Melissa Çevikel
November
As a reality show fan, I often find myself questioning why I, and many others, who seemingly had nothing to do with these, were so invested in white Americans searching for love on low-production online television platforms. But, after my recent discovery of “Love is Blind Habibi,” I was able to look at reality television from a completely new perspective.
“Love is Blind Habibi” is a self-proclaimed “social experiment” reality show where a total of twenty participants (ten men and ten women) communicate with each other inside “pods”—rooms with walls separating the two participants from each other—until they eventually decide to take the next step and get married. The participants have ten days in the pods to choose the person they wish to marry, and around three weeks until their marriage ceremony to split between a “honeymoon retreat” and their actual lives. Up to this point, there is nothing differentiating Love is Blind Habibi from any of its other adaptations around the world,such as Sweden, UK, Brazil and Japan. However, beyond the technical aspects of the work, there are things as simple as the mannerisms of the participants and the hosts that make the viewer feel captivated.
The show presents participants—or actors—from all around the Arab world that live seemingly similar lives but each possess very different characteristics. For example, there is the character of Simo, who is a retail business owner, and can only marry a Moroccan woman, later dumps his match because he believes she can’t handle him. There is also Chafic, an entrepreneur who proudly stated in an interview, “I've been single because I was too focused on looks, but looks fade and personality stays” yet realized that his second option from the pods was an Instagram model he once hit up. He then introduced the viewer to a stereotypical model of Middle Eastern men that is funny yet familiar to ordinary people in their day-to-day lives. While Love is Blind Habibi possesses the element of relatability that no other Love is Blind had arguably captured before, with mothers and aunties giving advice being a key point in the show progression, it also made me wonder (as someone who grew up at the prime of Turkish reality shows) if all Middle Eastern show adaptations were as successful at getting the same feeling across, or if most just felt forced and phony?
One of the first very unsuccessful—and henceforth generally unknown—attempts of adaptations that came to mind was Turkey’s recent take this summer on “Love Island,” named (and directly translated to) “Aşk Adası.” At first glance, Aşk Adası may seem like just a very low-budget reality show filmed at a villa which is being framed as a luxury island gateway retreat. But upon closer inspection, the viewers can come to realize that the show is much more than that. If one can get past how bad the production truly is, the first thing any experienced Middle Eastern reality media enjoyer will notice is how oddly everyone is dressed in comparison to the location where the show is filmed, where the actors are dressed in clothes that would not be found in a piece of Turkish media especially under the censorship of RTÜK, which will be discussed later.
Compared to Aşk Adası, Love is Blind Habibi has nothing to prove to the world. It lays out before the viewers eyes the naked reality of toxic masculinity, conservatism and family ties in the Middle East. Aşk Adası, on the other hand, seems like a very forced portrayal of Turks as— surely in the eyes of the producer—modern and European. Every ten minutes or so, the viewer is faced with a very forced “sexual tension” scene, which is most likely as difficult to watch for the viewer as it is to act, as the actors look very uncomfortable throughout the entire show. However, forceful over-sexualization and objectification of women in the show are not new to Western media, and the Turkish media has not shied away from this either. While these aspects are also the main catchpoints of popular U.S shows such as “Too Hot to Handle” and “Perfect Match,” the fact that they’re higher production and that they’re owning up to this reality distracts viewers from its flaws. Though Turkey’s attempt to move away from its conservative connotation is noticeable, doing this through oversexualization of women disregards the long history of women’s rights movements in the country, especially when looked in the context of the country's recent struggles on the topic. Not to mention these attempts will not prove to be successful as long as there remains a very strict inspecting body for Turkish media (RTÜK).
An example of a good Turkish reality show, however, would be “Kısmetse Olur” (2015) which translates to “If it’s Fate, it will Happen.” While I’m not sure if it was because of itsmid-2010s production or the randomness of its cast selection—which ranged from American men posing as machos to women claiming to be “ivent” (a new translation of the word “event” that emerged during the peak of the profession) organizers— there was something that made this show feel excessively Turkish. It was the only reality show which, in my opinion, is qualified to label itself as a “social experiment.” It revealed to the viewers the worlds of early 2010s bachelors and bachelorettes, how they spent their days, and how relatable their simple lives were. In 2022, the show made a comeback with a modern-day adaptation titled “If it’s Fate, it will Happen: The Power of Love” (Kısmetse Olur: Aşkın Gücü), with a first season that didn’t disappoint either. The 2015 version was a reign of personal trainers and event organizers as well as aspiring fashion designers, while the 2022 version showed a range of influencers, singers and entrepreneurs (unemployed). It perfectly portrayed the new generation of bachelor Turks we saw around ourselves and maybe even personally knew, despite being painfully obviously scripted.
2017 marked a very saddening legal decision for reality show enjoyers when marriage programmes were banned in Turkey. This was a rare moment when media censorship, in fact, breeded innovation, and the world got introduced to a very colorful selection of newly produced soap operas. If the West had reality shows and nudity, the East now had one thousand-episode-long plotlines and adaptations where no LGBTQ+ got to see the light of day. Erkenci Kuş, Sen Çal Kapımı and Aşk-ı Memnu are just a few of original soap operas produced around this time. And though cliches were one of the strongest points of these works, there were also many adaptations from Western media such as Grey’s Anatomy (Doktorlar), the O.C (Medcezir), Gossip Girl (Küçük Sırlar) and Desperate Housewives (Umutsuz Ev Kadınları). These received more international attention than they did locally, but were still enjoyed by the Turkish viewers.
More recently, screen adaptations of prominent Turkish literature themes from the late 19th and early 20th century novels, such as Westernization versus traditionalism, became a big hit for screenwriters. One of the most viewed Turkish TV series currently, titled “Kızılcık Şerbeti” follows the life of a young woman, Doğa, from a “modern and Western” family who, after becoming pregnant, has to get married to the father of the child, Fatih, coming from a religious and conservative background. The series follows funny and unfortunate events Doğa has to face living in a new environment and her culture shock. Despite how simple and uneventful it sounds, this is arguably the most progressive piece of media recently created in Turkey and it still seems unbelievable that it is able to air despite its scandalous and caricature-like portrayal of such topics in the country. Though these might be helpful in encouraging everyone to take a step back and realize how silly such differences are, many pieces of media aiming to achieve what Kızılcık Şerbeti has done were criticized for promoting abuse culture. Unfortunately, abuse and violence are staple plotlines in soap operas, and despite popular belief that they aid in raising awareness, they counterproductively normalize cycles of marital abuse often lived out in Turkish households.
You can love them; you can hate them; you can claim that you’re above them and so much better than others for not enjoying them. But, in reality, we all have things to learn from Reality TV. The way we choose to portray our “realities” to the world, and more specifically to the West, tells a lot about the extent to which countries stand with our values. Love is Blind Habibi showed that one does not have to appeal to Eurocentric values to be enjoyed by viewers outside of Arab states. Turkish adaptations of Western soap operas, on the other hand, showed where they chose to draw the line with Westernization.