Past imperfect: Transition narratives,popular discourses and The Informant

Contexts and concepts

In the last decade, there has been an emerging scholarly and public interest in the Eastern European region’s geopolitical and cultural status, which was accompanied by a trend of locally developed and globally distributed Eastern European quality television series on SVoD platforms like Netflix and Max (formerly HBO). These contents have targeted cosmopolitan, international audiences, but they have utilized local themes and settings in order to make sense of the region’s turbulent past and present. They have initiated public and academic debates on the nature of post-socialist nostalgia, the question of moral responsibility and on historical authenticity, and have also developed ways of understanding political processes in their cultural context. Scholars have approached these texts from the perspectives of transnationalism, cultural adaptation and cultural appropriation (Hansen et al., 2020; Hermann, 2022; Imre, 2018, 2019; Szczepanik, 2020; Varga, 2017). They have argued that the television series are important spaces of making sense of the past. After the appearance of other pay cable streamers in the early 2010s (Netflix, Sky and later Apple and Disney), HBO changed its business strategy in Europe; its response to the appearance of the competition probably came with a significant delay (Szczepanik, 2020: 244).

HBO’s European expansion coincided with critical and scholarly discussions that elaborate on potentialities for decolonization and de-westernization of global media productions and channel these concepts in a locally situated industrial and cultural milieu. The knowledge production in and about Eastern Europe has been affected by geopolitical relations since long before the Cold War and its hierarchic three-world structure, with the Soviet bloc being ‘the second world’, a terminology disseminated mostly by US scholars and politicians:

(. . .) the Cold War has been the gatekeeping concept for Eastern Europe in American social science since World War II. Some results of this has been an emphasis on politics as the defining object of Eastern European studies, the privileging of political science for setting research agendas, and, in the current era [as of 1996], the obsession with the concept of transition as the new gatekeeping concept. (Cahalen, 1996: 22)

Scholarship initially regarded the Cold War as a conflict of national and economic interests, but it became quickly evident that it was just as much about cultural and ideological beliefs (Westad, 2000, 10-11). Cold War cultural scenes have created interest in media and cultural studies as well by field-transforming volumes (e.g. Evans, 2016; Imre, 2016; Mihelj and Huxtable, 2018), which investigate the culturally-permeable Iron Curtain, similarities in broadcast media landscapes, patterns of ideology and their relations to aesthetic formats, transnational television flows, traveling formats, policy influences, shared institutions and common technologies. Some argue that geopolitical hierarchies effected the success (or the lack thereof) of the transition processes, and the subordinate relation of the East has remained intact. While ‘the West’ is continuing to see Eastern Europe as its inferior, this relation is based on mutual projections and narratives of self-definition. Many contemporary television shows are concerned with populism, metaphors of surveillance and social insecurity as they have attracted large local audiences and sparked discussions. Socialist espionage thrillers like The Informant are introducing the student resistance movement of the 1980s and create a malleable bond between state socialism, failures in the democratic process during the transition period, and current authoritarian systems. Thus, in the broadest sense, we examine bonds of power and representation in spectacles of the state socialist regime, political legacies, and aesthetic and social codes of historic televisual portrayals in the specific landscape of the Hungarian media industry.

Introduced in April 2022 on HBO Max, the Hungarian coming-of-age espionage dramedy set in the mid-1980s, The Informant, fits seamlessly into the trend of Eastern European contents that utilize global waves of nostalgia and socialist allegories to reference contemporary political issues. Eastern European quality series of the last decade (starting with Czech HBO’S 2013 Burning Bush, created by acclaimed Polish director Agnieszka Holland) have responded quickly to the way right-wing populist regimes to exploit the pluralistic media-technological milieu and occupy cultural and political spaces at all discursive levels. An important node in Eastern European studies is the lack of understanding of what constitutes memory politics in the region. Series produced and set in Eastern Europe, such as Burning Bush (Holland, 2013), The Sleepers (HBO Czech Republic, 2019), The Mire (Holoubek and Misztal, 2018) (Netflix Poland, 2018–2024), Spy/Master (Mobra-Proton-HBO Romania, 2023), or The Informant (Szentgyörgyi, 2022) attempt to fill this discursive void, as well as taking over other public service functions that are often absent in the region (Imre, 2018: 49–53). However, in this article, we propose that due to the specific situation of the totally centralized Hungarian media industry, and its capacity to rearticulate history in favor of the populist vision of the Orbán-regime, the series goes much further than the aforementioned global trend. The television series effectively thematizes a fundamental doubt in the transition narrative as a teleological story with universal moral lessons and injects an alternative interpretation of history into public discourses by proposing a third, critical space not overdetermined by the bipolar logic of contemporary right-wing populism. As such, the show utilizes a transnational, highly stylized image of socialism with the explicit goal of distancing itself from the discourses on individual moral responsibility, collaboration and resistance. The significance of this detachment consists in the fact that the language of moral responsibility has been effectively monopolized by the post-globalized, nationalist Hungarian state media, in which the forces of the nation are always cast in the roles of heroes, and anybody who does not agree as antiheroes. The characters of the series refuse to adhere to this logic and the show rather explores the compromises and concessions its fictional figures make as they participate in historical processes. By overstepping issues of responsibility and authenticity, the evidently fictional portrayals allow the series to address the problematic legacies of the 1989 transition period and some possible roots of contemporary political authoritarianism and populism. After the withdrawal of HBO from the local production scene in Eastern Europe, the political significance of the show can be felt even more painfully, as waves of populist state media fill in the absent spaces left behind by the departure.

What puts the series in an even more unique position is that it sparked heated debates on the legacy of the democratic opposition, the history of the transition period and the fragmented knowledge about 1980s politics in Hungarian collective memory. These controversies entered a hopelessly divided mnemonic space where both sides agreed that the series is inauthentic – each in their own different way. In the nationalist propaganda media machinery of the state, the series was a globalist conspiracy against Hungarian identity and history. Opposition intellectuals and commentators on the other hand were busy laying bare the non-authentic aspects of the series’ representations of the opposition movement. We argue that while The Informant offered a novel interpretation of the transition period that goes beyond the usual positions of the bipolar Hungarian public sphere, the series and the almost immediate departure of HBO from Eastern Europe after the premiere was interpreted in a way that confirmed both sides’ presuppositions and thus failed to make an impact on Hungarian memory politics. This also shows how political monopolization of media systems erases the possibility of open-ended democratic public discourses, which would be instrumental in the creation of a minimal consensus in memory politics.

The Informant in the age of illiberal media production

There has been a formative body of scholarly work on Central and Eastern European screen industries, media industries, institutional interests, the relations of global trends and local formats, and the geopolitical status of the region in terms of media flow, media production and content distribution (Imre, 2023; Szczepanik et al., 2020 Szczepanik, 2021; Varga, 2017). These analyses offer new ways to understand political and economic processes in cultural contexts and draw attention to subtle modalities of cultural colonialism, anomalies of platform imperialism, entanglements of local media policies and service industries, measures of unequal cultural power, differences of heritage media in transnational versus national popular images, and asymmetrical geopolitical relations that are always present in audiovisual content production.

In these accounts of the screen industries in Eastern and Central Europe – and post-colonial Eastern European studies in general – there is an understanding that the Global North dominates not only discourses and infrastructures, but also social imaginations of cultural production and storytelling, and media policies. Departing from these general premises, we proceed to examine how transnational productions intended for international distribution, whose historical accuracy is anchored in real events and distinctive periods, are dehistoricized. This line of inquiry fits – among other locally produced, but globally promoted Eastern European productions – The Informant, which remains relevant only in its home country due to the lack of international marketing potential, commercial budget and visibility. Although The Informant’s campaign relied heavily on the promise of its simultaneous transnational (72 countries) premier, the actual campaign, a typical programming strategy for local shows produced by global media companies, was only visible in the Hungarian mediascape. Locally, the series was, at least according to local officials, one of the most watched in HBO’s portfolio, but abroad it largely remained unpopular. However, aside from visibility and ratings, the series achieved something that fictional television shows rarely do: it rendered visible public debates and scholarly arguments on contemporary memory politics.

Many argue that online distribution and platform imperialism make peripheral positions more visible instead of leveling them out with the center, and that national borders and center-periphery hierarchies matter even more in the so-called ‘post-globalization’ (Elkins, 2019; Flew et al., 2016: 149–159) era than in the analog broadcast era (Szczepanik et al., 2020; Szczepanik, 2021: 1–4) Moreover, small nations’ cultural products tend to be perceived as too culturally specific, which activates the mechanisms of so-called cultural discount, and inhibits their cultural export potential, especially to larger import markets. ‘Smallness should not be confused with peripherality, because the two pertain to different parameters: size and resources in the first case, economic and cultural power in the second’. (Szczepanik, 2021: 19)

The cultural and industrial contexts of The Informant help to understand the asymmetries in the global digital market in the age of populist nationalism and oligarchic media systems in Hungary. We argue that the series entered the media space at the crossroads of global and local trends, a curious moment where several factors intersected: the dehistoricization of content produced by global entertainment companies, which is described as a form of cultural colonization; the end of ‘the regional operation of HBO Europe, which uses original local content production as a vehicle for its transnational corporate strategy’ (Szczepanik, 2021: 3); and the increasing politicization of the entire Hungarian media landscape under the Orbán regimes. Coming to power in 2010, the second government of Viktor Orbán quickly moved ahead to seize total control of the entire Hungarian media scene. Since then, his government has been reelected three times with a constitutional majority, and there have been practically no limitations to the dramatic transformation of the media market. As a result of these changes, foreign investors largely left, and their stakes were taken over by local oligarchs with close political ties to the regime. The process was intensified as ‘the state has emerged as the largest advertiser in the media market and its advertising campaigns are disseminated almost exclusively through media companies with ties to the governing party’ (Kovács et al., 2021: 7). With an overwhelming majority of Hungarian-language media outlets under its control, the regime centralized content production (news media and journalism) to an unprecedented degree: even the smallest regional newspapers are repeating messages articulated in the cabinet office of the prime minister. This transformed most outlets into the propaganda mouthpiece of the regime.

Film production has been an integral part of this model. In exchange for state subsidies, the most important state-funded player in the local audiovisual market, the National Film Institute, expects political loyalty and actively participates in the overrepresentation of nationalist narratives in return for financial support. This practice contrasts with former production practices of global media companies, HBO in particular, that formulate social criticism of contemporary authoritarian tendencies in the region (Imre, 2019). Media (and state) capture and oligarchization, the politicization of entertainment industries, populist-nationalist political and cultural agendas, and national media concentration in Hungary, arguably activate another important notion in media policy and industry research: ‘the return of the state’. In the introductory chapter of their formative volume, Terry Flew, Petros Iosifidis and Jeanette Steemers summarize the relations of global and local content production and media policies. Among the questions they ask, the most relevant is ‘Does media globalization weaken the power of nation-states, or do nation-states actively foster the engagement of ‘national champions’ in the global communications economy?’ (Flew et al., 2016: 6).

In recent years, the long-standing assumption that media convergence and globalization also represent the death of the nation-state has indeed been shattered: ‘Certainly the number of those linking the so-called death of television with the so-called death of the nation-state has fallen dramatically’ (Turner in Flew et al., 2016, 96). Industrial and policy developments in media suggest that the nation-state framework tends to strengthen as competition and tension between local and global content production grows. This description is particularly accurate for markets where smallness and peripheral position meets authoritarian, right-wing political tendencies. In countries such as Hungary, where the illiberal state became the biggest funding actor, nationalist narratives have dominated content production. According to Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union, in 2022, the Hungarian government’s expenditure on cultural, broadcasting and publishing services was 2, 3 and 0.7% of total spending, respectively, among the highest proportions in the European Union. ¹ Moreover, the government increased the amount that can be collected in the National Film Institute’s deposit account by HUF 25 billion to HUF 69 billion in 2022. This account collects film financing from companies in Hungary, in return for which the companies receive tax incentives. Both examples also point to and exemplify the continued ideological and financial relevance of the state in global and local media productions.

The National Film Institution’s political mission determines the layers of nationalist storytelling that, again, are very far from transnational or global modes of storytelling. On the other hand, besides local productions funded by global corporations, high-budget service productions have appeared that do not criticize the illiberal state, but take advantage of the tax breaks it offers and the cheap labor force of the region. This internal segregation is also present at the narrative, infrastructural, ideological and funding levels of the productions (Imre, 2023). Therefore we state that the distribution and timing of The Informant’s release, its aftermath and the controversies surrounding its reception unveil seemingly overlooked correlations of transnational formats, the authoritarian state and global media industries.

Political agency in fiction

The representation of socialism’s end and the country’s transition to democracy has been divisive in Hungarian screen culture (Strausz, 2014). Arguably, this is partially due to the long legacy of interpreting cinema along the lines of the works’ political commitment (Paul, 1983). Polemic films that depict the regime change as a set of problems and contradicting accounts have been produced in the neighboring countries both in feature film and television formats (such as the aforementioned Czech series Burning Bush, or the Polish The Mire). In the next sections we aim to show that HBO’s The Informant follows this strategy: it does not pursue the inherited critical patterns on resistance figures and morally questionable collaborators that the public has been conditioned to recognize throughout four decades of real existing socialism and beyond. The debates around the show reveal how deeply audiences are still entangled in the same binaries. Our article thus follows these two main threads: first, we highlight how the series’ main objective has been the deconstruction of various myths of heroic transition-era intellectuals. Second, we show that the public discourses surrounding the show, which arrived at the conclusion that the series failed to represent the period in question, were the results of the new Cold War-style thinking in the over-politicized Hungarian media landscape.

The Informant seeks to establish relational connections with the past through a specific interpretation of history, structural correspondences with historical actors, confrontations and problems. It provides a model for analogous historical thinking, which favors paradigmatic correspondences instead of direct historical correlations. The direct, syntagmatic obsession with ‘authenticity’ (colors, textures and surfaces, or actions and reactions) backgrounds an arguably more important function of The Informant, namely the re-visitation of some social-political choices transition-era intellectuals were faced with. By shifting the focus from objects and specific historical correspondences to narrative structure and longitudinal character analysis, the television series presents a novel way of thinking about the role of historical actors around the Hungarian transition. Ultimately, this paradigmatic, relational mode of representation failed to reach public discourses, as we will show, and in the end, we offer some speculative remarks on the possible reason for this misalignment.

While critics and the public were busy discussing questions of authenticity, the narrative structure, the system of generic references, and – to some extent – the visual language of the series all appear to argue against approaching the show along the lines of historical accuracy. The Informant’s episodes launch with an archival montage title scene that problematizes historical representation in a reflexive manner. Overall, each shot in the scene is presented with a grainy television filter, which creates a mnemonic frame around the entire narrative. Significantly, however, the scene prevents establishing an unproblematic sentimental connection with the period by encapsulating in each shot the main contradiction of the Kádár era: the relatively good standards of living and the general lack of political freedom. In the very first mobile shot of the montage, the camera is mounted on a skateboard looking back at the feet of a skater wearing a pair of Adidas sneakers, and in the back we can see the concrete gray prefab towers of socialist project buildings closing off the horizon. On the one hand, the shoes function as an emblem of Western consumer culture, and here more specifically the fact that the Hungarian population did have access to these items (at least during the last two decades of the socialist period, commonly called late socialism or late Kádár era). On the other hand, the claustrophobic background creates a gloomy outlook of the price that one has to pay for this commodity access. As the montage progresses, the cutting alternates images about the ordinary joys of socialist life (parades, marches, music, dancing, vacationing, the central icon of which is Balaton ² ) with shots that visualize brutal police repression. For example, a long shot showing carefree crowds on a Balaton beach is indexed by the following take, in which a worker’s militia parade at the Soviet War Memorial on Liberty Square in Budapest. Then, the montage cuts to a sunbathing couple in a tiny boat sailing, which – as a reference to the menacing Cold War context – is counterposed by a missile fired from under the wings of a fighter jet. There are further examples for this contrapuntal structure, and probably the most intense of these is the image of a militia soldier striking a civilian in the face with a butt of a gun, followed by a shot of cool dancers in a club. Importantly, the accompanying track Mocskos idők (‘Filthy Times’) by the 1980s alternative cult-band Európa Kiadó adds further layers to the scene. The lyrics – ‘Filthy times, you should love them, the future is here, and will never end!’ – talks about how time appeared to be frozen throughout the monotonous, ongoing practice of everyday compromises. Overall, this introductory montage fulfills two goals. First, it immediately sets up a relational mnemonic space for the series, in which the possibility of monological representation of history is ruled out. Second, it prohibits sentimental audience engagement with the 1980s, and effectively displays the distance between viewers and the depicted historical period. Furthermore, as we will see, The Informant uses generic templates and character development across the episodes in a way that deheroizes historical actors, in this case the student movement figures and transition-era intellectuals.

Geri, a young man from the countryside, gets involved with the student resistance movement as he begins his studies in Economy at a (fictional) Budapest university during the mid-1980s. The protagonist is introduced as an introverted person shunning confrontation. Geri’s co-optation commences when he is blackmailed into reporting on the student movement in the university dormitory already on the radar of the authorities. The services are using his brother’s need for special asthma medication as leverage against him. Deploying a universal thriller structure, the main source of tension in the narrative turns out to be whether Geri can uphold the appearance of an ardent pro-democracy student eager to participate in the activities of the university students against the regime, and at the same time satisfy the expectations of his handling officer. Throughout the first part of the series, Geri wins the trust of the student opposition cell led by the charismatic Száva and executes various dangerous assignments for them. Once an established member of the group, he successfully navigates the complicated task of a double agent, and the main focus of the series consists of setting up situations in which this tension can be used to drive the thriller narrative forward, thereby pushing the historical context into the background.

A great example for this is the prolonged action scene at the beginning of the sixth episode, where a fellow cell member, Barna, discovers Geri’s identity as an informant. In an action-packed thriller scene, his handling officer delivers Geri a piece of information that he can use to blackmail Barna into remaining silent. In a powerful monologue, Geri lays out the new rules of the game:

If you see me, you greet me from afar! If I need someone to agree with me, you immediately take my side! If I want to eat your fucking dessert at the lunch table, you hand it over and automatically pour me a glass of water as well, did you fucking understand me?

The reckless, brutal side of the protagonist steps into the foreground here, and although both men are held in check by intimidation, this does not change the fact that the series dissolves the political project of the student movement behind various genre patterns, here thriller elements. These are always driven by personal motivations (impressing the leader of the group by showing extreme loyalty, satisfying the internal need to dominate others, romantically conquering the heart of a rival, etc.). Actually, the historical context is at times so successfully hidden that if one looks at the motivations of the lead characters in The Informant, one could easily develop the impression that the show is simply a young adult drama or a coming-of-age story. In the light of Geri’s character, the political project to change the oppressive state socialist regime takes the backseat. Instead, the series emphasizes the behind-the-scenes deals and compromises he has made, all of which deconstruct the myth of the young, spirited transition-era intellectual, who selflessly sacrifices himself for the high ideals of liberalism and democracy.

Would this description only fit the blackmailed protagonist Geri, the series’ representation of the resistance movement would not be this one-sided. However, it is not just Geri’s figure that the series deconstructs: both Adél, the witty communist youth leader, and Száva, the charismatic resistance movement figure turn out to be ambivalent idols by the time the last episode finishes. The series portrays Zsolt Száva as a great rhetorician, whose speeches are eagerly anticipated by the students. Száva, besides being the captivating leader, is also a narcissist who is deeply concerned about how his allies and enemies perceive him; but, at the same time, he is unable to share his leading role or even listen to the advice of others. The strong-willed leader also turns out to be terminally ill. According to his doctors, he can pass away practically any time due to a rare heart condition. This lack of longer perspective also explains his recklessness, but additionally serves as a vital factor in his decision at the story’s end. The American secret service offers him medical treatment in the States in exchange for loyalty: should socialism fall at some point in the future, his job will be to return to Hungary and take on a central role in the construction of a democratic, anticommunist system. It remains unclear why he could not play this role while remaining in Hungary, and the script explains this with Zsolt’s illness. America has the best doctors in the world, the agent says, and his heart disease will surely be cured there.

After the thriller-like, action-packed final showdown (Száva organizes a large demonstration where he sets a Soviet flag on fire, knocks out several pursuing policemen and finally escapes in a car chase), he decides to give up on solidarity with the student movement and leaves the country on a Danube barge undercover to seek medical treatment abroad. In a farewell conversation, Száva tells Geri to keep the home front tidy until he returns after the first free elections. Száva’s departure shows that he is ready to sacrifice his political ideals in exchange for his personal recovery. Here, the generic motivation of the story, which always favors individual motivation to social commitment (in accordance with Robert B. Ray’s famous argument on Hollywood cinema; Ray, 1985), is cleverly used by the series to reach international audiences. The television show adopts this template by ‘reflecting or adapting transnational themes (. . .) embedded in histories that resonate with large populations nationally and regionally’ (Imre, 2018: 57). As such, The Informant deploys generic preferences in the specific historical context of the Hungarian regime change to depict the moral-political dilemmas and compromises of its agents.

Finally, even the partisan opponent of the anticommunist students is depicted as a person whose declared political convictions are corrupted by personal motivations. The Informant deploys Adél’s character as a young woman who firmly believes in the socialist ideals. During the student jamboree in the fourth and fifth episodes, she plays Száva’s counterpart in the political debate, where the speakers clash in arguments about the legitimacy of the state socialist system and its ideals. This episode is the most interesting political scene of the series, where Száva attacks Adél with arguments that make sense beyond the fictional world of the show. For example, when Száva opines that socialism’s forced egalitarianism kills the competitive spirit in society and the individual drive in its members to improve, Adél comes back at him and points out that unrestrained opportunities lead to social differences that are impossible to control. Rare as this exchange is throughout the show in presenting political arguments, its presence is undermined by the systematic cutaways to Geri, who, while listening to the debate in the audience, has to steal a list of student movement participants from a bag. By the time Adél summarizes her position on the necessity of social egalitarianism, Geri has managed to appropriate the list. He stands up, and whispers – almost as if dismissing the political debate altogether: ‘I have to leave now’. With the suspenseful music and the cutaways, audiences are strongly guided toward the thriller line of the action, and away from the political debate, which becomes a background event: even the sound level of the verbal confrontation is lowered and that of the illustrative music heightened. After the introduction of Adél as a communist youth zealot, in a true thriller-like plot twist, the seventh episode relays that Adél was in fact on a mission launched by the CIA to establish connections with the anticommunist movement in Hungary. Her assignment was to seduce Száva, which she accomplished successfully. This episode fades Adél’s political persona and strengthens her role as a thriller vamp.

In this section, we argued that The Informant’s narrative, visual and generic elements freely mix historical and fictional elements, and that this mixture effectively moves the show away from the topics of moral commitment and authenticity. The Informant utilizes the toolkit of transnational quality television series and the aesthetic repertoire of nostalgia in popular culture to criticize the teleological narratives of the transition period. In other words, similar to many other Eastern European quality television series, it projects back the contemporary contradictions of memory politics into the era of late socialism. In The Informant, the global aesthetic formula not only allegorizes local conflicts, but, because of the lack of consensus in memory politics, it makes its topic relevant in contemporary political debates on socialism’s legacy. Or, as we argued earlier, the series uses a genre vocabulary to speak about the Hungarian regime change and to depict the moral-political dilemmas and compromises of its agents. Interestingly, many of the discourses that the series attempts to criticize and overcome have been reproduced by the public discourses around the show.

Obsession with authenticity

The most effective contemporary mnemonic narratives for local use are the product of right-wing, and, more recently, populist alt-right political ideologies, which dominate the perception of the historical turning points in the 20th century, such as the regime change. In the right-wing social imaginary, the nation stands as a wounded outlaw on the margins of mainstream European (and Western) history, and poses as a victim in order to cover up its own uninspired mediocrity and the lack of moral liability (see further Frazon and Horváth, 2002; Rainer, 2017). The central question, then, is why the series has evoked such heated debates and triggered so many responses, when ‘authenticity’, otherwise, is rarely claimed for other fictional historical dramas? Among the possible reasons, we find the limits of conceptual frames for cultural memory of the 1980s, and the fragmented nature of knowledge production about transition-era political processes. Debates about the legacy of 1989 in the Eastern bloc are unfolding in various global, regional and national contexts.

Today, as the world witnesses hostilities unimaginable since World War II in the region, research centers all around the globe have been sharing their concerns about the reappearance of a new Cold War world order, partially due to the contradictory results of the regime changes in Eastern Europe. The Informant implies that the political attitude and moral credibility of the student movement was not entirely different from the ancient régime it wanted to replace: our previous scene analyses have shown that the protagonists prioritize personal motivations and neglect the idealistic political mission they seem initially to have embarked on. This continuity exists both in the diegetic and non-diegetic structures, and in the paratextual appendix of the series (i.e. ‘Filthy times’, the previously mentioned theme song). The narrative arc of 1989 in public and political discourses has been built on the story of heroic resistance and its ultimate victory: The Informant depicts the most important milestones of the opposition movement as a web of dubious negotiations between members of the old and the new political factions. Therefore, it suggests that ‘systemic change’ in Hungary has not introduced actual systemic changes. We argue that while the series thematizes the failure of contemporary political culture and public discourse, articulating its criticism in the form of 1980s nostalgia, due to its transnational aesthetic and the language of mediatized nostalgia, this criticism about the public memory of the regime change remains an unfocused allegory. Unfortunately, this line of criticism remains inconsistent throughout, and this is the reason public intellectuals and political actors attacked the show’s historical vision.

Acclaimed Hungarian historian and late socialism expert Rainer M. János and sociologist Róza Hodosán criticized The Informant for its inauthentic, or, as they put it, inconceivable plot twists. Hodosán, as a member of the 1980s democratic opposition movement in Hungary, argued in an online political talk show ³ that the series’ plot elements could never have happened in such a way. When the host, left-wing activist and journalist Márton Gulyás, showed her the scene from Episode 8 in which the students set the Soviet flag alight and engage in a fight with local police forces, she suggested that they would never have used phrases like ‘they [the Soviets] have been usurping power for 40 years’. This again highlights the gap between the operational aesthetic (Mittel, 2006: 29) of a transnational television series created for global audiences and the blind spots of the local cultural memory of the 1980s.

Rainer also expressed his negative opinion, as a historian whose research focuses mostly on Hungarian state socialism. As he put it,

[f]or an agent to sit down next to a newly selected informant on a train, and later to invite him to the dining car is totally absurd. The recruitment was always done in a formal space, and the future informant was placed as far away as possible from his comfort zone. ⁴

Film critic András Réz disapproves ⁵ of the representation of socialist-era scarcity. He argues that by the late 1980s almost every Western consumer product was available in Hungary, including those magazines and cigarettes that Máté, a student dealer, was trying to smuggle into the country with help from his ship captain father. These examples show that most commentaries on the series’ historical vision have targeted factual correspondences, and failed to take into consideration broader, paradigmatic analogies.

Another important characteristic to consider about the regional media landscape and locally developed transnational television shows is the relation between populism and popular media. The Informant offers a televisual approach to the 1989 transitions’ problematic legacy, and the materialization of populist authoritarian tendencies. State socialist and Cold War themes, portrayals of surveillance, spy culture and nationalism sketch a formative cultural map of the region capable of delivering criticism of contemporary populist tendencies either in direct form or in rhetorical figures:

What puts traditional and digital, or panoptic and post-panoptic surveillance in an essential position is that they consistently represent sociocultural tendencies such as the proximity between socialist and post-socialist agendas, the increasing white nationalism in the region and the spread of populism. The questionable legacy of the 1989 transitions and the emergence of populist authoritarian regimes are conceptualized in contemporary television. (Hermann, 2022)

On top of liberal public intellectuals and academics, who criticized the show for its lack of authenticity and historical accuracy, pro-government propaganda outlets also scrutinized The Informant, and alluded to its possible connections with real-life political actors, first and foremost the current Hungarian prime minister. Viktor Orbán, a textbook populist who in the last 13 years has built an authoritarian regime in the country, started his political career as a liberal figure in the democratic opposition in the 1980s. Pro-government sites suggest that Zsolt Száva, the charismatic but chauvinistic and bullyish leader of the students’ movement, is an allusion to Orbán’s character at best, and a critical allegory of his pro-Russian and anti-democratic turnaround at worst. A great example of this reading is the conversation ‘The Informant: a lie about lies’ between a pro-government journalist Barbara Vági (BV) and Gábor Mező (GM), a self-identified historian. This is an excerpt from the interview:

The conversation between these two commentators deploys all the representative features of alt-right, post-truth narrative constructions and conspiracy theories. For example, they imply that HBO, a global network with a ‘liberal’ background, put the premiere date of The Informant two days before general elections in Hungary on purpose, to undermine the power of Orbán and the ruling party Fidesz.

Conclusion

As for many other contemporary television shows about state socialist Eastern Europe, The Informant also freely mixes real historical references with fictional characters and situations in order to criticize mythical-teleological narratives of the Hungarian regime change. In this endeavor, the accurate representation of individual events is less important than the ability to revisit some preconceived accounts of 1989’s formative role for memory politics, and in turn, contemporary political identities. In a situation highly typical of the monopolized Hungarian media landscape, where voices outside of the nationalist, pro-government and globalist-liberal spectrum are increasingly hard to discern, public discourses across the political divide attempted to reduce the series to questions of authenticity.

Both sides in the debate on the television show – state media commentators and opposition voices – agreed on one thing: the series is an inauthentic representation of history. While commentators arrive at this conclusion following entirely different lines of argumentation, this situation throws into sharp relief the statetization of the Hungarian media landscape. In this regard, The Informant and the public debates around it highlight not only how the post-globalized state media in Hungary produces and distributes screen representations of history that deviate from its own nostalgic-nationalist visions, but also that these necessarily have to come from the outside: an American production company such as (HBO) MAX. Moreover, the case also reveals how, in the monopolized media landscape, even non-state commentators are caught up in binary banalities and the categories of the authentic–inauthentic. This in turn shows how the authoritarian Hungarian state media controls not simply the screen images on history and society, but also, probably even more importantly, the language in which we speak about them.