SEMINAR / DEPARTMENT OF COMMUNICATION AND DESIGN
Title: “Neither the Series nor the Serial: The Dizi as Televisual Form”
Speaker: M. Mert Örsler, Ph.D. (2026–2027 Mary H. Beatty Fellow & Teaching Associate Cinema Studies Institute & Department of Visual Studies)
Date: Nov. 6, 2026
Time: 12:30-13:30
Location: FB 309
Abstract
This talk concerns the dizi, the form of televisual seriality that has made Türkiye second only to the United States in international television distribution, reaching audiences from Japan to Chile and from South Africa to Sweden. Despite the extensive literature devoted to neighboring televisual forms, the dizi has attracted comparatively little sustained scholarly attention, least of all to its distinctive formal characteristics. Drawing on television studies, together with the historically contingent industrial conventions of Turkish television, I examine how the dizi both participates in and departs from established categories of episodic and serialized storytelling, the series and the serial above all. This double movement is perceptible in how different dizis organize continuity and resolution, such as through narrative arcs developed across seasons. Segmentation matters here, as in the distribution of narratively motivated hooks and larger unresolved questions; so too do characterization and the implications of recasting and dubbing. Beyond these, the dizi’s serialism demands further consideration through the distinction between structural openness and closedness, while the newer streaming counterparts of traditional broadcast dizis, especially the critically and commercially successful ones, may return us to a stronger episodic logic. The dizi, I argue, cannot be contained within an established televisual form, demonstrating how categories developed within particular traditions of television reach their limits when applied elsewhere. The talk is part of a monograph in progress on the dizi, among the first (if not the first) book-length studies in English of the form and of the processes that have made it consequential well beyond the screen.
Bio
M. Mert Örsler is a Mary H. Beatty Fellow at the University of Toronto’s Cinema Studies Institute. He is currently developing his first monograph on the Turkish dizi, drawing on his dissertation, defended in October 2026. His articles have appeared in Celebrity Studies, Journal of Popular Film & Television, and Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and he has contributed chapters to The Bloomsbury Handbook of Turkish Cinema (forthcoming), Adaptation in Turkish Literature, Cinema, and Media (2025), and The Routledge Companion to Global Literary Adaptation in the Twenty-First Century (2023).