Rerunning and 'rewatching' socialist TV drama serials : post-socialist Czech television audiences between commodification and reclaiming the past

Abstract

The writer documents, contextualizes, and accounts for the rerunning, as well as enthusiastic "re-watching," of socialist TV drama serials in the Czech Republic after 1989. History television programming not only consists of shows and documentaries that explicitly deal with history: programs produced during historical periods and later subjected to selection procedures for rerunning are also implicitly mediating the past and present.

It has been generally assumed that the Czech socialist TV serial reruns are not only about sentimental time travel but also about traveling in a dichotomized political history. Television audiences are taken back to a time that became, within the new neo-liberal paradigm of the early 1990s, subject to forgetfulness and taboo.

Television, thus, helped the process of memory consolidation and reconfiguration because it helped its viewers appropriate the past in a less demonized way.