I long,therefore I re-watch: Nostalgia and Turkish TV series

Introduction

During breaks from either my professional or everyday tasks over the past two or three years, I have become aware that I started watching old Turkish TV series. I shared my new habit with my Turkish friends and discovered that many of them do the same. Interestingly, we all watched series like Avrupa Yakası (2004–2009), Yabancı Damat (2004–2007), Asmalı Konak (2002–2003), and Yaprak Dökümü (2006–2010) during their original broadcasts, so we are familiar with their plots. Nevertheless, watching them again remains enjoyable. As I watched these series on YouTube, I noticed a significant increase in the number of comments on the episodes and a growing trend in their viewership rates. Upon reviewing the comments, I observed a prevalence of insults and radical criticisms directed at current conditions in Turkey.

These critiques primarily focus on the social and economic changes in Turkey over the past two decades, particularly since the Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002. However, the TV series listed above were broadcast during AKP's reign in Turkey. Despite this, the period in which they were aired is idealized through the perspectives of viewers and commenters on YouTube and Instagram. Comments on YouTube and various Instagram pages featuring short clips from these old TV series romantically frame Turkey's recent past. This raises the question: How much time needs to pass to long for the past? While there is a wealth of research on nostalgia and the production of nostalgic sentiment in Turkey (Akçakaya, 2021; Çınar, 2020; Danforth, 2015; Neyzi, 2009; Öktem, 2012; Özyürek, 2002, 2006; Rutz, 2007), this specific question remains underexplored, except in Aydeniz and Dede's (2024) study on nostalgia for the recent secular past of Turkey. Although the core research question of this study is not the one stated above, its findings, similar to those of Aydeniz and Dede's work, demonstrate that collective production of nostalgic sentiment does not necessarily require radical political shifts or a long passage of time.

In this article, I aim to advance beyond existing research on nostalgia studies in Turkey by exploring how recent history can become idealized, even when the opportunities associated with the past are imperfect. To achieve this, I will examine comments – through expressions and narratives of viewers – for visual artifacts, specifically comments on episodes from popular Turkish TV series. This study addresses the research question: “To what extent does rewatching old TV series evoke nostalgic sentiment?” I hypothesize that during periods of social and economic instability, members of society might express higher levels of nostalgic sentiments as a coping mechanism. The falsifiability of this hypothesis could arise if the comments do not reference the current social and economic instability in Turkey, or if the reasons for re-watching are expressed in a different way.

In the context of Turkey and nostalgia studies, Ottoman nostalgia and secular nostalgia are key components of social memory. These phenomena, while distinct, are interconnected and reflect the diverse socio-political contexts and identities shaping Turkish society. Ottoman nostalgia, as discussed by Çınar (2020: 47) and Öktem (2012: 35), romanticizes the Ottoman past, celebrating the empire's perceived grandeur and multicultural harmony, often used to support contemporary political narratives with neo-Ottoman aspirations. In contrast, Özyürek (2002: 103; 2006: 59) and Neyzi (2009: 85) argue that secular nostalgia evokes a longing for the early Republican era by emphasizing secularism, modernization, and Westernization as established by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. This form of nostalgia emerges in response to perceived threats to these ideals in modern Turkey. Additionally, Çetin's research on the Jews of Çanakkale highlights how certain strategies, such as discursive ones, aim to construct a nostalgic gaze to “cope with the troubling past in a post-nostalgic context,” particularly concerning native minorities and their collective traumas within nation-states (Çetin, 2023: 144).

On the other side, during the early years of the AKP's rule, the political climate was characterized by economic growth and democratic reforms. However, this period also saw increasing corruption and authoritarian tendencies (Esen and Gumuscu, 2016). By 2009, economic crises, social polarization, and growing media control highlighted the administration's corrupt aspects, resulting in heightened repression of opposition and restrictions on freedom of expression (Esen and Gumuscu, 2016; Özbudun, 2014). Especially after the Gezi Park protests in 2013 and the coup attempt in 2016, the AKP's authoritarianism became more pronounced, exacerbating social, political, and economic crises; the government's failures in managing the migrant crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic further complicated Turkey's societal and economic landscape (Bakir, 2020; Cortinovis, 2021).

In this study, I suggest that nostalgia for older TV series may become more pronounced during times of social and economic distress, as viewers turn to familiar cultural narratives and memories for comfort and stability. For this research I have chosen two popular TV series from both past and present: Avrupa Yakası (2004–2009) and Yabancı Damat (2004–2007). Avrupa Yakası became the only Turkish sitcom to consistently top rating charts from its debut (Çelenk, 2013: 101–102). Set in Istanbul's Nişantaşı district, the series explores urban women's secular lifestyles and their strategies for navigating conservative social norms, particularly through the writing and performance of Gülse Birsel (Aslı). Further, its vibrant visual style, exaggerated performances, and references to early 2000s pop culture contribute to its nostalgic appeal.

Agiş (2012: 95) highlights the show's early seasons’ frequent references to contemporary economic conditions, including minimum wage, café and magazine prices, and nightlife. While centered in an upper-middle-class neighborhood, Avrupa Yakası also offers insights into Turkey's everyday life, consumer culture, and material accessibility from a present-day perspective. As the second selected series, Yabancı Damat is a successful dramedy centered on the marriage of Nazlı, the daughter of a conservative Gaziantep family, and Niko, a Greek man. The series highlights cultural similarities and questions the artificiality of nationalism.

While themes such as the “local belief system” and “political education” position television as a venue for “political socialization” (Şimşek et al., 2008: 23) in the episodes, the show primarily engages with Greek-Turkish relations—one of Turkey's most prominent foreign policy topics in the early 2000s (Papailias, 2005). Thus, beyond reflecting the political climate of its time, Yabancı Damat invites comparisons with contemporary socio-political dynamics upon rewatching.

On the other hand, contemporary TV series differ thematically and aesthetically from those produced in the early 2000s, as issues such as family boundaries, the impact of modernization on family structures, the propaganda of nationalist founding figures, and religious orders (e.g., Kızılcık Şerbeti, Kızıl Goncalar, and Diriliş Ertuğrul) have become central themes in the TV series produced in the late AKP era (Çetin, 2023; Kaymak, 2024; Yalçın, 2016). Despite new media tools, this shift shows that TV series remain one of the key mediums for reflecting social transformation, particularly among their audiences.

The analysis draws on comments about episodes from these series, specifically sourced from the Instagram page Nostalji Kuşağı (Generation of Nostalgia) and YouTube. I employed a mixed-methods approach in this study. Firstly, I conducted a thematic analysis of the viewer comments of the short episodes of the two series via Nostalji Kuşağı. At the same time, I thematically analyzed YouTube comments by using Python to identify and code terms related to nostalgia.

Theoretical background: Memory and nostalgia

Neyzi argues that when there is a lack of memory, historical official sources are relied upon more (2002: 137). While our memory carries personal characteristics due to our individual experiences, Halbwachs (2020) states that collective memory may extend over distinct groups. Then, those group members can draw a pattern for their own experiences in case of the risk of individual forgetting. On the other side, Assmann and Czaplicka's (1995: 129) distinction between “cultural memory” and “communicative memory” is also significant, as it illuminates what societies remember collectively (cultural memory), and what we have and remember through our individual experiences (communicative memory). In other words, the collective memory of a society might tend to forget certain aspects of incidents under cultural memory, but people can continue to remember what they experienced, and they can transfer their memory to the next generations through communicative channels (Assmann and Czaplicka, 1995). Hence, oral history studies play a crucial role from both a thematic and a methodological point of view to trace what has been forgotten and what is worth remembering (Portelli, 1998).

Ernest Renan (1882) examined collective forgetting to understand the importance of memory and denial in the process of national identity construction, and collective forgetting specifically becomes important to see the borders and gray zones between the narratives of the victims and the perpetuators (Üngör, 2015). Therefore, one could argue that memory studies may go hand in hand with nationalism or nation-state building process to legitimize collective claims of societies. In parallel with this argument, the Eurocentric essence of memory studies make its theoretical adaptation to non-European cases superficial (Olick et al., 2023). Thus, the analysis of politics of memory might be framed as controversial due to its Western formulation, and as Feldberg (2023) claims, the politics of temporality is the current overarching title in memory studies to trace the changeable importance of previous incidents, opportunities, or conditions in the memories of people.

While temporality shows that the “representation of time” depends on multiple factors, such as shifts in political structures or modes of production, the “mode of remembering” may also differ among agents due to changes in their interpretations of different incidents through time (Feldberg, 2023: 1596–1598). Currently, the literature of nostalgia studies and the theoretical discussions of memory studies intersect since the mode of remembering can reveal what is considered nostalgic. Boym (2007) argues that nostalgic actors might long for their past, either recent or distant ones, by embracing the positive aspects of a certain period and forgetting the adverse outcomes of incidents during that time. Boym (2007: 13) named this “restorative nostalgia”, and restoratively nostalgic subjects mainly aim to reconstruct their lost homeland because of the lost opportunities of that time.

In this study, I also expected to see restoratively nostalgic subjects and their framing style of their nostalgic sentiments, but my expectation did not centralize the construction of desire for a lost homeland or paradise. I argue that the nostalgic subjects in my study might long for the past without having a critical gaze over that past, idealizing the atmosphere of a period, and that is why they can also be classified under the banner of restorative nostalgia. For example, currently, the nostalgia studies literature on Turkey displays that the 1990s are longed for by inhabitants of the country due to its socio-economic opportunities and the secular prospects of everyday life (Aydeniz and Dede, 2024; Danforth, 2015; Özyürek, 2002, 2006; Rutz, 2007). However, during the 1990s, Turkey was experiencing a catastrophic period marked by the Kurdish question and a wave of unresolved murders, popularly known as faili meçhul (“unknown perpetrator”) cases. This era was characterized by political instability, human rights abuses, and deep social divisions. İnsel (2003) frames the atmosphere of fear and repression, and states that Turkey was a society terrorized by state violence and paramilitary groups in the 1990s. Similarly, Göçek (2011) points to the discrimination and violence in Turkey in the 1990s. So, the (re)production of nostalgic sentiments, even restorative ones, do not generally depend on the reality of an actual lost paradise.

While the existing literature provides valuable insights into nostalgia and memory, its recurring focus on established distinctions—such as Assmann's cultural and communicative memory or Boym's restorative nostalgia—risks reinforcing well-trodden analytical pathways without accounting for contemporary shifts in the social and technological landscape. In the context of Turkey, for instance, nostalgia is increasingly mediated through digital platforms that function as lieux de mémoire, or the site of memory (Nora, 1989), reshaping both the production and consumption of collective memory. Unlike traditional memory studies, which often emphasize static frameworks, this study foregrounds the dynamic interplay between digital technologies and nostalgic sentiment, illustrating how social media facilitates a participatory reimagining of the past.

Nostalgia and digital culture

The production of collective nostalgic sentiments through mass rituals, commemorations, or moments of mnemonic remembrance has been widely discussed and can be traced across various contexts. However, the transformation of the classical concept of lieux de mémoire into digital platforms is a relatively recent phenomenon, particularly following the rapid popularization of social media tools. In this study, I build on Katharina Niemeyer's conceptualization of “digital nostalgia,” which she defines as encompassing “several not necessarily separate types of nostalgia expressed, experienced, or made because of, via or within the digital world” (Niemeyer, 2016: 28). This definition highlights both what is missed and how the yearning that is expressed occurs within the borders of digital platforms. This phenomenon is particularly significant for scholars of memory and nostalgia, as it demonstrates that the production of nostalgia, even when referencing multiple contexts, can primarily be traced within media environments.

Suominen (2008) effectively shows how digital gaming was an essential component of Finnish households, particularly in the 1980s. The reconfiguration and popularization of classic games such as Pac-Man in the new millennium underscore how the past is commodified as a profitable object (Suominen, 2008: 18). However, the study does not focus on the ways in which user or gamer experiences of the past are mediated and expressed within digital environments.

Further, Schrey (2014: 28) argues that digital media function in a self-reflexive manner, making it evident that they not only reflect current consumer behaviors but also shape perceptions of past media objects and their consumers. His research on nostalgia and digital culture is particularly significant from a critical perspective, as it explores how older media technologies and their content can become nostalgic objects within new media frameworks (Schrey, 2014: 29). This contribution is valuable in understanding how digital media serve both as a memory space and as a producer of nostalgia itself.

Reifová (2009: 66) discusses the contemporary fetishism of re-watching television series from the socialist era in the Czech Republic, interpreting this phenomenon as evidence of the persistent presence of post-socialist nostalgia and audience affection for what is often termed “socialist kitsch.” From a psychological point of view, Zhang et al. (2023: 485) state that re-watching old television series serves as a common strategy for alleviating boredom, particularly as a means of escaping from contemporary issues and debates. Hermes and Kopitz (2023) also focus on the globally popular American sitcom Friends (1994–2004), attributing its enduring re-watchability to two primary factors. The first is its genre, while the second, closely tied to the genre, is the timeless nature of the humor it portrays, which does not age (Hermes and Kopitz, 2023). While these studies address the relatively underexplored topic of nostalgia and re-watching TV series, they remain limited in scope. Specifically, they do not examine how the collective nostalgic sentiments that emerge among viewers re-watching these series are expressed or narrated.

Taheri Kia’s (2020) study examines new media platforms Facebook and Instagram for the production and detection of nostalgic sentiments, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic in Iran. His findings illuminate that the pre-COVID period was imagined as an idealized time period, constructed as a dreamlike past by Iranian users who ignored its negative aspects and perceived it as flawless in comparison to the pandemic era. Social media was employed as a research tool in this study, yet the analysis does not explicitly explore how digital platforms simultaneously function as both objects of nostalgia and spaces for the expression of nostalgic experiences. In the following section, I will discuss the dual relationship between old and new media in light of my findings by examining how digital platforms mediate and shape nostalgic engagement within contemporary memory cultures.

Nostalgia through the comments: How to trace nostalgia qualitatively?

The term nostalgia etymologically derives from two distinct Greek words: nostos and algos. The former means returning home, and the latter indicates pain in Greek. If the literature on nostalgia were to be analyzed, it would not be wrong to say that the first studies on nostalgia mainly centralize and classify nostalgia as a medical disease, especially among soldiers who yearn for their homeland in the battlefield (Boym, 2001; Landwehr, 2018).

Boym (2001: 26) states that the rapid pace of industrialization and modernization have made nostalgia clearly a social phenomenon since people started to migrate from their homeland to earn money and tried to adopt new conditions of city life in the nineteenth century, so social changes caused the production of nostalgic sentiments linked to the image of homeland. Then, there was an increase in studies using social theories to demonstrate social and historical reasons for the construction of nostalgic sentiments of either individuals or societies (Angé and Berliner, 2014).

In this study, as the first part of my methodology, I employed thematic analysis to examine comments on the Instagram page “Nostalji Kuşağı” (Generation of Nostalgia) to understand how nostalgic feelings and reactions are articulated among commentators – also viewers – of the two TV series. This page mainly posts old Turkish TV series and music clips from the late 1990s and the early 2000s. Thematic analysis, as defined by Braun and Clarke (2006: 79), is mainly a qualitative method for identifying, analyzing, and reporting patterns within texts or speeches. This approach is particularly useful in qualitative research, as mentioned above, for capturing the richness of social phenomena as articulated or narrated by informants (Guest et al., 2012: 10).

Specifically, I employ narrative thematic analysis, as it emphasizes “taking language seriously as culturally embodied and intentional practices” (Bamberg, 2020: 244). This approach is particularly crucial to see comment-based engagement in a specific cultural context. Moreover, it has the potential to reveal how ordinary incidents or memories become storied through the processes of narration and commenting. While analyzing the comments, I aim to identify recurring themes that might reflect a collective memory and nostalgia for an idealized former Turkey by highlighting mentions of previous socio-economic conditions among the comments on the posts on this page.

I selected the posts from Nostalji Kuşağı based on the number of comments they received, focusing on those with a minimum of 100 comments. Unlike the ‘like’ count of each post, which often exceeded 5000 likes, the level of engagement through comments varied significantly. Therefore, I prioritized comment volume as a key criterion for the selection of the posts.

“Like the last beautiful times the county left behind” reads the first comment on the first of the selected posts from Nostalji Kuşağı. This comment was written by a follower of the page for an episode of Avrupa Yakası. The short video taken from an episode of Avrupa Yakası is about a New Year celebration in Turkey, and one of Turkey’s most famous singers, Sezen Aksu, guest stars in the episode. Sezen Aksu sings her popular songs while the actors dance together in a pub. Recently, New Year's Eve celebrations have turned into a controversial issue and a reason for polarization in Turkey, as religious authorities or figures supported by AKP argue that celebrating the new year is not a proper act in Muslim countries. ¹

At the same time, New Year celebrations in pubs or restaurants, or even at homes, are more expensive than they were in the early 2000s due to the drastic increase in inflation rates and the excessive taxation policies for alcoholic beverages in Turkey. ² This explains why an image of a New Year's Eve celebration from the recent past may cause a mnemic imagination among the followers of Nostalji Kuşağı. For the same post, another follower asks, “can we be transported to this period?” While there is no direct reference to the socio-economic conditions of the early 2000s in the construction of nostalgic reaction among viewers and commentators of this post, there is a visible comparison between today's conditions and those of the recent past that produces longing.

In another selected video post from a different episode of Avrupa Yakası that guest stars members of popular pop band in Turkey in the early 2000s, Grup Hepsi, one of the first comments below this post reads, “God damn those who vote for the known political party.” In this episode, young women, members of Grup Hepsi, sing and dance, and again other actors join them for a minute, to the enjoyment of spectators in the middle of a street in Istanbul. Pupcenoks (2012) argues that AKP's conservative turn has affected many people in Turkey and the forms of entertainment in their lives due to the pressure of state-sponsored policies on the entertainment sector. This explains why a critical lens could emerge to compare the conditions of the recent past and today, and why nostalgic feelings might be more expected to appear, as in the next comment below this post: “It was a great series; those years were beautiful in every aspect.” This episode was shot in 2005, by which point AKP had been ruling party almost for three years. The commentator might have evaluated that period from a personal perspective, but s/he may also be a nostalgic subject for a certain period by dismissing negative developments or issues during that period under the impact of nostalgic sentiments (Bonnett, 2015).

This post has received hundreds of comments, and one of the most current ones states: “Those times were good. There was no war, no 15 million refugees in the country. The dollar was 1.40 Turkish Lira.” This commenter and the viewer of the post directly criticize the current atmosphere of Turkey from both political and economic perspectives, referring to the economic crisis and AKP's politics on Syrian refuges since 2011. Feldberg's (2023) argument on the importance of shifts in political structures and their reflection in memory becomes valuable in this analysis as these shifts might cause reinterpretation of the past to criticize the present. When the Turkish lira lost value against the dollar, and the exchange rate became 1 to 1.40, local newspapers reported this situation seriously, and there was a massive public reaction against the rise of the value of the dollar. ³

Another post from a different episode of Avrupa Yakası also received many comments in the last year. This time one of the main characters of the series, Volkan, sings his own funny composition that was also popular in Turkey in the early 2000s. One of the current comments below this post states, “we were lucky since we witnessed the good times of this country.” Just after this comment, another commenter writes that “now there's no Avrupa Yakası left; it's [Turkey] filled with Syrians everywhere.” This commenter/viewer equates good times with this TV series, and the current refugee population of Turkey seems to reflect today's failure. According to Di Castri (2017), a refugee crisis or an increase in the number of migrants are possible motivations for a rise in exclusionary nationalism, and people, especially those who are supporters of far-right movements or political parties, are under the pressure of nostalgic sentiments that are constructed through a fetishism of an ethnically homogenous homeland. Although I aimed to trace mainly similar motives of communist nostalgia in my case due to idealizing the past and lost socio-economic conditions in Turkey, structural changes also show how different motives of nostalgia might be embedded among the memory of commentators.

While I was watching short video posts with hundreds of comments from diverse episodes of Yabancı Damat through Nostalji Kuşağı, I also realized that there was notable dialogue among actors that might have caused comparisons between the recent past and the present by viewers, focusing on lost economic conditions, the issue of tolerance in the family, and peaceful relations between Turkey and Greece. One of the selected posts read, “This show reminds me of the days I thought were ordinary with my family, but years later, I realize how happy I actually was.” However, this expression from the commentator about a random part of an episode of Yabancı Damat that makes almost no reference to the past or its conditions. This suggests that even “ordinary” parts of the past might have the potential to evoke nostalgic sentiments through re-watching TV series.

Another comment below this post depicts a fetishism of the past again: “I wish we were young in these times.” One of the next comments also touches upon the economic dimensions of nostalgia in the case of Turkey and its recent past: “It was a very beautiful show. The dollar and euro were 1.02 Turkish lira. Those were days full of hope when both internal and external relations were good.” Therefore, one could claim that even romantic TV series may carry mnemic connotations among possible nostalgic agents since those tend to ignore negative issues and have a strong memory through details (Farrar, 2011).

For another post, again a random part of an episode of Yabancı Damat received many comments, and this time one of the first comments encapsulates almost all current hot topics in Turkey from a nostalgic gaze: “Back then, there were no Syrians, wars, diseases, or economic crises. Oh, those were the days.” This comment, in line with the previous examples, illuminates today's living conditions in Turkey by dismissing problems of the early 2000s. Santesso (2006) states that this is why the past looks flawless from the perspective of a nostalgic subject, and today's problems might be framed by exaggeration.

Observing nostalgia via YouTube: Quantitative data extraction

For the quantitative part of my research, I examined YouTube comments on these two Turkish television series popular in the early 2000s. Although there are hundreds of comments about these two series below the posts of Nostalji Kuşağı, there are also thousands of comments about these TV series below their videos (episodes) on YouTube. In the quantitative analysis, I analyzed comments to identify sentences containing specific keywords indicative of nostalgic sentiments. These keywords include “the old days” (eski günler), “Turkey” (Türkiye), “free” (özgür), “country” (ülke), “yearning” (özlem/hasret), “remembrance” (hatırlama), “memory” (anı), “better” (daha iyi), “beautiful” (güzel), “money” (para), “dollar” (dolar), “crisis” (kriz), “refugee” (mülteci), “coronavirus” (korona), “unemployment” (işsizlik), and “poor” (fakir). I selected these terms as they had the potential to reflect nostalgia linked to shifts in political, economic, and social realms. This approach allowed for a comprehensive analysis of how viewers express nostalgia during periods of social and economic instability. Therefore, I also looked at the comments that have been written in the last four or five years, when Turkey was facing a structural crisis.

Although this study does not strictly follow the traditional framework of “fan research,” its focus on in-depth audience engagement and YouTube comments aligns with the core principles of the field by moving beyond conventional viewing practices (Gray, 2003: 66–67). YouTube functions as a key platform to observe how (former) TV audiences now consume content online. Oladehin (2019: 9) highlights that from the early 2000s to 2020, adult users became more active, largely due to the platform's flexible viewing options. Further, Ha (2018: 2) emphasizes YouTube's vast content library and interactive nature, where users can engage through comments, fostering a visual community. Thus, as Hanson and Haridakis (2008) argue, YouTube is not merely a substitute for television but a distinct viewing experience.

In this part, from a methodological point of view, firstly, I extracted the comments of the TV series’ episodes on their first season using the YouTube API in Python. Then, I filtered comments to have at least 10 likes, which indicates endorsement from other commentators. Further, I filtered in comments having at least two exact or lemmatized words from the nostalgic word list mentioned above. In this part, I will offer several examples from these filtered comments to trace nostalgic sentiment (re)production via social media, specifically on YouTube.

My study is not a statistical one alone, nor does it rely upon generalizability criteria, and thus the quantitative data alone cannot test my hypothesis; however, I nevertheless use it alongside my qualitative data to engage that central of question of whether, during periods of social and economic instability, members of society might express higher levels of nostalgic sentiments as a coping mechanism.

“Everything in the country is so terrible and bleak that the only thing that comforts me is watching this series and remembering the times when it was aired,” reads a comment below the second episode of Avrupa Yakası that has received 2427 likes. When this episode was first aired in 2004, heated debates about the legality of wearing headscarves in public spaces were occurring (Nieuwenhuis, 2005), and this issue caused bifurcation within Turkish society, especially between religious and secular sections of the public (Gökarıksel, 2012: 12). Demir (2004) also argues that the economic collapse within Turkey was visible even in 2004, and financial liberalization had started to adversely influence ordinary citizens. In other words, social and economic conditions were also problematic and polarizing in 2004, and today's nostalgic subjects may look at the past with a blurred vision, as remembering the past through rose-colored glasses can serve as a coping mechanism (Miller, 1988).

Moreover, another comment for the third episode of Avrupa Yakası on YouTube, receiving 416 likes from other viewers, carries similar connotations with the above-mentioned comment: “Every time I watch this series, I feel like I’m going back to the past and finding peace. Those were the years when I was happiest and when the country was beautiful.” Or another comment for the fourth episode reads, “While watching this series, I forget all the troubles of my country and go back to those old, beautiful times.” All these comments display that re-watching popular and local TV series might have caused the construction of collective nostalgic sentiments since I mainly detected certain references to the good times of “a country” among those viewers of course through idealization. Sedikides and Wildschut (2019: 149–150) claim that “collective nostalgia strengthens the positivity of ingroup evaluations,” and this causes discursive references to a certain period of a society, a neighborhood, or a country as it is positively related to ethnocentrism. While there are many examples of ethnocentrism and of exclusionary attitudes towards the Syrian refugees in Turkey to be seen on the Instagram page Nostalji Kuşağı, I did not detect any comments about this political issue among the comments on YouTube.

Another of the commenters for the same fourth episode of Avrupa Yakası states that “I don't know how many times I've watched Avrupa Yakası, but now I understand that what I'm really searching for isn't Avrupa Yakası itself, but the old Turkey, our old times.” Beyond the evocative capacities of smell and taste, visual artifacts also possess the power to elicit memories of the past. They do so by restorative nostalgia, as evidenced by the way this viewer conceptualizes the past through their comments, reflecting a desire to relive those idealized times (Boym, 2007).

If I need to compare comments of these two TV series on YouTube, Avrupa Yakası and Yabancı Damat, it is numerically obvious that episodes of Yabancı Damat have received many more nostalgic comments. Although Yabancı Damat centers on a humorous love story between a Greek man and a Turkish woman, the way this TV series is remembered imbues it with significant connotations regarding contemporary daily life and current socio-political conditions in Turkey. For example, “fifteen years have passed, I have never loved any TV series as much as I love this one, ahh old Turkey and the sincerity of those days…” This comment on the fourth episode of Yabancı Damat on YouTube, which has received 1582 likes, exemplifies how mnemonic agents such as TV series can provoke structural critiques of a country's past and present. Or: “How beautiful old Turkey was; now everything is literally going backward”, “ah, where are those old TV shows and those years…”, “when you think about what we are experiencing now, it makes you want to go back to the past”. All these comments infer that the past, the conditions of the past, and the imagined former country are better when viewed from today's perspective. Looking from today's perspective and posting such comments for these visual artifacts not only fosters a collective nostalgia but also demonstrates that watching these series can serve as a coping mechanism for some viewers dealing with current realities (Gammon and Ramshaw, 2021).

Another comment for the second episode of Yabancı Damant illuminates a distinct dimension of nostalgic sentiment production:

I hope I am not a pathological case. While the country is reeling from the effects of the pandemic, I started watching this series at this very hour. It is of much higher quality than contemporary shows. My eyes still search for the sincerity of old TV series, and because I cannot find it today, so I seek refuge in our older shows.

Another comment for the fifth episode of Yabancı Damat reads, “Oh, the old secular Turkey. It makes me want to cry.” As I discussed in the previous part, severe versions of nostalgia may cause distress, silence, tears, and attempts to escape and return to a perceived home (Fuentenebro de Diego and Valiente Ots, 2014: 409). Despite these tumultuous emotions, the preference to continue watching these TV series is evidence of nostalgia being used as a coping mechanism.

Therefore, my research question – “to what extent does rewatching old TV series evoke nostalgic sentiment?” – is a vital one for understanding the nostalgic impact of social media on audiences, since social media turns into a site of memory for many, as illustrated in the cases above. The hypothesis that individuals express heightened nostalgic sentiments during periods of social and economic instability as a coping mechanism was supported by the qualitative analysis of YouTube comments, too. Comments expressing longing for past TV series and idealizing previous eras also confirm that, for some, nostalgia serves as an escape from current social or economic adversities. This finding illustrates that nostalgic engagement with social media can provide a sense of continuity in response to current challenges. By examining how viewers engage with nostalgic content on social media to address current challenges, this analysis enhances the broader literature on nostalgia studies. The study shows that nostalgia is more than just a sentimental longing. Instead, it serves as a proactive coping mechanism in the face of the social and economic instability of a country.

Conclusion

This study contributes to broader discussions in nostalgia and media studies by foregrounding how digital platforms, particularly Instagram and YouTube, mediate a specific form of nostalgic engagement with the early 2000s Turkish TV series. Rather than offering comfort or fostering optimism about the future, the rewatching of these series appears to activate a backward-looking sentimentality that constructs the recent past as a space of perceived normalcy in contrast to present instability. What is distinctive here is not simply that viewers feel nostalgic, but that they articulate this nostalgia in ways that reflect political disillusionment, economic frustration, and a sense of temporal rupture. The study thus extends existing research by showing how digital memory practices anchor feelings of loss and displacement not in distant historical epochs, but in a selectively remembered, recent past still associated with the early years of the AKP era.

Even though this nostalgic discourse is emotionally powerful, it would be a stretch to read it as a sign of cultural resilience. Rewatching does not appear to offer genuine comfort or foster any constructive engagement with present-day social and political challenges. Rather, the expressions of longing observed in the comments point toward a melancholic retreat into idealized media memories, underscoring the affective power of television as a mnemonic device. This study focuses on the emotional and discursive dimensions of nostalgia; it does not evaluate whether such practices translate into meaningful forms of adaptation or agency. Further research is needed to assess how, and whether, nostalgic media engagement can move beyond affective expression to shape political or cultural practices in the present.