Documentarism, Imagination, and Social Change in Finnish Television Culture

Abstract

This article focuses on the historical role of recording and representing reality in the Finnish television culture, especially in the production of the serial Uutishuone (Newsroom TV1 2009), which is a historical drama about a television newsroom. Both factual and fictional events, such as the biggest international and domestic news of the 1960s and 1970s, are not only mediated to the audience but they are also experienced and they feed the social imagination. Television series and serials at different times inform us of how a particular social and cultural context produces its own kind of documentary articulation that ushers the viewers into imagining the past.