Eastern European Television

The field of television studies has given us a rich tapestry of the history and theory of the dominant commercial model that developed in the United States, and of the public broadcasting model that defined Western European television systems, through the 1980s. However, substantial work on the histories of Eastern European and (post)Soviet broadcasting has only appeared in English in the new millennium. To some extent, this absence of work on (post)socialist television has been due to a shortage of information about socialist cultures. Other reasons include television studies’ own identification of American TV as the normative path of the medium’s development, supported by a Cold War ideological filter toward (post)socialist cultures, which equated socialist TV with propaganda, as well as television’s status in Eastern Europe as a “lowly” popular medium not worthy of serious study. Recent publications have finally challenged the lingering stereotypes about socialist systems and introduced a different model of television into the study of the media. They have shown that, while socialist television systems varied significantly in terms of language, cultural tradition, political attitudes, and economic development, Eastern European and Soviet TV welcomed a range of innovative aesthetic practices and involved hybrid economic models. It fostered frequent exchanges and collaborations within the region and with Western media institutions, a programming flow across borders, a steady production of genre entertainment, in some cases significant reliance on commercial revenue, and transcultural reception practices along the shared broadcast signals of national borders. Rather than homogeneity and brainwashing, the history of Eastern European television shows affinity and collaboration with Western European public broadcasters; socialist party leaderships’ more or less haphazard attempts at control, which was constantly tempered by the demands of viewers to be entertained; the crucial role of competition as a driving force;, and experiments with various forms and genres in an effort to convey authenticity and persuasion. With transnational conglomerates’ rapid takeover of postsocialist media markets in the 1990s, and the accession of most former socialist states into the European Union in the mid-2000s, the story of Eastern European television has officially become a part of that of European TV and, more broadly, of the globalization of the media industries. What still justifies a regional approach are simultaneous political-economic developments that have once again shaped the region’s media in similar ways: after a short period of hard-fought reforms over media ownership and regulation in the 1990s, Europe’s financial crises in the late 2000s gravely affected postsocialist media economies and prepared television for a new type of re-centralization under the control of illiberal national oligarchies in coexistence with global neoliberal competition and consumer access to media content from around the world.