In her dis­ser­ta­tion pro­ject Zeynep Tuna looks at the recent crop of true-crime talk shows on tele­vi­sion in Turkey against the back­drop of the po­lit­i­cal de­vel­op­ments under the gov­ern­ment of the con­ser­v­a­tive AKP (Jus­tice and De­vel­op­ment Party). Cen­ter­ing on real crim­i­nal cases (e.g. fraud, miss­ing people, do­mes­tic vi­o­lence, and murder) but taking place mostly in a stan­dard studio talk show set­ting, these shows blend dif­fer­ent for­mats of late night, day­time, and re­al­ity tele­vi­sion. At the cross­roads of pro­duc­tion and re­cep­tion stud­ies, Tuna not only fo­cuses on the shows them­selves, but par­tic­u­larly on the au­di­ence’s online ac­tiv­ity: how they follow the some­times week-long de­vel­op­ment of in­di­vid­ual cases, shar­ing the­o­ries, dis­cussing hy­pothe­ses, and search­ing for clues. She argues that the pop­u­lar­ity of the shows—es­pe­cially among a female au­di­ence—is both a symp­tom and a prod­uct of a heav­ily me­di­al­ized so­ci­ety in which col­lec­tive mis­trust, sus­pi­cion, and doubt are steadily rising, es­pe­cially through the con­sec­u­tive purges in the af­ter­math of the failed coup at­tempt of July 15, 2016.

Zeynep Tuna is a PhD can­di­date in the Graduiertenkol­leg “Con­fig­u­ra­tions of Film” at the Goethe Uni­ver­sity, Frank­furt. She stud­ied Film and Tele­vi­sion (BA) at Is­tan­bul Bilgi Uni­ver­sity and Art in Con­text (MA) at Berlin Uni­ver­sity of the Arts (UdK). Be­tween 2016-2018, she held a fel­low­ship at the Berlin Centre for Ad­vanced Stud­ies in Arts and Sci­ences at the UdK.​Between 2018-2020 she has been a fellow of the GNK-Re­search Train­ing Group “Tes­ti­monies: Media and Cul­tures of Wit­ness­ing” at the Jo­hannes Guten­berg-Uni­ver­sity Mainz.

tuna-klin­gler[at]tfm.​uni-​frankfurt.​de