Nationalization of Spatiotemporal Artifacts: National Chronotope,Authenticity,and Local Colors in Danish TV Dramas

Abstract

This article investigates the conceptualization of spatiality and temporality in television drama series in the age of extensive digital media consumption by focusing on Turkish audiences’ reception of Danish TV dramas. Based on the empirical data collected through extended fieldwork in Turkey, and relying on Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope (spacetime), I analyze how research participants negotiate socio-geographical features, as well as both spatial and temporal textual representations signifying Danish culture and society by delineating “authenticity” and “local color” to distinct spatiotemporal cues in Danish TV drama series. This study reveals that by critically articulating notions of authenticity and local color as distinguishing markers of a particular spacetime, Turkish audiences employ these concepts as strategies to define “national chronotope” which provides a middle ground for reconciliation between the facticity of the geographical place and mediated images of space, as well as factuality of time and local temporalities on screen.

Introduction

In the last two decades, the digitization of media production and consumption, and the worldwide circulation of media products via legal or illegal channels (e.g., Disney+, Netflix, or BitTorrents) not only have increased the accessibility and availability of global television shows, but also have transformed the relationship of media audiences to media products by dissolving space- and time-bounded media consumption (Barr 2011; Uricchio 2010). Such changes have opened new ways of “experiencing and imagining places” (Kim 2016) which resulted in “the compression of time and space” (Harvey 1990) and “the production of new spatialities and temporalities” (Massey 1999; Sassen 2000). Audiences are no longer to be geographically present at a particular time to watch TV programs. More than ever before, media products are readily available anytime and anywhere for those who can access information and communication technologies. For instance, Turkish viewers can buy, download, watch, and engage with globally circulating TV dramas on different online platforms and file sharing sites. Therefore, although Danish television drama series were “made in Denmark for Danes only” (Redvall et al. 2016, 1) by the state-owned Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR), Turkish audiences—an unlikely target audience of DR—watch and enjoy globally popular Danish TV series such as Borgen, Bron, and Forbrydelsen (The Killing) while residing in Turkey or elsewhere. These TV series in different genres entertained international audiences in the 2010s. Borgen (2010–2013), a political drama about Denmark’s first female prime minister, traces her fight for political power, as well as her personal struggles. Bron (2011–2018) and Forbrydelsen (2007–2012) are police procedurals in which the stories revolve around female detectives who investigate murder cases with political and personal consequences in season-long stories.

In this article, by taking an ethnographic approach, I analyze Turkish audiences’ conceptualization of spatiality and temporality in Danish TV dramas to understand how audiences make sense of the contemporary features of the compression of space and acceleration of time, while consuming globally circulated media products. Drawing on Bakhtin’s (1981) theory on chronotope and by juxtaposing the theoretical notions of mediated place and time, I suggest a novel concept, what I call “national chronotope,” to investigate the audiences’ experiences and interpretations of spatiotemporalities in TV drama narratives. The concept of national chronotope succors to reconsider the challenges of constructing “the national,” especially in spatiotemporal terms, in the age of the intensive global flows of digital media. I argue that the visual spatiotemporal signs of Danish dramas not only create an experience of a “sense of place” and a geographical location, but also signify a particular national chronotope regarding authenticity and local color.

Bakhtin’s (1981) analysis of chronotope offers a convenient concept for investigating narrative time/space constructions through the integral relationship between spatial and temporal systems, not only in novels, but also in media narratives and audience reception. Bakhtin defines chronotope as the unity of time and space inherent to a narrative and uses the concept as a linguistic tool to understand the configurations of time and space in discourses and narratives. Definitions of place which focus on spatiality could neglect the integrity of place and time, as well as the misconstrued reception of televisual narratives in socio-cultural and historical dimensions of geographical locations, resulting in the construction of the concept of place being related to a range of representations of time.

Although Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope has been widely discussed in communication studies, only a few scholars have expressed complex relationships between the concept and the contemporary television and film narratives and seriality (Hutchings 2008; Swinehart 2018; Tischleder 2017; Wall 2000). For TV series, Tischleder (2017) discusses spatiotemporal dimensions of a serial world by defining a serial chronotope which “represents the spatiotemporal coordinates that shape and are shaped by the imagination of producers and audiences alike” (p. 120). Swinehart (2018) and Wall (2000), examine “the chronotope of the road” and use national chronotope to define reconfigurations of cultural and political spaces in different nations. According to Swinehart (2018), in Bolivian cinema, the road functions as a model of spacetime and a space of heterogeneity which shows changes in discourses of Bolivian identity. By looking at the political speeches of English- and French-speaking Canadians, Wall (2000) focuses on the centrality of the chronotope of the road in Canadian nationhood to describe the fragmented cultural fabric in different geographic spaces, and to problematize Canada’s claim for the nationhood.

In this article, by focusing on the audiences’ discourses about images of space and variants of time as constituents of national spacetime, I scrutinize the multilateral configurations of space and time in their reception. I reconceptualize the definition of the term national chronotope and define it as a spacetime in which landmarks, symbols, images, and signs are both incorporated into and embodied through media representations in the media narrative—in this case, television drama narrative—that facilitate the nation-making process, inscribe a national identity, and mark the otherness in the discourse of audiences. In so doing, national chronotope also becomes a site of contestation of different nationalities and the signifier of the distinct and distant other of the national. National chronotope not only refers to the configuration of time and space as represented by a particular “nation” or that of “the national” in media texts and audiences’ imagination, but it also represents a discursive construction of social worlds which function in a discursive space in which nation-ness and national (e.g., Danishness) or socio-geographical identities (e.g., Nordicness) can be created in the mediatized world. How chronotope of the TV narrative is projected by audiences of Danish dramas is closely related to how the spacetime is experienced phenomenogically in the context of media consumption of Turkish audiences. In cross-cultural viewing practices, audiences could consider national chronotope as reflective of a national culture, a national identity, or a proximate locale. In other words, from the audiences’ perspective, the national chronotope could signify a singular nation as well as a community of contiguous nations as in the case of Nordic countries. Following Bakhtin, I restate that “the national” signifies the difference of place in time. Thus, for audiences, the national is always differential in which it mitigates the sameness (the global) and emphasizes functional differences in televisual affairs. According to Turkish audiences, not only the national is represented through spatiotemporal artifacts in Danish TV dramas and signified in difference of place in time, but also the relative success of Danish TV dramas, as a televisual affair among a niche Turkish audience, has been achieved by strategizing and staging cultural differences of the chronotope, including spatiotemporal divergences in representation.

To provide a geographically informed, and both spatially and temporarily sensitive analysis of audience reception of media artifacts, I conducted extended fieldwork in Turkey between 2016 and 2018, including participant observation, focus group interviews, and personal interviews with audiences of Danish TV dramas. Based on the qualitative data pulled from fieldwork, I analyze two concepts that emerged from field notes and in-depth interviews: authenticity and local color. Authenticity and local color become useful concepts for evaluating the cross-cultural reading of place and time by transnational audiences in terms of mediated spatiotemporalities and televisual chronotopes. By critically articulating the notions of authenticity and local colors as distinguishing markers of a particular chronotope, Turkish audiences reflect on visual images of space and time as signs of the making of national representations and attribute a national drama status to Danish TV series. Turkish audiences negotiate symbolic boundaries between the national and the global through the scenes of staged authenticity and local color during transnational media viewing practices. In other words, by picking up on spatial and temporal textual representations signifying Danish culture and society, they negotiate distinct ways of imagining and experiencing the national spacetime that is represented in the dramas.

In the next section, first, I briefly define concepts I employ in this study such as space and time. Since the re-imagination of spatiality and temporality relates to the reception of the authenticity and local color of Danish TV dramas, I discuss the scholarly definitions of these concepts. After explaining the method of the study, I focus on audience reception of spatial signs, visual representations of socio-geographical features, and the temporal cues that delineate authenticity and local colors to construct the national chronotope in Danish TV dramas. In conclusion, I discuss the mutually constitutive relationship between authenticity, local color, and national chronotope within the context of the imagination of spatiality and temporality through multiple flows of widely circulating global televisual texts.

Conceptualizing Space, Authenticity, and Local Color

In this article, I employ Lefebvre’s (1991) definition of space as a social product and a complex social construction (including the production of meaning making). According to Lefebvre (1991), space both affects and is affected by social practices and perceptions in a dialectic relationship between everyday life and its representations. Thus, Lefebvre’s spatial approach is useful to understand the relationship between space and its televisual representations. As a construction, rather than merely a discovery of difference, the production of space involves both the practices of actively performed place-making and the media (Kim 2016, 534–35). Considering the distinct role that the media plays in place-making, the consumption of national TV dramas traveling internationally has a significant impact on audiences’ reception of space. Since space is closely related with the spatial imaginary of the time (Lefebvre 1991), dramatic time in TV series, inherent to a narrative, is always configured in a particular historical and temporal context.

In recent decades, many scholars have explored how place and time are mediated in the digital age (Agger 2013; Couldry and McCarthy, 2004; Kim 2016). For example, Agger (2013, 235) discusses the relationship between space, place, and atmosphere by emphasizing Nordic Noir as the symbolic space at the intersection of the abstract level of space and the concrete level of place which helps The Killing [Forbrydelsen] to hold both a global and national appeal. Despite their global media appetite supported by rapidly growing on-demand services, web TV series, and BitTorrents (i.e., cryptic online file sharing), audiences still remark on media products by making a reference to their locations or national origins such as Nordic Noir movies, Korean popular music (K-pop), and Turkish TV series. Therefore, geographic origin is highly important to the authenticity claims of media texts.

According to Knudsen and Waade (2010), authenticity is a feeling which is experienced and also a performance. Here, relying on Knudsen and Waade’s (2010) definition, I define authenticity as “a construction and a performative practice” of Danishness regarding distinct features of physical spaces (e.g., austere landscapes, gray, dark, gloomy colors of indoors and outdoors etc.) and a slow flow of narrative temporality. Thus, the discourse of authenticity identifies and reproduces specific dispositions of a particular spacetime.

Authenticity can emerge from the possibility and plausibility of a given representation which can amplify or diminish the authenticity of media products. In TV series, authenticity, realism, and fictionality become intertwined and tension increases when possibility and plausibility are acknowledged, negotiated, and recognized by viewers (Kaptan 2021; Kaptan 2020). These interlaced concepts account for the complexity of authenticity as recognition of the familiar and discovery of the unfamiliar. Thus, authenticity can work simultaneously in different, and, at times, contradictory ways.

Although the concept of authenticity has been broadly applied from cultural studies to tourism studies, authenticity and its complex relationship with space or place has been discussed by only a few scholars in media studies (Esser 2020; Hansen and Waade 2018). As Esser rightly argues, “the notion of place, which implies authenticity, appeals most strongly in a globalizing world. At the same time, representations of unfamiliar yet highly specific places, in spatial as well as temporal terms, appear particularly authentic” (Esser 2020, 41). On-screen depictions of unfamiliarity and peculiar images can prompt a sense of authenticity of place for transnational audiences in a global world of familiar places and images.

In analyzing Turkish audiences’ reactions to Danish TV dramas, I also reflect on local color. According to Hansen and Waade (2018, 34), “the notion of local color has been used to describe the images, the atmosphere, the sounds, and the colors of a particular place.” More specifically, in terms of film and television drama series, local color refers to a complex collection of images, representations, meanings, and different levels of mediation related to the geographical place and its aesthetic, political, and practical dimensions (Eichner and Waade 2015; Hansen and Waade 2018; Jensen and Jacobsen 2020). As a means of representing and reproducing the spirit of a particular place at a particular time, local color “reflects in significant ways the particular aesthetic qualities of settings in drama series, and also the complex relationship between an actual, geographical place and the mediation of the place” (Hansen and Waade 2018, 30). Thus, it is related to representations of places as well as the political and economic conditions of the regions and the commodification of locations in global market cultures (Hansen and Waade 2018, 40).

In the process of creating national chronotope through the interpretation of socio-geographical features and distinct spatiotemporal cues, authenticity and local color have become strategies employed by audiences. Put differently, authenticity and local color play a significant role for understanding audiences’ reception of Danish TV dramas as audiences constitute national chronotope with respect to an imaginative world of Danish society and culture, presuming resemblances between mediated representations on the screen and spatiotemporal aspects of everyday life in such societies. Thereby, Bemong at al. (2010) underline the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships in constructing a particular world in a narrative, as well as constructing worldviews. These worldviews can be detected in the interpretation of chronotope. Bakhtin suggests that “both author and reader inhabit their own chronotope, so that the term also comes to possess a reader-response element; and perhaps most commonly, it can be used to analyze local images in a text which are based upon a link between time and space” (Quoted in Vice 1997, 208). Additionally, in Bakhtinian sense, chronotope provides salient insights regarding audience responses. On that account, I explore the notion of national chronotope that serves us to understand the audiences’ conceptualization of spacetime regarding authenticity and local color. Hence, I conceptualize the national chronotope that is linked to local images and the discussion of authenticity and local color of these images in the narrative. In the next section, I briefly discuss the methodology of the study including data collection and analysis and provide information about the research participants.

Methodology

As part of a collaborative transnational research project, this study encompasses the reception of Danish TV drama series in Turkey. In the fieldwork, I collected qualitative audience data by using field notes, audio recordings, and a set of colloquial conversations with Turkish audiences of Danish drama series. I interviewed twenty-six participants face-to-face by undertaking semi-structured in-depth interviews and conducted four focus groups between 2016 and 2018. Here, based on the focus of this study, I analyzed excerpts from fourteen one-on-one interviews and four focus group discussions. The interviews were one to three hours in length. Since the Danish drama series were watched by a niche audience in Turkey, finding potential participants was very challenging. Therefore, I utilized snowball sampling and asked participants to assist in identifying and recruiting potential future informants for this research. Snowball sampling can be helpful when studying hard-to-reach populations which are relatively small, when compared to the general population (Nikolopoulou 2022). All participants were chosen based upon their viewing practices and knowledge of Danish TV drama series. Interviews were conducted in the first and the third largest cities of Turkey (Istanbul and Izmir), and mainly in the offices or homes of participants, as well as in coffeehouses. Ages of participants varied between 24 and 57, and they have different professions (e.g., journalists, engineers, architects, scholars, and graduate students). Regarding socio-economic class and lifestyle, participants positioned themselves as middle-class or upper-middle class. They defined their cultural identity as secular, cosmopolitan, urban, Western, and modern. They are well-educated as all participants have a bachelor’s degree and six participants have post graduate degrees (MAs and PhDs). Some participants lived abroad for a short or extended period, and participants can speak at least one foreign language (some being fluent in three or more foreign languages). All participants are familiar with the global entertainment media. They regularly consume global media content (e.g., independent arthouse films, high-end foreign dramas, and indie movies), and engage with international news media such as BBC, The Guardian, and Deutsche Welle. Interviewees for this study declared that they watched Danish dramas via BitTorrents rather than using digital television platforms or legal streaming services.

The confidentiality of the interviewees has been maintained by revealing only the age, gender, and occupation of the research participants. Interviews were recorded in Turkish, and a paid professional translator transcribed the recorded interviews and translated them to English. Using an inductive approach, I have thematically analyzed the interviews to discuss distinct characteristics of mediated spacetime in the perception of Turkish audiences. I investigated recurring themes, repeated ideas, words, and phrases such as place (yer), space (mekan, alan), location (konum), locale (yer, mahal), venue (olay yeri/mahali), landscape (manzara, çevre), milieu (ortam, çevre), geography/geographic (coğrafya/ coğrafi), environment (çevre), city (şehir, kent), indoor/outdoor (iç mekan ve dış mekan), region (bölge), nordic (Kuzeyli, İskandinav), Denmark (Danimarka), Scandinavia (İskandinavya), spatiality (mekansal), time (zaman, vakit), and temporality (zamansal/zamansallık). Explicit and implicit meanings are critically examined through consideration of linguistic components, cultural and communicative patterns, and socio-linguistic structures in audiences’ conversations (the concepts regarding the images, the imagery, the atmosphere, the sounds, the colors of particular places, representations, the aesthetic, and the mediation of the geographical places). The research reveals that Turkish audiences negotiate a particular sense of chronotope represented in Danish drama series by critically articulating the concepts of authenticity and local colors.

Spatiality and Authenticity of Mediated Places

Danish dramas attract Turkish audiences who attribute authenticity to screen representations and characterize them as a national text in the spacetime semantics. In discussion of Danish TV series, audiences perceive mediated images and representations of geographical places as the authentic local color of Denmark in terms of austere landscape, gloomy and dark colors, and grayness in the physical spaces. Similarly, Hansen and Waade (2018) discuss that scenic representations of both Denmark and Nordic countries manifest through dim lights and gloomy places, as well as through the use of dark colors in the landscapes. From Turkish audiences’ perspectives, the use of darkness, defies conventions of American and other TV dramas (i.e., Korean or Turkish). Thirty-eight-year-old associate professor, Male Subject #2 spoke about Danish dramas compared to other TV series:

We recently watched that British TV drama, Wolf Hall. In Wolf Hall, for example, we talked about it with [a friend] too, BBC shot indoor shootings. They’re quite dark. Why? Because there’s no light. I mean it’s 16th century. So, in night-time shootings, the Tudors for example, with a setting similar, they shoot with studio lighting. I mean there’s no such thing, no electricity, no nothing. Shooting here conveyed that darkness, that uhm, not being able to see the details, lighting with a candle-light and so on, much better. That really caught my interest, for example. In an American series, even if it’s historical, the castle is spotlit-like even at 12, in the middle of the night. You do not see that in Danish TV dramas. It really caught my attention how they conveyed that authenticity with shootings and technical stuff (Personal communication, June 19, 2017, emphasis in original).

Male Subject #2’s statement signifies that a realistic and symbolic transmission of the authenticity of place and (historical) time allows Danish TV drama series to be considered as authentic. In addition to spatial characteristics, Danish producers conveyed a sense of authenticity by emphasizing gloomy and dark shots, in which grayness in the physical place produces the dramatic effect of local color. In other words, the stylistic representation of darkness and dimness signify the local color of Danishness in these TV shows. The relationship between gloomy colors and spatial signs become referential and mark off the national identity of TV dramas as a distinct form of chronotope. Audiences recognize these signifiers and index their origin as Danish, Denmark, or Nordic. As Reijnders (2009, 176) argues “this local atmosphere is intensified by the representation of stereotypical weather conditions.” Something as “ordinary and mundane” as gray weather (Jensen 2009; Waade 2017) and dark colors are astonishingly significant to Turkish audiences who are more familiar with bright colors, sunny days, and a great quantity of light in terms of their viewing experiences of American and Turkish dramas, as well as their everyday life experiences. In a similar study with Japanese audiences of Danish dramas, a female audience member states that she likes “Northern European dramas and when [she] turns them on and sees them [she] knows immediately if it is from Northern Europe because it is very grey” (Jacobsen 2020, 86). In a focus group discussion, participants emphasized the significance of chronotope as a signifier of a national representation, by highlighting the strong relationship between local colors and a sense of authenticity:

Male Subject #3 (FG3): [Colors, lights, images] are what makes them [Danish dramas] captivating.

Female Subject #1 (FG3): Ye::s Yeess! I mean it’s actually like looking into a photograph. You just get lost in the same feelings and it [deeply] affects you.

Female Subject #2 (FG3): Actually, the city felt really dark in Bron.

Female Subject #1 (FG3): Buuu:t darkness attracts me. So, in Borgen, the feeling that Denmark is very dark. . .

Female Subject #2 (FG3): No! I’m not saying that it’s bad. I mean something different from [our environment]. But uhm, there are such scenes that I really want to see that cinematography.

For these participants, the unfamiliar images and dark atmosphere of the TV series created a genuine ambience in an almost sacred, mystic, and magical milieu (Kaptan 2020). They implied that authentic indications of the landscape, particularly the city (e.g., Copenhagen), created a sense of place which conformed to their expectations about Copenhagen as a Nordic city. Gloomy weather (“the feeling that Denmark is very dark”) was indexical to Nordic climates and Scandinavian geography. In this focus group exchange, when Female Subject #1 stated “it’s actually like looking to a photograph” she not only emphasized the aesthetics of the landscape as an authentic place, but also recognized the indexicality of the imagery. The audience members’ likening of series scenes to photographs of the place signals an iconic representation in the mind of the audience. Chandler (2002, 43) points out that the photographic and filmic image is both indexical and has an iconic signification. Relying on the iconic signification and indexicality of spaces, Female Subject #1 from the same focus group took authenticity at the face value she saw on the screen, without questioning the mediated representations of the place. However, when Female Subject #2 pointed out that she “really want[ed] to see that cinematography,” she reminded other participants that what they were watching was not the city as an actual place, but the cinematic mediated representation of the physical space. The verbal exchange between these focus group participants documents the audiences’ ambivalent position as they oscillate between the concept of the representation and the facticity of the place. Focus group participants discuss television images that denote real and actual (unmediated) places with a degree of accuracy, and also simultaneously re-construct them as mediated places of representation through iconic codes (resemblance between image and referent) of cinematographic images. In other words, Turkish audiences assign authenticity to Danish TV dramas through local colors to negotiate divergent ways of imagining and experiencing mediated places and time in the context of global digital media consumption. The gray colors of landscapes, dark and shady places, and gloomy weather in Danish TV dramas evoke “a sense of place” which signifies Danishness or Nordicness. The perceived iconic qualities of the visual and aesthetic representations of place elicit authenticity in these dramas. As a result, spatiotemporal iconicity authentically represents a mediated place regarding national chronotope.

Audience members also implied an imaginative quality of the mediated place that goes beyond memetic representations of Denmark. The participants who have not been to Denmark and who only have a mediated experience of the place imagine it to be “a certain way.” They presumed resemblance between the real physical space and its representation in media. When mediated images fulfill both audience expectations and prospects, the dramatic series garner authenticity. Hansen and Waade (2018, 10) argue that “for the viewer, navigating between the fictional diegesis and the actual world seems much less of a controversy.” That is, audiences do not always feel uncomfortable while realizing visual and representational contrasts between the fictional narration and the sense of place, as it carries out distinct spatiotemporal cues of national chronotope. In the case of Danish TV series, visual spatiotemporal signs (i.e., Nordic Noir) signify a “sense of place” although that place is not always an actual geographical location. The place is a mediated location constructed through audiovisual content with attributes of Nordicness. For example, a Danish TV series shot in Iceland, Belarus, or England with iconic signifiers resembling the landscape of Denmark, without any reference to a specific place, work as well for audiences as those shot in Denmark or Sweden. The iconic signs of Denmark contribute to the authenticity of the TV series because of the indexicality of the signs, regardless of the origin of production place. Therefore, the verisimilitude representation of Copenhagen in Borgen, Bron/Broen, and Forbreydelsen contributes to the authenticity and local color of Danish TV series, regardless of the actual location or place of filming. Many participants admitted that they did not pay particular attention to the “production place” or “the place of origin” of the TV series before watching them. A few informants stated that [after watching Nordic dramas] they specifically searched for more Danish or Nordic serials to watch (Personal interviews, March 2016 and August 2018). However, Borgen, Bron/Broen, and Forbrydelsen are Danish not because they were shot in Denmark, but because they authentically represent the local color of Denmark and Nordic countries. Put differently, within the multiplicity of media products in circulation on digital platforms, Danish dramas take up space within the genre of Nordic Noir in the global cultural industry, as audiences of these dramas engage in a spacetime that evokes a particular sense of place by configuring national chronotope. Hence, in the digital age of media, it is not about ‘the origin of the place’ that makes a Danish TV series authentic. Even if the TV drama series is not shot in Denmark, incorporating characteristics of Denmark or Nordic places to form national chronotope can be satisfactory for audiences. In other words, only the place elicits authenticity, and the audiences’ interpretation of indexical and iconic signs, as well as the audiences’ desire for local colors ignite a national spacetime. In this sense, the representation of Danishfication is enough for authenticating media products and claiming locality of national chronotope.

Time in Seriality and Temporal Semiosis

In addition to spatiality, participants in focus groups and personal interviews highlighted the importance of temporality in establishing local colors and maintaining the authenticity of Danish TV series. Turkish audiences declare that time of events flows at a different rate in different TV series as constituents of national chronotope. For instance, temporal duration and dramatic time in Danish series is notably slower than the pace found in shows from other countries including Turkey and the United States. As evidenced below by participants in Focus Group 1 (FG1), Turkish audiences consider the different use of time as a sign of local color and a facilitator of authenticity in the case of national chronotope in the TV drama narrative:

Female Subject #1 (FG1): I feel that Danish dramas are different from other series. Time really flows slower. Because I feel like, if I start an episode I absolutely follow with another. I watch two or three episodes. But it never happened. Uhm! [paused] With Borgen, and also with Bron, just one episode was enough for me. And I saved them. In other [series], I have an insatiable hunger. I’ll watch this [episode], that, and that. But it doesn’t mean that these series are brilliant and Danish ones are bad. Those always have a constant action and a fast-paced thing, so time flows by and I can’t understand. I swallowed the time. I continue. Two, three episodes.

Female Subject #2 (FG1): Based on consumption.

Female Subject #1 (FG1): Yes.

Female Subject #2 (FG1): Like you eat healthy food and you’re full but you eat junk food but you’re still hungry.

Female Subject #1 (FG1): Exactly. I feel awesome after I watch an episode [of Danish TV series].

Female Subject #2 (FG1): But I can only watch two episodes at most and that’s only if I started early.

Female Subject #3 (FG1): Also, it needs a bit of time to digest. Uhm! . . .. [Talk over]

Female Subject #1 (FG1): Maybe before bedtime, watch three or four [episodes]?

Female Subject #3 (FG1): Oh, I mean you need to digest the story anyway. Well as I said, I finished Lost’s one season in one sitting, but it was watchable. I don’t remember watching Broen three or four episodes consecutively. Even when I had time.

The participants in this focus group appreciated the narrative temporality of Danish TV series. They also specified two types of temporal characteristics of their viewing experiences: the timeframe in the TV dramas, and the audience’s experience of the flow of time. The participants acknowledged the juxtaposition of the different temporalities that they experienced when watching Danish TV dramas. On one hand, audience members were aware of the real time in which they were viewing the dramatic episodes, and, on the other, they were aware of the passage of time in the storyline. Here, Bakhtin’s chronotope is useful for understanding the experience of the audience. Bakhtin (1981) suggests that not only the author, but also the readers inhabit their own chronotope. Thus, the concept includes a reader-response element and can be used to analyze local images in a text which are based upon a link between time and space (Quoted in Vice 1997, 208). The audiences’ experience addresses the perception of the mediated spatiotemporal artifacts through the spatial and temporal embedding of everyday life. In reference to chronotope, audiences’ self-reflexive engagement with distinct configurations of timespace both in the Danish TV drama series and in their ordinary locus and quotidian time brings about the authentication of national TV products. In addition, unlike other TV dramas which enable binge watching, Danish TV dramas enforce a time-symmetrical experience. All participants of the study admitted that they did not choose to binge-watch Danish TV dramas, even though they have a habit of binge-watching other television shows. These participants found the dialectic between screening time and real time appealing, as the experiential flow of time in a particular national chronotope of Danish TV dramas.

Another supporting remark by a twenty-four-year-old graduate student, Male Subject #5, in Focus Group 2 (FG2), offers and additional avenue of possibility related to the temporal features of Danish TV series:

Scandinavian series [are] marked and differentiated by their quality. [They have] higher quality. I mean it seems quality is more important [for them]. The story [develops] very slowly! They take their time to develop the story, they take their time to develop characters. [The Danish drama] is slow! How can I say that? [It is] more impressive and more captivating like this. The audiences [of the dramas] are encouraged to reflect on [the drama] I think!

All participants in this study, including Male Subject #5, stated that the authenticity of Danish dramas relies on the narrative temporality of these TV dramas (e.g., duration, pace etc.). Danish dramas demand focused and reflexive viewing practices of audience members and invites them to reflect on the distinct spacetime of the narrative. As a result, space and time are intertwined with the audiences’ mediated and daily life experiences of spatiotemporality, and invoke distinct spatiotemporal cues of national chronotope for Turkish audiences.

Based on fieldwork data served, this study affirms that temporal frameworks of audiences which range from the mundane to the epochal with different temporal orders define national chronotope. For instance, Turkish audiences’ temporality of everyday life in Turkey does not align with the temporalities on the screen. Therefore, Turkish audiences foreground the unfamiliarity of time that draws a temporal semiosis that is different than Turkish and American TV dramas and assign a distinct national chronotope regarding the Danishness of the mediated spacetime. In terms of cross-cultural TV series consumption, unfamiliar and unexpected representations of temporality is associated with the national chronotope of Danish dramas.

Conclusion

In this article, by employing an ethnographic approach, I investigated the interpretations and engagement of a niche audience with TV dramas from a periphery country, Denmark. Although in Denmark, Germany, and the United Kingdom, mainstream audiences consumed Danish dramas (Eichner and Esser 2020; Waade et al. 2020) they were not popular among mass Turkish audiences. Therefore, the data and the analysis do not ruminate as a totalizing argument and a homogeneous category granting all television audiences in Turkey. The findings and inferences of this study only appeal to an urban, modern, secular, middle- or upper-middle class niche audience segment, rather than mass audiences. Here, by focusing on the representation and reception of place and time in Danish TV dramas, I explored Turkish audiences’ imagination of divergent forms of spatiotemporal frameworks. Two interrelated, yet complex concepts, authenticity and local color, emerged repeatedly in the interviews and in mundane conversations with audiences that reflect the significance of place and time for Turkish audiences. As inquiring local and authentic representations of place, physical and symbolic landscapes, and the depiction of time in Danish dramas has been one of the central themes of personal and focus group interviews, the participants of the study critically engaged with the Danish TV dramas, and ascribed authenticity and local color to these dramas to elucidate divergent spatialities and distinctive temporalities in these TV drama series. By comparing representations of spatiotemporalities in different TV drama series (e.g., Danish, Turkish, and American), Turkish audiences negotiated and re-conceptualized how they imagined national chronotope in the context of the global digital media cultures. Thereby, the participants differentiated Danish TV dramas from other international media products. While audience members experienced mediated space and time defined through the consumption of global media products, they ascribed authenticity to these places and flow of time in Danish dramas, and attributed local colors to spatiotemporal representations. In the case of Turkish audiences, globally circulating images and representations related to specific geography (e.g., Denmark or Nordic countries) and style of temporality played a significant role in establishing the authenticity and local colors of Danish TV dramas. In cross-cultural viewing practices, national chronotope signifies both (1) time and space configurations which indicate a particular “nation” (e.g., Denmark) or that of “the national” (e.g., Danishness) in media texts and (2) discursive constructions of social worlds in which socio-geographical identities (e.g., Nordicness), besides national identities, can be created in the mediatized world. Thereby, the participants of the study perceived spatial and temporal visual representations signifying Danishness or Nordicness through the depiction of socio-geographical features and distinct spatiotemporal cues concerning a national chronotope. Put differently, in the audiences’ imaginations, national chronotope can be the reflective of a national culture or a national identity, as well as a proximate locale. Visual spatiotemporal signs could refer to the “sense of place” concerning a singular nation or a community of contiguous nations as in the case of Nordic countries (i.e., Nordic Noir), whether it is an actual geographical location or a mediated location constructed through audiovisual indexicality of content with attributes of Nordicness.

Within the factuality of space and mediated signs of place, audiences found authenticity through decoding detailed depictions of both familiar and unfamiliar geographical settings, landmarks, and the distinctive temporality of dramatic time. Audiences appeared to perceive local colors in places that were “atypical” of their own surroundings or of places unfamiliar to them. They credited or criticized these dramas for accurately and authentically representing places, regions, landscapes, and time spans on screen, as well as mediated representations of these places in time-bounded contexts. Relying on their extensive experience with diverse media products and their preceding knowledge of local color, audiences in this study took up a position which enabled them to label the mediated places and time as “authentic.” In other words, from the perspective of Turkish audience members, Danish TV drama series, which properly utilized place-making practices, were distinct enough to be marked as original and authentic national products. In this context, local colors reinforced the idea of authenticity by satisfying expectations, beliefs, and prior cognitive images and representations. Turkish audience members ascribed a national chronotope to Danish dramas by negotiating visual representations of local colors depicted in the TV series in the context of multiple spatialities and temporalities. In cases that there seem to be an irreconcilable tension between the local reality of the physical space and mediated representations of places in the TV dramas, from the audiences’ perspective, multiple spatialities and temporalities cohabited and interacted in the TV dramas. In the case of Danish TV dramas, Turkish audiences assign facts to a fiction and actuality to acting by assessing the possibility or plausibility of the places and spatiotemporal events depicted in these dramas. With recurring images of Denmark or Scandinavia, these scenes not only established an imaginative Denmark and Danish society, but also, they heightened a sense of realism regarding authentic representations and local colors. Thus, TV dramas gradually fortified a growing familiarity with the Nordic spaces and distinct structure of time. However, Danish dramas also reproduced an unfamiliarity associated with Turkish audiences through foreign and exotic aesthetics of places and temporal sequences. In these locales, while the national chronotope and the narrative mutually constituted each other in the process of the production of meaning, audiences re-constructed, re-interpreted, and retained the national ambient, as well as the national identity (e.g., Danishness) in the dramas.

Based on qualitative data, I concluded that audiences employed authenticity and local color as strategies to define national chronotope which provided a middle ground and offered reconciliation between the facticity of both the geographical place and mediated images of space on one hand, and factuality of time and local temporalities on the other. Through a reconciliation between factual places and ambiguous appearances of mediated places, and between real time and representations of equivocal diegetic time, Turkish audiences strived to ease this tension with a search for genuine representations and local colors of “foreign”/national spatiotemporal artifacts on TV. Participants made textual references to the authenticity of the media products through distinct depictions of places and time which enhanced the credibility of these representations and interpreted them as distinguishing markers of national chronotope. While TV dramas artistically reformulated time and appropriated places of mundane life, from the audiences’ perspective, authenticity was originated in the process of assimilation of everyday space and time in TV dramas. In Bakhtinian sense, they created a form of chronotope as an immediate reality in which space and time became an artistically visible constitutive category of the visual and textual narrative in Danish TV dramas. They mutually constituted the narrative where they were responsive to the movement of the plot, as well as the national spacetime. Thus, spatial and temporal motifs defined the genre and generic qualities of the story as they concurrently underline a distinction of Danish TV dramas from other nationally produced dramas. Here, the chronotope has become the indicator of national cultural products. In a matrix of the complicated relationships of TV drama narratives, spatial motifs such as Nordic style buildings, streets, interior places, pastoral landscape of Northern Europe, and temporal elements including the depiction of events in lengthy time, slow pace of progress in plots, and a sedate urban life indicated differences, distinction, or even the strange or unfamiliar. Time and space which operated in unity to present the chronotope of Danish TV dramas reinforced the audiences’ perception of local colors and the sense of authenticity (true to its origin). A Danish drama has become a locus and a spatiotemporal point in which the national identities and representations of nations intersected with audiences’ interpretations and experiences. Based on a mediated representation, Turkish audiences incorporated the national cues and construct “Danishness” by textualizing national chronotope in the dramas. In the case of Danish dramas, as a televisual affair, the “national” connoted the difference in the global context. The national chronotope not only marked off the national identity of the TV drama, but also became a national text in the space-time semantics. The rhythm of Danish dramas characterized the nation’s contemporary life and became the signifier of the nation. Spacetime semantics was a constructional of Danish culture as well as a mode of a national representation.