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Polish Culture? World on Fire, Transnational Coproduction and the Inscription of Cultural Specificity
Joanna Rydzewska 
TV Drama in the Multiplatform Era: Transnational Coproduction and Cultural Specificity
Swansea University Author:
Joanna Rydzewska
Abstract
This chapter studies the first season of BBC/PBS coproduction World on Fire (2019-) as an example of new high-end transnational television drama which foregrounds cultural specificity as a means to target an international audience. By analysing World on Fire’s unprecedented foregrounding of a Polish...
| Published in: | TV Drama in the Multiplatform Era: Transnational Coproduction and Cultural Specificity |
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| Published: |
London
Palgrave Macmillan
2023
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| URI: | https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa63195 |
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| Abstract: |
This chapter studies the first season of BBC/PBS coproduction World on Fire (2019-) as an example of new high-end transnational television drama which foregrounds cultural specificity as a means to target an international audience. By analysing World on Fire’s unprecedented foregrounding of a Polish experience of World War II, we show how the serial exemplifies the increased salience of cultural specificity for high-end TV drama and deploys both textual and aesthetic strategies to inscribe this. The chapter analyses how World on Fire’s story reframes the (British) national myths of WWII that have traditionally put emphasis on the UK’s ‘Home Front’ by instead highlighting Polish heroism and an Anglo-Polish connection. We argue that World on Fire’s introduction of the heroic Pole archetype subverts previous representations of Poland exclusively focused on images of migrants. Another objective of this chapter is to trace WoF’s inception as a transnational coproduction and an example of alignment between the cultural objectives of national public broadcasters and the commercial necessity to address an international audience. We suggest that the strategies around cultural specificity in WoF respond to the challenges of the multiplatform era, which include the capacity to engage and/or appeal to multinational SVoDs and their subscribers. |
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| Keywords: |
transnational high-end TV drama, BBC, PBS, Anglo-Polish relations, heroic Polishness, Word on Fire |
| College: |
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences |