From Agent to Subject: Panoptic and Post-Panoptic Surveillance in Contemporary Eastern European Television Series

Abstract

There has been an increasing number of locally developed but globally distributed Eastern European quality television series during the last decade. Almost all of these products are concerned with the region’s troubled past, using state socialist regimes as contemporary allegories of nationalism, populism, surveillance and social control. These series merge classic spy culture of the Cold War era with new ideas of capitalist surveillance technologies and highlight patterns in which Cold War aesthetic and generic themes have reproduced themselves in contemporary culture. In this paper I present the relationship between narrative representations of social control and the relationship between postcolonial symbolism and post-socialist cultural hierarchies by analyzing television series such as 1983 (Netflix, 2018) and Hackerville (HBO, 2018). First, I introduce the paths to quality television in Eastern Europe and identify possible connections between Cold War and contemporary generic templates, various modes of surveillance, and recreations of these procedures in popular media. I then consider the difference between traditional panoptic power techniques and post-panoptic surveillance technologies by examining notions of social control and context, with an emphasis on vulnerabilities exposed in layers of social order and representation.

Keywords:

• Television studies
• surveillance
• Eastern European television
• streaming
• quality

Disclosure statement

The author reports there are no competing interests to declare.

Filmography

1983 (Netflix, 2018), Atomic Blonde (David Leitch, 2017), Comrade Detective (Amazon Prime Video, 2017), Hackerville (TNT Germany-HBO, 2018), More than a Life at Stake (Janusz Morgenstern and Andrzej Konic, 1967-68), Seventeen Moments of Spring (Tatyana Lioznova, 1972), The Informant (HBO Max, 2022), The Coldest Game (Łukasz Kośmicki, 2019), The Spy (Netflix-OCS, 2019).

Notes

1 On July 4th 2022, HBO Max announced that ‘it will no longer produce originals for HBO Max in the Nordics (Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland), Central Europe, the Netherlands and Turkey, and will also remove some content from its platform in order to free up licensing deals elsewhere.’ (Variety, July 4, Ravindran 2022) This decision and the recalibration in streaming priorities will, without a doubt, reshape and redraw European landscapes of production and consumption.