Beyond Datafication: Creative Labor and Orientalist Production Logics in Turkish Drama Streaming

Introduction

About a decade ago, I started an ethnographic project on Turkey’s global drama industry, observing production practices and interviewing more than sixty workers above and below the line. During the early stages of my research, drama producers were pessimistic about the industry’s future, because long working hours, and the country’s drift toward authoritarianism constrained their creativity. Back in 2015, no streaming company operated in the country. For many industry professionals, the future thus seemed to lie with streaming services. The drama industry’s creatives believed that global streaming services would reduce the industry’s notoriously long working hours and create a space less vulnerable to state censorship.

Over the years, these hopes have partly become a reality. I heard from my interviewees that although violations persist, the industry has gradually adopted twelve-hour workdays—initially thanks to the efforts of the Cinema-TV Union and then the standards imposed by global streaming companies. Moreover, Netflix productions like The Club (2021), Ethos (2020), Fatma (2021), and Hot Skull (2022) show that drama producers have been able to tell politically charged stories, addressing the nation’s conflictual past, present, and future.

However, streamers are not frictionless spaces. Complying with a regulatory framework introduced in 2019, streaming companies have established a “symbiotic relationship” (Khalil and Zayani 2021) with Turkey to retain audiences and market share, complicitly restraining drama makers’ creative capacities (Bulut 2025). Beyond censorship, creators also described frustrations familiar across global screen industries: opaque data regimes, limited access to performance metrics, and executive decisions justified through proprietary analytics.

Screenwriter Ufuk is one of the drama creators I interviewed for my decade-long ethnography. He describes streaming companies’ secretive and protective position concerning data through what he calls “servitude data” (data esareti). While cable television managers previously used ratings as an excuse to enforce certain narratives and genres, streamers now use “data” to push creators to write stories where something major happens (bir şey olsunculuk) in the first five to fifteen minutes of a show. When they disagree, streaming executives assert “it is the data” that enforces such creative decisions. In short, datafication, which is a corporate effort to produce screen content in a “quantified format so that it can be tabulated and analyzed” (Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier 2013, 78), is powerfully at work.

Yet dissatisfaction with streaming production cultures extends beyond metrics. Mehmet, a director with extensive experience working with Netflix, was frustrated not only by the lack of access to performance data but also by what he saw as the limits of platform diversity (Saha and van Lente 2022). For Mehmet, despite its promise to change Hollywood geography, Netflix was far from being “truly novel.” It had not quite allowed diverse productions that pushed “the boundaries of geography.” He said: “When you set out with the promise to produce diverse stuff, you have to extend your hand towards what is left outside the culturally hegemonic.”

Drawing on thirteen interviews and aiming to globalize streaming production cultures (Idiz 2024), this article examines the sectoral dynamics behind that disappointment and foregrounds streamers’ political-economic reluctance to produce content beyond what Mehmet calls “the culturally hegemonic.” What Mehmet considers “culturally hegemonic,” I argue, can be framed as an Orientalist production logic that capitalizes on Turkey’s non-Western geographical positionality, its “exotic” narratives, and regional myths beyond Hollywood’s scope. The contemporary Orientalism across global streaming dramas, particularly Netflix, differs from the classic artistic and literary works of Orientalism, which represent non-Western subjects as irrational, lazy, and stagnant (Said 1979). The contemporary Orientalist logic permeating streaming production cultures instead blends multiculturalism, sci-fi narratives with superheroes, and cosmopolitan diversity. Articulated through multicultural branding and genre experimentation, this profitable logic is visible in productions set in Istanbul, Göbeklitepe, or Adana and built around globally recognized Turkish stars such as Çağatay Ulusoy, Beren Saat, and Serenay Sarıkaya in series like The Protector (2018), The Gift (2019), and Shahmaran (2023).

Drama creators diverge in their negotiation of Orientalist production logics. Creators’ tendency to pragmatically accommodate these logics or critique them depends on whether they perceive streaming services as marking a rupture with older industry practices or reproducing existing continuities. Some pragmatically reckon with them, emphasizing new opportunities for visibility and experimentation. Others view them as evidence that streamers privilege profitability, familiar gatekeepers, and touristic spectacle over narrative risk. Thus, although the digestible and profitable content made by streaming companies may satisfy global audiences and some drama makers, the limited experimentation in storytelling dissatisfies a large group of creators.

I argue that although datafication has introduced new dynamics across streaming production cultures, these dynamics build on existing historical, cultural, and political-economic inequalities around knowledge production. Demand is surely predicted and measured through digital data in new streaming production cultures, but then, demand is never neutral. It is shaped through inherited assumptions about which places, stories, and identities are legible and profitable in global media markets. I ask: how is the demand for certain shows formed in the first place? What historical discourses enable the interpretation of data in particular ways across streaming production cultures? In this context, streaming production cultures depend not only on data-driven creative processes but also on the older logics of Orientalism, which structurally condition inclusivity in global drama markets. Simply put, there is no useful and profitable streaming data without the old, reified, and essentialized data about “the Orient.”

Methods and the Drama Streaming Context

This article is part of a book project on Turkish dramas. Since 2014, I have ethnographically researched the making of Turkish dramas from a production studies perspective (Caldwell 2008; Mayer et al. 2009; Sanson 2024). I observed drama creators across four sets and in the writers’ rooms. The insights gained from these observations varied. I visited my first drama set about ten times, whereas another crew allowed me to visit their set only twice. In another case, I had to wait for two years because it was a period drama that required extensive coordination. In my fourth set, I spent more time with the crew as we traveled across Istanbul. I also attended industry summits, government workshops, and union meetings. In my interviews with more than 60 drama professionals (producers, actors, writers, cinematographers, directors, set workers, set managers, costume and make-up staff, art directors, union officials, drivers, and tea makers), we discussed working conditions, the relationship between the state and creativity, streamers’ impact on production cultures, and workers’ globalizing imaginaries.

Throughout my research, I witnessed the industry’s global growth, pain, and tensions surrounding censorship. While Turkey is now the biggest seller of scripted shows after the US and Britain (The Economist 2024), the government’s presence in the market has become palpable through censorship and heavy commissioning of neo-Ottomanist dramas to pro-government producers. Since the Gezi Uprising in 2013, employment opportunities for anti-government drama makers have become limited. Thus, streaming services have emerged as a panacea for drama professionals. BluTV’s (now HBO Max) first original was streamed in 2017, whereas Netflix released its first show in 2018. Disney+ has a more limited presence in the market. Following Covid, streaming services created so much business that top performers’ schedules are booked multiple years in advance. Currently, the streamers in the market include Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, HBO Max, TOD (global); Exxen and Gain (local; Ildır 2024; Vitrinel and Ildır 2021).

The data in this article are drawn from thirteen online interviews (2022–2024) with participants (anonymized throughout) commissioned to create a show for Netflix and HBO Max. The interviews foregrounded the creative dynamics of global-local collaborations, datafication, and the ways in which streaming services shape production. I manually transcribed the interviews (forty five to eighty minutes long) and used an inductive approach for coding categories (Glaser 1992). Owing to Netflix’s market leadership, the analysis overwhelmingly comes from interviewees working with this company. With three million subscribers, Netflix caters to citizens who want to stay away from traditional TV series while simultaneously targeting Turkish dramas’ global fans. Producing shows with global stars in fantastic stories set in major tourist destinations, Netflix reveals how drama creatives’ hopes to expand their global visibility unfold within a contested terrain. Meanwhile, HBO Max has created noticeable original dramas and nonscripted productions. Exxen and Gain released successful originals, such as Gibi (2021–2025) and Ayak İşleri (2021–2024). Amazon Prime Video has produced one original drama.

Globalizing, But How? Orientalist Logics in Turkish Drama Production

Shaping markets, regulations, infrastructures, and labor practices, platformization has transformed global cultural production, ranging from social media to traditional media industries (Thomas et al. 2022). While enabling visibility and expanding markets for cultural producers, streaming companies and platforms have also amplified inequalities across industries (e.g., Bishop 2020; Bonini and Gandini 2019; Johnson and Woodcock 2019; Lobato 2019).

The site of film and drama production is no different. As the 2023 strikes in Hollywood revealed, the proprietary market power of streamers over data often puts media workers in a disadvantaged position, raising questions about creative agency and fair compensation (Kilkenny and Goldberg 2023). Shows are indeed renewed or canceled based on viewership data and completion that come through recommendation algorithms (van Es 2023). At the same time, despite the “metric logics” across platformized screen industries, screen workers struggle to increase their agency over data (Navar-Gill 2020; Poell et al. 2022). Notwithstanding “power asymmetries,” dominance of data-informed commissioning, or data-informed executive notes handed to creatives (Idiz 2024, 2138–39), screen workers strategically ignore “data secrecy” (Rasmussen 2025).

Thus, despite the insights of this emerging literature, how political discourses, global geographies, esthetic representations, and historical imaginaries shape data-driven production practices remain underexamined. We now know that global locations as real places and settings of media production are valuable (Lynch and Albarrán-Torres 2024). Similarly, “the Orient,” as a site of economic and cultural value, is out there to be explored and exploited through its fantastic narratives (history now blended with sci-fi stories) and the use of the West’s superior screen production techniques. In sum, without examining historical inequalities around global flows and the value of global locations outside the West, we cannot fully grasp streaming production cultures, data imaginaries, or the uses of data in streaming production cultures.

I follow work that addresses the promising but unequal interactions between streaming companies and their local collaborators (Barra 2023; Castro and Cascajosa 2020; Idiz 2024; Sundet 2021). To further reveal Orientalist production logics in Turkish drama production, I draw from theories of “platform imperialism” which underline the centrality of the USA in shaping the production of platform technologies and their IP-based dominance (Davis 2023; Jin 2013; Mirrlees 2019). Apart from these macro perspectives, I benefit from work on Netflix’s global expansion and its contested claims of streaming diversity (Edmond et al. 2024; Meimaridis et al. 2024; Wayne and Ribke 2024), and the repackaging of local fantasies with cosmopolitan sensibilities (Asmar et al. 2023; Lynch and Albarrán-Torres 2024). After all, how Orientalism shapes transnational streaming production cultures has real effects on audience practices. Although Netflix produces global dramas, consumption patterns reveal that US-based content is dominant, and the global content that is out there remains touristic (Idiz et al. 2025). This ultimately produces a global appeal through a “grammar of transnationalism” where, although national audiences do matter, transnational markets and profits are equally essential (Jenner 2020). The “stories that travel” valued by Netflix ultimately create “placeless” stories (Lotz and Potter 2022), which risk explicitly or implicitly circulating Orientalist stories that seem to take place in a geographical place, but only on condition that they cater to transnational tastes, markets, and profits.

Finally, I draw on critical scholarship that foregrounds the coexistence of experimentation and homogenization in global streaming production cultures. For instance, despite Netflix’s encouragement to produce original stories, Korean production companies and television stations fail to gain profits that match their shows’ popularity because they must sell intellectual property rights to Netflix (Park et al. 2023, 81). Some scholars fear that Netflix’s distribution capacity reduces Korean drama producers to “mere subcontractors” (Kim 2022). In Nigeria, Netflix has enabled local producers to globalize but failed to strengthen their relationships with local audiences, raising important questions regarding the future of pan-Africanism and its esthetics circulated through a global platform (Jedlowski 2022). The creative negotiation of these unequal terms of exchange between global streamers and local creators informs this article through what I will call Orientalist production logics.

“Netflix Is Like a McDonald’s Menu But Then. . .”: Reckoning with Orientalism

My interlocutors were aware of the unequal access to streamers’ instrumental and profit-seeking Orientalist production logics. However, through active interpretation, they were inclined to foreground streaming companies’ novelties, professionally investing more in how streamers opened a space for new forms of storytelling. Thus, they were “reckoning” with streaming companies’ Orientalist and commercial logics as they strove toward global visibility (Winegar 2006).

Zeliha is a well-known director who has produced major television dramas. She now works primarily with streamers because of censorship on cable television. For her, criticizing Netflix for investing in Orientalist productions and becoming television-like was unjust, because if that was the case, the stories of ordinary humans in shows like Fatma, Ethos, or The Club would have never been made. “Based on my own experience, I find these criticisms a bit harsh,” she said. Thus, she was more prone to emphasizing what streamers enabled rather than failed at.

With her extensive experience in drama production for cable television, Tülay knew that streamers shared limited data only with producers. Still, she did not seem to care about the lack of access to information on how her shows performed. Even more resolutely than Zeliha, she disagreed with the argument that streaming companies strategically produced shows with a digestible cosmopolitan sensibility to market to global audiences. These companies enabled “experimentation with things that were never tried before” such as “fantastic and mystic” stories, which was already satisfying. Referring to Netflix Turkey’s first and highly criticized original The Protector, she said: “We owe it to platforms that we learned to produce shows like The Protector, a highly watched show globally, with such infrastructure and digital effects.” Thus, even though some found Orientalist tones and themes in The Protector, Tülay was content with and hopeful about the new capacity to produce new genres.

For a considerable number of drama creators and audiences, shows like The Protector pointed to a failure because it subscribed to Orientalist production logics. The director of one such show, Utku, disregarded the critique, making an analogy with culinary arts to justify his endorsement of streaming companies:

My project was not designed for here (Turkey) . . . The CEO of Netflix said that their company grew after they realized that similar content could be produced in different geographies. A generic zombie story in Australia becomes Cargo, an apocalyptic story in Denmark becomes The Rain, and a time travel story becomes Stranger Things in the US . . . So, they present familiar stories in different geographies, but they are more acceptable because the genre is the same. When I make a similar production here, I must consider how it will be received globally. Our Turkish cuisine is included, but we can think of it as a global meal. Our tomatoes, our greens, our ingredients, but one that appeals to global tastes.

Utku had enriched his own superhero project through his own “spices.” One main “spice” was inevitably the locale. “They cannot show Turkey on the map, but when you say Hagia Sophia, everyone has an idea,” he said to express how Istanbul globally appealed as an “exotic” space. Thus, in his show, they used real locations, which were not cordoned off during shooting. Rather, they organized flash-mob-like shooting techniques, which, for him, particularly helped give the city its natural and chaotic feel.

Director Mehmet acknowledged that Netflix and other companies were corporate businesses. For him, Netflix presented audiences with “a McDonald’s menu,” but the company also needed productions from Turkey because Turkish dramas and their strategy of pairing major stars with certain geographies were profitable. No one had told him about this strategy. He “recognized” this after the fact when the well-known melodrama genre was combined with different locations from Anatolia in different projects. “If it weren’t for Göbeklitepe, it would have been Cappadocia (in the case of The Gift), for Netflix,” he added, emphasizing the productive value of place, and its Orientalist uses in drama production. The replaceability of Göbeklitepe with Cappadocia attested to the Orientalist logic and its distinct shooting style:

Not sure if this was all discussed behind closed doors, but what mattered was the combination of the Anatolian ancient wisdom (kadim bilgi) and a family story . . . I suggested putting Turkey and Anatolia as the main stars. Close-ups of our human star and long shots of the Turkish geography. I do not mean to suggest that it was just me, but we collectively made this decision.

Thus, Mehmet was aware of and had reckoned with Netflix’s profit-seeking Orientalist production logics, because if the Turkish drama industry was to remain competitive, it had to capitalize on its “hybrid system” that brought Islam together with Western ways of living along with geography. For him, the “hybrid model” and “the tensions surrounding the secular system and its Muslim population” were profitable cultural exports. That is how he had reckoned with the combination of “supernatural” and “melodrama” as it allowed him to globalize his visibility. Although these companies reproduced Orientalism in production cultures, drama creators like Mehmet imagined streamers as a new global opportunity, as Netflix “chased its next Squid Game or Casa de Papel in Turkey” and beyond.

Critiquing Orientalist Production Logics

The critical group of drama creators perceived more continuities than ruptures in how streamers shaped the drama industry. For them, these companies produced Turkish dramas not necessarily to enrich storytelling but because Turkish dramas, with their stars and globally selling narratives, brought profits. Thus, to ensure a smooth flow of revenues, companies such as Netflix have worked with established local production companies and stars with global fandoms. These market strategies to create a transnationally diverse brand led to frustrations among drama creators, since profits and a performative liberal diversity apparatus were prioritized over truly innovative storytelling (see Asmar et al. 2023).

Tuna, a director who produced dramas for both HBO Max and Netflix, believed that despite streamers’ promises to disrupt the boundaries of screen production, much remained the same. What Tuna called “continuity” and “sameness” persisted because global streaming companies had not quite differentiated themselves from the logic of cable television. For him, a streamer was not supposed to be an institutional space that “tried to catch everyone during prime time” but in fact needed to “be different in terms of content, grammar, and promotion.” He said: “For me, a platform works to diversify its product diversity rather than making productions that make everyone happy. . . When you pull the same people from the same talent pool, when the same people shoot a Netflix drama and a drama on Show TV, that does not quite work.”

Tuna was not even asking for ostensibly political productions featuring “underrepresented groups, LGBTQ+ people, Kurdish movement.” He believed that even modest docudramas would make Netflix more diverse. Yet, Netflix was chasing “the mass,” because “their market vision is not simply Turkey but the entire world. Not sure if we can call this Orientalism but. . .,” he said with hesitation.

While Tuna hesitated to use the word “Orientalism,” screenwriter Nesrin felt comfortable taking Tuna’s observation further toward a sharper critique. As a highly visible and esteemed creative who wrote some of the most iconic shows in Turkish drama history, Nesrin was uneasy about Netflix’s constant writing interventions. “I hear that colleagues are all frustrated and exhausted,” she said. When I asked her who intervened in screenwriting, she highlighted that Netflix perceived writing as its own job: “An American screenwriter wrote The Protector. That is nonsense. I would really struggle to write a story in the US without living there or often going there.”

Thus, Nesrin targeted Netflix’s instrumental approach to global content, which involved hiring a US-based writer to satisfy transnational audiences’ appetite for “stories that travel.” In addition to critiquing this instrumental pairing of foreign writers with local producers, Nesrin was heavily disillusioned with the instrumental use of locations in Netflix Turkey’s shows. She said: “The second show is The Gift. These sites were carefully selected for screen production. Our sector has bowed too much to Netflix. Consequently, they (Netflix) now have the reins of the industry.”

The pairing of stars with exotic sites upset her since these were concrete barriers to creativity. I asked whether Netflix did this to attract global audiences. Her response: “I guess so. . . I do not want to see the Grand Canyon while watching Breaking Bad or Mad Men. I don’t care. I want to watch a story. This is an incorrect perspective. Why is this the case in Turkey?”

Producer Asuman previously worked with Max and has recently completed a show for Netflix. Working at a small independent company, Asuman believed that Netflix’s business decision to work with the old gatekeepers from the drama section of an established TV channel (Kanal D) was the main reason for the Orientalist production logics. Former personnel at Kanal D, who now work at Netflix, knew what sold abroad, and followed a similar formula: “Exotic TV shows are made for Netflix. The only difference is the duration. They do not last for two hours (as in cable TV) but 45-50 minutes.”

Before Netflix, there was widespread hope among drama creators to make shows like those on HBO. However, for Asuman, the fact that shows were made based on the selling capacity of global stars as opposed to good and promising stories killed creative hopes toward streamers, because “the market drifted towards shows like The Gift, The Protector, and now Shahmaran.” For her, these shows “blended major stars in touristic destinations through exotic sauces.” Asuman particularly underlined how these were “not personal creative choices but informed business decisions” with an industrial rationale: “This is not an accident but rather a conscious decision. This is an informed decision, a business preference . . . The content on streaming companies will (inevitably) be very close to what we call exotic Kanal D dramas. This is what global audiences and Netflix executives demand.”

Consequently, this critical group of drama makers felt politically and creatively uncomfortable with how Orientalism, as the profitable knowledge of the non-West, informed the data that was digitally produced, collected, and interpreted in the networks of streaming production cultures.

Conclusion

The global Turkish drama industry adopted a different working model after streamers entered the market. Some successful shows have been released thanks to new techniques of datafication, relatively standardized working hours, and global-local collaborations. Yet, Orientalism as a production logic persists across production cultures geared toward accelerated regimes of content creation. While some drama creators reckon with the Orientalist production logic in their quest for global visibility, a critical group points to how this logic blocks experimentation in storytelling, perpetuates stereotypes in novel forms, and reproduces creative inequalities through gatekeeping. For a truly diverse streaming industry, the industry and its global collaborators need to realize that diversity is not simply about “plastic representation,” a system of reified box checking exercise for commercial screen production (Warner 2017). If streaming is to fulfill its democratic promise, diversity must mean more than exotic settings, stars, and symbolic inclusion. It requires institutional reform in commissioning, authorship, and creative decision-making. Only then will more diverse local storytellers be able to circulate their work globally, allowing streaming services to transform production cultures rather than simply repackage existing hierarchies.