Streaming freedom in illiberal Eastern Europe

Global TV and global crisis

A recent article in the LA Times, commenting on the ‘mad, mad, mad, mad world of television’, announces that American television finally went global in 2018. As the author puts it, thanks to Netflix and the other international streamers, ‘…it is easily possible now to watch way too much television – even too much good television – and never hear a word of English’ (Lloyd, 2018). While the claim is boosted by a touch of journalistic exaggeration, the rate of accessing and consuming non-American television content has no doubt been accelerating – not just in the United States but also in every territory covered by Netflix, Amazon, HBO and the many smaller, regional streaming platforms. At the 2019 annual convention and marketplace of the National Association of Television Program Executives (NATPE), ‘International Focus’ was one of the five main session streams, sponsored by the global audience measurement firm Parrot Analytics. According to a presentation on Parrot’s recent data on global consumer engagement, 13 of the top 100 titles in the United States were of non-American origin in 2018, up from 8 in 2017 – an increase that might well suggest a leapfrogging rate of continuing internationalisation in US television consumption (Parrot Analytics NATPE, 2019).

But the LA Times article also stands out in a sea of similar news because it goes a step further than most in assigning sociopolitical value to TV’s rapid globalisation: ‘Even as the world convulses in fits of chauvinism, parochialism, populism and xenophobia, television in its various delivery systems has never been more cosmopolitan and international’ (Lloyd, 2018). The implications of this contrast remain unexplored, but the author clearly intimates that watching television from other cultures challenges ethnocentrism and nurtures curiosity, openness and tolerance. ‘For whatever reason’, he concludes, ‘we have become a little more open to otherness. It may be just what the world needs now’ (Lloyd, 2018).

It is precisely those unspoken implications that intrigue me about the accelerated globalisation of television content enabled by digital access. The reason why ‘what the world needs now’ is global understanding and cooperation is an implied sense of shared crisis. The economic, environmental, political and social dimensions of this crisis converge and increasingly crystallise in the failure of free market capitalism and its underlying global neo-liberal agenda to provide good, or even liveable, lives for the growing majority of the planet’s inhabitants.

While one finds plenty of commentary on the global streaming revolution and the global crisis of neo-liberalism, respectively, one hardly ever finds these discussions crossing and connecting. In popular and academic criticism alike, ‘streaming’ – often used now as shorthand for digital on-demand services – has become synonymous with disrupting older models of television on several fronts: digital on-demand services have threatened the very ‘television paradigm’ in terms of ‘technology, usages and business models’, claims a recent report by the European Audiovisual Observatory (Cappello, 2016). The ‘Netflix model’ has disrupted the ‘temporal regularity of television’ (Grandinetti, 2017: 11–12). In terms of consumption, the time-shifting experience enabled by streaming ‘challenges the traditional power dynamics of unidirectional broadcast flows from producer through viewer’ (Steiner, 2017: 147). Streaming has also improved TV content, liberating television from the position of the ‘idiot box’ and lifting it into the proximity of art, cinema and even literature. In the digital environment of narrowcasting, a certain kind of aesthetic standard, embodied by the HBO-type drama, has emerged on an international scale, disrupting alternative schemes of evaluation rooted in regional and national traditions (Buonanno, 2013).

In a rare attempt to address the politics of digital sharing (although without specific reference to television), Cammaerts (2011) claims that widespread digital sharing of code, content and platform may be disruptive to neo-liberalism’s very core practices. Can ‘disruptive sharing’, the growing availability of content from elsewhere in the world, help mediate and perhaps even manage crisis, let alone suggest shared global solutions? Where and how do we locate and how do we assess the political impact of streaming TV, which tends to get systematically or anxiously erased from academic, journalistic or industry accounts?

The Cold War as a paradigm of disruption

One place to start would be the abundance of recent international drama that addresses the rise of anti-democratic, authoritarian forces within a neo-liberal landscape. Not coincidentally, many of these series – along with feature films – draw on the Cold War for historical parallels, antecedents or representational elements. The revival of the Cold War as a theme and explanatory matrix in popular media culture has yielded recent blockbusters such as Atomic Blonde (David Leitch, 2017), Red Sparrow (Francis Lawrence, 2018), The Spy Who Dumped Me (Susanna Fogel, 2018) and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Tomas Alfredson, 2011), and television dramas such as The Americans (2013), Counterpart (2017), Comrade Detective (2017), Homeland (2011), Deutschland 83 (2015), 1983 (2018–), Au service de la France/A Very Secret Service (2015), The Man in the High Castle (2015), The Handmaid’s Tale (2017), Berlin Station (2016) and Secret City (2016). Some of these series are localised products made or licensed by transnational streamers, and some are scripted formats adapted from elsewhere for the US market. What most of them have in common is that they infuse familiar nostalgic Cold War clichés with a decidedly contemporary sense of ambiguity, allegory and dystopia in the wake of the global crisis of neo-liberal markets, the erosion of trust in democratic institutions and the emergence of autocratic leaders worldwide. Together, they visualise global political resonances of populism, oppression and fear, including widespread digital state and corporate surveillance, a conservative backlash against the rights of women, minorities and immigrants, the appearance of fake news delivered by algorithms and Russia’s return to the international stage as powerful state with imperial ambitions, headed by a former KGB agent.

This international cluster of programmes evokes historical continuities between the current sense of global crisis and the Cold War, calling up the spectre of socialism, which was banished in the early 1990s as a feasible alternative socioeconomic order in the wake of market capitalism’s global ‘victory’. At the same time, these contemporary dramas disrupt the received narrative of the Cold War order as a binary struggle between two superpowers, represented by agents who are either villains or heroes. In this reordered world brought to us by global streaming platforms, the Hulu original, The Handmaid’s Tale as a dystopian allegory of contemporary America, and the Polish Netflix-original, 1983 as a dystopian allegory of contemporary Poland are more similar than different. They portray contemporaneous worlds threatened by autocratic oppression, propaganda, misinformation, lies, distrust, surveillance and paranoia. While the structures of governance and feeling they represent are borrowed from the Cold War, the main dividing factors are no longer along socialist and capitalist orders. Rather, these programmes, taken together, call attention to actual, unlikely post-Cold War alliances among the political leadership in Russia, the United States, North Korea, Hungary, Poland, Brazil, India, Brexit-afflicted Britain, as well as a host of subnational and transnational groups. Whereas in the original Cold War paradigm, populism, illiberalism and authoritarianism had been assigned to communism and the unfettered spread of popular media culture was associated with the freedom of the markets cherished by capitalism, the world order that is currently taking shape shows a confusing movement towards grand equalisation in both areas: the global spread of populism and the global reach of popular media via streaming. Television juxtaposes and superimposes spheres formerly separated by the Cold War paradigm. A critical analysis of the attendant, productive epistemological confusion created by global streaming platforms, their resurrection and simultaneous disruption of the Cold War order, may thus provide crucial clues to resolving what appear to be the glaring contradictions of our time.

This is easier said than done, of course, not the least because such an analysis immediately calls into play specific regional and local circumstances that impact the content and reception of streaming media. Perhaps nowhere is the contradiction between the unimpeded flow of international television and the retreat into defensive, ‘illiberal’ modes of governance as stark as in the post-socialist countries of the East European region, which were on the other, socialist side of the Iron Curtain during the Cold War and have embraced right-wing populism in the past 10 years. These countries thus yield excellent platforms to at least begin to speculate about potential of internationally travelling scripted content for making a political intervention in the post-Cold War environment of permanent crisis.

Such a region-focused analysis also challenges the assumption that the disruptions of television are uniform across geographical regions. Buonanno (2013) assesses the contemporary and retroactive levelling effects of the ‘HBO-type drama series’ in Europe, where the recent realignment of technology and values around HBO-type quality shows has been widely internalised among critics and audiences. Critics now routinely devalue strong local traditions of public broadcasting in favour of digital and satellite networks, which have helped to valorise the contemporary American series, giving them priority access to the selected environment of the narrowcast television, and even screening the most hyped programmes on prestige-conferring movie channels.

In much of Eastern Europe, the disruptions caused by ‘HBO-type drama’ and other quality series delivered by non-linear services differ significantly from those in most of Western Europe and from those generally identified within television studies and criticism. These differences involve television’s identity, value and quality, its business model and regulatory environment, its audiences and their ‘freedoms’ and its apparatus of evaluation. To assess the disruptions and continuities that are occurring, we need to take into account regionally (and nationally) specific conditions: the legacy of socialist television’s versions of public broadcasting; the struggles for democratic public service media to emerge since the end of socialism and especially under post-socialist regimes’ illiberal re-centralisation; the parallel neo-liberalisation and globalisation of the media business, including fast-paced digitalisation, the restructuring of the media industries to maximise foreign investment and attract runaway production in the service industry; the differential effects of European media regulation on the region; and the long-standing cultural and ideological tension between nativist/populist and cosmopolitan/elitist nationalisms.

In fact, we may consider the advent of digital on-demand television in the region as a flashpoint that illuminates a combination of larger changes regarding economic, ideological, aesthetic and cultural models in post-socialist countries. None of the usual constituencies of streaming television – production personnel, critics, scholars, audiences, regulatory bodies or politicians – will conform to a monolithic ‘global’ template in this scheme. My analysis revolves around the disruptions caused at the interaction of these factors in the case of HBO Europe’s operations, which set up its headquarters in Budapest as early as 1991 and has since expanded into the rest of Eastern and Southern Europe and other European territories.

HBO Europe in illiberal Eastern Europe: A clash of values?

HBO Europe’s operation in Eastern Europe offers multiple contradictions through which we can trace the ruptures and continuities between the Cold War and the contemporary television era at the intersections of transnational popular television and national-populist politics. Most surprisingly, HBO Europe has been headquartered in the region since 1991, despite the fact that its brand identity is much better suited for the core countries of Europe, where the urban–rural divide tends to be less extreme, where broadband penetration is higher (Europe’s Digital Progress Report, 2017), and where HBO’s quality programming and altruistic investments in progressive causes organically build on and cooperate with a strong tradition of public service broadcasting (Clover, 2017). It is counter-intuitive, then, that HBO would anchor its production arm in the East European region, where neither the commercial nor the public service model of quality TV has cultivated a particularly nurturing soil.

HBO was one of the first Western media companies to establish itself in Eastern Europe following the end of the Cold War. Its first expansion into Europe occurred in 1991, just 2 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the company launched its first premium pay cable channel in Hungary on Kabelkom, a joint venture between Time Warner and Sony Pictures, transmitted by microwave relay. Disney entered the joint venture in 1995. In 2010, Time Warner bought out Sony and Disney and became the sole shareholder of the company. HBO Digital, a subscription video-on-demand service, was made available in a number of markets during the same period. HBO Hungary was followed in Eastern and Southern Europe by HBO Czech Republic in 1994 (including service in Slovakia from 1997), HBO Poland in 1996, HBO Romania (covering Moldova) in 1997, HBO Bulgaria in 2002, HBO Adria (covering Croatia and Slovenia) in 2004 and by HBO Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Macedonia in 2006. Across these territories, HBO has been offering the primary HBO and Cinemax linear programming services in standard and HD, as well as multiplex services including HBO2, HBO Comedy and Cinemax 2 (Briel, 2010). HBO Europe’s headquarters are presently in Budapest and Prague. The OTT streaming service HBO Go, which has been introduced in phases in the various territories (2010 in Poland, 2014 in Scandinavia, 2015 in Romania, 2017 in much of Eastern Europe), is now available to all European subscribers (Dziadul, 2015).

When other companies were withdrawing from Eastern Europe following the global recession of 2008, in reaction to the increasing involvement of local business elites in the media sector (Štetka, 2012) and to the ensuing, unfavourable business climate of widespread political corruption, HBO began to invest in original production. The numerous adaptations of Be’Tipul (In Treatment) served as important early test cases for HBO’s groundbreaking method of localisation in the post-socialist region, namely in Serbia (2009), Slovenia (2011), the Czech Republic (2011), Poland (2011), Hungary (2012), Russia (2012), Croatia (2013) and Macedonia (2017). The series enlisted the best writing and acting talent in the respective countries. These markers of quality were important borrowings from the Israeli original, produced in an environment where television quality is prescribed by law, following a 1990s Israeli legislation that distinguishes between high and low-end genres and requires private channels to air at least 150 hours of content that is deemed to be of high production value (Perkins, 2015). Lavie (2015) singles out Be’Tipul as an example that embodies the social value attributed to the ‘high end’ of production in this ‘Bourdieusian scheme’ of institutional distinction.

A show of such cinema-adjacent pedigree, lining up some of the most respected screenwriters, directors and actors in each country, aligns well with pre-existing value schemes of a marked, long-standing separation between elite and popular cultures. This was partly a function of access – HBO was mostly available in most of the region as a subscription-based, premium cable channel in 2012 – but also of the situation of introspection and analysis that characterises a therapy setting, which interpellates a more educated audience. One could speculate further that the format’s success among Eastern European audiences is a symptom of legitimating intellectual and emotional self-improvement among populations still undergoing the transition from the top-down, collective educational mandates of the socialist nation-state to a neo-liberal model that primarily approaches social problems in terms of self-examination and individual self-improvement. The fact that the series enumerates a tableau of individual dilemmas and generalised emotional issues that revolve around families, marriages, careers and children, makes it more broadly relatable. In Treatment (2008–2010) introduced the new model of ‘popular quality television’, bringing the value of art film to television and effectively disrupting the hierarchy between film (art) and television in the course of a post-socialist, neo-liberal transition. It offered prestige and production values associated with film in an accessible, everyday language and an outlet for addressing emotional disorders and mental health issues, along with re-legitimating the Central European legacy of psychoanalysis, which had been suppressed in official public discourses during socialism.

Boosted by the resounding success of In Treatment and other format adaptations, HBO Europe turned to making even more localised, original series, which have been successful in the national context and have also shown potential for transnational sales. Wataha (2014) earned record ratings in HBO Poland’s history and was also sold in foreign markets (Dziadul, 2016). The Hungarian Aranyélet/Easy Living (2015–), the Romanian Umbre/Shadows (2014) , the Czech Mamon (2015) and the Polish Pakt/The Pact (2015) are either successful adaptations of dramatic formats or originals that embody a cosmopolitan sensibility suited for travel. The three-part miniseries, Horící ker/The Burning Bush (2013), fictionalised the story of Czech national hero and martyr Jan Palach, who set himself on fire to protest the 1968 Soviet occupation of the country. The Czech public broadcaster had initially rejected the screenplay before HBO recruited venerable Polish director and FAMU graduate Agnieszka Holland, who had previously worked for HBO in the United States. Written by Czech screenwriter Štěpán Hulík and coproduced by newcomer Tomáš Hrub, the series received multiple awards, became a critical and audience success and was eventually released as a theatrical feature. The Czech public broadcaster subsequently identified The Burning Bush as the new benchmark of success to strive for (Szczepanik, 2016).

HBO dramas’ transnational aesthetic, high production values and filmic quality fulfil a high cultural preference for art that has been a cornerstone of cultural nationalism in the region. Having Holland direct Horící ker, Oscar-nominated Ildikó Enyedi direct the Hungarian adaptation of In Treatment, or Bogdan Mirica, winner of the 2016 Cannes Fipresci Award for his feature Câini/Dogs (2016) direct the Romanian serial, Umbre/Shadows, instantly distinguishes these productions from ordinary television (Roxborough, 2017). However, parting with art film’s elite address, HBO’s quality dramas and documentaries issue a broader popular appeal – a kind of entertaining quality aesthetic and ordinary language that had not existed before due to the value gap assumed to separate art film and television. Even though HBO is most popular among an urban viewership, the recent adaptations and original series reach a broader audience by offering familiar, local stories and characters at an affordable price, without requiring multilingual competence.

As Petr Szczepanik (2016) explains, HBO’s treatment of local labour is something of a positive exception in the Czech – and, by extension, East European – screen labour market, where local personnel are generally kept at lower tiers of responsibility and pay, facing more limited learning and professionalisation opportunities and upward mobility than their Western counterparts. HBO has even come to occupy some of the space where PSB would operate in countries with more robust democratic traditions (Szczepanik, 2017). The company has supported national film and documentary production and exhibition in Europe, often in collaboration with public broadcasters. It runs a documentary production branch in Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland and Romania.

Being a transnational media company that specialises in ‘art TV’ also escapes direct government control and allows HBO’s locally produced programmes to strike a tone of moderate sociopolitical criticism, which has become rare or extinct in most of the post-socialist countries (Soós, 2016). These drama series revolve around what are seen as recognisable national character types and familiar narrative trajectories of navigating the corrupt conditions of the transition from late socialism under the Cold War to the environment of oligarchic, state-led capitalism. The protagonists of Shadows (Romania) and Easy Living (Hungary) are both ordinary men who get involved in local mafia business in the immediate post-socialist years of tumultuous economic realignment. When they try to extricate themselves from crime, they get even more entangled, exposing the inescapable web of government and business corruption in the process. The Czech format adaptation Mamon also features a tangle of corrupt business arrangements among Czech financial elites whose alliance goes back to the early 1990s, and who are also in bed with law enforcement. The original Mammon, a successful product of the cycle of quality crime fiction popularly known as Nordic noir or Scandinoir, about a journalist exposing corruption in a company run by his brother, originally produced for Norwegian public broadcaster NRK 1 (2014, 2016), inspired two HBO adaptations in Eastern Europe, in the Czech Republic and Poland, respectively. Offering realistic, contemporary characters and speech patterns, HBO has managed to broach the theme of crime and corruption on a transnational scale that lends itself to adaptation to local histories (Soós, 2016). HBO Europe tapped into a multi-level awareness about corruption that encompasses widespread disappointment with the unbridled triumph of neo-liberal capitalism globally, its continental crisis in Europe, and the local experiences of cynicism and disillusionment in the small nations of the post-socialist peripheries, whose populations are especially susceptible to defensive retreat into populist nationalism.

Buonanno (2013, 182) argues that HBO, the ‘standard-bearer of “quality TV”’, has re-established the prestige of the miniseries with particular success in the European environment. Along with other US-based narrowcasting content providers, HBO has capitalised on the traditional value of the miniseries, which was particularly high in Italian television culture, where the format had long lived in the hybrid zone between television and cinema, distinguishing itself from serial formats associated with soap opera and uniting content deemed socially valuable with an aesthetic form deemed sophisticated (Buonanno, 2013). It has also successfully broken down (or bypassed) the seemingly intractable divide between national and supranational identifications. It has designed and implemented a pan-European approach that envelopes the European tradition of public service broadcasting, art film and documentary in its elastic ‘quality’ brand, and offers stories, themes, characters and styles that qualify as ‘originals’ in specific national contexts while they travel easily from market to market thanks to digital platforms of borderless internet distribution.

HBO thus appears to be the poster child for the kind of digital connectivity and choice-driven freedom that TV criticism and industry professionals unconditionally celebrate and that recent EU media regulation (Imre, 2018) also embraces. HBO Europe’s localised adaptations and originals appear to be precisely the kind of international TV that makes us recognise the continuities between globally shared histories and contemporary crises embedded in localised stories, the kind that might make viewers more open, more accepting and less ethnocentric. One would expect that, given its investment in high-quality, localised production content that critically revisits recent national and regional histories and connects those to internationally relevant depictions of corruption and crime, HBO Europe perform a disruptive role in relation to the enveloping political culture of populist nationalisms in Eastern Europe. However, it is precisely this post-socialist context of blatant contradictions that also cautions us about associating access to globally mobile quality drama with fostering political tolerance and open-mindedness. In fact, HBO Europe’s case may offer the beginning of an explanation why consuming versions of the same programming and retreating into ethnocentric, homophobic, xenophobic silos might be quite compatible global trends.

I single out two major, interlinked reasons that undermine optimistic projections and constitute disruptions in the way in which international, digitally rendered television is being discussed within television studies, both of which can be traced back to the ordering force of cultural nationalism and the possibility of its inadvertent support for populist nationalism.

Quality and nationalism

The first reason is the matrix of evaluation embedded in cultural nationalism, which tends to absorb quality TV into the class system of film, despite HBO’s mediating role between high and low dimensions through its production of ‘popular quality’. Unlike in Western Europe, in much of the post-socialist Eastern European region, the new, transnational television content is not threatening to undermine the value of native traditions. The main reason for this is that television has historically been understood to carry little cultural or economic value in the region. In contrast to literature, the theatre or cinema, television, which was launched and developed under state socialist regimes, has been thought of as an agent of mass entertainment, information and propaganda rather than as an art form. Art film, the most immediate medium of comparison, has built a robust critical and educational infrastructure to validate its cultural status and relevance. Most socialist film industries pursued a modernist, ‘aristocratic’ auteur film tradition (with the notable exception of Czechoslovak cinema), which consolidated its hegemonic position by the 1960s and reconsolidated it in 1990s by keeping the old studios in state ownership. In the new, regional production centres such as Prague, Budapest, Warsaw and Bucharest, substantial changes began only in the late 1990s to early 2000s by building new studios, offering massive tax incentives to foreign companies and training a skilled, English-speaking labour force.

If television has been seriously studied at all, it has been confined to institutions of sociology and communication, with an emphasis on the medium’s social impact within a strictly national context, rather than its aesthetic or cultural value. As a reflection of the cultural value assigned to television until recently, television studies as a discipline is non-existent or nascent at best, and even dedicated TV criticism is scarce.

In (Western) Europe, ‘quality’ has been historically reserved for television with an educational purpose, produced primarily by public service broadcasters. In the post-war decades, television in much of Europe was assigned to the service of national cultures, under the control of national governments. Public broadcasters in Western Europe carried an uncontested public service broadcasting (PSB) remit or followed a mixed PSB-commercial model. Programming privileged liberal modernist values associated with balanced news, erudition and high art driven by the author-director’s creative vision (Gelencsér, 2017; Varga, 2016). Such high-minded, pedagogical beginnings, best exemplified by John Reith’s ambitions to bring high culture to the masses, were redirected somewhat as early as 1955, when the BBC adopted a more popular programming strategy similar to those of commercial channels (Nelson, 2007). Most Western European broadcasters transitioned to a dual-broadcasting, mixed public service-commercial model by the 1980s.

During socialism, national televisions in Eastern Europe largely adopted the values set by public service broadcasting, with some differences in ideological emphasis. Of the three goals embraced by the BBC, to educate, inform and entertain, socialist television put a major emphasis on education, for the most part presented information in a propagandistic frame, and, notwithstanding significant variations in political and economic liberalism among the different countries, only reluctantly embraced entertainment (Imre, 2016).

In the absence of both a fully developed PSB tradition and academic prestige conferred on television, in Eastern Europe, ‘quality TV’ remains an oxymoronic term precisely because it marries two concepts long thought of as incompatible. For the most part, ‘quality TV’ has remained a foreign idea in this part of Europe, referring to series imported mostly from the United States, associated with HBO and other cable companies, including US-based cable networks such as Showtime and AMC, some Western European public broadcasters such as the BBC, as well as the some of the original products of video-on-demand services such as Netflix, Amazon and Hulu.

As a result of increasing media conglomeration and digital distribution, also facilitated by EU policy, there has recently been a marked convergence between the respective ‘qualities’ that have historically distinguished the European PSB type and the American HBO-type quality. One aspect of this quality convergence has precisely been the diminishing distinctions between film and television. It has become rare for directors, screenwriters and producers to tether their careers exclusively to either film or television. The financing of films in Europe is increasingly contingent on the presale of television rights. Labour conditions in PSBs have become more casual, precarious and outsourced, much like in the film industry. ‘Quality television’ is swiftly becoming an umbrella of themes, styles, industrial practices, production values and talent pools, which also encompasses film and PSB (Szczepanik, 2018).

Paradoxically, ‘quality TV’ enters the post-socialist milieu at a time when the media are so globalised, interconnected and convergent that some have questioned the very need for distinguishing between film and television any more (Caldwell, 2008). The wide availability of quality television in particular, increasingly facilitated by streaming platforms, is often identified worldwide as one of the symptoms of the ‘end of television’. It is hardly a coincidence that it has finally become legitimate to discuss television as a medium of quality in the region when it has ceased to be just that, at the point of television’s loss of a distinct identity and its dispersal among forms and platforms. Rather than legitimising television as a medium of cultural value, the foreignness of recent imports and format adaptations may help further distance quality TV from ordinary, domestic TV and entrench the existing value divide between cinematic quality and domestically produced television.

Whereas Scandinoir has readily surpassed the national containment of its origination in national public broadcast TV and has been widely analysed as a testament to television’s global disruptions, HBO’s Eastern European dramas tend to be contained within their national brackets of comparison and assessment. The continuity within the magnetic force field of the national is proving to be stronger than the forces of its potential disruption introduced by HBO-type quality.

Fans and freedoms

The second, even more fundamental obstacle to HBO Europe’s potential to facilitate cosmopolitanism concerns viewer agency and ‘freedom’, which often anchor discussions of streaming television in television and media studies. Unlike the collective, familial, synchronous experience of broadcast TV, digital TV allows for highly individualised, playlist-like consumption that is not conditioned on simultaneous watching but creates taste-based fan groups or ‘tribes of affinity’ (Turner, 2011: 42) through sharing via social media.

Such a model of consumption-based freedom relies on the taken-for-granted construction of the fan operating within the conditions of free market capitalism that has historically defined the ideological parameters of TV studies. Discussing the ‘international experience of digital media’, Graeme Turner scrutinises the notion that the ideal addressee of digital television is the fan. Turner comments that this situation might be true for global centres but ‘in places like the Balkans and the Middle East’ (2011: 44), television continues to be used to form national communities. This is an important critical note, which cautions against generalising projections about the consumer ‘freedom’ associated with digital television and the empowerment of its sophisticated viewers, who are allegedly liberated from the limited options and temporal constraints of the broadcast menu.

But who is the East European fan? While such a figure certainly exists – and did so during socialism, too – it is a very different formation. Unlike the fan who is amply discussed in the volumes of Western ‘fan studies’, the East European fan (let alone the nerd) would be defined as a Bulgarian, Slovak or Polish person in the first place, with their national identity and belonging creating an immediate limitation to the empowerment or cultural legitimation afforded the American or British subject of consumption. Their consumer ‘freedom’ would be further limited by the hierarchical force of cultural validation, which has prescribed an evolutionary trajectory between the immature adoration of the ‘fan’ and the sophisticated appreciation of the mature citizen-critic. In the United States and other global media centres, the OTT model has democratised access to good TV and made it the new standard to aspire to, creating tribes of affinity across class barriers rather than exceptions in a world of least objectionable programming. While HBO executives frequently express a similar aspiration in the post-socialist region, the appearance of on-demand quality TV might also further entrench the divide between cosmopolitan, intellectual elites and ‘the people’, which is heavily politicised in the current populist environment.

Clearly, the issue of ‘freedom’ takes on very different inflections in a region where four decades of state socialism was followed by a brief period of democratisation that has been severely curtailed by creeping neo-authoritarianism and anti-intellectual populism in the past decade. Pondering the issue of freedom afforded by non-linear media access, Maria San Filipo asks:

…to what degree has liberation from the tyranny of time-contingent viewing, cord-dependent shared consoles, and multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) – i.e., cable operators like Comcast, satellite carriers like DirectV, and fiber-optic network providers like Verizon fiOs – in favor of time- shifting, personal/mobile devices, and online video distributors such as Netflix actually freed viewers, temporally or otherwise, from normative family and corporate values? (San Filipo, 2017: 78)

From the post-socialist vantage point, the problems with digital choice go well beyond overwhelm and choice fatigue. The danger is not simply that market freedoms are limited or ambivalent but that embracing or glorifying them may actually strengthen, rather than challenge, neo-authoritarianism. As Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev explains, authoritarianism and free market liberalism are not opposed. On the contrary, new authoritarians view themselves as corporations. The current forms of ‘competitive authoritarianism’ (Krastev, 2011: 12) are not openly repressive. They survive best in the no-man’s land between democracy and authoritarianism. They fake democracy by ensuring freedom of travel, speech and access to global media.

Unlike state socialist regimes, competitive authoritarianisms are non-ideological, or, rather, post-ideological (Krastev, 2011). They cynically weave pieces of populist nationalism into brands available for identification to their devoted fans, in the service of what Zala Volčič and Mark Andrejevic aptly call ‘commercial nationalism’ (2016). As Volčič and Andrejevic write, ‘nationalism is perhaps the ur-form of the brand – a means of channeling affective sentiment around a floating signifier. At the same time, state-sanctioned forms of nationalism in the era of the “enterprise state” piggyback on commercial entities and strategies’ (Krastev, 2011: 2). HBO, Netflix and other digital platforms might thus promote pseudo-freedom, a withdrawal from ideology and politics, in which viewers and repressive governments are aligned in a paradoxical way.

The stakes: Assessing disruption and continuity

As I have argued, any disruption attributed to TV’s digital revolution, or specifically to HBO Europe’s impact, is mitigated by the fact that paradigms borrowed from TV studies and cultural studies have limited usefulness and need significant adjustment in the post-socialist arena. One of these paradigms is the contrast between the past of television as monolithic broadcasting that offered little choice to the spatially and temporally bound citizen and the new, limber, digital TV accessed any time and place by the empowered fan. This history evolved against the steady background of free market capitalism. Neither the living past of socialist authoritarianism nor the no man’s land of competitive authoritarianism are easy to accommodate within this global paradigm.

Nevertheless, the intervention of global, digital television, and more specifically, of HBO Europe’s locally produced ‘quality’ dramas, do have the potential to challenge the national containment of taste-based distinctions and audience formations. HBO Europe’s operations highlight the degree of exchange and movement within the European cultural space and, in turn, reveal nationalism’s gate-keeping function, which served to obfuscate the interconnectedness of European media in predigital times. They thus trigger a retroactive disruption of the Cold War paradigm. Artists, stories and audiences have always participated in European circulation. Socialist film and television were a part of extensive European networks, both official and unofficial (Imre, 2016). HBO and other media companies are building on, and profiting from, these existing transnational networks and exchanges. One can argue that, among more cosmopolitan constituencies at least, HBO Europe has successfully broken down (or ignored) the seemingly intractable divide between national and supranational identifications.

Extending this logic retroactively, we can also see that the aesthetic quality conferred on art cinema itself has actually been conditioned much more heavily on its market value than previously assumed, accrued in the course of its international circulation (Szczepanik, 2016). In other words, it is precisely art films’ international validation on the cosmopolitan European and world stage that may primarily lend it its national value, rather than the other way round. This would render that national value contingent, transactional, rather than inherent and immutable. This transactional value is not merely aesthetic then but inherently economic, not unlike that of television. In other words, rather than further diminishing television’s value in order to shore up the inherent national(istic) quality of art cinema, HBO may also perform a levelling function between the two by highlighting the commercial underpinnings that connect the two media and thus indirectly questioning the role of art cinema as the proper expression of national culture.

Extending the same logic of levelling, on the other side of the cosmopolitan/mass divide, HBO’s ‘quality TV’ also brings into question the simplistic notion of TV audiences, the ‘people’ assumed to be mindlessly glued to the idiot box. In the Anglo-American arena, one of the most important interventions of television studies was to remove the stigma of ‘guilty pleasure’ or ‘trash’ associated with television and its alleged audiences and to produce a much more subtle understanding of the work of social and cultural mediation performed by television. This process of lending cultural capital to TV and lending legitimation to TV studies was infused by insights from cultural studies, an inherently cross-disciplinary approach that helped connect the ideological dots between aesthetic and political representation and de-naturalise the barriers between high and popular culture. In its most productive manifestations, such as the work of Raymond Williams, cultural studies relentlessly uncovered how systems of representation derived their social and political power. In his canonical article, The Uses of Cultural Theory (1985), Williams argues that cultural theory is most useful when it avoids both the formalist approach considered specific to art and the sociological criticism considered appropriate for objects and texts of popular culture. Instead, he argues, cultural studies calls attention to the ways in which the naturalised categories that underscore both approaches conceal their own embedded-ness in historical, social and political structures (Williams 1985).

For television studies scholars, therefore, the emergence and industrial framing of quality TV as ‘not TV’ in the past decades has presented a threat to the very legitimation of television as a platform of ideological struggle over the social relevance that television studies had achieved. Quality TV has threatened to re-aestheticise television in a neo-formalist fashion, borrowing auteurist discourses left over from cinema studies and bracketing issues of ideology and culture. In the Eastern European region, where television and cultural studies have not made a significant impact, the challenge for critical media studies is similar now: to resist incorporating quality TV into the largely apolitical aesthetic analysis reserved for art film and literature and thereby confirm ordinary television’s death as good riddance. To fail to resist would amount to missing the opportunity to de-naturalise the categories that set aside aesthetic analysis as exempt from the politics of representation. This would be a dangerous proposition, especially in a time of raging populism where the dominant political discourses level constant attacks against intellectual ‘elitism’ and critical education and dismiss efforts at legitimising representational politics by historically marginalised groups as a wrong-headed practice of extreme political correctness tied to self-righteous liberal censorship.

A more productive response to quality TV would be an active re-legitimation of education and scholarly inquiry away from the elitist, aesthetic path of hierarchical presumptions, following Williams’ recommendation for the role of cultural theory to mediate between and bring into mutual influence social meaning and modes of aesthetic representation. Digitally accessed ‘quality’s’ recent appearance in relation to television, which allows certain kinds of the television to be discussed in the vicinity of film in the first place, is also an opportunity to revisit the history of how and why TV had been relegated to the status of the neglected, despised ugly duckling until it assimilated the features of its big brother, cinema. This recent development gives us a chance to defamiliarise and investigate the value system that has been so seamlessly woven into the national and regional cultural fabric as to function as an unquestionable truth. This system is far-reaching, resting on value systems reified by nationalism, gender, colonialism and whiteness, categories that have anchored hierarchies that have normative implications beyond academic inquiries and across the entire sphere of social and cultural life.

To return to the original question raised by LA Times piece: Does the unprecedented level and unimpeded flow of shared, quality TV content offer a parallel corrective to widespread nationalistic fragmentation and challenge xenophobia, racism, and the false belief in the self-sufficiency of the nation-state? Probably not. But the coexistence of these phenomena displaces and forces us to mix disciplinary and methodological apparatuses that are usually treated as distinct. Studies of media policy, industry, data and surveillance do not tend to engage with those of nationalism, xenophobia, racism and cosmopolitanism. Issues of policy and politics often seem to be at methodological odds, which makes it harder to uncover how they are ideologically intertwined.

Perhaps the Cold War has returned as a matrix of understanding the contemporary order because we are seeing a curious convergence between former easts, wests, norths and southes. The dividing line turns out to be not so much between socialism and capitalism but between forces of equity and redistribution against forces of wild, unfettered capital accumulation. Global, streaming television now encompasses the entire post-Cold War world population with its stories – as well as its well-known investment in algorithmic surveillance. In this connection between big data and Big Brother, there does seem to be – if not a naïve sense of understanding others -- at least the possibility of a critical understanding of post-Cold War convergences and continuities.