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Cakirlar, C 
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1171-8635 and Serinkaya Winter, Z ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0008-8027-0938,
2025.
Families in constant crisis: Ömer’s nostalgia, critical affordances of TV genres, and shifting politics of intimacy in 'New Türkiye'.
Jump Cut: a review of contemporary media, 63 (Summer).
ISSN 0146-5546
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Abstract
A new group of TV dramas have garnered popularity in Türkiye. Shows like Cranberry Sorbet and Ömer bring together characters with immutably different lifestyles and build their narratives on the endless conflict that ensues. Set against the backdrop of the decline of the welfare society, economic crisis, growing hypervigilance and neoliberal politics of intimacy, these shows point to a new narrative structure and set of aesthetic conventions. Family ties in these dramas arise as toxic entanglements which impose themselves as a necessary survival mechanism in a growingly ruthless and corrupt social environment. This article carries out a close reading of the TV show Ömer by treating Lauren Berlant’s “cruel optimism” (2011) as a conceptual anchor to understand how these emerging trends in Turkish TV drama reinvents the ‘waning of genres’ within new neoliberal governance in Turkish politics and culture. Cruel optimism, in these depictions of hetero-familialism, is informed by a constant investment in heteronormativity and familial attachment when the family has failed to fulfill its promises. The characters’ adherence to their family is cruel as it is more unbearable for them to sever their ties with family, even in the face of disillusionment and harm, than to remain in the stifling relations of family and kinship. Following Berlant, our analysis will depart from the questions of what happens when the fantasy of family starts to fray and how the characters adjust to the “crisis ordinariness”. We situate the TV drama and its depiction of families in the post-state-of-emergency authoritarianism and politics of intimacy in Türkiye. Following a brief overview of the (dis)continuities in popular film and TV narratives of familialism in Turkish generic system, the article’s analysis of Ömer considers the implications of the show’s narrative structure and the rhythm of its storyline – by critically exploring how conflict is framed, and how crisis (or crisis ordinariness) emerges as both a stylistic and narrative element.
| Item Type: | Journal article |
|---|---|
| Publication Title: | Jump Cut: a review of contemporary media |
| Creators: | Cakirlar, C. and Serinkaya Winter, Z. |
| Date: | 3 July 2025 |
| Volume: | 63 |
| Number: | Summer |
| ISSN: | 0146-5546 |
| Identifiers: | Number Type 2466671 Other |
| Rights: | This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. |
| Divisions: | Schools > School of Arts and Humanities |
| Record created by: | Jeremy Silvester |
| Date Added: | 11 Jul 2025 08:47 |
| Last Modified: | 11 Jul 2025 08:47 |
| Related URLs: | |
| URI: | https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/53933 |
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