Turkish Flourish

Mansha Daswani checks in with leading Turkish drama distributors about how they are sustaining the genre’s moment in the spotlight.

The last few years have certainly been challenging times for Turkey. Amid slowing economic growth, political unrest, security concerns and an attempted coup, tourism took a hit last year. However, the dizi industry—the prolific drama production sector—continues to fire on all cylinders, with scripted series airing daily on all of the main networks. Distributors, meanwhile, are stepping up their efforts to keep the Turkish wave going, penetrating new territories, selling format rights and finding innovative ways to edit and market their shows in an ever more crowded business. It has, after all, been a very long road to international success.

“It all started with Gümüş in 2006,” says Özge Bulut Maraşli, the executive VP of international and corporate strategy at Doğan TV Holding, the parent company of Turkey’s leading broadcast group, Kanal D. That was the show that pan-Arab broadcaster MBC licensed, aired as Noor and sparked a viewing phenomenon.

“At first there was no demand, and we created the demand,” Bulut Maraşli says. “In the ’90s we were watching telenovelas in Turkey, but now Latin Americans watch Turkish dramas. They give Turkish names to their children from our drama characters. In the MENA region, women take our characters as role models and they change their lives for good. These things make us happy. Now when we launch a new drama, broadcasters come to us and demand it before we air it on TV.”

PIONEERING A GENRE
Turkish distributors do indeed have to thank Middle Eastern audiences for creating the foundations of a dizi export sector.

“The increase in sales prices, hand in hand with the economic status of the MENA region where Turkish drama series first gained popularity, have definitely been a trigger in the exportation of Turkish content,” reports Can Okan, the founder and CEO of Inter Medya, an independent outfit that began selling Turkish series in 2008 after first serving as a film distribution venture.

And while the Middle East remains a key territory for the genre, it’s been the boom in Latin American demand that has really boosted the sector. Chile, for example, has emerged as a voracious consumer of Turkish series, with leading broadcaster Mega recently inking an output deal with Kanal D covering Wounded Love, Time Goes By and Fatmagül. “Kanal D has licensed approximately 1,200 commercial hours to Mega until today,” reports Doğan’s Bulut Maraşli.

“The MENA region has always been the largest importer of Turkish TV series, however, the weight has shifted to Latin America as Turkish dramas continue to break viewership records in that region,” agrees Beşir Tatli, the managing director at Calinos Entertainment. “They now fill prime-time slots in a number of countries, including Chile, Peru and Argentina.”

Inter Medya’s Okan adds, “Although there have been some declines from time to time, Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia are still territories where good quality productions always find a buyer.”

NEW HORIZONS
And now, even more markets are opening up, among them India and Malaysia, says Izzet Pinto, the CEO of Global Agency. “India has such a rich local market, so for them to be buying foreign content is a big thing. Also, there are some new territories in Africa. There’s still not much, unfortunately, in Western Europe. It will open up. I will be happy if I can enter territories like Portugal and Spain this year.”

Sweden’s Eccho Rights took a gamble on Turkish series back in 2009 when it started representing Ezel from Ay Yapim. “Nobody had any idea where it would go at the time, so we tried it and it has been working ever since,” says Fredrik af Malmborg, managing director at Eccho Rights. “Ezel is still selling. We just sold it to Malaysia and Mongolia. It has been a success everywhere, it’s incredible. And we built on that. We were early in the genre and believed in it. It was not just opportunistic—I watched it and really liked it.”

For af Malmborg, the opportunities for selling Turkish drama continue to expand. “We’re selling a lot to India, we’re starting to sell series into Italy and we just sold Brave and Beautiful to Spain to a major channel. There is some competition coming in from Indian drama in some countries, like Indonesia. Malaysia is opening up. Some countries in the Balkans weren’t airing Turkish programs for a while, but they’re coming back. When the Turkish series come in everybody goes crazy, and they buy everything because the first one worked so well. And then it doesn’t work so well, and they try other things, and then they come back.”

GLOBAL PLAYERS
FOX Networks Group Content Distribution (FNGCD) has also taken on Turkish drama, given its connection with the FOX broadcast outlet in the country. “It’s been two years now since we brought in the Turkish drama to the overall catalog,” says Prentiss Fraser, executive VP and managing director of content distribution. “It has completely skyrocketed the business for us. It’s been fantastic. These were assets that were being created for the channel in Turkey anyway and then being monetized by third parties. Protecting the brands and doing our own distribution, we’ve been able to secure a lot of revenue for the production community and the channel business, it’s been really great.”

Like so many other distributors, Fraser has found Latin America and U.S. Hispanic to be the best markets for Turkish content at present. “It’s hands down where we see the most amount of money coming from. The Middle East has always been a strong market for Turkish drama, but we’re now seeing it in places like Pakistan and Indonesia, and we’re moving into the Far East. SVT has picked up a couple of Turkish dramas. It’s now slowly wriggling its way through Western Europe too. We’ve done a couple of sales in Italy. We want to try and get into some new markets.”

Inter Medya’s Okan says that his company has started to receive requests from Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. “I believe that we will quickly spread in these newer markets just like we did in all the countries and regions where Turkish content has been broadcast.”

Aysegul Tuzun, the VP of sales and marketing at MISTCO, which represents the slate of pubcaster TRT, is similarly bullish about the future of Turkish drama given the industry’s increasingly high production values and the fact that Turkish actors have “become ‘brands’ in the international arena. The interest towards Turkish drama from all over the world will continue rising just like last year.”

What’s helping to drive the sector is the volume of production and the range of genres available.

“Our catalog is huge, it’s very varied, so there’s always something for any need: short series, action, drama, etc.,” says Müge Hanilçi, the content sales deputy manager at broadcaster ATV.

Global Agency’s Pinto cites “modern-day dramas with big casts, well-known faces and big budgets from leading production companies” as those getting the most interest. “For Turkish dramas, clients always look for famous, familiar faces—that’s a priority. Also, the story is very important, of course.”

Doğan TV’s Bulut Maraşli identifies “love and family stories” as being key sellers, particularly “impossible or forbidden love, a missing child or a mother trying to hold her family together. Combining these stories with beautiful scenery of Turkish cities, of course, makes it much more desirable.”

Reflecting a similar sentiment, Calinos’s Tatli observes that “impossible love stories teamed with dramatic narratives have always had the largest demand. [Stories with] strong and independent female protagonists who challenge patriarchal social structures and fight in the name of love are the types of dramas that sell the most.  When it comes to love and passion, betrayal and intrigue, there seem to be no geographical boundaries.”

MISTCO is home to TRT’s top-rated Resurrection (Ertugrul), a historical drama about the establishment of the Ottoman Empire. At MIPTV, the company is presenting a world premiere screening of The Last Emperor, another historical epic. “While illuminating the recent past of Turkey, it is also drawing a [connection] between history and modern day,” Tuzun says. “The story sheds light on the last 14-year reign of the strongest Ottoman Emperor in the 19th century, Abdulhamid Han. The Last Emperor has a great cast of celebrities, such as Bülent Inal, who attracts tremendous interest from the international audience, and Özlem Conker, who is a very well-known Turkish actress.”

While historical epics are still big ratings winners in Turkey, there are some new trends emerging. Calinos’s Tatli is seeing “a greater appeal for detective and revenge-themed plots. Crime and vengeance have been widely incorporated into the dramatic narratives, mainly to attract male audiences, which helps attract different types of advertisers.”

At FNGCD, romantic comedies and dramas led the slate for a while, Fraser says, but she sees that starting to change. “We’re seeing some things in the development slate that are more crime-based and heavier drama, which is an interesting shift for the business. I think it will open up more opportunities for the content.”

At MIPTV, Eccho Rights is launching Phi, a 20×60-minute drama created specifically for a digital platform by Ay Yapim, with two additional seasons planned. Hour-long episodes are rare in Turkey, as are limited episode counts.

MAKING THE CUT
Turkish television is super competitive, and things can get axed after just a few episodes, leaving distributors with a delicate balancing act when it comes to deciding when to showcase new series internationally.

At ATV, Hanilçi says that if the ratings for the first five episodes are positive, the show can start being introduced to foreign buyers. “But it’s always good to wait until episode 13—if a title goes past 13, then it will work.”

Eccho’s af Malmborg reports that presales are increasingly prevalent now, given how competitive the business is, but it depends on the region. “In Latin America, they normally need 100 45-minute episodes before they can make a decision. We’re having quite some success now in Italy. We had Cherry Season running well on Mediaset this summer and that was a shorter run. It’s becoming more diversified, but traditionally the Turkish dramas have been long runners.”

Turkey also makes very long episodes, which means distributors are often re-cutting series into more conventional durations. “Our original duration is more than 2 hours per episode,” says ATV’s Hanilçi, “so we edit them into 45 minutes. We are very careful when we cut the episode because it has to be done in a good way, so the audience sees that the episode is ending.”

EDITING ROOM
“We are putting great effort into cutting them into 45 minutes,” Eccho’s af Malmborg says. “For Insider, we’re even creating a new ending for each one to make it follow the style of the series. In Sweden with SVT we started with The End from Ay Yapim, and now we have a second series that’s been picked up, Broken Pieces from Endemol Shine. We’re cutting it down, so we’re going scene by scene to make each episode 30 percent shorter, and we make a new sound edit. In many Turkish series the storytelling is much slower, so sometimes we speed it up. That is also done with many Turkish series in Chile. There, the first five to ten episodes are cut down by 30 percent.”

To broaden their customer bases, Turkish distributors are also looking at format opportunities. Eccho Rights is among the leaders in this space, with notable examples that include The End being reversioned in the Netherlands and Spain. More recently, Fatmagül has been adapted for Star Plus in India.

“In 2017 we are bringing format sales to the forefront,” says Doğan’s Bulut Maraşli. “Some broadcasters want to reshoot the series with their own drama stars in their own cultures, which is a very good opportunity to spread our stories to different regions. It is also a good way to make the stories timeless and borderless.”

ATV’s Hanilçi says that she’s starting to see more format requests, particularly from Latin America and Asia. At FNGCD, Fraser notes that localization deals have been done in Latin America, “and now the project is to try to get some of our Latin American productions produced in Turkey.”

MISTCO is also looking at format opportunities, following the sale of the TRT drama Little Miss to Latin America for potential adaptation.

Another area of future growth is co-productions, notes Doğan’s Bulut Maraşli, a view backed by Calinos’s Tatli. “We still need a couple more years in order to enter a stage that would enable us to co-produce with some of our clients, but we would certainly wish to. We are actually in talks with a Mexican company that we have been negotiating with for some time now.”

Tatli is also keen for Calinos to start representing some of its own productions, pointing to an emerging issue for independent distributors: access to product. It’s a situation that’s being played out in the rest of the global drama landscape, as distributors worldwide battle it out to be aligned with the top producers in any given territory. As Turkish drama continues to find new slots internationally, you can expect the landscape of sellers trying to access that product to become even more competitive.

Pictured: Kanal D’s Wounded Love.