TV Socialism by Anikó Imre

Reviewed by: TV Socialism by Anikó Imre Heather L. Gumbert Imre, Anikó – TV Socialism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Pp. 315. Timely and innovative, this comparative history of television across the Eastern Bloc in the socialist and post-socialist periods uses television as a lens to destabilize post-Cold War narratives of socialism and its demise, while also using the socialist example to revise the way we think about television. Imre has succeeded on both counts, offering some surprising and fruitful conclusions that will revise the way we think about socialism and its relationship to the emergence of nationalism and post-feminism in post-socialist societies. At the same time, it challenges contemporary television studies to look toward the past and farther afield than America and the United Kingdom. The book is a synthetic work that also offers original research and provocative insights. Imre builds on important recent national studies on the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and East Germany, as well as critical studies of genre, cultural theory, and European media cultures to trace regional trends and demonstrate remarkable continuities within and beyond the Soviet sphere. Its scope also includes original archival research and interviews with television professionals from Hungarian State TV. It also breaks down the conventional boundaries of media research—exploring television as a transnational medium; genre as a "transcultural form of expression;" and the onset and end of the Cold War as mere moments in a larger history of media cultures. Imre gives us a fresh and invigorating interpretation of industrial, political, and cultural practices that transcend the boundaries of (Cold War) East and West, and the Cold War itself. The book is organized in four parts defined by the discussion of particular television genres: reality and realism; "History" and the historical adventure drama; "Fiction," especially soap operas; and Humor, especially socialist and post-socialist political satire. In each of the four sections, Imre traces the broad strokes of the history and operation of genre in particular national contexts, provides case studies of specific programs, and demonstrates the significant—and often unexpected—continuities between socialist and post-socialist television cultures and practices. The narrative and affective patterns developed over decades under socialism and evolved during the "thaw" of late socialism smoothed the way for neoliberal TV practices and even the rise of the radical right in places like Hungary. In the first part of the book, Imre explores socialist "reality television," arguing that its history is not a "narrative of failure," but instead offers us "an alternative pre-history of reality-based programs" that can also revise our understanding of the entire bipolar Cold War order (pp. 39, 84). Such programming was designed as an instrument of social transformation, a "grand equalizer," exposing rural and undereducated populations to greater edification and European high culture(p. 46). Case studies of "School TV," crime, and game shows illustrated how socialist reality television engaged in "taste education," encouraged learning through participation, and "mobilized affective engagement without yielding to voyeurism or self-serving emotional display" (p. 65). Such programming revealed how fundamental notions of gender roles, success (meaning talent and hard work), competition, and national community were for socialist societies. [End Page 179] Popular television nurtured Eastern European cultural nationalisms, which Imre describes as "anticolonial" and directed primarily against the (imperialist) Soviet Union (p. 87). Post-socialist states have relied on and intensified these cultural nationalisms to provide legitimacy to new governments, leading to the paradoxical mobilization of socialist-era programs and formats to shore up conservative values. The emergence of cheaper, Western formats has challenged these nationalisms and, in particular, their claims to cultural and ethnic homogeneity. The second section delves into "Genres of History," including the historical adventure drama, the problem of nostalgia, and how commercials became repositories of socialist memory. This is a complicated story of the emergence of a regional television culture that reinvented the nationalist project of Eastern European literary cultures. These tendencies generated a "blatantly inauthentic" set of national myths with narrative elements that were interchangeable throughout the region (p. 154). Commercials on television similarly offered audiences opportunities to identify with Western-style consumer identities, creating expectations that socialism could not fulfill. The commercial

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