9 Disguised Impact of the Distribution Processes in Turkish Television Domestic Strategies for the Global Dizi Arzu Öztürkmen Boğaziçi University, Turkey The rise of dizis, Turkish drama series, and their circulation around the world has generated a growing news media and academic interest in the history and structure of “Turkish content.” A report issued by the Ministry of Development in 2018 stated that dizi export had reached around 400 million viewers in more than 140 countries, with a volume of 350 million dollars, ranking second following U.S. series (T.C. Kalkınma Bakanlığı 2018). During the 2010s, the foreign press covered this issue several times (Armstrong 2017; Vivarelli 2017; Bhutto 2019), while scholarly research on transnationalization processes has also increased significantly in recent years (Yesil 2015; Alankuş and Yanardağoğlu 2016; Erguvan and Koçak 2020; Qasmi 2020; Kaptan and Kraidy 2021; Kesirli Unur 2021). Since 2011, I have been involved in an ethnography of the television industry in Turkey, focusing mainly on the intermediality of both the verbal and visual components that make up the dizi genre. My book, The Delight of Turkish Dizi: Memory, Genre and Politics of Television in Turkey, explores the dizi production process, with its tightly interwoven mode of communication and consumption (Öztürkmen 2022). This essay aims to highlight an important dimension of dizi production history, showing how distribution played a key role in the establishment of the dizi genre, mainly through financing but also by increasing the volume of production. When a handful of dizis were being sold in the first decade of the 2000s, one could hardly talk about a dizi industry, but rather a “sector in-progress.” The number of production com- panies was low, and the distributors were more involved with the acquisition of foreign content than with selling “Turkish drama.” Compared to other sectors of the Turkish industry, distributors of Turkish drama have been much more friendly and accessible during my research. In many cases, they have acted as a hub connecting a diverse range of academic and journalistic researchers engaged in dizi studies. They contributed greatly to the establishment of a discursive realm on dizis, producing a rising trend of publications. Exploring the historical process through which distributors shifted from acquisitions to sales, this essay examines the politics of global DOI: 10.4324/9781003185161-10