The Survival of the Turkish Reality Television in the Pandemic Era

Abstract:

Reality television is a hybrid television genre that appeared in the late 1980s. It is generally defined as a new trend in which the main subject represents real people and reality. Reality television has many subgenres, also called formats, which combine different elements of other popular genres of television programming. Globally well-known reality television programs in the United States and the United Kingdom include Survivor, MasterChef, and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire that corresponds to reality-show known as reality game show or gamedoc. These programs were also adapted worldwide in many countries such as Turkey, which will be the focus of this chapter. Starting with the early 1990s, Turkish television began to use a mixture of formats and genres from European and American television. By combining these formats and genres, private TV channels created new shows that became widely popular in Turkey. Building on this foundation, the reality shows such as Survivor, MasterChef, and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire were directly adapted to Turkish television. In the present, the media is collectively being transformed to accommodate the needs and conditions of the era of the pandemic. Our purpose in this chapter is to explore and analyze the surviving formats of the most popular adaptations of primetime reality shows that adjust to the transformations in the media, which are Survivor Türkiye ( Survivor) , MasterChef Türkiye ( MasterChef) , and Kim Milyoner Olmak İster? ( Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?) . First, we will present the original formats of these programs to showcase how they usually function (before the COVID-19). Afterward, we will examine the Turkish adaptations. Finally, we will compare the normal (before) and new normal (after) versions of the Turkish adaptations and explore the features that were added to accommodate the needs of the new normal, which will reveal the reasons for the endurance of the reality shows and how they can survive in any given condition.