit by authoritarianism, powerful corporations
independent from the government can be perceived as the last havens of media freedom and as
such, carrying great cultural potential. This is in sharp contrast to contexts that are less
democratically challenged, where profit-making as the core agenda of media companies is
habitually deemed as an essentially compromising factor in cultural production.
The anticipation and aspirations on part of producers, creatives and cultural experts
embracing transnational media companies and their obliteration or criticism against the public
television imply that none of the fully original series created so far by MTV are relevant
candidates for the title of local quality series. Surely, the locally developed and produced series
on part of the public broadcaster never made it internationally—nor domestically, for that matter.
However, some of these original shows are of considerable production values and would actually
deserve more honorary mentions than it is usually the case. In the following sections, I will
explore the causal factors behind this discursive erasure of MTV from the aspiration-, hope- and

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On the ideology and practices of illiberalism in the Hungarian context, see e.g., Halmai 2019; Wilkin (2018).
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pride-filled discussions on the domestic series revolution and The New Holy Grail of Hungarian
Television. These factors include: the missing quality tradition and the ongoing “developing”
status of national broadcasting; the economic and ideological corruption of public television (and
other parts of the public and private media) escalating since the inauguration of second Orbán
government, and their hardcore shift toward an authoritarian-ethnicist neoliberalism and
“systematic ‘cronyism’” (Fabry 2019: 136 ); violence-, sexuality- and other obscenity-related
representational conventions and taboos on broadcast TV; and an unusually low viewership.
In order to carefully consider the industry, expert, and popular discursive obliteration of
public television from the Hungarian series boom, I want to argue that the specific relationship
between domestic broadcasters and global streamers in Hungary is significantly affected by the
particular history and recent operations of the public television. In general, European PSBs
following the BBC model, historically and in the contemporary context, have been well-
positioned to commission programs that are deemed of high cultural and artistic value, including
content that cannot expect to appeal to a mass audience. PSBs’ special position compatible with
quality, innovative, and niche content production and distribution is due to their public service
mandate and their relatively lower, less direct exposure to market forces, at least compared to
private, fully commercial broadcasters (ratings/shares, advertisers, and the ultimate drive to
produce profits—see e.g., Bourdon 2004)—though such PS distinction, as argued in the
Introduction for Part II, has been under threat.
Importantly, Hungarian public television misses a quality tradition (Virginás 2018 in Imre
2019: 10). As Aniko Imre argues, in postsocialist Eastern Europe, “’quality TV’ has remained a
foreign idea,” still mostly referring to American series, primarily by HBO or other cable
networks, Western European broadcasters (notably the BBC), and, more recently, global
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streamers like Netflix (Imre 2019: 179). Crucially, this traditional division perceived between
quality and Hungarian domestic television is still powerful.
There is a seeming contradiction here. Namely, on the one hand, the Hungarian Television
does not figure as one with significant merits in terms of the series boom or as a common site for
hopeful projections in high contrast to HBO, commercial broadcaster RTL, and, increasingly,
Netflix. On the other hand, however, MTV was actually unique in continuously producing fully
original, weekly series way before the current wave of the Hungarian series boom, consistently
allocating considerable resources for this purpose—although many of the shows produced by the
public network during early postsocialism failed to attract viewers and were also considered to
be of inferior quality. In general, the first two decades after the regime change, especially the
2000s, have been regarded as the dark age of Hungarian series, even hitting rock bottom in terms
of the quality of original television series production (Inkei 2017; Krigler, Inkei and Jánossy
2019; TóCsa 2018). According to creative producer, and former producer and lead writer at HBO
Gábor Krigler, one relevant factor is that the institutional gap and financial crisis of the 1990s
also entailed the neglecting of proper focus on and training for screenwriters who would be
skillful at telling stories (Krigler, Inkei and Jánossy 2019).
Regardless of the exact causes for the two dreary decades for Hungarian series in terms of
popular or critical success, unquestionably, MTVA (the Media Service Support and Asset
Management Fund)
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and its predecessors have spent large amounts of money on a number of

65
The FIDESZ-KDNP coalition established the Media Services Support and Trust Fund (Médiaszolgáltatás-
támogató és Vagyonkezelő Alap) in 2010, as part of its all-encompassing centralization of state media. MTVA
became operational in 2011. The Fund merges the four state-owned and -operated media (Hungarian Television,
Duna Television, Hungarian Radio, and Hungarian News Agency). The Fund is managed by the National Media and
Infocommunications Authority’s (NMHH’s) Media Council (Médiatanács). NMHH’s five council members are
elected by the parliament (where the government has had a two-thirds supermajority). NMHH has been heavily
criticized for suppressing media freedom (see e.g., Fabry 2019: 138).
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series. In fact, the combination of suspiciously high budgets and the lack of producing
memorable shows has been part of MTV’s tainted status. The public television has not only been
operating as a government mouthpiece in terms of news, informational and some other programs,
but also as the network that greatly helps allocating public money in ways most beneficial to a
narrow business elite who are the ruling party’s allies bound by personal loyalty. It is important
to emphasize though that fictional programming on public television, as opposed to most non-
fiction—news, informational, entertainment, and educational programming—cannot be said to
be ideologically compromised as a whole. There have been numerous fictional programs that are
relatively apolitical or not consistent with the ideologies promoted by the Christian-conservative
chauvinistic authoritarian regime, and the creatives behind of which do not belong to the
government’s clientele. At the same time, not in textual but in trade and management terms, the
public television has been an institution strongly tainted by the colonization and
misappropriation on part of an elite at the expense of public service and a loyal management of
public monies. For instance, many of the recent TV series commissioned by MTVA have been
produced by producer Gábor Kálomista’s Megafilm production company, including Hacktion
(2011-2014), Munkaügyek (“Employment issues” 2012-2017), Fapad (“Wood bench”, referring
to low-cost airlines, 2014-2015), Egynyári kaland (Summer Fling, 2015-2019), Csak színház és
más semmi (“Just Theater and Nothing Else”, 2016-2019), or Tóth János (“John Doe”, 2017-
2019). By 2016 already, Megafilm had received state commissions worth 3 billion HUF (about
10 million dollars, a conspicuously large amount of money in the Hungarian context; Rényi
2016). The production company had been for long the beneficiary of other forms of state
support, as well as a concerned party in suspicious film and TV transactions between public and
private companies (Vorák 2010; Bodoky 2011). Significantly, the media mogul’s wife, Zsuzsa
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9. Figure: Media Mogul Gábor Kálomista as the
president of Veszprémi Építők Sports Club (source:
m4sport.hu)
10. Figure: Media mogul Lőrinc Mészáros with Prime
Minister Viktor Orbán (source: hvg.hu)
Kálomista was also MTVA’s Director of Content Sales & Acquisitions and Archives between
2011 and 2017. Besides his production company, Kálomista has also been the president of the
Hungarian Ski Association, a Hungarian handball team, the director of Thália Theater, and the
director of the National Cultural Fund’s Festival Academy (generously supporting Thália
Theater, Átlátszó 2013).
Kálomista and his wife’s case illustrates Orbán’s building of a postcommunist Mafia State, in
which the prime minister is the Padrino with a narrow circle of oligarchs coming from his actual
as well as adopted family, with whom they practice overwhelming control over the country
politically and economically (Magyar 2016). As Tamás
Sárközy notes, there is hardly any other “democratic”
country (except for some African and Latin American
dictatorships), where a close-knit group of 10-20
persons, with a long-term friendship to the prime
minister and knowing each other since young adulthood, share the key positions of state power
(2014, in Fabry 2019: 146). Accordingly, the owner of an expansive regional and national media
empire, and the world’s nr. 2057 richest person
in 2020 with a net worth of about $1.2 billion,
Lőrinc Mészáros is originally a gas fitter from
Viktor Orbán’s home village Felcsút. He
emerged to be one of Hungary’s most influential
businessmen in 2017 when he created no less than 82 companies that won public tenders worth
over a billion dollars (Fabry 2019: 145; hvg.hu 2019; Forbes 2020).
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Press reports on the high budgets of the many series commissioned by the MTVA in critical and
oppositional publications present the fabulous budgets in terms of shadowy deals, corruption,
and payments way over market prices, exemplified by titles such as “Public media pays another
660 million to Kálomista’s firm” (KB 2016, see also Medvegy 2015). Kálomista’s production
company has been one of the narrow range of firms and people who have been repeatedly
benefiting from the state’s selective largesse and the often times huge profits that were made
when fictional and non-fictional programs were sold to public television (FG 2018). The point
for my present purposes is that the recent large spending on content by public television is first
and foremost framed as a matter of corruption on part of progressive and critical media (or what
has remained of the latter since the FIDESZ party’s systematic destruction of democracy and
media freedom), which approach is all the more validated because at least some parts of the
granted public monies will not actually feed into the productions. That is, the democratically
crucial informing and criticism on part of the oppositional media fighting government autocracy
and corruption inadvertently help obfuscate the issue of the MTV productions’ narrative and
aesthetic characteristics and positive cultural potentials. To confirm, while some relevant titles
have indeed been intertwined with propaganda and/or appeared to be pretexts for public money
misappropriation rather than legitimate pieces of work, many titles produced and distributed by
public television still have merits and are far from being determined as texts by the wider context
of their financing. Undoubtedly, many of the series so far produced have not been up to par with
international standards of quality in terms of many aspects of the writing—notably, themes, the
narrative, social realism, and language, —directing, or performances. However, unequivocally,
many of them have increased their production values in ways that are consistent with the current
trends toward and expectations related to “quality television series.” Ultimately, a few of these
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public TV series could be considered as important steppingstones at least as significant as shows
like the much more acknowledged and popular Divorce (Válótársak, 2015-2018) on RTL
Klub—yet they usually are not.
While many among the fictional programs on public TV have not been affected by
ideological directives, the threat of growing political propaganda looms large in relation to TV
series, too. RTL Klub’s Creative director Péter Herman loves working in commercial instead of
public television because of the former’s clear-cut way of measuring success (Herman, Inkei and
Jánossy 2019). Significantly, when asked about the Patronage’s recent, 2019 directive to produce
historical films and series, Herman stressed that this could only be beneficial if there is the
option to think freely; if such production, however, requires the construction of a certain kind of
politicized historical memory, the fate of such series would be sealed as “cultural suicide.” Put
differently, Herman implied that the state project of producing grandiose national historical
series may be embedded in propaganda. The tendency to politicize such projects, as well as them
being expensive, is why Herman regards his own dream production—a series about the
Hungarian myth of origin and finding the Finno-Ugric ur-motherland, made in the style of The
Vikings (2013-2019)—as lacking any realistic basis.
While a direct and comprehensive political attack on fictional TV representations’ freedom
of speech is not yet a reality, other limitations regarding realistic and edgy representations do
apply. In series director Márk Radnai’s experience upon working on Holnap tali! [Catch you
tomorrow!, a 2016 youth series produced for MTVA and originally distributed via the web only
and later transferred to linear channel M2]:
“On Hungarian Television, naturally, one could not show anything that would have
gotten close to reality, starting with the characters not being allowed to give a peck on
the lips. So you can surely imagine how we could make a high-school series. They could
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not talk about anything that’s not parent-compatible.” (Radnai, Inkei, and Jánossy
2019).
Basically affirming TV journalist Bence Inkei’s assertion about the lack of daring series
being produced by Hungarian public TV in contrast to many European PSBs, Radnai concluded
that pioneering experimentation is not among the functions public TV fulfills in Hungary.
Consequently, Radnai’s hopes for coming out with some groundbreaking, truly original
Hungarian series lie, rather, with the commercial broadcasters, including Sony’s Viasat who
have also started investing in Hungarian originals. As Barbara Hámori, producer and founder of
series developer and production company ContentLab put it in 2019:
“Currently it is awfully hard to achieve success on the entertainment channel of
Hungarian public media. Its ratings are so low, they just cannot bring the viewers there.
Being a producer of fiction programs, this is tantalizing to me, because it is the public
TV where higher quality content or genre could be experimented with; a really good
crime series, for instance.” (quoted in Sixx 2019a, my translation)
With the help of the illustrative quote by this prominent local producer, I argue that
Hungarian public television’s cultural status and potential to become the flagship for the
Hungarian series revolution has also been deteriorating due to its drastic drain of viewership.
One telling example: in 2018, M4 Sport, the public sports channel, was the only public channel
that made it into the top 10 total share among 18-59-yo-olds, with its 2.99% (vs the winner RTL
Klub’s 10%); while the public TV’s main channel M1 came in 12
th
(2.04%). The same data for
prime time only: M4 Sport 3.72% (compared to winner RTL Klub’s 14.90%), followed by the
second best-performing public channel, M1 that was #15 with 1.53% (based on TV Sales and
Nielsen data, CRT 2019). To use another example related to weekly series specifically: in April
through June 2019, Duna TV’s youth comedy series Egynyári kaland (“Summer Fling”)
attracted 60-123k per episode in Saturday’s prime time (starting at 7:30pm), while the
viewership of RTL Klub’s comedy series A mi kis falunk (“Our Little Village”) was about 10x
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the size (764k-967k; starting at 8pm). Illuminating the state of things more is the fact that MTVA
has repeatedly presented its own ratings in misleading ways (atlatszo 2013; Varga 2014) – even
losing a lawsuit it started against online publication Index that revealed MTVA’s falsification of
viewership data on its day-long show on September 27, 2014, Magyarország, Szeretlek!
[Hungary, I Love You!] (Hvg.hu 2015).
Hungarian TV Series Premiering in 2015: A Comparative Case Study
To underline the lack of popular or critical breakthrough on part of MTV’s series, I will use
the comparative cases of public television’s Kossuthkifli [archaic term for traditional Hungarian
dessert Poppyseed Roll] and Egynyári kaland [Summer Fling] both debuting on Duna TV;
Válótársak [Divorce] premiering on RTL Klub; and the first season of HBO’s Aranyélet [Golden
Life], all coming out in 2015. Importantly, 2015 is the year that is widely regarded as a milestone
for Hungarian television series; often as the very start of the revolution of (higher) quality series
(e.g., Sixx 2016c). 2015 is the year, for instance, when online publication sorozatjunkie’s yearly
online awards JAws—founded in 2007—first introduced the very category of “Best Hungarian
Series,” apparently not relevant in previous years (Wallace 2016). By popular vote, Golden Life
won JAws best series by 1485 votes, an overwhelming majority before Summer Fling (465) and
Divorce (343), while Fapad [Wood Bench] came in 4
th
with 165 votes, and Poppyseed Roll
gained 66 votes, a mere 3% of the votes distributed among the 5 candidates (ibid). In mainstream
daily news publication Index’s survey among readers with regards to 7 candidates, Golden Life
got 2236 votes, about three times as much as Divorce (736 votes), and about nine and a half
times the votes Summer Fling received (231 votes), while Poppyseed Roll gained a humble 101
votes, only coming before two cheap and amateurish series and an arguably obscure threepartite
TV play (Sixx 2016c). Generally, as I will further demonstrate, Golden Life’s domestic reception
was without precedent; Summer Fling or especially the rather spectacular and ambitious
268

12. Figure: Screenshot from Poppyseed Roll
Poppyseed Roll, despite their considerable budgets, cinematic attributes, and other merits, did not
even come close to Golden Life’s reputation, but not even to the level of appreciation that RTL
Klub’s quite mediocre Divorce received.

11. Figure: Budapest billboard advertising Poppyseed Roll
To elaborate, I will juxtapose these series’ estimated production budgets and apparent
production values, primary
distributor, popular and critical
reception, and how and to what
extent they have been referenced in
journalistic discourses on the
Hungarian series revolution in the
past few years.
269
13. Figure: Publicity image for Summer
Fling
14. Figure: Summer Fling
Poppyseed Roll premiered on public channel Duna Television in March 2015. The six-
episode, 53-min each, historical-fantasy-adventure-comedy set in 1849 had a budget of 816
million HUF, thereby safely qualifying as a super-production in the Hungarian context. It was
adapted from multiple award-winning contemporary writer Béla Fehér’s novel, directed by Péter
Rudolf, a prominent and very popular actor-director, and featuring a group of very well-known
Hungarian performers.
Summer Fling is a youth-oriented, comedic series the first season of which premiered in
April 2015. It is about a group of high school graduates
spending their summer at lake Balaton. It had an
approximately 300 million HUF budget for 6, 52-minute
episodes (Sixx February 16, 2016). This first season was
written by
TV writer
András M.
Kovács
and hip movie director Zsombor Dyga. It
features newcomers in the main roles of the late teenagers while many well-known actors played
the older characters.
RTL Klub’s Divorce is a format adaptation that debuted in November 2015. Its first season is a
10-episode dramedy with 40-42-minute episodes, focusing on three men going through a divorce
or breakup, who end up moving in together. It had a budget of 4-500 million HUF (Sixx 2016b).
It was directed by TV director Dániel Kovács unexperienced in fictional genres; while written by
270
15. Figure: Golden Life
16. Figure: Divorce
A-level screenwriter Norbert Köbli together with Kálmán Gosztonyi, based on the Dutch
original. It featured celebrity and prominent performers in the main and supporting roles.
The first season of Golden Life,
consisting of 8 episodes 48-58 minutes
each, also debuted in November 2015
on linear HBO and subscription on-
demand service HBO GO. It had an
estimated budget of 800 million
(Jánossy 2017). It is a dark crime drama with some dark comedic and satirical elements. It
features a family with the father living a double life as a criminal; eventually all the family
members get tangled up in the underworld. The debuting season of Golden Life had a highly
prestigious group of creatives behind it: it was directed by Zsombor Dyga and Áron Mátyássy,
written by István Tasnádi, Virág Zomborácz, and Márton Bárány, and featuring both renown
performers as well as young talents.
Poppyseed Roll was a
limited miniseries; Summer
Fling ended after its fourth
season in 2019; the final third
season of Divorce aired in
2018 similarly to Golden Life.
All these four weekly series had high (Summer Fling; Divorce) or superhigh (Poppyseed Roll;
Golden Life) production values considered in the Hungarian context. They were all shot on
271
multiple locations and featured a level of cinematic quality and visual variety clearly exceeding
the traditional televisual and multiple-camera aesthetics. Poppyseed Roll’s viewership on Sunday
nights sank from the first episode’s 435k (broadcasted on the biggest national holiday celebrating
the 1848 revolution, March 15) to 130k by its finale. Summer Fling scheduled at 7:30pm on
Saturdays gained 159-369k viewers per episode. Divorce had 652-859k viewers on Thursday
nights (starting at 9:30pm). There is no available data for Golden Life’s first run on HBO or its
on-demand viewership. In terms of their critical reception at the time, all series were generally
well received, however, Divorce, and above all, Golden Life gained the most and most positive
attention. The reception of Summer Fling included moderately favorable but usually not too
passionate, as well as mixed, and also negative reviews, with the storylines, dialogs and
characters often deemed to be irrealistically sterile, forced or “gagyi” [“lame, cheap,
bootlegged”] (which has changed for the better in later seasons according to Kovács Bálint,
2017; see also Sixx 2016c; Desmond Wallace 2015). That is, the subject of criticism largely
aimed at writing, while the visual aspects and production values did not really figure in these
reviews (as they often do in reviews on Hungarian shows). Divorce was often constructed as the
first decently executed weekly series by commercial broadcaster RTL Klub (after catastrophic
earlier attempts, such as Első Generáció [First Generation] or Casino)—as a very promising
start for commercial broadcasters to join the series revolution (e.g., Sixx 2016b). At the same
time, Divorce’s dramaturgy, cinematography, and some of the performances were often and
rightly criticized. In turn, the sensationalistic, celebratory publicity surrounding HBO’s third
local Hungarian high-quality series was unprecedented. Golden Life quickly came to stand for
the first truly modern Hungarian show worthy of international attention, a breakthrough for
Hungarian television entering a new era—the best Hungarian series ever made without any
272
similar antecedent. That is, for many, Golden Life refuted the strongly negative national self-
identity attached to television and Hungarian TV series specifically: it was the best-ever
Hungarian show because it was the least Hungarian as we know it on TV.
Golden Life’s unmatched celebratory hype and critical success is all the more significant
when considering it in contrast to the unfortunate case of public TV’s Poppyseed Roll. Notably,
Poppyseed Roll was actually even more expensive than Golden Life, and it did, likewise, show
the money on screen. Star actor-director Péter Rudolf’s historical-fantastic series featured—
uniquely in the Hungarian context—1148 well-executed special visual effects constituting 90
minutes of screen time (Hirado.hu 2015) on top of top-notch settings and costumes; and an
arguably innovative combination of genre elements. Criticism on the show usually focused on
the controversially unusual historical-fantasy language (originating in the novel the series was
based on), and the dragging narrative, while visuals were generally praised (Wallace 2015). In
prominent TV critic Sixx’s assessment (2016c), for instance, Poppyseed Roll came out as “one of
the most beautifully shot (…) absolute nonsense.” It was a widely mentioned fact that Poppyseed
Roll fits the nationalist agenda of MTVA that prioritizes projects that feature Hungarian history.
While many related film and television projects under the FIDESZ government received
enormous financial backing, similar to Poppyseed Roll, their execution and distributional
practices have been heavily criticized as propagandistic, artistically inferior, involving firms and
creators who are associated with the political elite and thus as the wasting and embezzlement of
public money. While Poppyseed Roll’s reception was much more positive than earlier historical
projects enjoying enormous state support, it failed with audiences. Importantly, it has not built a
legacy, either. In fact, it is almost completely obliterated from contemporary expert discourses on
the Hungarian television revolution—despite its spectacular budget, visuals, and arguably
273
17. Figure: Poppyseed Roll
innovative characteristics. However, I would argue that in retrospective, Poppyseed Roll could
be recognized as precisely the kind of quality niche programming that has come to be primarily
associated with the global streamers and that which has dominated the global discourses on
“quality TV.” Admittedly, it is not a dark crime drama with social criticism aimed at the
Hungarian reality—thus, it is not the prototype of the current quality series, and not the kind of
programming that has raised the most anticipation and cultural nationalist aspiration in the
Hungarian context, to which HBO’s Golden Life has come the closest so far. However, its
combination of popular appeal with niche and innovative sensibilities, even when considering its
narrative weakness, would arguably make it a steppingstone for Hungarian series at least as
significant as the much more popular yet safely mediocre Divorce—a show that has figured
much more strongly in current discussions on the Hungarian TV series boom. In my view, it is,
to a considerable extent, because of the
severely compromised cultural and
political status of Hungarian public
television and its dwindling viewership
that Kossuthkifli has been by and large
obliterated from discussions on the TV
revolution. Though a surely self-
interested opinion, director Péter Rudolf shares this view: when he was asked by (rightist) daily
Magyar Hírlap if he thinks whether “the critique against the currently transforming public media
[had] also influenced the critical reception of Poppyseed Roll,” Rudolf said “Obviously. (…)
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[a]ltogether, the commentators’ relation to public media was often a more important factor than
the piece itself”
66
(quoted in Szilléry 2015).
In turn, following the industry examples, the second most popular national commercial
broadcaster, TV2 has also increased its involvement with series production. However, TV2 has
not been able to come even close to the number, popular success, or critical acclaim of RTL
Klub’s new shows
67
. TV2 has been decidedly and consistently lagging behind its competitor
despite the government-critical comment that “thanks to the state’s advertisement spending [on
TV2’s network] they have been basically working on an unlimited budget”
68
(Sixx December 12,
2019). Indeed, the TV2 media group has made several times the money market leader RTL Klub
has (e.g., Fülöp n.d.; Kovács 2018); in turn, the network has shown strong bias in favor of the
governing party (e.g., Czinkóczi 2019). Their portfolio has been owned and controlled by
persons close to the FIDESZ party: Zsolt Simon and Yvonne Dedrick (2013-2015); Viktor
Orbán’s personal friend Andy Vajna (also the Government Commissioner in charge of the
Hungarian film industry, 2011-2019; co-owner of the Korda Studios in Etyek; a winner of the
very limited casino concessions] from 2015 until his death in 2019; and currently, József Vida,
chairman-CEO of Takarékbank, and Lőrinc Mészáros’s friend and business partner. Notably, it
was Mészáros who installed the gas in Vida’s home back in the day (hvg.hu 2018).

66
My translation for the Hungarian original: “Az éppen átalakuló közmédia kritikája a Kossuthkifli kritikai
megítélését is befolyásolta?” and “összességében a hozzászólók viszonya a közmédiá hoz nemegyszer fontosabb
tényező volt, mint maga a mű” (Szilléry 2015).
67
Notably, TV2 produced weekly dramedy Korhatáros szerelem [“Love with an Age Limit” or “R-Rated Love,”
2 seasons, 2017-2018] adapted from New-Zealand Step Dave. The show’s performance quickly changed from the
initial moderate success to poor ratings. In turn, TV2’s Bogaras szülők adapted from Dutch Lice Mother (1 season,
2018) was a pure flop. The network has also come out with a new daily comedy soap series Mintaapák [“Showcase
Dads”], based on Argentinian Senores papis, in 2019. The daily show has provided decent numbers so far and up to
present (February 2020) it still scheduled in prime time. According to TV2 Group’s Creative director Attila Kirády,
the network will launch several new weekly series in 2020, “similarly to the competitor [RTL Klub]”, (RaulReal
2020).
68
My translation from the Hungarian original: “(…) hogy az állami reklámköltésnek köszönhetően kvázi feneketlen
zsebből dolgozhattak” (Sixx 2019b).
275
In sum, the severe issues of a political-economic oligarchy and the mismanagement of public
resources notwithstanding, some of the series that have been commissioned by MTVA, at least in
some respects related to production values, cinematic characteristics, and the prestige of the cast
and crew involved, have been tending toward Hungarian quality TV while hardly being
recognized as such. I argue that beyond some expectable shortcomings related to budgetary
restrictions, lack of experience and specific skills especially in terms of the script, and, perhaps
its habitual abstention from critical social realism, it is largely Hungarian public television’s
severely compromised political-ideological status and dwindling viewership, which have
discursively distanced it from the Hungarian series revolution constructed in terms of progress,
innovation, and what is widely framed as catching up with world class Western if not American
quality entertainment. Put differently, regardless of its actual involvement in producing weekly
series of decidedly elevated “quality” concurrently or even preceding the similar projects of
HBO and commercial broadcasters, Hungarian public television MTV has not figured as a
considerable force and site of hope in discourses on the Hungarian TV series boom and
aspirations for a truly original quality drama series of international potential. Simultaneously,
HBO’s local involvements, and its local original series especially, have been regarded with
heightened appreciation. Due to their independence from or recent resistance to governmental
influence and propaganda, it is HBO and large national private broadcaster RTL Klub,
respectively, that have been recognized as the main potential sites for social realism and
criticism, associated with HBO-type quality drama. They also operate as the potent sites for
future aspirations and hopes regarding The Hungarian Holy Grail of TV series.
Domestic Broadcasters and Transnational Streamers: Complementarity over Competition
Because premium and OTT remains a relative niche model and linear television has insofar
retained its stable status, no considerable value-based and nationalistic opposition has been
276
constructed between them and domestic broadcasters by any of the players or other cultural
stakeholders. Industry-wide, HBO has been perceived as introducing higher quality to the
Hungarian context and forcing broadcasters to up their game (e.g., Kis-Bocz, personal interview,
2019). I want to highlight that the relation between transnational SVODs and other premium
television, on the one hand, and, on the other, the domestic linear broadcasters has been
predominantly constructed in terms of complementarity in the Hungarian context. The idea of
direct or cutthroat competition, and transnational SVODs compromising the viability of domestic
broadcasters or proper local content, national culture, or national industry do not figure in any
public discourses in Hungary. In this context, the initial entry of (at the time, very much
underlocalized) Netflix was regarded, at least publicly, as pretty much insignificant on part of its
domestic competitors. In turn, Netflix’s more recent linguistic localization in the country was
overwhelmingly welcomed by the mainstream and media and television-focused press as
beneficial to Hungarian viewers who can now more comfortably access high-quality US series.
Speculations about Netflix potentially commissioning a high-quality Hungarian local original
have also been circulating among filmmakers and experts—although numerous industry players
are dismissing this idea as irrealistic due to the small size of the Hungarian market. (Relatedly,
some assume that HBO Hungary’s local originals simply could not be financially profitable, and
so they do not expect further commissions on part of the WarnerMedia Entertainment
subsidiary.) At the same time, until the turn of 2020/2021, Netflix did not figure at all as a
cultural or economic threat in discourses on TV and the cultural industries in the Hungarian
domestic context. Instead, TV buffs and early adopters welcomed it as a cultural emancipator, as
being a source and force of good TV. The domestic broadcasters expressed their lack of concern
while often acknowledging Netflix’s great ability to deliver quality niche TV—better than their
277
own related ability given the characteristics of the Hungarian market. Importing quality niche TV
to the Hungarian market is not a function claimed by the big broadcasters anyway. As RTL
Klub’s managing director Éva Kis-Bocz stated in a workshop at the 2019 NATPE in Budapest,
their long-term business plan is to expand their presence in the nonlinear space, and focus on
local and hyperlocal content, including the further production of higher quality midcult series.
That is, RTL Klub as a domestic broadcaster does not express any intention to directly compete
with the likes of Netflix or HBO—not even in the online on-demand space that they do want to
invest more in. As a Hungarian industry expert expressed in a personal interview, attempts on
part of Hungarian broadcasters to directly compete with HBO or Netflix, including the
purchasing of rights for the hippest, most expensive quality series, would be a lost battle anyway.
Rather, by emphasizing hyperlocal (rather than transnationally mobile) content and the
preference for midcult (rather than niche and edgy) sensibilities, RTL Klub practically positions
itself and SVODs as complementary services. That is, while Netflix, HBO and some other giant
transnational US-origin companies are expected to become the primary if not exclusive
exploiters of very high-quality, mainly US shows and films, domestic broadcasters hope to
maintain their position by relying mainly on complementary functions, including, notably, on the
production of hyperlocalized content transnational SVODs are neither inclined nor well-
positioned to do. That is, in contrast to the increasing interest on part of big European
broadcasters in large national markets to capitalize better on their assets in the VOD space that
make them join forces so they can compete with Netflix (like in the case of Britbox, or upcoming
French platform Salto), no such cooperative effort is detectable in the Hungarian media ecology.
278
It is also among the remarkable, beneficial affordances of Netflix (similar to HBO), that as an
international on-demand distributor it provides immense transnational mobility to a selection of
local Hungarian titles that would otherwise hardly travel so wide and with such wide
accessibility internationally. Likewise, as a
newly active domestic distributor of
Hungarian programs it can provide another
platform for domestic works, a source of
revenue for Hungarian right owners, and
finally, frictionless and legal access for
national audiences. The curious case of A
mártfűi rém (Strangled, 2016, 121 min &
2020, 178 min) exemplifies how Netflix can make trendy and bestow new and expanded popular
potential on content. Director Árpád Sopsits’ 2016 feature film received 14 nominations at the
2017 Hungarian Film Awards, out of which it won 9, including Best Film, Best Director, and
Best Cinematographer. Among many of its virtues, the film was praised for providing an exciting
murder mystery narrative that is simultaneously embedded in a sharp and even more chilling
exposure of post-1956 Hungarian society (e.g., Matalin 2016). The dark thriller drama about
Hungary’s “first serial killer” during the repressive period of 1950-60s’ socialism, was a
smashing hit not only with critics but also with audiences: the movie was seen by 40 000 movie
goers (source: filmforgalmazok.hu), which counts as a good box office performance for a
domestic film in Hungary. The 121 min feature film was then repackaged as a 4-part, altogether
178 min long miniseries (supplemented with scenes cut from the feature, and a new intro), and
premiered under the same name on Netflix on August 2020. Thereby, Strangled follows the
18. Figure: English-language poster for Strangled
279
example of The Hateful Eight: Quentin Tarantino’s 2015 feature film was reedited and re-
released as a four-part miniseries by Netflix in 2019 (Hoffman 2019). As film and theater
director Árpád Sopsits noted, he had actually imagined the piece as a series, in which he would
have greater space for elaborating the characters and the multiple storylines; however, at the time
he could not find supporters for the idea (Klág 2020). It took an extra couple of years and a
transnational studio like Netflix to provide a local filmmaker with the hip option of creating a
miniseries instead of the traditional form of feature-length movie. Notably, Strangled was
featured on Netflix’s list of “Top 10 in Hungary Today” for weeks after its premier.
Sopsits’ film perfectly exemplifies the kind of material and cultural sensibility the typical
transnational SVOD seeks in a “local original” to be marketed as multicultural “quality
television”: it is dark and edgy in tone; affiliated with the thriller and drama genres; it focuses on
a series of mysterious and shocking series of crimes; it contains R-rated representations of
sexuality and violence; it is invested in social criticism; it has a cinematic aesthetic backed by
talent experienced in film production rather than traditional television. Its historical and
culturally specific focus on the socialist era with a realist and critical social sensibility is
combined with the universalist themes of human evil surfacing in horrifying sexual crimes. It is
clear that Strangled can easily qualify as “authentically local” while simultaneously harboring
great transnational appeal, to rely on Ted Sarandos’ much-repeated formulation on the perfect
recipe for flagship quality “local originals” (quoted in Bylund 2019). As an already existing and
tested material being re-edited, the miniseries does not qualify as Netflix’s own local original,
though it certainly compliments its global brand bolstered by the ideal of a multicultural
community of local quality drama series. Given the lack of similar and thus competing ambitions
on part of domestic broadcasters, who would disapprove this new SVOD life of this very locally
280
specific, very prominently Hungarian piece? Could there be any nationalistically inclined reason
not to celebrate Netflix’s local engagement in Hungary?
The New National Film Institute and the “Hungarian [State] Netflix:” The Coming of State
Quality Drama?
The case is not only that industry, expert, and fan discussions on TV series have been
soaring, and that they attest to the complete and final discrediting of the Hungarian public
television. Rather, crucially, the official national prestige bestowed upon TV series in Hungary
has been also on the rise. For instance, the Hungarian Film Awards
69
introduced 14 separate
categories for television series in 2019 (all of which were won by Golden Life’s third season,
again signifying the show’s unrivalled reputation, MTI 2019). Furthermore, in 2019, the
Hungarian Media Patronage Programme got supplemented by a new, 7-billion HUF (about 22.5
million USD) fund for television film and series focusing on the Hungarian historical past and
culture called Television Film Patronage (Televíziós Film Mecenatúra or Televíziós
Filmkollégium, MTI 2019 március 20). According to FIDESZ MP Róbert Simon, historical films
serve to present the way of thinking of a certain time and general human values; and that
Hungarian film art has been “one-sided” to the extent that while the Holocaust has been, rightly,
thoroughly discussed, there has been no worthy film or series attempts at presenting the Treaty of
Trianon
70
(quoted ibid). Importantly, what Simon implied is that the Jewish people and “their”
historical tragedy have gotten disproportionate attention at least compared to the national
Hungarian tragedy of Trianon, a prominent nationalist symbol contemporary ethnicist-nationalist

69
Organized by the Hungarian Film Academy, which, though nominally an independent professional organization,
has been criticized as being an organic part of the complete restructuring of the film industries by the authoritarian
FIDESZ government (e.g., Csákvári 2014).
70
The 1920 Treaty of Trianon was the peace agreement between the Allies and the Kingdom of Hungary ending
WWI, in which the latter lost the greater part of the territory and population of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire,
including parts with a Hungarian ethic majority. Importantly, Trianon became a prominent symbol of national
tragedy and victimization, heavily appropriated by Hungarian nationalists up until today.
281
groups still heavily trade in. Given the longstanding investment in boosting a certain kind of
Hungarian identity through mythologized history through expensive theatrical film projects, the
government’s recently emerged interest in investing in large-scale television programs on
Hungarian national history is another index of FIDESZ’s sensitivity to and dexterous
appropriation of transnational trends. In the present case, they started merging the strong global
and European trending of quality drama series for their own political agenda.
On January 1, 2020, the former National Film Fund, the Hungarian Media Patronage, and the
Television Film Patronage were merged into the National Film Institute (Nemzeti Filmintézet)
that came to supervise and support all segments of state-supported Hungarian film and television
under one central organization belonging to the Cabinet Office of the Prime Minister
(Miniszterelnöki Kabinetiroda; Ágoston 2019). The organizational reform and the new, unified
system overseeing works regardless of their primary (theatrical or televisual) distribution is
aimed at a more all-encompassing, multi-platform distribution of audiovisual works that would
also suit more the content consumption habits of younger generations (PK 2019). As Csaba Káel,
the Government Commissioner taking over the National Film Fund after Andy Vajna’s death and
leading the unification under the National Film Institute says, they want to encourage film
creators to leave behind the traditional prioritization of theatrical premiering and start thinking
more in terms of TV films and series (Varga 2020). In fact, they are planning on launching “a
kind of Hungarian Netflix”, as Káel put it, based on the national film archives under the control
of the Film Institute
71
. “Hungarian Netflix” would not only be available for home screens but
also for communal exhibition such as university film clubs, cultural community centers, and

71
P.S. Filmio—the “Hungarian Netflix” as numerous publications have referred to it—the National Hungarian Film
Institute’s SVOD/TVOD service was launched on November 19, 2020. The service initially offered about 260 titles,
among them 160 feature films; the size of the catalog has been growing at a slow pace.
282
schools, so students could familiarize themselves with Hungarian film art. Appropriating the
hype around Netflix, and the aspect that among the possible rhetorical comparisons, Káel chose
this one US-based, global media company is all the more significant for several reasons. First, it
is significant considering the fact that the basic concept for this future public-state kind of
“Hungarian Netflix” is far from new, despite the grandiose rhetoric with which the new service is
being publicized. There have been several on-demand video platforms making available a great
deal of the contents of public television and national archives, with varying types of access, such
as public TV and radio’s site Médiaklikk’s Médiatár (“Media Store”) service, a free catch-up
service with general access (including from outside the country). There is also NAVA, the
National Audiovisual Archive that provides “a unique opportunity in Europe to view its
collections for free for research and education purposes at so-called NAVA Access Points
(affiliated educational institutions, libraries, museums and cultural institutions)” since 2006
(Nava.hu, 2017).
Secondly, using Netflix as a metaphor by Káel is all the more conspicuous as based on the
Government Commissioner’s description of this future service, it does not seem to resemble
Netflix any more concretely beyond being a VOD platform, that is, in terms of catalog
composition, and probably, geographical scope. In fact, the presumably exclusively or
predominantly local-national catalog and the emphasis on cultivating national culture and
heritage is straightforwardly antithetical to Netflix’s comprehensive strategies and branding
centering on internationalization. Instead, “Hungarian Netflix” seems to be aimed at a VOD-type
revitalization of an older model of television dominated by a pre-multichannel-type national
broadcasting. Thus, the metaphor of the “Hungarian Netflix” simultaneously appropriates the
transnational private company’s connotations with ubiquitous market success and popularity and
283
infuses it with a kind of nationalism that actually largely opposes the transnational company’s
cosmopolitan-multiculturalist brand and the concurring major effects on and potential for global
popular culture.
A further modernization on part of the National Film Institute entails the expansion of the
group helping the development of film scripts hitherto functioning within the frame of the Film
Fund: filmmakers working on a script and supported by the Institute will be directed to external
experts specializing in different areas and genres. As Káel emphasizes, they want to expand the
increasing focus on script development—a growing trend worldwide— “to big television genres,
too” (Varga 2020). In terms of themes, there will be special tenders for works featuring
important figures and events from national history, as they “help process traumas and strengthen
the Hungarian identity.” Such projects may address the 200
th
anniversary of national poet Sándor
Petőfi’s birthday in 2023 or the 800
th
anniversary of the issuing of the Golden Bull by King
Andrew II of Hungary in 2022 (ibid).
I argue that the latest developments of further centralizing audiovisual media support and
control, and the new turn toward and riding the global waves of locally authentic and
transnationally mobile original quality drama series in Hungary should be considered in terms of
its dangerously potent unifying force of cultural nationalism, which could help further solidify
the current government’s ideological grip and economic colonization of the country. Focusing on
the production and dissemination of breakout large-scale series, and potentially, indeed finding
the New Hungarian Holy Grail of Television provides a great occasion to tap into the widespread
cultural nationalism of the greater population including those segments who are otherwise
critical of the government. It also enables the allocation of even larger amounts of public monies
to a few companies belonging to the FIDESZ oligarchs with ever less legitimacy issues, protest,
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or questioning, further entrenching the government’s political power and economic colonization
of the country. That is, the new unified organization for national film and television, at its worst,
seems to be a looming powerhouse sensitive for the dominant international trends already
intertwined with nationalist identity politics combined with an efficient, state capital-fueled,
chauvinist nationalist ideological-economic government machinery. State-supported quality
historical drama series and a “Hungarian Netflix” could become the perfect new bearers of the
oligarchic and ethnicist-nationalist Hungarian media empire, also the spectacular and proud
pallbearers of the democratic polity.
To reiterate, formations of cultural nationalism can be variously attached to otherwise quite
different sensibilities and political views. This general ideological flexibility of cultural
nationalism notwithstanding, it is important to add that the sort of relatively moderate cultural
nationalism widely attached to the aspirational or actual object of quality TV is not necessarily
the same as or is teaming up with decidedly worse kinds of nationalisms—like the kind of
nationalism that has been performed by the authoritarian, anti-EU, anti-Muslim (…) ultra-
conservative government. The latter’s ideological-economic project of producing nationalist-
celebratory representations of Hungarian history using and partially misappropriating
tremendous budgets controlled by government-affiliated organizations and firms may
nevertheless also successfully rely on the same or similar sort of cultural nationalism when trying
to legitimate those projects. Notably, older projects under FIDESZ’s wings have decidedly failed
to do so thus far, partially because of the questionable artistic merits of some of the related film
and TV products, and also because of the vigilance of the critical media. At the same time, I have
hardly any doubt about the plausibility of a new kind of television soon to be born in the
Hungarian context: the state-financed, truly modernized quality TV production, inspired by
285
international trends and the local innovations and normativities inspired by the initial successes
of local HBO, which could successfully hybridize a “proper” Hungarian historical theme
enabling, as complex texts necessarily do, ambiguous-enough readings. They would give voice
to great local, potentially, leftist and socially liberal creative talent, while also financially
benefitting mostly the government’s very own oligarchic business circle. If so, especially if this
potential future miniseries or other programs carve out some international recognition for itself,
such successful feeding of a highly widespread cultural nationalism may help further cement the
power of the current, chauvinistic-nationalist government. This is why one could hope that
transnational or transnationally backed up media companies like HBO, RTL Klub, Sony, and
others, including, hopefully Netflix, will be adamant to give voice to and successfully compete
for local Hungarian talent, even if ultimately for their own interests—this is why one hopes for
the Holy Grail of Hungarian TV to be found by these transnational companies rather than state
television. (Or better yet, the government should fall.)

286
Conclusion
“Once you overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many
more amazing films,” said Boon Joon-Ho upon accepting the 2020 Golden Globe for Best
Foreign-Language Picture via his Korean-English interpreter (quoted in Eisenberg 2020). Such
an utterance on part of the internationally acknowledged filmmaker of Korean origin at a US
award ceremony could have been business as usual, however glorious for him and his team
personally. Namely, Parasite (2019) won the BAFTA Award for Best Film Not in the English
Language, Best International Feature Film and Best Director at the 92
nd
Academy Awards, the
Palme d’or and many more. Awash in countless wins and nominations, the most widely
celebrated achievement of Boon Joon-Ho’s Parasite is that this fully non-English-speaking
movie coming from outside the Hollywood system also won the Oscar for the Best Picture—
period. Parasite’s Oscars publicity gave new momentum to the director’s earlier movies.
Practically, it was a Korean-speaking movie as the most successful piece by an internationally
active director that facilitated the wider retroactive rise of the same director’s earlier English-
language and larger-scale productions with US involvement such as 2013 Snowpiercer or 2017
Okja (e.g., Joseph 2020; Palamara 2020; York and Vaidyanathan, 2020).
Winning both the foreign-language feature film division and the “universal” film category at
the Oscars earned Parasite a new entry into the Guinness World Records (2020)—indicating the
extent to which treating international, non-English screen fare not simply as “equal but separate”
but actually on the same footing as US productions has had hardly any historical precedence
72
.

72
At the Oscars, there have been some notable cases that anticipated Boon Joon-Ho’s success: the previous year,
Spanish-speaking Mexican film Roma (Carlos Cuarón, 2018) won Best Foreign-language film and Best Director, the
latter being a historical first for a foreign-language movie; and most recently, US drama Nomadland’s (2020)
director, Chinese-born Chloé Zhao won Best Director as the second woman and the first woman of color in the
Oscars’ entire history.
287
According to some, “Parasite's best picture Oscar could kickstart a new era of internationalism”
(Hoad 2020), and its success “convinced even the most skeptical viewers that, rather than
something to be avoided, subtitles are the gateway to a great big world of engrossing
entertainment” (Variety Staff 2020). I agree that Parasite’s breaking into the fenced territory of
universality as imagined and constructed in the US media context was an important milestone—
in a process that had already been underway in cinema and television: the ongoing globalization
of the screen industries and cultures that is becoming more mutual and equalizing in terms of
territorial origin than it used to be before the digital distribution and, more particularly, SVOD
revolution. Not coincidentally, Boon Joon-Ho’s metaphor of the 1-inch wall of subtitles that
separate masses of viewers from great non-English-language content was quoted by Ted
Sarandos at Netflix’s FQ4 Earnings Call (S&P Global Market Intelligence, 2021: 12-13).
Sarandos highlighted the option of watching foreign-content dubbed—a fast-growing option on
streaming platforms that constitutes another index of screen media’s new kind of globalization.
According to Netflix’s co-chief executive officer and chief content officer, the global SVOD is
synergistic with everyday media globalization:
“I think what happens is people say, ‘Hey, I don't watch foreign language television, but
I've heard of this show called Lupin and I'm super excited to see it. And it's included in
my subscription by push play.’ And 10 minutes later, all of a sudden, they like foreign
language television. So it's a really incredible evolution.” (quoted ibid, 12)
My dissertation gives considerable credit to Sarandos’s account, as much as it may be rooted
in PR and vested interest, because it rightly points to the affordances of big transnational SVODs
and their cultural impact in terms of cultural diversity as internationalization.
Importantly, the coronavirus and long quarantines around the world did not simply raise
screen media consumption even further than ever before and make VOD streaming subscriptions
surge (Crawford 2021; Watson 2020). The year of lockdowns also saw a major boost of interest
288
in non-English-language programming specifically. In the US, for instance, the viewership of
foreign-language programming rose by 50% compared to the previous year (Kay 2020).
According to Reed Hastings, international programs have gained further ground because viewers
have had more time to explore the depth of the catalog during the epidemic and because of
Netflix’s commitment to working with “local, diverse creators to tell local, authentic stories that
speak to us all” (quoted in Kanter 2020). Moreover, the era of quarantines may have intensified
people’s desire to see more of the outside world, including other parts and cultures beyond one’s
own, with foreign shows enabling “Vicarious Travel Thrills” as The New York Times publicist
Jason Bailey put it (2020). Entertainment Weekly asked their readers if they “[w]ant — need,
even — to make an escape in the midst of coronavirus self-quarantine?”, suggesting an
“international binge” of TV programs as a reasonable solution (EW Staff 2020). Likewise, The
Guardian invited readers to discuss “television shows you have watched that replicate going
abroad” (Guardian Community Team 2021). While the causality behind the rising tide of
international TV remains nebulous, the growing popularity and public visibility of international
shows and films on SVODs have been documented and are palpable in expert as well as more
popular online discourses about screen media. I assert that this tendency of the international
diversification of screen cultures, including popular and quality TV, is already robust and will
continue to strengthen in the foreseeable future thanks to the growth of transnational SVODs and
the mainstreaming of the global-local production and distribution strategies that Netflix
pioneered originally. Even Disney has started commissioning and acquiring foreign programs for
its transnational streaming platform (Kanter 2021).
The trending of local original productions will most likely remain parallel to the kind of
media globalization that Hollywood as well as world and art house cinema have been practicing
289
for long decades: the ongoing cultural hybridization, the geographic dispersal of talent scouting,
and the further tightening of trans- and international institutional, business, and professional
ties—which are palpable within many singular texts/productions. The primary language of such
productions often remains English yet in terms of their textual and representational aspects, and
creative and production background, they could hardly be designated as American(ized) or
culturally “bland” (vs Crofts 1993: 63, 1998: 391). I would like to use Hungarian filmmaker
Kornél Munduczó and his most recent feature Pieces of a Woman (2020) as an example to
illustrate this more recent type of network-like media globalization. Mundruczó graduated from
the University of Theatre and Film Arts in Budapest: as an actor in 1998, and as a film- and TV
director in 2003. Since his debut feature This I Wish and Nothing More (2000), Mundruczó has
been active in theater and in film; he has become one of the most acknowledged Hungarian
auteur-directors both domestically and internationally; and he is the co-founder of one of the
most successful independent production companies in Hungary, Proton Cinema. Proton has a
profile quite unique in the Hungarian context: the company engages in creative projects while
also offering production services. Pieces of a Woman is Mundruczó’s first English-language
original—a drama about the grief of a woman whose newborn baby dies minutes after she gives
birth to them at home. It was adapted from the play by Kata Wéber (Mundruczó’s private and
professional partner), originally set and performed in Poland (Piotrowicz 2019). After being
turned down by the Hungarian National Film Fund, the film script found support from US
producers—among them, Martin Scorsese as an executive producer –, and was produced as a
Canadian-US co-production, with the story being reset to Boston and the characters played by
renowned American and British actors. After its worldwide premiere at the Venice Film Festival,
Pieces of a Woman was acquired by Netflix for worldwide distribution—the first movie directed
290
by a Hungarian filmmaker to make its debut to wide audiences on Netflix (Klág 2021).
Mundruczó expressed his satisfaction as following:
“As a European filmmaker, I couldn’t be more excited and appreciative of finding my
home for this film with Netflix. Their taste in independent cinema feels like the United
Artists of the 1970s. The true champions of filmmakers and original voices for today.”
(quoted in Fleming 2020)
Certainly, the director’s public opinion about Netflix being a champion of innovative
filmmaking and independent cinema, including world cinema, does not resonate with much
scholarly and other cultural commentators, who are concerned that Netflix facilitates a “global
uniformity” (Elkins 2019: 384). Netflix as a transnational media company has been charged with
perpetuating cultural imperialism, destroying cultural excellence, and ghettoizing minority
identities and non-American titles (e.g., Floegel 2020; Arnold 2016; Shapiro 2020; Markham,
Simona Stavrova, and Max Schlüter 2019; Hallinan and Striphas 2016: 122; Evans 2019;
Alexander 2016; Salmon 2014; Cummings 2021).
Supplementing much existing scholarship that sees Netflix as a facilitator of cultural
homogenization, my dissertation argues that the transnational SVOD revolution and market-
strong studio-platforms such as Netflix have significantly contributed to global cultural diversity
in at least one important sense of the concept: internationalization, that is, the diversification of
widely distributed programming in terms of national-territorial origin and textual-linguistic
features. I argued in the first and second chapter of this dissertation that such TV
internationalization can be welcomed insofar as it entails a symbolic and practical equalization
across territories, in terms of trade flows, professional and financial opportunities, and the
hierarchical imaginaries of world nations in the sphere of screen cultures. However, such
nationally-territorially based equalization comes at a high price. Netflix (and other global media
companies in their footsteps) have promoted a global TV multiculturalism through the figures of
291
the “global catalog” accessed by equal individuals across the globe, and of supposedly unique
“authentic local cultures” expressed and recognized through “local original” productions. These
two agendas rely on the politics of equality and the politics of difference, respectively, thereby
repeating the tensions inherent in the concept of multiculturalism. The idea of worldwide access
to the same global catalog has gained some popular currency in many territories especially
among tech-savvy consumer-activist individuals. However, it is the concept of, and the
ambitions and practices related to the “local original” that have been well-received and translated
into local-national policies, party politics, public debates of high prestige and visibility, and
powerful ambitions on part of local-national media producers and creators. The main issue I take
with the agenda of the “local original” is that it implicitly but powerfully appropriates cultural
nationalisms and the related identity politics. Thereby, the trending of “local originals” has
helped reinforce the synergy between global corporate capitalism and nationalisms: neoliberal
nationalisms in which contradictory claims on cultural protectionism and outward expansionism
can simultaneously flourish. As such, it ultimately serves the political and financial interests of
transnational corporate and national elites in the name of culture, authenticity, and recognition.
The work I perform in this dissertation could be continued along the lines of researching
cultural diversity in digital media and transnational SVODs particularly, when defined other than
internationalization. As mentioned above, Netflix has been the subject of much criticism related
to cultural imperialism. homogenization, and dumbification. As I have shown, the tendency of
international diversification in terms of the programs’ creative origin and main textual features
seems to be robust – and this translates into greater cultural diversity in several senses of the
term: a demography-based kind of source diversity of creatives and cast; a demography-based
content diversity that focuses on national-territorial origin and textual features; and arguably, at
292
least in the US, actual exposure diversity as international programs are becoming part of the
consumption habits of more and more people. At the same time, admittedly, the mainstream –
including global hit shows and successful quality, midcult and middlebrow TV shows and
films—remains “mainstream,” which means that its diversity is by definition limited in many
ways. It is fair to assume that there will always be programs that are much more popular than
others at a given time—i.e., there will always be a “mainstream” of culture in contradistinction to
a much wider, diverse range of other, more marginal and niche content. What intensifying
globalization has been bringing about is the globalization of pop culture, in other words, the
globalization of mainstream cultural spheres—and it is this particular sense of “cultural
homogenization” that many scholars, cultural commentators, and politicians have criticized as if
it was an all-encompassing, monolithic process. My dissertation has provided a supplement to
this argument, calling attention to its overgeneralized nature and implicit terms. Likewise, I
argue against the equation of homogenization with Americanization in the cultural sense,
considering the immensely dynamic cycles of cultural appropriations and hybridizations that
Hollywood and the more recent US-based media companies perform. What I would confirm is
that globalizing cultural mainstream, such as globalizing quality, midcult, and popular TV, can
indeed be perceived as bearing a limited cultural diversity in terms of format and genre
affiliations, narrative and visual patterns and motifs, and so on. Thus, in many ways, the cultural
diversity of internationally travelling hit series, conquering newer national territories that join
international trends, is arguably limited—hence the basis for concerns about “cultural
homogenization”. The emphasis of this dissertation is different, however, from what critics of
cultural imperialism usually focus on. I actually question that the “universality” or
“homogeneous” tendencies of transnationally travelling “local” content, more particularly, high-
293
budget TV series are worrisome because of losing global cultural diversity and/or national
cultural specificity. I assume that if we accept the idea that culture will have, at any given time
and place, a certain mainstream, which is, however, just one stream of otherwise very diverse
cultural streams, then the limited format- or narrative diversity of this mainstream is not simply
expectable, but it does not entail the deterioration of culture as such, either. Alternative and niche
cultures may very well flourish next to, and to a considerable extent, thanks to, a globalizing
cultural mainstream—as Chris Anderson (2006), Tyler Cowen (2002), and from a cultural
studies perspective, Arjun Appadurai (2003[1990]), Roland Robertson (1992), or Stuart Hall
argue with regard to the simultaneity of cultural homogenization and heterogenization.
As the example of Mundruczó’s Pieces of a Woman reminds us, however, the story of
cultural diversity and SVOD trends and impact may be even more complicated than what I
sketched out above. What about the genre and format variety of programs available in the Netflix
catalogs, such as the widening variety of independent titles or the recent appearance of short
films? Notably, Netflix’s recommendation system and underlying taxonomic structure and
operating algorithms have been especially under attack as working towards conformity and
underscored simply by business interests of profit making and market domination (e.g., Evans
2019, Arnold 2016, Alexander 2016).
The supposedly devastating logic of uniformity notwithstanding, upon navigating the
platform’s interface, I serendipitously arrived from Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, an American
biographical musical chamber drama about a recording session in 1920s’ Chicago with blues
singer Ma Rainey and her band, to En djungelsaga [The Flute and The Arrow], a 1957 Swedish
documentary-adventure-drama film about the Muria, an indigenous people inhabiting parts of
294
Chhattisgarh, India, in about four steps
73
. Though a viewer and researcher of Netflix for some
time, I was still slightly astonished by how far I quickly got from the recent Oscar-winning US-
movie, as well as by the fair possibility provided by the platform to start exploring Swedish
classics, due to loose yet totally sensible connections to my interest in Ma Rainey. Netflix’s
taxonomy and algorithms, even its otherwise controversial assignment practices and promotion
of “Netflix originals” that programs of national origins and formats of a widening range receive,
may wither cultural diversity slower than many have predicted.
Watching Ma Rainey also tapped into another major issue of globalizing media: translation
as part of localization. How are transnational platforms navigating the challenges of localizing
language, culture, and identities and communities, on a massive scale of globally distributed
titles? For instance, how is Ma Rainey’s dialog translated into Hungarian, given the historical
specificities and linguistic nuances of racial constructions and politics embodied in this work?
What sort of transformation happens when “the ’White Man’” is translated as “the White” (“a
fehérek”)? What shall we make out of the fact that the term “nigga”—presumably because it
lacks familiarity or any equivalent in the Hungarian language—simply disappears from the
subtitles while the disparaging term “nigger”—a racist slur long present in the Hungarian
language with only its pronunciation localized—remains? At first sight, this seems like an
example of cultural erasure and loss, yet I believe that the opportunities for more enriching (yet

73
On May 15, 2021, I chose to watch Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (dir. George C Wolfe, 2020) with some of my
family members. Subsequently, I checked out the related recommendation, Chadwick Boseman: Portrait of an
Artist, a short documentary (also a Netflix original) on the recently deceased actor who played Ma Rainey’s Levee
Green. The doc on Boseman reminded me that I had seen shorts appearing among my Netflix recommendations,
without me having ever watched one on the platform—most memorably to me, The Trader – Sovdagari (dir. Tamta
Gabrichidze, 2018), an award-winning short documentary from Georgia, also marked as a Netflix original. My
curiosity drove me to search for “short films”—apparently, a browsable category on the platform. Among the items
listed, a black-and-white thumbnail caught my eyes: as it turned out, To Kill a Child is a 9-min Swedish film from
1953. Among the title’s “More like This” recommendations, I came across a range of films, mostly black-and-white,
mostly Swedish-language titles from the 1910s through the 1980s, among them The Flute and the Arrow (digitized
by the Swedish Film Institute in 2014).
295
undeniably challenging) cross-linguistic and cross-cultural transposals are there. Indeed, what
sort of linguistic, cultural, and political responsibilities and potentials do Netflix and other
transnational SVODs bear due to their power vis-a-vis local-national popular culture and
discourses on culture and TV?
In my view, Netflix and many other transnational media companies’ cultural adaptability to
social critiques and their heightened potential for plasticity due to their platforms being digital
have already given some ground for hope. Regarding digital and global cultural diversity and
innovation (and even the algorithmic quantification and management of these) I am quite
hopeful—an optimism the ground for which this dissertation has hopefully started to lay out,
connecting global culture to various economic, business, and industrial aspects and embedding it
within the technological horizons of both production and distribution, and consumption and
engagement. Perhaps more controversially, I have argued against the excessive culturalization of
global in/equality and in/justice—whether it is being practiced by transnational corporations such
as Netflix and its promoted ideal of a global TV multiculturalism through including “local
cultures” or by national governments, politicians, and other cultural commentators in the name of
a supposedly unique and authentic “national culture” in need of recognition by the world.
Instead, my argument supports the prioritization of economy-based arguments over cultural
issues when navigating the increasing power of global corporate capitalism and its allies, local
neoliberal nationalisms. This is why it is crucial to address “local original” drama series as a
rising global currency of nationalist identity politics and break down why the prospect or practice
of creating transnationally mobile, high-budget TV series framed by the ideal of “local [national]
culture” can evoke such powerful public affect and invite and legitimize the assignment of large
public monies to support their production.
296

297
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Whose quality is it? Transnational TV flows and power in the global TV market