Making television fiction in a commercial context: Commercialization, ideology and entertainment in a production study of Greek private television

Abstract

This article draws from interviews with creators of television fiction (directors and screenwriters) with professional experience in Greek private television and examines how and why fiction programmes are produced in a commercial context. By focusing on the first decade of private television in Greece, an era popularly remembered as the ‘golden age of Greek television’, this study makes use of accounts from ‘exclusive informants’ in order to complicate facile assumptions about the relationship between commercialization, ideology and entertainment. As such, this article aspires to update the (limited) scholarship on Greek television production culture and to contribute to the recent research focusing specifically on private television in Greece.