In Turkey, a surprise-hit crime drama trades the glitter for grit
ADANA, Turkey: A vicious stabbing. An evening of booze, cigarettes and casual hookups. Bored young men with deadend lives, racing motorcycles for thrills.
This was not what Turkish television usually looked like.
‘Sifir Bir’, an underground hit about an upstart crime gang, has struck a nerve in Turkey and garnered millions of viewers here and around the world since it launched last year.
The show’s creators and fans say that its uncommonly frank depiction of life in a poor neighbourhood, and the struggles of the people stuck there, is precisely the reason for its popularity.
The team behind the production - inspired by American crime shows such as ‘The Wire’ - intended it as a retort to the lavish historical epics, summer-romance serials and white-collar crime dramas that dominate Turkish television. Those shows, which are among the country’s most popular exports, are dubbed into local languages from the Middle East to South America and beam a largely lustrous image of Turkey around the world.
They have also frequently reflected the priorities of Turkey’s leaders by amplifying nationalist rhetoric or, more recently, reviving the Ottoman historical legacy that is central to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s conservative Islamist appeal. The striving ethos of the Erdogan era is often reflected in the extravagantly wealthy protagonists, ensconced in Bosporus mansions.
Television projects the president’s morals, too: Alcohol and cigarettes, for instance, are blurred out or covered up in television shows.
But the appeal of ‘Sifir Bir’ suggests that some portion of Turkey’s television-obsessed population was yearning for something a little more real.
The main characters are working-class anti-heroes. They preside over streets a million miles removed from the Turkey of travel brochures: neighbourhoods that recall Rio de Janeiro’s favelas, long neglected by the government, where policemen feared to tread.
‘Sifir Bir’ features no-name actors and residents recruited from quarters of the city where it is set. Scenes are often shot with handheld cameras, and Turkish rap music thumps in the background.
“It’s realistic. It’s raw. It doesn’t hide anything,” said Yigit Cakir, 33, a barista and actor in Istanbul who is one of the show’s fans.
“They use the language that we use in our daily life.”
The first two seasons were carried on YouTube, freeing the creators from the conventions of Turkish broadcasters and allowing them to evade government censorship of difficult topics such as teenage drug addition (and also allowing the characters to smoke).
The decision to post on the Internet did not prevent ‘Sifir Bir’ - ‘Zero One’ in English, for the first two numbers of the Adana licence plate - from finding an audience. The first episode has racked up more than 10 million views on YouTube, though the show’s producers say the number of regular viewers each week is about 2 million to 3 million.
The plot follows a group of young men from a hardscrabble Adana neighbourhood as they form a gang and methodically eliminate their rivals. The violence - drive-by shootings, beatings and stabbings - is graphic. In the first season’s finale, young boys shoot two of the protagonists in the back.
But in a nod to conservative Turkish sensibilities, the gang leaders possess an unshakable, if particular, moral sensibility. So, as they murder competitors, they also rub out pimps who abuse sex workers and drug dealers blamed for hooking teenagers on heroin.
It also depicts a world almost exclusively of men: The few female characters play love interests or a doctor who patches up the bloodied gang members.
One of the stars of ‘Sifir Bir’, Cihangir Ceyhan, created the show with Kadri Beran Taskin, the director. Both spent portions of their childhood in the setting they chose for the drama, a city of 1.7 million people near the Mediterranean coast that is known for its high crime rate. — WP-Bloomberg