The politics of pleasure in global drama: A case study of the TV series, The Magnificent Century (Muhteşem Yüzyıl)

This article is concerned with the ways in which local/national drama becomes a global success, which strategies are developed to appeal to viewers within different cultural settings and how far this shift is important when re/thinking audience reception studies. The study answers this question by exploring the television (TV) drama series, The Magnificent Century (2011–2014) by conducting in-depth interviews in the Greek capital Athens and the Moroccan capital Rabat with viewers and the production and distribution team of the series. The findings show that potentials for pleasure in the consumption of drama are designed from the very beginning when thinking globally, to reduce cultural differences to a minimum, to finally fuse audiences’ interpretative practices beyond cultural polarization to common understandings.

‘Deared by Being Lacked’

Though it has been much criticized by theatre artists and scholars, the legacy of theatrical realism and naturalism continues to shape contemporary Shakespearean performance. If realist and naturalist approaches to acting fail to encompass the full power of the Shakespearean play-text—or to remedy its more problematic aspects—is this failure necessarily unproductive? Considering this question in relation to the play-text of Antony and Cleopatra and a few of its recent theatrical incarnations, this chapter argues that the lacks, omissions, and failures of realist and naturalist modes of performance can provoke spectators to engage anew with Shakespeare’s lovers and their potential significance for contemporary Western audiences. Acknowledgement of the persistence and value of such traditional modes can add to the complexity of audience reception studies of Shakespeare..

Television Audiences

Three models have dominated the study of the television audience: the industry’s commodification of the television audience model, as well as two academic perspectives from the field of mass communication, the passive and the active audience models. The first of these, known as the currency audience, stems from attempts by early raters to count and commodify the television audience—an invisible mass of disparate listeners and viewers—in order to develop a form of currency that could be exchanged between broadcasters and advertisers and programmers. This currency was known as ratings, and each generation of raters added to a growing vocabulary to enhance the ability of advertisers to identify and understand their audiences. For ratings services that conduct empirical measurements of the television audience, the cornerstone of such research has been the scientific method, whereby information about television audiences is gathered largely through various survey techniques and their improvements over the years, together with a body of scientific theory known as sampling. The study of the television audience, in addition to the study of audiences commodified for exchange through the ratings industry, is also a specialized niche within the academic discipline of mass communication. In the field of mass communication, two key models have developed to understand the television audience. First is the view of the audience as a passive victim to larger economic and political forces, whereby media has the ability to brainwash and shape public opinion. Schools associated with the passive audience (and covered here) include the media economics perspective, what is known as the hypodermic needle theory, the Frankfurt School, screen theory, and the political economy approach. Similarly, a second and opposing view asserts that the audience is not simply passive but has the ability to resist and act, known as the active audience view of the TV audience. Critical research has grown since the 1940s to include a number of different schools or approaches including the Frankfurt School, screen theory, the Birmingham School, audience reception studies, and more recently, fan studies. Fan studies will not be covered in this article as there is a separate Oxford Bibliographies in Cinema and Media Studies article entitled “Fan Studies.” Problems are inherent in the extremes of each model. On one hand, one would appear to study masses as numerical figures, on another as manipulable masses through Freudian psychology and propaganda techniques, and lastly as active members of an audience where resistance is based on personal anecdotes and behaviors.

Opening eyes to opera

In today’s rapidly developing digital age and increasingly socially-aware society, the notion of media accessibility is evolving in response to shifting audience expectations. Performing arts and media, such as opera, are called upon to include all audiences, and related audiovisual translation methods are progressing in this direction. These comprise audio description and touch tours for the blind and partially-sighted, two relatively new translation modalities which are consumer-oriented and require an original research design for the analysis of the translation processes involved. This research design follows two fundamental principles: (1) audience reception studies should be an integral part of the investigation into the translation process; and (2) the translation process is regarded as a network. Therefore, this paper explores the unique translation processes of audio description and touch tours within the context of live opera from the perspective of actor-network theory and by providing an overview of a reception project. Through discussion of the methodology and findings, this paper addresses the question of the impact of audience reception on the translation process.