The 1990s on the RTS Screens: Analysis of the Domestic Television Series and the Audience Attitudes

Abstract

In the cultural memory of peoples or individual groups, there is always a certain temporal point around which complex socio-political discourses develop. In Serbia, it was the 1990s. Many studies analyzed this period from different and opposite perspectives, but research on TV programs from that era has been rather neglected. This paper focuses on TV series and audience attitudes in order to determine their role in this period. The methodology is based on secondary data from previously conducted research since it is difficult to determine the audience's attitudes towards a serial program that was broadcasted in the 1990s from this temporal distance. The reports from the RTS (Radio Television of Serbia) Research Center were used, and a brief analysis of individual achievements from that period was made to define a more general picture of the television series offered. The methods used were: historical analysis, content analysis and comparative analysis, therefore, the qualitative approach dominates.

Ideology has long been identified as an increasingly common component of popular content, so particular attention was paid in this paper to detailed analysis and „reading between the lines.“ Although at first glance it was expected that clear ideological representational matrices would be recognized in TV series broadcasted in the 1990s, our research shows that this is not the case. Detailed analysis provided answers to the newly discovered meanings of a complex and never-completed process of cultural formation within the peculiarities of everyday life in a territory that was largely isolated and at a time pressed by various phenomenological and axiological categories. That everyday life was human, lively and inevitable, and its representation in the series does not cover the semantic paradigm of the most difficult of all times in contemporary Serbian history. In a deeper reading of the attitudes and thinking of the audience, it is noticed that the perception of the socio-political crisis of the time was projected on the wishes of the audience, as it pleaded for more fun, optimism and humanity, which became part of the basic viewing preferences. More than that, viewers have expressed a need for much more love content in future recorded series, which shows a certain measure of saturation, on the one hand, and a culmination of optimism and relaxation regarding the expectations of the serial content, on the other. The audience's desires were turned toward distraction from reality, wars, sanctions and dark topics.