Russian Television Today : Primetime Drama and Comedy

The most important stories in Russia have traditionally been those of literature; today that function is fulfilled by TV drama. This book examines the role of dramatized narratives in Russian television, demonstrating how they grapple with key questions of both national identity and recent history. Russian Television Today shows how visual drama succeeds in offering some answers or consolation, laying claim to a window on past generations and showing Russian viewers what might be salvageable from the Soviet experience. Just as Putin uses that experience to hone a fresh understanding of what it means to "be" Russian, so TV's heroes and heroines frequently express themselves with a related, soothing simplicity. Extending and complicating any such harmonies, this book then turns to other important developments: the manufacturing of new "national" on-screen characters and their peculiar relationship to both classic or Soviet literature and Latin-American soaps - all filtered through the enduring emphases of love, fidelity, humor, and irony. Since, however, those filters are often designed to block an unpleasant actuality, this book also pays considerable attention to the pressing problem of domestic crime and its troubled representation on screen - either as Mafia or police adventures. Overall, Russian Television Today provides a detailed account of critical social and aesthetic issues in Russia's primetime visual media, all the way from historical epics to the recent, more profitable emphases of situation comedy and reality shows. Book jacket.

David MacFadyen is Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Los Angeles, USA