Abstract
Reviewed by: Marina Vujnovic, Monmouth University, USA
I thoroughly enjoyed reading Anikó Imre’s monograph TV Socialism, the agenda of which was to tell a forgotten story, or more precisely, the neglected story, about socialism by examining televised entertainment genres during and after socialism, geographically understood as Eastern Europe. As cultural studies, television studies, and, in some sense, history, Imre’s work contributes to a growing body of work which focuses on the examination of everyday life under socialism. In that sense, television, like no other medium, presents itself as an ideal site for such research. A book of this scope requires exceptional cross-disciplinary reach, and this volume was surely not easy to write. Imre’s ability to reach beyond traditional boundaries of disciplinary research makes this book a refreshing read. Perhaps, its most important goal was to debunk common misconceptions in public and academic discourses about socialist television as simply an extension of the arm of the communist party to affirm the ideology of communism and to assure its rule. To be sure, such history of socialist television has already been told and, of course, is valuable in and of itself. What is distinctive in Imre’s work is her attempt to focus on entertainment genres rather than news, from which a different story has emerged, that of socialist television’s constant interaction with the its Western counterparts and between state-run examples throughout Eastern Europe and beyond the perimeters of the Iron Curtain, for example, Yugoslavia. Imre’s story is one of socialism’s contradictions, thus reaffirming that every system of organization of social and political life produces its own contradictions. Thorough reading of these contradictions provides a more forensic view of what socialism was as a system and alternatively gives a more precise understanding of how people might have experienced it. Television, itself, can be seen as a system for production of counterculture. This book illuminates that a unique space was created between “top-down attempts at influencing viewers and bottom up demands of entertainment” (p. 4) and gives us a unique view into not only socialist television, but, more importantly, the various cultures that socialist television had created. Many surprises emerge in this book, but perhaps one of the most important is that socialist television produced unique genres even when some were modeled to their Western counterparts. Such examples include crime drama, soaps, and reality TV that help us to understand what was unique about socialist vision of modernity. In that sense, this book is as much as about the uniqueness of socialist television as it is about socialist television’s continuity and similarity that it had retained as it developed historically alongside its Western counterpart. Another important surprise was that socialist television didn’t die with the socialist system itself. That continuity perhaps demonstrates the enduring cultural power of television as institution that is capable of carrying cultural, social, and even political values of systems beyond their expiration date.
The book is structured in four parts: Genres of Realism and Reality, Genres of History, Genres of Fiction, and Genres of Humor. Although this generic organization is a strength in many ways, it also uncovers the weaknesses of such organization. Imre defends her choice of such organization by arguing against geographic and chronological organization and by defining genre as “transcultural form of expression rather than a set of specific television genres, since socialist genres do not exactly overlap with those derived from Anglo-American television” (p. 5). However, as someone who had grown up in the socialist country of Yugoslavia, I was left with the feeling that perhaps differences among and between socialist television models of Eastern European countries that were examined were as stark as between socialist television and Anglo-American television, even if at times similar. Because of the transnational nature of this book, particular experiences and differences between socialist models of television studied are missing, with the exception of Hungary. Indeed, this book sometimes reads more like a case study on Hungarian socialist television than as a truly transnational study. Although a generic organization might be useful for transnational mapping of socialist television in general terms, that same approach was proven to be an obstacle in fully understanding and historicizing the unique experiences of selected countries. In that sense, if Imre had approached this book more as a historian than as a cultural studies or television studies scholar, this book’s already significant contribution would have been unmatched by better examining the role of entertainment genres in nation-building and the role in which entertainment genres served to negotiate, mitigate, and examine issues of nationalism. For instance, the Yugoslavian experience could be understood through a comparative transnational approach. I was impressed at the level in which Imre had accomplished that; however, I question whether some of the traits of socialist television that Imre identified applied to the Yugoslavian experience. In a more advertising-driven, mixed economy, Yugoslavian television had a unique response to those socioeconomic conditions. As a tele-education example, Male Tajne Velikih Majstora Kuhinje (Little Secrets of the Big Masters of Kitchen) which was a cooking show that I remember watching as a kid and as a young adult, was a model of a corporate mass propaganda for Podravka, the Croatian company that produced Vegeta, a nationally and internationally popular seasoning, even as it was teaching socialist viewers how to cook. Producers of the show were male, and as were the two leading characters, cook Karapandja and host Mlakar. By default, national viewers for this program were female, which was in stark opposition from default national viewers in the Eastern Block, who were male. In fact, I would argue that the majority of tele-education, in addition to cooking or child rearing, programming in Yugoslavia, was intended for a female audience because many of those programs had a corporate-marketing component, and consumption and consumerism have been historically a female domain.
Thus, a generic focus might be a weakness of this book that tries to cover too much territory. Its attempt to encompass premodern roots of television, as well as socialist and post-socialist television, makes this project feel too large. Particularly, in the section on reality television, the examination of post-socialist ethno-reality shows mostly draws on examples from Hungary, which kept me wondering whether the book’s focus of post-socialist TV is providing a broader understanding of socialist TV or rather is obscuring it. I could recommend at least three projects here, although probably more: socialist TV, post-socialist TV, and women and socialist TV. Each would require a book-length project in itself. Finally, the methodological scope of this book is vast. Its combination of archival research, interview research, television reading, and examination of existing literature, as well as some input from viewer experiences, is truly impressive. However, interviews were conducted with Hungarian television professionals only. Additionally, we don’t know much about the interviewees, themselves, other than that they were television professionals. For a broader audience consumption, this might be altogether enough information; however as a scholar, I craved to learn more about these people. Because of that methodological limitation and the book’s overwhelming focus on Hungarian television, I wondered whether this book has accomplished its goals to provide a unique look and to debunk misconceptions of socialist television if it hasn’t attempted to be a comparative transnational study of Eastern European television.
Nevertheless, I positively and wholeheartedly embrace this study as a surprisingly refreshing and significant contribution to study of television and socialist television per se. I recommend this book to cross-disciplinary scholars and students whose interests may lie in television studies and the examination of everyday life under socialism. And finally, I’m excitedly awaiting Imre’s next project because this book has opened at least as many important questions about socialist and post-socialist TV as it has successfully answered. I will keep coming back to this monograph with enthusiasm and continued curiosity.