How TV Series Change the World

Despite the growing number of publications and studies on TV series, little attention has been paid to their role in transmitting and sharing of values, deepening democracy, raising awareness of various threats (such as terrorism or health and climate crisis), and promoting social inclusion, gender equality, and diversity.

TV series are ambitious cultural works that inspire and inform our reflections on the world, going so far as sometimes to generate a « reality effect ». For instance, the hero of the Ukrainian series Servant of the People, actor V. Zelensky, was elected president in real life. In Europe, series like Baron noir (France), and La Casa de Papel (Spain) aim to educate the public about political life and even to re-enchant democratic life. In Japan, shows like The Journalist and, in Korea, Spy and Vagabond explore the political relevance of series. The rise of post-apocalyptic series (such as The Walking Dead, The Leftovers, The Handmaid’s Tale, Chernobyl, and The Last of Us) signals a greater attention to the risk of environmental or health catastrophes and of general loss of values and freedom while raising questions about accountability and responsibility. Moreover, the number of series revealing the backstage of democratic regimes facing the threat of terrorism is also increasing significantly (The Bureau, Fauda, False Flag, Deutschland 83, Our Boys, No Man’s Land, Teheran).

Through their long-term, weekly and seasonal regularity, their narratives, attachment to their characters, and democratization of their access on the Internet (streaming, platforms, amateur creation, mobility), series allow the expression and transmission of « public problems » in Dewey’s sense and can play a role in preserving and developing the democratic spirit, thanks to their large audiences.

The era when a television series dominated the entire public is over: each of us engages in an individual experience that shapes and transforms us, like an education. The series provide strong common cultural referents that populate ordinary conversations and political debates, creating a new public space. The study of television series is, therefore, not only a resource for reflecting on current issues but also a tool for social and political transformation.

This workshop aims to bring together researchers from France, Japan, Eastern Europe, and other cultural contexts, in order to develop a reflection on the impact that series have on each of us and on the transformation of contemporary societies where they operate.

Programme:

12:00-12:20 – Adrienne Sala, Maintaining the Social Order? Individuals’ Dilemma within Organizations: Two Japanese Series Case Studies
Series have become interesting fields for social sciences research. By vulgarizing particular issues difficult to access through the sociological lens they contribute to the construction of social reality. For example, the TV series Hanzawa Naoki, which aired from 2013 to 2020 on the TBS channel, highlighted the deleterious effects of organizations that are undermined by hierarchical harassment (pawa hara). The Journalist (Shinbun kisha), a 2022 Netflix series, incisively exposes a similar process within the Japanese public administration. This series provides an original ground for analyzing the politico-media complex through balance of power, interdependencies, moral violence, domination and submission relationships showing how politics prevails over policy.

12:20-12:40 – Xavier Mellet, Individual Choice, Social Consequences? Moral Sensibility on Marriage in Contemporary Japan as staged in Kekkon dekinai otoko
Since the early 2000s, the simultaneous acceleration of population shrinking and decrease in the number of marriages has fueled a public debate in Japan about the failure of social mechanisms. Increasingly criticized as no longer suitable for developing an effective framework to improve the birth rate, the institution of marriage represents one of the major issues and/or dilemmas in an individual life course. TV series accompanied and questioned social change on this issue, such as Kekkon dekinai otoko (KDO, in English « He who can’t marry »), a critical and popular success, aired on Fuji TV in 2006. This presentation will analyse how moral and social dilemmas related to marriage and social recognition are framed in KDO, through a specific focus on the moral sensibilities of the main characters.

12:40-12:50 – Q&A

13:00-13:20 – Reng Jibu, Traditional and Changing Gender Role appeared in Korean and Canadian Popular Series
In my presentation, I will talk about expression of gender roles appeared in the Crash landing on you, popular Netflix series Korean romantic comedy, and also Epidemie/Outbreak popular Canadian TV series. In each series, how women and men are described, and how new type of families are defined. Both series are very well made as entertainment and also provide fresh perspective of reversed gender roles.

13:20-13:40 – Sandra Laugier, How Feminist Series Change the World

In its representations as well as in its narratives, the cinematic universe has so far illustrated and supported male domination, despite the great and regular performances of actresses. In its industry, only a handful of women have emerged for symbolically valued positions such as director. TV series have had a different trajectory. Since the turn of the century, the aesthetic power of television series has been well adapted to the progressive physical and ethical prominence of women.  The feminist turn in the series came at the turn of the century, with the cult series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2004) and the exceptional creative moment of HBO’s early years.

13:40-14:00 – Tatsiana Zhurauliova and Anastasia Krutikova, Female Representation in Contemporary Russian TV Series: Three Case Studies

Since the 1990s, there has been a growing number of Russian TV series that prominently feature complex female characters, who take on an increasingly more diverse range of social roles. While these productions are often influenced by U.S. series (with some even originating as official or unofficial adaptations of American productions), Russian series offer a distinct vision of womanhood and femininity that is specific to the post-Soviet society. This presentation will focus on three recent Russian series Two Hills (Start, 2022-), An Ordinary Woman (TV-3/Premiere, 2018-2021), and The Sleepers (Yuri Bykov, Pervyi Kanal, 2017) to discuss the role of fictional serial representations in both reflecting and shaping the contemporary discourse on womanhood in contemporary Russia. We will ask: How are women depicted in recent Russian series? What models of gender relations do these series represent and/or promote? And what is the impact of these series on the broader understanding of feminism and womanhood in Russia? 

14:00-14:30 – Q&A

14:30-14:45 – break

14:45-15:05 – Thibaut de Saint Maurice, What a TV Series can do against Terrorism? The Example of No Man’s Land (Arte & Hulu, 2020)

This paper explores the potential of security series as a democratic resource in the fight against terrorism, using the series No Man’s Land (Arte 2020, Hulu 2020) as a case study. By portraying jihadist terrorism within the framework of patriarchal domination and presenting the struggle for democracy within the framework of feminist emancipation, No Man’s Land helps viewers to understand and relate to a threat that is often oversimplified in media narratives as a distant foreign conflict or a singular attack.

15:05-15:25 – Sylvie Allouche, Code Artist: The Hacker of TV Series

Since 2010, there has been a growing number of TV shows that deal with hacking and cybersecurity, for example Person of Interest (2011-2016), Black Mirror (2011-2019), Mr. Robot (2015-2019), Le Bureau des Légendes (2015-2020), and many others. Each of these series approaches the theme in its own unique way, but they all share common elements. They all examine the impact of technology on society and the ethical dilemmas that arise when technology is misused. They also explore the complex relationships between individuals, corporations, and governments, and the power dynamics that come into play in the world of technology. We will look into the way these shows provide a variety of ethical dilemmas which allow for a variety of answers from the protagonists, and how they could develop in the future, considering how hackers, good or bad, are often romantically depicted as code artists of some sort and the growing possibilities offered by AI in the field.

15:25-15:45 – Camille Guinaudeau, Automatic Tools for TV Content Analysis

Machine learning approaches can take advantages of the different modalities of multimedia document (video, audio or semantic information extracted from speech) to automatically understand or organize multimedia collections. This talk will present an overview of recent works on multimedia understanding through scene segmentation, scene linking and memorability prediction, that can be useful for in depth TV series analysis.

16:45-16:15 – Q&A

16:15-16:30 – break

16:30-17:00 – Rémi Tereszkiewicz, TV Series, Key Assets of the TV3.0 (R)Evolution

This keynote will present the latest evolutions of television in the OTT world and how TV series are used by the new and incumbent players to drive their strategies. Focused on Western Europe media landscapes, the presentation will be a mix of marketing strategy insights and live data discovery extracted from the usages of the 2,8M Betaseries community.

17:00-17:30 – General Discussion

Biography of the participants

Sylvie Allouche is part-time Associate Professor at Lyon Catholic University, and researcher in the Demoseries project since 2020. She develops her research on the philosophical issues raised by techno-scientific progress and on the relationship between philosophy and fiction, focusing on science fiction and TV series. Her recent work includes a chapter on the politics of Black Mirror and a paper presented at the Maison française d’Oxford on the politics of mind uploading in TV series.

Camille Guinaudeau is Assistant professor in Computer Sciences at University Paris Saclay since 2013. Her research focuses on Natural Language Processing for Multimedia Document Understanding, especially TV series and news. Since September 2022, she is a member of the Japanese French Laboratory for Informatics in Tokyo.

Renge Jibu is Associate professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology, Institute of Liberal Arts.She holds a B.A. of Law and an MBA from Hitotsubashi University. She worked as business journalist for Nikkei Business Publications, she was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at University of Michigan, and a Freelance journalist. Her specialty is gender analysis of business management, policy making and media. She also gives talks, writes articles and provides advice for corporations and governmental organizations.

Anastasia Krutikova is completing her PhD in socio-cultural anthropology at School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS), with her project focused on school representations of human diversity in France and Russia. Her research interests include secondary education, media and popular culture, and the history of anthropological thought.

Sandra Laugier is Professor of Philosophy at Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, Senior Fellow of Institut Universitaire de France, and Principal Investigator of the European Research ERC Advanced Grant project Demoseries. She has extensively published on ordinary language philosophy, moral philosophy, democracy and civil disobedience. Her recent work focuses on gender studies and TV series and includes: Series. Laboratoire d’éveil politique (ed.), CNRS Éditions, 2023.

Xavier Mellet is Associate professor at Waseda University, School of International Liberal Studies. He holds a PhD degree in Political Science from SciencesPo Paris, and is a member of the Area-studies and Plurilingual-Multicultural education program (APM program). His research focuses on French and Japanese domestic political issues, such as populism and youth political participation, and youth citizenship education. He co-founded in 2021 a French research group on Japanese domestic politics (Groupe de recherche sur le politique au Japon) with Ioan Trifu and Arnaud Grivaud.

Thibaut de Saint Maurice has taught philosophy for the past fifteen years in different high schools in France. His research focuses on the moral and political implications of TV series, particularly in relation to the use of seriality. From 2010 to 2013, he served as the director of « Culture Pop » collection published by Ellipses. Since 2011, he has been exploring the intersection of fiction and everyday life in various columns on French public radio, France Inter.

Adrienne Sala is Researcher at the French Research Institute on Japan at the Maison Franco-Japonaise (UMIFRE 19, CNRS, MEAE) since 2019, Associate Researcher at the Fondation France-Japon de l’EHESS. From 2019 to 2022 she was invited Researcher at the University of Tokyo. Her research focuses on sociopolitical issues related to legal mobilization, public policy and law-making process in Japan. Since 2021, she developed a research network about the « Judicialization of social and environmental issues in France and Japan ».

Rémi Tereszkiewicz is an expert of Over The Top (OTT) television services and TV series marketing. Having served since 1994 as VP or SVP in sales and marketing positions for various companies such as Warner Brothers (2016), Lagardère Studios / Mediawan (2014), Netgem (2004) or Eurosport (1994), he led the creation and launching of numerous TV services and  SVOD/AVOD offers. He is currently CEO of Betaseries, a media platform  running recommendation services for a community of 6 million monthly TV series fans and analysing TV series & OTT usages and trends for the media industry.

Post-doctoral fellow in the ERC Demoseries project, Tatsiana Zhurauliova is an art historian, whose work focuses on the intersection of visual culture and discourses on identity and difference in the United States and in Eastern Europe. Tatsiana received her PhD from Yale University in 2014. Before moving to France, she held the position of a Collegiate Assistant Professor and a Harper and Schmidt Fellow in the Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago.

Moderator: Adrienne SALA (IFRJ-MFJ)

Organization: IFRJ-MFJ