Why You Should Be Watching Turkish Dramas

Turkish dramas, known as dizi, have become one of the most-watched television exports on the planet. After South Korea and before any Western country, Turkey is the world's second-largest exporter of television content. Shows like Winter in Yeditepe, Magnificent Century, and more recently Bir Baskadir (Ethos) on Netflix have found audiences across Latin America, the Middle East, and increasingly Europe and North America.

The export story starts well before Netflix. Gumus, an unremarkable Turkish serial from 2005, was dubbed into Syrian Arabic as Noor and became a phenomenon across the Arab world. Then in 2014 Chile's Mega bought Binbir Gece, and Turkish drama landed in Latin America to ratings nobody had forecast. Everything since, the Spanish dubs and the Netflix commissions included, follows from those two accidents.

The production values are cinematic. Turkish dramas shoot on location in Istanbul, Cappadocia, and along the Mediterranean and Aegean coasts, giving them a visual richness that studio-bound Western shows cannot match. Budgets have climbed steadily, and shows like The Gift use the same production techniques as Hollywood blockbusters while maintaining distinctly Turkish storytelling traditions.

The storytelling pace is different from Western television, and that is the point. Episodes often run 120 to 150 minutes, allowing for a depth of character development that 45-minute American episodes cannot achieve. Plots unfold with a patience that rewards investment, building emotional stakes over dozens of episodes rather than rushing to the next plot twist.

A practical warning about those 120-minute episodes: what you watch abroad is usually not what Turkey watched. Distributors re-cut dizi into 45-minute international episodes, so a 40-episode Turkish season becomes ninety-odd episodes elsewhere and the pacing changes completely. The other thing to know is that Turkish channels cancel on ratings mid-run, which is why some warmly recommended series simply stop rather than end. Check the episode count before you commit a hundred hours.

Bir Baskadir (Ethos) on Netflix was a breakthrough for Western audiences. The show explored class, religion, and psychology in Istanbul through intersecting character studies, and it did so with a nuance that most Western shows about religion cannot manage. It treated faith and secularism as equally complex positions, which felt genuinely novel.

The genre range extends far beyond romance, though the love stories are a major draw. Yargi (Judgment) is a legal thriller with genuine suspense. Sahsiyet (Persona) is a dark crime drama that rivals Scandinavian noir. For Western viewers tired of the same British and American formulas, Turkish television offers a massive library of content that feels genuinely fresh.

Three specific recommendations that are not romances. Sahsiyet, on the Turkish streamer puhutv, stars Haluk Bilginer as a retired court clerk with Alzheimer's who decides to spend the time he has left killing people who deserve it, and Bilginer won an International Emmy for it in 2019. Kulup, on Netflix, is set in 1950s Istanbul and is partly spoken in Ladino, the language of the city's Sephardic Jews. And Ertugrul, whatever you make of it, was dubbed into Urdu in 2020 and became one of the most-watched things in Pakistan's history.

https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/best-turkish-shows