Television & New Media

Rape-revenge narratives are no stranger to our screens. However, these stories take on new implications in the wake of the #MeToo movement. Originally a staple of exploitation cinema in the 1970s, rape-revenge narratives conventionally feature a survivor of rape who hunts down and brutally murders their rapist(s). However, the exact form these acts of violence take has shifted with changing sociocultural contexts. This article analyzes how rape-revenge television narratives in the #MeToo era opt for violence occurring on behalf of the survivor by a woman and/or abuse survivor (proxy violence) or through a fantasy sequence (imagined violence). Through an analysis of the series Big Little Lies (Kelley 2017–2019) and I May Destroy You (Coel 2020), I articulate how this redevelopment reveals changing cultural attitudes toward sexual violence embodied by the #MeToo movement. Ultimately, #MeToo-era rape-revenge television texts engage with past rape-revenge narratives and contemporary sociocultural contexts to participate in feminist discourses.

This study examines the cultural politics of Great Seoul Invasion, a 2022 Korean band survival reality TV program produced by Mnet with Master Plan Music Group funding to create global Korean bands amid the rising Korean Wave. Through textual analysis, this study explores the program’s commodification of Korean band music while promoting diverse styles. To this end, the paper introduces “K-wavification,” combining “Korean Wave” and “commodification,” to analyze Korean band music’s transformation into transnational commodities. This concept reveals the ideological embodiment of K-wavification in the program by focusing on global commodification, genre hierarchization with K-pop at the apex, and spectacularization of Seoul and Korean histories. The study identifies moments of resistance where authenticity pursuits in reality TV intersect with indie bands’ artistic integrity, challenging, yet absorbed by commodification.

Over the past decade, over-the-top (OTT) platforms have profoundly impacted the television broadcasting landscape in Turkey. These platforms have opened up new opportunities for producing and distributing original TV drama, known as “dizi” in Turkish. This study examines the localization of global TV drama genres on Turkish OTT platforms. The study uses a genre analysis framework to examine three TV dramas, each declared as the pioneer of its genre in Turkey. Genre analysis is conducted critically regarding both textual and cultural levels of the generic characteristics and background. The findings indicate that these dramas exhibit a hybrid characteristic, showing similarities in textual properties (generic verisimilitude) but lacking the generic practice’s cultural background in Turkey (cultural verisimilitude). The study argues that this hybridity is the result of a tension between market-driven localization and the deeper socio-cultural context.

As one of the longest running reality television programs in America, Survivor offers a unique opportunity to explore how reality television meets the needs of “real life,” particularly in a conjunctural moment marked by racial reckoning. In this essay, we analyze two pivotal moments from Season 41 and 42 of Survivor, colloquially referred to as the show’s “new era” following a network-wide diversity mandate. By performing a textual analysis of two tribal council scenes, we explore how racial politics complicate the stories Survivor tells about itself–and, in turn, how Survivor frames these scenes to collapse racial discourse into discourse about gameplay. We argue that Survivor attempts to meet the exigencies of the moment by presenting feel-good, or “happy” multiculturalism as central to Survivor’s mythologies, and using these mythologies to justify “unhappy” multiculturalism, thereby preserving the whiteness inherent to the game itself.