Saturated colours, censored alcohol and cigarettes, kisses withheld until the hundredth episode. The allure of Turkish soap operas has not left Italy unmoved: second only to Spain, the country ranks among the top European nations for dizi consumption – the term being an abbreviation of televizyon dizileri, which in Turkish simply means "television series". It is a cultural phenomenon of considerable complexity, albeit one too often dismissed as entertainment for the romantically inclined housewife.
Italy's first encounter with the dizi came in 2019, when Pier Silvio Berlusconi's Mediaset staked its claim on the format, broadcasting Bitter Sweet – Ingredienti d'amore on Canale 5 to considerable popular success.
The decision would prove a shrewd one for the Cologno Monzese broadcaster: in subsequent years, series such as Terra Amara and Endless Love became reliable revenue streams for the channel, regularly attracting audiences of between two and three million viewers and achieving a 20% share, frequently surpassing far more expensive domestic productions. The format has proved equally resilient across both daytime scheduling and Sunday primetime slots.
The appeal rests, in part, on the familiar architecture of the soap opera: intrigue, love triangles, and ill-fated relationships – the genre's classic ingredients that offer to the viewers a reliable comfort zone. The genuine novelty, however, lies in the way relationships between protagonists are staged. Just forget the betrayals of Brooke Logan in The Bold and the Beautiful, or the passionate outbursts of Una Vita's characters. In dizi, viewers encounter very few ardent kisses; in their place, glances weighted with tension and hands barely grazed. These characteristics reflect the cultural traditions of the country of production, much like Korean K-dramas do. It is precisely through these traditional values – the centrality of community, respect for one's elders, filial devotion – and the relative restraint of their narratives that Turkish soaps prove appealing to a broad demographic, from family audiences to younger viewers: a distinct strategic advantage for a generalist broadcaster such as Canale 5.
Equally significant is the question of audience loyalty. The extended seriality of these productions forges an exceptionally strong bond with viewers, who become deeply attached to the characters and follow their intricate storylines for months, if not years – a highly profitable dynamic for any broadcaster, particularly given that Turkish series carry considerably lower production costs than comparable international drama.
The energy of digital fandom further sustains this success. Platforms such as TikTok and Instagram appear saturated with short edited clips from dizi – content produced by fans, for fans, which adapts the source material to current trends and music, effectively extending the narrative well beyond the boundaries of television. Audiences migrate to Facebook groups and Telegram channels to dissect every plot development and romantic rivalry, generating a bottom-up pressure that often prompts broadcasters to chase web trends.
It is through precisely this mechanism that actors such as Can Yaman – known across Europe for series including Viola come il mare and a remake of Sandokan – have been able to establish a significant foothold in the Italian and international market following their dizi success. Their popularity, having first ignited on television, is subsequently sustained through a daily flow of social media content that progressively dissolves the boundary between soap opera fiction and celebrity reality.
Istanbul has, in this sense, come to resemble a new Hollywood. According to a Parrot Analytics report cited by The Economist, Turkey ranks third in the world – behind only the United States and the United Kingdom – for the export of television series. The countries first to recognise the potential of Turkish-made fiction were those culturally and historically closest to the Republic: the nations of the Middle East, North Africa and the Balkans, which began consuming these media products from their earliest iterations in the early 2000s.
Today, however, the dizi market has also achieved extraordinary popularity in South America – until recently the genre's undisputed stronghold – and in the United States, where the critically acclaimed Yargı (released in Italy as Segreti di Famiglia) was honoured with the Emmy for Best Telenovela at the 51st edition of the awards ceremony.
And yet, any serious engagement with the dizi phenomenon cannot avoid a reckoning with soft power. Scholars and political analysts have drawn attention to the strategic importance of this medium for the Turkish government, which deploys soap opera production as a vehicle for projecting the most appealing possible image of the Republic abroad. In this light, the decision to set the majority of these series in Istanbul – a city poised between East and West, modern yet steeped in Ottoman culture and tradition – appears anything but coincidental. Moreover, notwithstanding their orientation towards international audiences, robust government pressures persist, compelling the dizi industry to align with the country's religious and nationalist agenda.
It comes as little surprise, then, that every national broadcaster reserves at least one contemporary military-themed serial in its evening schedule, in which a heroic Turkish army confronts and neutralises unspecified threats – from terrorists and rebels of indeterminate origin – to the constitutional order and the integrity of the State. Nor is it surprising that a historical dizi such as Diriliş: Ertuğrul (Resurrection: Ertuğrul) should attract sustained criticism from historians for its treatment of the formation of the Ottoman Empire, while receiving Erdoğan's enthusiastic endorsement for its portrayal of positive Muslim characters and its capacity to speak, in his words, "to the heart of the nation."
In the final analysis, Turkish dizi, for all their apparent innocuousness, represent considerably more than a form of popular entertainment: they convert emotional investment into geopolitical influence, demonstrating once again how mass culture functions as a strategic instrument for the construction of national image on the world stage. As we continue to lose ourselves in their labyrinthine plots, the capacity to read their subtext remains not merely desirable but essential.