On the harsh realities of researching television in Poland: Traditions,obstacles and perspectives

No country for television scholars – the context for understanding Polish TV research

This article provides an overview of the central ideas and intellectual traditions of studying television in Poland, examining its various approaches and objects of study. I try to steer away from discussing what was written about television before 1989, as it is a topic deserving an article of its own and not quite in tune with approaches to television exhibited by more contemporary scholars. I similarly omit the body of research on media and the systemic transition from the socialist to the commercial context, mainly because these issues do not seem to impact the academic field of television studies in Poland. Instead, I chart the primary areas of the Polish academic field to uncover significant differences and overlaps with its Anglo-American counterparts and to nominate new directions for future research. Television has always been studied under several disciplinary protocols but continually there have been three key sites for analysis of television, namely, the programmes, the audience and the industry. I, therefore, chart Polish TV scholarship on television with all its diverse set of subjects, but I organise this present audit around these particular three key sites of analysis. When conducting an audit on television studies in Poland, the first thing that needs to be acknowledged, and one that informs the subsequent sections, is that television studies is not an institutionalized field of study in the Polish academy. This, of course, does not mean that television is not an object of research, because it certainly is, but academic research on television is being conducted only as part of related subfields and not as a distinct research area.

The word television does not appear in the taxonomy of scientific fields in Poland, but as an academic interest it typically falls in the subfield of social communication and media (nauki o komunikacji społecznej i mediach) or alternatively, cultural and religious studies (nauki o kulturze i religii). Interestingly, in 2018, the taxonomy of scientific categories in Polish academia was reviewed by the Ministry of Education, but sadly, television was not considered as deserving a formal recognition as a distinctive subfield of research. This marks a significant lag behind Anglophone academia, where television studies gathered momentum as a discipline in the mid-1990s. As a result, students are not trained explicitly as ‘television’ scholars and there is a significant lack of mentors from the TV studies discipline. What’s more, none of the Polish academic journals is devoted in its entirety to television. Television-related research, typically, appears in cultural and religious studies journals, or those devoted to communication, media or social sciences. The way that television fits into the taxonomy of science categories in Poland has a significant impact on the type of research that is being conducted and the way television is taught. Since television studies is not a separate subfield of research, TV-related university courses are usually offered by journalism and communication departments or film studies departments. Within those academic units, television still lacks proper recognition, being either considered inferior to film or not as exciting as new media, such as newly emerging video-apps or streaming services. Universities in Poland tend to value anything called new media as a somehow more high-end field of culture, and thus worthy of study. This puts television at a significant disadvantage, as it is seen as somewhat separate from the thrilling new video technologies, and so there is little research currently being done on the technological, industrial and cultural convergences that take place between television and new media. The bastions of those new media – Netflix, Apple, Amazon and YouTube – are, in fact, among television's biggest players and producers, all the while being significant disruptors to the concept of traditional TV. While in the Anglo-American context television studies has been working hard to keep up and scrutinize these dynamic changes and make sense of them, in Polish academia there is a lack of interest in the continuity of these processes as still television. Insofar as television now converges with digital platforms, it seems only natural that people who study television would also study the Internet and other digital services and devices. But in Polish academia, studying anything that comes over the Internet (including television shows) is not really recognized as part of the TV canon anymore and has somehow become more legitimate than studying television itself. Even though sectors of television overlap with sectors of new and digital media, there is very little appreciation of how television informs our understanding of how new and digital media work. Considered inferior to film and not as cool as new media, many of the approaches to teaching and researching television, which have been at the heart of television studies in the Anglo-American academia, are not yet offered to students in Poland. While television is yet to be granted, conceptually, some autonomy and specificity as a field of study in its own right, Polish academics are trained as film, literature, sociology, or communication scholars and are applying those perspectives to the study of television.

What does not help to elevate television to the status of a distinct field is a significant lack of original theoretical works specifically devoted to television by local scholars or translations of important texts from the Anglo-American field of television studies. As a result, there is a lack of both terminology and appropriate methodologies in local critical discourse for television analysis that would account for television’s key attributes such as production systems, aesthetics, narrative mechanics and reception. Without these basic tools, local scholars have no fully formed language of appreciation to ‘read’ television by and are left with nothing but terms borrowed from film studies to apply to the analysis and evaluation of television. This is not to say that Anglo-American TV studies texts never travel to Poland through official channels, but even when they do, it is usually with a significant time lag. For example, in 2011, an important edited collection was published with translations of Jason Mittell’s 2006 article ‘Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television’ as well one of his book chapters on Viewing Television, along translations of texts on quality television by Sarah Cardwell, Jane Feuer, Roberta Pearson and Amanda Lotz from 2007 (Filiciak). Polish university libraries do not hold copies of English-language academic books, nor do they subscribe to international journals. It is, of course, possible for Polish students or scholars to obtain international articles or electronic versions of academic books through their own channels but that does not change the fact that lecturers tend to rely on Polish language teaching materials in the classroom, irrespective of the students’ command of English. As a result, Polish students are not exposed to the most recent methodologies, nor are they up to speed with current international research in the field. What’s more, the Polish academy cannot rely on funding as much as American and British universities do, and so it is very rare that Polish graduate students go abroad for training and have the opportunity to work within American–British television studies and return to their home country with an American–British frame for their work and pedagogy. Linguistic and economic barriers have thus limited the easy flow and exchange of ideas and intellectuals between Poland and significant international centres for television studies. This brief overview of the institutional placement of television as a research area and the practical aspect of conducting research in Poland is a necessary context for understanding the state of television studies in Poland.

Television texts – approaches and interest areas

The body of work done on television in Poland is not usually as interested in factual forms of television, nor in its institutional histories, as it is with television series and within this perspective only certain types of television are considered worth studying. Predominantly, it is American TV production that is of interest to Polish scholars, who have tended to conglomerate around a few landmark television shows, such as Mad Men, Breaking Bad, House of Cards, Band of Brothers, Girls, Homeland, Game of Thrones, House. Between 2013 and 2018 more than 14 edited volumes were published on television series and three television-themed special editions of media journals, becoming a significant repository of the available writing on television in Poland. These contributions are driven by an emphasis on close reading and primarily chart textual approaches to studying television, relying on tools such as textual analysis of visual style, cinematic techniques, types of shots, formal attributes, mise-en-scène, narrative structures and character tropes – very much the methods derived from film and literary studies. Formal analysis eschews the idea that anything makes its way into a text by accident and, thus, regards every sound, image, character, plot point or choice as one worthy of analysis and potentially requiring explanation. Polish scholars frequently identify the conventional codes of composition to conduct textual analysis of chosen case studies, analysing how scenes are arranged to construct meaning, for instance, to create a specific point of view on World War II in Band of Brothers (Chruszczewska, 2014; Musiał, 2014) or the War in Iraq in Generation Kill (Płaneta, 2016). The textual analysis also serves to flesh out audio and visual metaphors in particular scenes or episodes to achieve certain narrative functions, for example, to compose different timelines, where even minor details such as characters’ names are analysed for meaning (Mochocka, 2014). Several authors take interest in exploring the complexities of the fictional world created in Twin Peaks (Dwojnych, 2017; Knapik, 2017), Downton Abbey (Jakóbczyk-Gola, 2014; Sadowski, 2017), Mad Men (Kozera, 2014) and the apocalyptic worlds of The Leftovers, Dollhouse and Fringe (Smoręda, 2016).

There seems to be a strong desire among Polish scholars to use such close engagement with textual form as a tool to investigate how power and ideology work at the level of the text as a site where cultural values are articulated. Breaking Bad is quite a popular case study in this respect. Polish scholars discuss many of the broader social formations and problems the show depicts, for example, how Breaking Bad constructs representation of masculinity, poverty in American society, the notion of the American dream and its moral conflict (Arcimowicz, 2017; Kokot-Góra, 2016; Konwerska, 2014; Kufel, 2014; Mirys, 2014; Szeremeta, 2014; Wierzchowska, 2014). An equally popular case study for investigating the TV text as a site where power and ideology operate is The Wire. Polish scholars consider the show’s potential to dramatize the nature of the social order, investigate how the show constructs social realism concerning the collective life in the ghetto and representations of inequality (Drygalska, 2012; Durys, 2016; Kotuła, 2014; Musiał, 2016). The show is also a useful case study for the investigation of representations of minority populations, in this instance the Polish, whose identity is depicted as worthy of preservation but under assault as a consequence of the failure of the American dream and American promise of equality (Caputa, 2016). The representation of the Polish minority is also investigated as part of formal analysis of sitcoms Hot in Cleveland and Two Broke Girls (Caputa, 2014). House of Cards, on the other hand, is investigated as a portrayal of the Machiavellian nature of the American legislative process, with democracy and politics as the main points of interest (Czarnecka, 2015; Peplinska, 2014; Piontek, 2016; Sobota, 2016).

Using close reading as a key method, Polish scholars enthusiastically focus on character types or depictions of protagonists whose actions are often morally objectionable, such as mobster kingpin Tony Soprano, meth cook and gangster-in-the-making Walter White from Breaking Bad and serial killer Dexter (Darska, 2012; Major, 2011; 2012; Sobota, 2017; Wróblewski, 2011). For Polish scholars, television is an important site of cultural representations of different identities and much of this work is informed by feminist perspectives. What seems interesting to Polish scholars is a greater complexity afforded to female characters in American television and so they investigate small screen portrayals of women as empowered heroines, single career women, and professionals struggling with family commitments and occupational demands, in shows such as Desperate Housewives (Boryszewski, 2014; Jachymek, 2013; Jawor, 2011; Szcześniak, 2008), Ally McBeal (Graff, 2001; Strehlau, 2017), The Good Wife and How to Get Away with Murder (Strehlau, 2016), The Tudors and Vikings (Kurzyńska, 2017), Orange Is the New Black (Bruszewska-Przytuła, 2014), Broad City (Kamińska, 2017), Grey’s Anatomy (Wawer 2016). The TV show Girls has been the case study of several academic contributions that scrutinize its aesthetics, depictions of female bodies and investigate how the show empowers women and encourages women-identified constructions of meaning (Chludzińska, 2014; Graff, 2014; Konwerska 2014; Major, 2014; Sobaś-Mikołajczyk, 2014; Szmidt, 2014).

Anna Nacher provides quite exhaustive book-length theoretical explorations of the relationship between television and gender more broadly (2008). This gender perspective is also quite pronounced in the body of work done on domestic TV fiction, which focuses almost exclusively on soap operas. Through textual analysis scholars investigate hugely popular Polish soaps as a site where cultural values are articulated, examining how tensions regarding changing sexual attitudes are manifest and whether soaps conform to and sell the status quo in terms of gender, sexuality and societal relations (Cikała, 2014; Dwojnych, 2014, 2016; Jawor, 2011; Łaciak, 2005, 2007, 2008, 2013, 2015; Rosińska-Mamej, 2014). A slight departure from what is mainly a body of work on female depictions, is an extensive textual analysis of public service broadcaster TVP’s domestic soaps that spans more than a decade worth of content. Krzysztof Arcimowicz conducted a textual analysis of the most popular TV soaps such as M jak Miłość, Barwy Szczęścia, Klan, Plebania, Na dobre i Na Złe between 1990 and 2015, focusing on the depictions of masculinity, including the gendered division of household chores and family life (Arcimowicz, 2013, 2014, 2016). This preoccupation with gender, feminism, postfeminism and sexual difference continued through to 2020, when comprehensive research on depictions of women in Polish TV series was published (Sojak et al., 2020). This includes analysis of selected episodes of eight television series, TV soaps as well as prime-time dramas, broadcast by the public service broadcaster TVP and its commercial counterparts TVN and Polsat. Authors of this very valuable contribution to the discussion on gender and television present the contexts in which women are depicted on the small screen and map the findings against prevailing culturally specific stereotypes of women. When talking about Polish soaps, one must mention Alicja Kisielewska whose book Polskie tele-sagi – mitologie rodzinności [Polish Tele-Sagas – Family Mythologies] (2009) is arguably one of the few original contemporary works about television published in Polish. The main aim of the book is to offer a new theoretical approach to analysing Polish soap operas, which the author sees as distinctive in their character, and thus different from soaps theorized in Anglo-American context. Kisielewska’s writing is highly original because she investigates the specific cultural, in this instance Polish, context that led to the emergence of a new generic incarnation of the soap opera, for which she coined the term polska tele-saga rodzinna [Polish family tele-saga]. Kisielewska investigates historical predecessors for this uniquely Polish take on the genre of soap opera, tracing its diachronic development and context.

A lot of the scholarly texts analysing television from the position of film studies reflect upon so-called ‘quality TV’ as a generic descriptive category with key textual features, where Polish scholars engage enthusiastically with the artistry of American series with increased cultural legitimacy and investigate normative thematic and aesthetic standards and conventions (Baran, 2016; Dziubczyńska, 2017; Filiciak, 2011, 2013; Lipińska, 2016; Lisowska-Magdziarz, 2016; Major, 2014; Nowak, 2014; Rosińska, 2011; Rydzek, 2018; Ryszkiewicz, 2014; Szmidt, 2017; Włodek, 2014). Prestige dramas are typically approached from the point of view of their narrative complexity, merging serialized storylines, episodic plots, and innovative techniques such as temporal play, twists, and reflexivity (Borowiecki, 2017, 2018, 2021; Kubit, 2011; Racięski, 2016). Yet again, Breaking Bad is a popular case study for Polish scholars, who chart the show’s innovative approach toward characterization, narrative and stylistic experimentation (Katner, 2016; Lewandowska, 2015; Major, 2013) or edgy content (Arcimowicz, 2017). Unsurprisingly, HBO is a by-word for quality in Polish academia and Game of Thrones is an obvious choice for analysis of its various markers of prestige (Pawłowska, 2016; Przytuła, 2014), alongside The Sopranos (Wierzchowska, 2011), The Wire (Drygalska, 2012) and True Detective (Pawłowska, 2016). The only significant non-American television text analysed through the framework of quality TV is the BBC’s Sherlock (Lisowska-Magdziarz, 2015), itself a co-production. The early 2000s saw a lot of experimentation from American television producers in offering what would come to be called transmedia storytelling. Polish researchers, following the footsteps of their Anglo-American counterparts, have recently started to analyze the textual fragments and extensions that variously start or continue the television text (Czopek, 2018; Sołodki, 2018). But, yet again, their focus is on American series exclusively. Agnieszka Całek, who wrote excitedly about transmedia storytelling and convergence culture, is the first Polish researcher to provide an exhaustive description of the phenomenon, historicizing the concept and providing an extensive bibliography of Anglo-American academic sources on the topic. She draws heavily on secondary sources but, at the same time, provides a lot of examples regarding shows such as BBC’s Sherlock, House of Cards, House and Game of Thrones. Sadly, the author neglects to account for the phenomenon in the local, Polish context (Całek, 2019a, 2019b). The only original contribution on transmedia storytelling so far is an article-length research by Małgorzata Wierzbowska on Legendy Polskie – the first Polish transmedia project created by Tomasz Bagiński, the executive producer of Netflix’s The Witcher.

The shared approach by the dozens of authors cited here is the assumption that there is something to be discovered by carefully examining the television text, which, in most cases, is a particular series, as authors rarely connect multiple programmes by a key thread or establish patterns across significant numbers of similar texts. As much as Polish scholars investigate the cultural value and textual meaning behind some of history’s most prominent television shows, they approach textual analyses of shows without the examination of the industrial, regulatory and cultural contexts that lead to particular textual forms and without a critical awareness of audiences, or understanding television as a specific medium. Text alone is rarely enough for television studies, even if it is often the first port of call before embarking on context, audience or industry. Polish authors fetishize the programmes under scrutiny and forget the contexts of production or reception. As a result, television programmes are mainly analysed as a part of the film canon, where the main requisites of what has come to be considered worthy of attention for Polish scholars are novelty, edginess, cult status, narrative complexity and transmediality. This erasure of the specificity of television in critical discourse is a distinctive feature here. Therefore, the body of work that focuses on television texts is not necessarily “doing” television studies or engaging with the range of methods and theories characteristic of television studies in the Anglo-American tradition.

As already discussed, another striking characteristic of Polish scholarship on TV is that local researchers favour American television over domestic content. The Polish homegrown television series, their longevity and high ratings in the domestic market notwithstanding, are thus far ignored by academic works not only outside Poland, but also locally. I should recall here the useful notion of invisible fiction (Mills, 2010), which captures the idea that a substantial amount of televisual content hardly ever enters the sphere of attention and interest of media scholars and thus remains unseen with academia. Polish TV drama is, obviously, an extremely improbable candidate for visibility within the taste community for current Anglo-American television scholarship. But, what is striking, Polish TV fiction is rarely investigated by local researchers either. This trend continues through to 2022, when HBO and Netflix both produce original Polish dramas that demonstrate the very same key attributes as their American counterparts. Qualities so enthusiastically praised by Polish scholars with reference to US content, such as narrative complexity, high production value and edginess are so far ignored in Polish shows such as HBO’s Wataha, Ślepnąc od Świateł, Pakt or Netflix’s 1983, Sexify, Rojst’97. Original series produced by HBO in Poland are only mentioned in a few article-length studies (Borowiecki, 2019; Kujawska-Lis and Lis-Kujawski, 2014; Majer, 2021). Actually, there is very little research done on any contemporary Polish TV programmes other than soap operas produced by the public service broadcaster TVP. Equally absent from existing scholarly analysis are shows produced by Polish commercial operators. A good example here is TVN’s prime time drama Chyłka, which in 2020 ranked as the most often streamed show in Poland, pushing Netflix’s hit Queen’s Gambit to number two. Despite its obvious enormous popularity with local viewers, Chyłka is thus far completely absent from academic research. There seems to be very little conviction that domestic original productions could serve as worthy case studies. In this respect, the immense interest of Polish scholars in either US TV fare or domestic soaps demonstrates a profound historical continuity. After all, American TV series flooded Polish television immediately after 1989 and throughout the whole 1990s, Polish viewers were exposed to either immensely popular American imports or domestically produced soaps. To this day, both remain very important for the local TV culture. Think pieces, Internet TV bloggers, film and television critics alike continually criticise Polish prime time dramas by comparing them to the landmark American shows and domestic soaps remain undefeated when it comes to viewership. Polish academia is thus yet to recognise this immense research potential of Polish domestically produced TV fiction. American TV series, as worthy of discussion and scholarship as they are, should not be an exclusive focus for Polish scholars. Contemporary Polish research on television is in need of a broader, more complete audit of domestic television, and research on local original TV product is the unexplored territory in which new scholars can make their significant mark.

Approaches to TV audiences – active viewers, pirates and fans

In Polish scholarship on television, it is the TV text that certainly captures the majority of attention of local scholars, which is somewhat understandable as programmes enjoy a considerable degree of specificity. But television matters very little without audiences. Polish work on audiences started as early as 1990s, when theories concerning the supposed passivity of viewers were the predominant paradigm (Goban-Klas, 2000; Goban-Klas and Sienkiewicz, 1999; Gwóźdź and Krzemień-Ojak, 1998), and where television was considered an instrument of social control and order. Halawa (2006) serves as a spectacular example of the quick maturation of audience research and theory within studies on television in Poland. He examined a broad range of responses to and uses of television, rituals of TV watching and the place that television occupied in the home. This represented a steep learning curve of realizing a need to discuss television as it was actually watched and how the practice of watching fitted into the patterns of everyday family life. Halawa draws heavily from sociological and anthropological methods of ethnography, observation, and interviewing to produce studies that examine the active process in which audiences construct meanings for television texts, thus domesticating the texts in personal ways to fit their daily lives. His work gave rise to a thriving sub-area of audience studies in Poland that involved examinations of the television audience in everyday life. Later on, Beata Łaciak also focused on the practice of watching, applying active audience theory to insist that Polish audiences were neither powerless nor uncritical and accepting of TV texts as coded power structures. She considered the relationship between viewers and soap operas as a culturally “lowbrow” product and examined the ways in which programme choice and viewing styles were inflected by gender. Łaciak, drawing on cultural theorist Ien Ang, discussed viewers’ emotional responses to soap operas in relation to their own lived experiences (2013). Their work is highly relevant as it contributes to an understanding of television beyond the Anglo-American context in its local, in this instance, Polish environment.

A great deal of work in this area was being conducted on soap operas. Halawa explored a broad variation of meanings viewers pulled from watching the hugely successful Polish soap opera Klan by analysing emails written to producers (2002, 2003). Relying on Tania Modleski, Halawa explored why the soap’s formal strategies were appealing to women viewers, considering stock character types and the genre's ever-unresolved form. He offered important perspectives about interactions between the programme and its audience. Several other researchers also found particular interest in soap viewers. The politics of everyday life impacting processes of decoding were an important feature in this body of work, namely how audiences interacted with TV texts and shaped meaning themselves (Citko, 2004; Godzic, 1999; Kisielewska, 2009; Łaciak, 2013; Mateja, 2010; Woźniak 2014a, 2014b; Wróbel, 2011). Certainly, the ethnographic method employed by many of them – interviewing, observing, sitting in with subjects and discussing television with them in their natural environments – borrowed from anthropology with its similar interest in cultures as systems of meaning.

Much of this burgeoning new form of studying television that examined the practice of watching television focused on gender, but still with regards to domestic soaps. Halawa examined how programme selection enacted power hierarchies within the home, and explored the gendered politics of taste and the ways in which programme choice and viewing styles are inflected by gender (2006). Several other researchers have also shown a particular interest in soap viewers and gender. Łyszkowska (2009) examined how, for example, social roles and power hierarchies within the home impacted female viewers and their practice of watching and choosing programmes, and how they explicitly challenge and seek to deconstruct the programmes' ideologies. She tried to investigate whether viewers, in this instance women, hold considerable power in the construction of meaning. In a similar vein, Kamil Łuczaj was informed by feminist perspectives in his extensive empirical research that looks at the practice of decoding soap operas by their female viewers in keeping with their social situations. This is a fruitful analysis of Polish audiences that revealed how women participate in popular culture and form communities of watching that are far removed from the picture of squealing housewives as passive viewers and surprisingly often involved communal watching of soaps with their male life partners. Additionally, Łuczaj considers variables such as cultural capital in the formation of meaning (2012, 2013).

Later on, the consideration of television audiences in the context of everyday life gave way to looking at engagement with television texts across new media and various technologies. The transition into a digital convergence era forced Polish scholars to increasingly think beyond a single television screen and investigate how TV watching might change in a multi-screen environment. The technology of internet-distribution substantially refines the experience of television by freeing it from a linear schedule in a manner deeply appreciated by viewers. Polish scholars felt the need to balance an interest in what is made available to audiences, with what is subsequently done with that content. Interesting and path-setting work into audiences and users of the streaming era has been conducted by Mirosław Filiciak (2010, 2012). The research projects he led were not devoted exclusively to television, but their goal was to chart a wide variety of new everyday cultural practices and behaviours enabled by computers and networks, that included downloading music, movies, TV shows and other digital media. Filiciak’s efforts to map the Polish media landscape and the role of copy culture within it are highly valuable original contributions to the field of TV studies in Poland, which include ethnographic findings on actual informal and Internet-based sharing of TV and uptake of digital TV files. Throughout his career, Filiciak has been interested in tracing the changes in viewer behaviours in his local context, often delivering fascinating academic findings. He demonstrated, for example, how television becomes more of a background noise for other activities, but when audiences look for specific TV content, they go online, or that American TV series account for half of the digital TV files uptake in Poland (2011). Elsewhere, Filiciak focused exclusively on the consumption of American television series viewed via the Internet (2014). In subsequent years, several scholars continued an interest in the non-linear distribution technologies and concomitant viewing behaviours. Karasińska (2016) explored the term ‘binge-watching’ as a new phenomenon and juxtaposed it with earlier theories on the phenomenon of compulsive television viewing that can be found in Polish literature as early as 1999. Back then such a viewing practice was referred to as ‘telemania’ and was considered an addiction to television, which entailed consuming large quantities of programming just for the sake of watching. Karasińska presents binge-watching as an entirely new social phenomenon in which the viewer exercises a lot of control and editorial power. The author, through empirical research of Polish TV series viewers/consumers, arrived at a profile of a Polish binge-watcher of TV series and revealed that the process involves consuming quality TV series such as Game of Thrones or Sherlock, and that it was becoming a socially accepted activity, source of pleasure and even a demonstration of one’s cultural capital. Małgorzata Major has also discussed binge-watching and how it impacts the reading of a TV text. She grounds her work in American sources and the empirical evidence is based on the author’s own comparison of her experience of watching The X-Files as provided by Polish broadcasters in the 1990s and then binge-watching the whole series years later, in 2014 and 2015 (2016).

The arrival of Netflix in Poland in 2016 has attracted considerable scholarly attention but most work has been descriptive and/or theoretical, without much original empirical research in the Polish context. Jaskiernia (2016), neglecting the Polish context, has provided an extensive overview of exclusively American television in the digital age that included an exhaustive discussion of Netflix as not only new technology for distributing television but also an important source and creator of American television content. She investigates the American TV landscape and discusses competition that Netflix and other internet-distributed services have introduced, as well as the changes they have forced upon legacy television services such as HBO or network broadcasters. Elsewhere, the arrival of Netflix provoked academic interest in the algorithms used by the service and data acquisition necessary for tailoring viewing suggestions and programming library, menus and interfaces and prodding viewers to continue watching subsequent episodes. Several journal articles were devoted to providing context for the introduction of the service in Poland, describing its business model and the potential it had to change viewing modes of the local audience and Poland’s audio-visual landscape more generally (Major, 2018; Sztąberek, 2018). Scholars paid attention to the accessibility of TV series that Netflix made available to Polish viewers, namely the reintroduction of middlebrow TV by including in their library whole seasons of Gilmore Girls, for example. This was quite a big departure from what Polish viewers associated Netflix with, namely quality TV series such as House of Cards or Orange is the New Black that they watched via the illegal circuit before the service was made available legally in Poland (Major, 2017). Insofar as Filiciak’s research discussed how unauthorized downloading of TV shows played a large role in meeting the demand for easy, and free of charge, but most importantly immediate access to the most recent American shows in the pre-Netflix era, there is no research to date to demonstrate whether the introduction of Netflix to Poland in 2016 marked a shift away from unauthorized streaming services, offering direct substitutes for file sharing. The legal distribution chain in Poland also includes home-grown streaming services and on-demand pay TV services, which also happen to produce TV content, as is the case with TVN’s online service Player. But, so far, there is no empirical academic research on Polish users of television content provided by legal streaming providers. Polish audience researchers have told us a great deal about the practices of viewing, especially within domestic contexts, but how are people watching now? Streaming television invites and makes possible many new modes of viewing, but are audiences actually watching differently, and if so how? Especially when Netflix and its counterparts are not particularly forthcoming with answers to such important questions, it behoves tomorrow's audience studies scholars to seek answers through ambitious projects. Because of the complexity of this landscape, this is a research area where Polish TV scholars can still make a significant contribution.

Another thriving sub-area of audience studies in Poland with relation to television has been work that examines fans and fandom. As storytelling began to range across platforms giving way to new forms of engagement with television texts, Polish researchers have written excitedly of the phenomenon of convergence, seeing in it a considerable opportunity for fans and audiences to find ways to push the medium to do more of what they wanted, to co-author its texts, and to participate more meaningfully. There is a lot of introductory material that, due to the lack of Polish-language translations of the Anglo-American body of work on the topic, describes the basic concepts and presents fandom in a historical perspective (Czaplińska and Siuda, 2008; Kobus 2018; Kulesza-Gulczyńska, 2014; Siuda, 2007, 2010, 2012b; Włodarczyk and Tymińska, 2012). Lisowska-Magdziarz provides a methodological framework for understanding fandom as well as a substantial insight into fandom as a set of practices (2017, 2018). Polish scholars are generally interested in audiences as a site for cultural negotiation and resistance and they pay attention to fan productivity but very little attention is given to the productivity of local audiences. Here, yet again, the case studies are not local, but are Anglo-American television texts, for example, Sherlock (Lisowska-Magdziarz, 2016, 2018; Rabiej, 2015; Włodarczyk, 2014), Game of Thrones (Całek, 2019), Breaking Bad (Katner, 2016), American Horror Story (Pawlikiewicz, 2018), or Supernatural (Kozera, 2016). There have been, however, several attempts at describing the phenomenon from a local Polish perspective (Godzic, 2001; Kamińska, 2018; Kisielewska, 2009; Kobus, 2018; Siuda, 2008a, 2008b, 2012a), but more empirical audience research is required as this body of literature is profoundly historical in its approach to the topic, making historiography a central tool for analysing and understanding fandom.

Production context – the invisible practices of making television

Turning to TV texts and audiences alone is not enough to account for the complexity of television, which also requires the examination of the industry – the process of making television and how it impacts the various forms and shapes that television takes. This third site for the analysis of television can be called many things, such as production studies, television industry studies or critical media industry studies. The distinctions between these different notions remain somewhat vague, but they all seek to interrogate the industrial conditions and the practices of television production that guide the television industry. This type of research places much less consideration on the television text itself and exhibits awareness of the significant role that industrial practices and conditions play when it comes to understanding programmes and audiences. It has been particularly robust since the early 2000s in the Anglo-American academia, but Polish scholars are still shockingly ignorant of industrial considerations even though several have tried to raise awareness of this much needed academic venture into the Polish television industry (Filiciak, 2013, 2014; Wróblewska, 2016). Insofar as Polish academics focus on television texts, there is very little empirical research that links the analysis of actual programmes with industrial conditions of their production. Polish scholars gloss over or presume industrial determinants not to exist or matter. This is not to say that there should be less of any one type of study, so much as more Polish local studies synthesizing a variety of scholarly perspectives, including the industrial factors. The causes for this academic lacuna are complicated and tied very much to the predominant critical and theoretical traditions of studying television in Poland that prioritize textual analysis and fetishize the television text itself. There are no examples of this type of industrial research historically in the field of television, and examples from related sub-fields are equally limited, as production studies in film only surfaced in 2014 (Adamczak). Concomitantly, there is a lot of uncertainty regarding how to conceptualize industrial research. John Thornton Caldwell has created a vocabulary for identifying and describing many of the sites for industrial research, such as, for example, cultivation rituals or industrial reflexivity, and named the tools for this type of research available to researchers (2008). Caldwell’s methodological contributions are yet to be translated into Polish and there are no local equivalents. Polish scholars, thus, are struggling for a theoretical language and intellectual framework through which they could account for the impact of industrial variables on television texts. Polish scholars, thus far, look at TV texts as distinct analytical objects removed from their production context. Additionally, this unfavourable environment for industrial studies likely has much to do with the practical challenges of access to industry workers and their workplaces. Practitioners rarely share their knowledge of the production culture for television. The shooting crews often remain cautious, to say the least, to let an outsider in and allow them to observe their media practice. Most industry practitioners remain very reluctant to participate in ethnographic study. Interestingly, quite an impressive number of Polish industry professionals now have successful careers in the regional structures of the bastions of the new media: Anna Nagler is Director Local Language Originals for Netflix CEE and Russia, and Agata Burdzy works as Netflix Originals Publicity Manager for CEE, just to name a few examples. Sadly, this does not allow for better access for Polish scholars to the industrial discourse.

Despite these obstacles, there have been instances of successful attempts at industrial and production studies in Poland. Sylwia Szostak, for example, worked within British television studies and returned to Poland with an American–British training that frames her research work, along her industry experience at commercial broadcaster TVN. She investigates the myriad ways in which policy, local cultural context, audience preferences and industrial demands are incorporated and negotiated within the practices of cultural workers in a specific socio-historical context and how it impacts the form of domestic TV texts. Szostak explains the industrial processes and personalities involved in the development of particular local series and includes first-hand accounts of practitioner discourse, where Polish television professionals critically engage with their work and working environment, and describe their understanding of the industrial and cultural constraints determining their creative activities. The self-reflexive discourse from both the broadcaster and the production team sheds light on the ways in which members of the television industry in Poland negotiate the prevailing local cultural values and international influences in transplanting generic conventions from American television (2012). Her extensive article-length contributions on the formatting of scripted series blend textual analysis with industry-drawn insights to present a richly informed explanation of the commercial and artistic as well as cultural tensions at the core of formatting (2013, 2016). Szostak also examines broad shifts in programming and importation patterns, thus revisiting the once-dominant cultural imperialism thesis of political economists by theorizing the international television flows with a focus on Poland, and how they shaped audience demand for particular type of programming, which in turn impacted the character of the domestic product (2014). Most recently, she considers genre as an industrial practice, where scheduling, local culture and audience preference impact the generic repertoire of local broadcasters (2021).

Similarly key were the empirically based efforts by Artur Majer, who alongside his successful academic career, is also an industry professional working for TVP – Poland’s public service broadcaster. He exhibits an awareness of the importance of industrial aspects to the textual considerations and discusses in much detail the production process of TVP’s series Artyści. Using production culture methodology, Majer (2018) aims to uncover the impact specific production models had on the final text. He skilfully constructs a narrative about the ways in which top-down approaches to the industry play a significant role in the production process, and how the specific structure of the broadcaster TVP, its financial limitations and institutional politics forced artistic compromises impacting the final outcome. He discusses the agency and artistic vision of media workers, and how these had to be negotiated with the macro-level structures and adjusted to the paradigm of power relations within the industry, offering in-depth insights into the Polish production culture.

Television industries research in Poland is yet to consider the change wrought by digitization on traditional practices of industrial operation. There is no research that charts how the shifts in production, distribution and technology of television changed the competitive environment and textual products of the Polish industry. The affordances of internet distribution enable different industrial strategies and business practices and they provide much for scholars to consider. We should now count Netflix and HBO among important sources and creators of Polish television, but this means that, for the first time in the history of Polish television, we need to consider how the economic requirement of transnational circulation leads to particular textual outcomes for the domestic product. This opens up new areas for exploring political and economic consequences related to the environmental ramifications of our many screened environments. But insofar television industry development is targeted at internet distribution, broadcast and cable/satellite television persist without any sign of their imminent replacement. Television studies thus needs to also examine the boundaries of what television production or television industry entails in the here and now.

Historical perspective in TV research – coming to terms with television’s socialist past

A strong vein of studies on television in Poland is constituted by historical analyses, appearing throughout the 2000s, that provide detailed histories of broadcasting in Poland and situate television within the period of systemic, political and social context and that, in most cases, chart television’s changing roles over time. The first contextual histories of television largely emerged from scholars trained in media, politics and communication studies, amidst a heady mix of theoretical and methodological fermentation largely related to socio-political transformation. At book length, Katarzyna Pokorna-Ignatowicz provides an engaging history that blends archival research of government entities with social history and analysis of the content of TV broadcasts from the pre-1989 era to give Polish TV a record of its past (2003). Andrzej Kozieł connects the cultural texts of socialist television with the context of their production, engaging critical discourses about the programming produced within the industrial conditions of the socialist period (2003). In a similar vein, Jarosław Kończak provides an exhaustive chronological exploration of cultural history through analysis of television programming from the socialist era (Kończak, 2008). These projects detail the industrial, technological, as well as social context, for understanding how and why broadcasting developed, who was involved, often providing behind-the-scenes anecdotes that give a sense of the aura of the period, thus presenting a nuanced narrative account of the establishment and history of broadcasting in Poland up to 1989. Many from this cohort focused on the nexus of television and the political system. The dominant historiographic accounts of policy history and post-1989 transformation of Polish TV operator into a public service broadcaster is provided by Ociepka (2003), Dobek-Ostrowska (2002) and Braun (2008), charting the key decisions, political and institutional, of the dominant regulatory bodies and tracing the early days of Polish public service operator TVP. Such work provided an important foundation, both methodologically and in grounding the history of television and post-socialist transition which drew considerably upon TV's industrial and textual foundations, utilizing archival and historiographic methods. All provided a rich secondary source for subsequent scholars.

In addition to these, a variety of edited collections and monographs have provided more focused historical considerations of various aspects and key moments of socialist television, focusing on particular case studies. In a volume edited by a renowned media scholar Wiesław Godzic, Polish researchers provide a contextual analysis of a variety of themes related to socialist television such as the importance of the evening news edition, children programming produced under socialism, live coverages of John Paul II’s visits to Poland, cultural programming that includes TV anthologies and cabarets. They openly appreciate and take Polish television from the socialist era seriously, though they were written at the time when it might have been difficult to take such a stance as the majority of Polish writing on TV focused on American television, particularly quality prime-time dramas. Many among these contributions were explorations of television during particular moments in television history, often focusing on how a specific theme or entity appeared on television in a blend of cultural history, institutional context, and textual analysis. Many in this cohort chose historical examples of analysing television's programmes, audiences, or industries. These works are neither overly defensive nor reactionary in their tone. Common methodological practices can be found among them and all operate with a consistent serious engagement with a combination of television's industrial, cultural, and textual practices, each implicitly making the case for the importance of its subject matter by providing broadly researched claims and meticulous analysis.

A vibrant area of studies on television has been historical work on the obvious legacy of the state socialist era, namely the television programmes themselves. In 2010 a whole edited collection was devoted to socialist-era Polish TV programmes (Karwala, 2010). Many of the most popular serials of that period continue to be rebroadcast on both public and commercial channels and have been reissued on DVD. Obviously, television in socialism was singled out as a particularly effective means of shaping historical awareness and was explicitly tasked by the authorities with history education. For this reason, the continued popularity of socialist-era programming has attracted considerable controversy. In Poland, the show Czterej Pancerni i Pies [Four Tankmen and a Dog] began to be widely criticised after 1990 and was accused of distorting history by omitting information about the Soviet occupation of Poland and instead promoting an ideologically charged notion of Soviet–Polish friendship during World War II. This prompted a wide-ranging debate. These controversies suggest that the state socialist television heritage had become an integral part of the wider process of coming to terms with the communist past and academic works on the show played a part in this process. Czterej Pancerni i Pies lost any grounding in historical reality, as Soviet–Polish friendship served to erase the history of Soviet raids and mass murders of Polish soldiers during the war, attracting significant scholarly attention (Kotański, 2004; Majer, 2005). As a recent study of vernacular memories of Czterej Pancerni i Pies conducted in Poland in 2014 shows, viewers of all generations appreciate the entertainment value of the series, yet those born between 1940 and 1959 also mention the propagandistic intentions and historical inaccuracies of the series, while those born in 1960 or later largely treat these controversies as insignificant or fail to mention them altogether (Szostak and Mihelj, 2017). One of the legacy shows from socialist TV that continually generates scholarly attention is Czterdziestolatek [The 40 Year Old] (1974–1977), which is investigated as a satirical take on the successes of socialist Poland in the Gierek era, and a show that pointed to a social system that was in the process of decaying (Bloch, 2013; Majer, 2005). Similarly, the Polish comedy show Alternatywy 4, which continued the 1970s trend of satirising the country’s housing conditions but went much further in mocking the clichés of the ‘block of flats’ genre, has been the topic of many scholarly contributions (Ostrowska, 2013). There is now a huge public archive of what was once regarded as passing entertainment. This suggests that state socialist television programming may become less controversial with time and gradually turn into an accepted part of cultural heritage.

There also exists a branch of work on socialist TV that departs from textual or contextual analysis of specific programmes and situates the medium culturally: explaining television’s social role in the pre-1989 era and looking at the cultural practises of watching. Here, Mateusz Halawa makes a significant contribution by discussing the introduction of TV into Polish households, investigating how television became a domestic medium and its impact on viewers’ daily lives (Halawa, 2006). Sylwia Szostak provides a rich illustration of how television became both attuned to and constitutive of the rhythms of everyday domesticity in an article-length investigation. A knowledge of the social history of television in the socialist era is, in this instance, used as a context to investigate the degree to which audience behaviours changed over time and why, and how it affected the construction of the TV flow post-1989, thus proving vital for an appreciation of television in the present moment. She also charts the changes and continuities in programming practices of Polish broadcasters both pre and post 1989 (Szostak, 2013).

A lot of existing research on TV in socialist Poland has continually explored issues connected with new technologies – such as satellite dishes or VCRs – and how they facilitated new creative practices to emerge, thus allowing TV watching to break free from the control of communist bodies. Krzysztof Jajko and Patryk Wasiak are two Polish researchers who explore the expansion of satellite television within the context of the socialist system, including both the broader technical and political background of the process and the ways in which the medium was adopted by Poles in the 1980s (Jajko, 2016; Wasiak, 2014). Sitarski, Garda and Jajko describe cultural practices in which new technology was fashioned to gain access to Western television, film and video games. Coupling archival research with in-depth interviews, the authors bring to life the ingenuity and determination of Polish TV audiences and new media pioneers to demonstrate their cultural practices that involved, for example, acquiring VCRs “under the counter” and organising communal private screenings of audio-visual material obtained via the illegal circuit or translating dialogues and adding Polish voice-over or subtitles to the soundtrack (Sitarski et al., 2020). The most prolific writer on the topic of the VHS phenomenon in Poland is Grzegorz Fortuna, whose research covers the institutional history of VCRs as a technology, the cultural practices surrounding the VHS cassettes such as Polish localizations, illegal copying and importing of American films and TV shows (2013, 2015, 2016, 2021).

Conclusion – where do we go from here?

This aerial review has mapped academic research on television conducted by Polish scholars, demonstrating that television studies in Poland is not yet a legitimate subfield with its own approaches and sense of purpose. I argue that it is still more a collection of work about television, because there is not a particular way of studying television with its own distinctive intellectual and industrial characteristics that we might call television studies. Interestingly, television as an object of study is in most cases equivalent with television series, as there is little academic literature on any other type of programming. This focus might have to do with the specific local, historical and cultural context. Scripted series were not produced in abundance under socialism and so, once technology allowed, Polish audiences began excitedly smuggling VHS cassettes with American films and television series, exercising a lot of ingenuity and control by practices of amateur dubbing, subtitling and copying. Throughout the 1990s, Polish TV screens were flooded with (finally legally) imported American series and once Polish post-socialist TV industry developed tools to produce local content, domestic television series production bloomed. Before the arrival of HBO Go and Netflix, American TV series was the most pirated type of TV content on the torrent scene. In this respect, television series have been, historically, a very important part of Poland’s audio-visual culture.

Polish critical writing about television centres mainly around close readings of programmes as a repository for meanings and ideology or alternatively as a site where cultural values are not only articulated, but also negotiated by audiences in their lived, everyday experiences. More often than not, scholars turn to American television for inspiration and research material. From the now impressive array of domestic original content, Polish scholars mainly choose to study Polish soaps exclusively, which are, historically, the most successful Polish domestic fare in terms of viewership but also the type of programming with the longest provenance, some being continually broadcast since the 1990s. This marks a significant lack of focus on locality and results in an inability of the majority of Polish research on TV to contribute to richer understandings of television and culture outside the US or UK. I hope to offer some ways forward and to nominate new directions for analysis that would allow Polish scholarship to expand an understanding of television beyond the Anglo-American context.

The key task ahead for Polish television studies will be to find ways to subside an overwhelming Anglo-American focus and to find ways to discuss local TV, not only its programmes but also the contexts of television: its historical placement, the temporal environment, and the sociocultural moment in which texts, audiences, and industries find themselves. So far, there is not much empirical and original research done on television as an industrial entity produced under specific conditions. Close reading of TV texts may still have value as an academic exercise, but we know now that if we want to understand texts’ place in society and culture, and the work that they do there, we must look beyond the text and consider a variety of industrial practices such as paratexts, for example. Many industry-created paratexts set limits for interpretation around a particular programme, enabling texts to mean specific things to a broad community. This is particularly important for Poland, where a great majority of television texts, such as American television series, is imported and thus undergoes processes of localization that include language translations, and promotional materials that position and often reframe the original text. In this instance, Netflix comes to mind, because many of its Originals are framed by locally produced promo materials that refer to local Polish culture, relying heavily on audiences’ intertextual knowledge. The promos sometimes do the job so well, as was the case with The Umbrella Academy, that the videos were widely shared and appreciated as standalone texts. It is, therefore, naive to assume that the broader context and industrial practices do not impact the reading of a given TV text. Taking The Witcher as a more recent example, Netflix offered local audiences the ability to watch the series in three different language options: the original voice track, Polish voice over and Polish dubbing. Geralt was dubbed by Polish actor Michał Żebrowski, who, interestingly, is also the actor who embodied the first cinematic incarnation of the Witcher for Polish domestic audiences back in 2001. This collaboration became a significant part of the show’s marketing by strengthening the locality of this American TV series. While Anglo-American scholars point to the fundamental insufficiency of looking only at television programmes to understand television, Polish scholars extricate paratexts and other industrial practices from the analytical endeavours and do not look outside of what is traditionally considered as the TV text itself. In this regard, they have not yet joined international television studies scholars in considering a wide variety of contexts, objects, platforms and their importance for television analysis. It is not that television has decreased in importance or been replaced by anything, just that television needs to be considered as more than its programmes.

Yet, a tide is turning away from programme analysis and part of this shift is caused by the advent of streaming and downloadable television and the gravitational pull of digital studies. Importantly for television studies, Internet-distributed television is not some sort of entirely new medium, but simply a new technology for distributing television. There has been very little, close to nothing, said in Polish literature about the object of study – television – in these new conditions, where TV content is often re-versioned for and embedded in varying technological platforms, social media, and mobile devices. It seems that Polish scholars do not see this new environment as a continuity of television, but predominantly as separate and distinct from television, which as a medium is still largely associated with living room sets. In reality, not only are companies associated with new media making television, but an increasing number of Polish viewers receive their television programmes via the Internet. Scholars would yield much richer understandings of what such companies are and what they represent by placing internet-distributed video within the long trajectory of television distribution. The spatial environment and geography of television are hugely important, but historically, there is no tradition of researching television as part of a larger textual and industrial system such as a distribution channel or programming flow. Interestingly, the broadcasting flow is alive and well in Poland as broadcast and cable/satellite television persist without any sign of their imminent replacement. Despite the emergence of local streaming service Player, which serves as the first distribution window for TVN’s original series, domestic shows are still produced with linear distribution in mind, as it is still the advertisement-supported broadcasting model of distribution that allows TVN to stay afloat. This means that, at least in the case of TVN, Polish series must be written with an awareness of both binging and once-a-week viewing. This invites Polish television studies to attend in more detail to form and to how television is now being written and paced, simultaneously for two different distribution models. There is a strong need to see TV texts as part of a greater whole and appreciate continuities between broadcast and Internet-distributed television. On one hand, television as a linear flow is still a significant part of the TV landscape in Poland, as traditional live viewing remains dominant and several types of television experience are still valued for their liveness. On the other hand, streaming services create a different type of flow, which is now about the images, menus, and assemblage of TV texts in the interfaces through which viewers access television. It becomes increasingly important for domestic scholars to account for these continuities and their impact on the form of a TV text.

Another path for serious thinking and writing about television is the consideration of media professions, personalities and industry practitioners. Academic literature in Polish omits this aspect almost entirely, acting as if television programmes appear in a vacuum, which, of course, they do not. They are the outcome of collective work of media workers in a particular cultural and institutional setting. It is the TV workers who are the gatekeepers and negotiators of international media flows, who know their local culture and understand the specificity of Polish industry, its weaknesses, its problematic history and institutional politics. Adding the TV creators and production personnel to the equation can only benefit our understanding of Polish television.