A Funnier "Monk": A Multimodal Approach to Transnational TV Series Adaptations

Abstract

In their book Reading Television (1978: 64-5), John Fiske and John Hartley define television as a medium that provides the members of a particular community with a “confirming, reinforcing version of themselves.” Although the introduction of the unfamiliar and innovative via televisual productions is a business imperative as well as a cultural necessity today, television continues to function as a mirror of its receiving society, and provide its viewers with culturally appropriate content through its various semiotic modes of communication situated within the visual, verbal, and sound tracks. Televisual productions, in this sense, can be viewed as one of the most salient multimodal texts through which our everyday politics are continuously materialized, fictionalized, and rendered into an entertaining popular language that shapes our everyday perceptions and expectations. Transnational format adaptations, in particular, stand out as ample content-rich texts in which the processes of localization and appropriation, realized through individual semiotic choices made by producers, manifest themselves. It is the goal of this paper to trace back such semiotic choices made during the re-production phase of transnational format adaptations, and reveal sociocultural and political interventions in meaning making at the time, through a multimodal analysis of an American comedy crime series, Monk, and its Turkish adaptation, Galip Derviş