This essay discusses the series in full.

Berkun Oya’s six-part Netflix limited series A Round of Applause, released in February 2024, stars Aslıhan Gürbüz, Fatih Artman, and Cihat Süvarioğlu as the members of a small family whose lives unfold across several decades. At its centre is Metin, a child profoundly reluctant to be born and later consumed by an existential unease that no conventional account of growing up can resolve. The series follows his movement from the womb into childhood and adulthood, yet it does not really tell a story of development. Metin does not progress towards a stable identity or social destination. By the end, he returns to the maternal body from which he emerged.

This circular movement is central to the series’ unusual form. A Round of Applause does not simply use absurd scenes to decorate an otherwise conventional family drama. It turns absurdism into a method for dismantling familiar ideas about time, parenthood, identity, and social success. The result is something close to an anti-series: a work that refuses the narrative satisfactions through which television normally makes a life appear coherent.

What Does an Absurd Narrative Do?

The language most frequently used to describe A Round of Applause includes terms such as surreal, strange, and absurd. These labels overlap, but absurdism has a more specific literary and theatrical history. The critic Martin Esslin popularized the term “Theatre of the Absurd” in his 1961 book of the same name, bringing together playwrights such as Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, and Arthur Adamov. These writers did not constitute a formal movement with a shared manifesto. What connected their work was a dramatic world in which language fails, actions become repetitive, time loses its ordinary direction, and human beings search for meanings that continually evade them.

The emotional atmosphere of absurd drama is not necessarily solemn. Its situations may be comic, energetic, or even ridiculous. Yet beneath the comedy lies helplessness. Characters speak without communicating, wait without arriving, and act without producing durable consequences. Rather than guiding the audience towards a moral lesson, the form disrupts the expectation that a narrative must explain the world or show how it can be improved.

This distinguishes absurd drama from a political theatre associated with a figure such as Bertolt Brecht. Brechtian theatre seeks to estrange spectators from what appears natural so that social relations become visible and changeable. Absurd drama also unsettles everyday reality, but it rarely offers a comparable programme of transformation. Its historical force is inseparable from the disillusionment produced by the Second World War and the wider twentieth-century crisis of faith in rational progress. The promise that reason, history, or political action would necessarily lead humanity towards emancipation had become far more difficult to sustain.

Existentialism provided one philosophical background to this sensibility. Dada and surrealism offered an artistic one. Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, for instance, challenged the authority of the art institution by presenting an ordinary urinal as an artwork. Surrealism turned away from rational order towards dreams, unconscious desire, and unexpected combinations. Absurd narrative is not identical to either movement, but it shares their anti-conventional impulse. It asks the spectator to encounter language, time, character, and representation outside the structures through which they usually become intelligible.

An Anti-Series Built on Circular Time

Seen from this perspective, A Round of Applause is not simply an eccentric Turkish family drama. It works against the organizing principles of serialized storytelling. There is no stable protagonist whose choices produce a recognisable arc. Metin occupies the centre of the narrative, but his mother, Zeynep, often carries equal dramatic weight. Neither develops in a consistent direction. Their identities shift with age, memory, fantasy, and the demands imposed by the people around them.

Metin’s life establishes the series’ circular temporality. He resists birth, returns to the womb immediately after being born, is removed again, grows older, and ultimately seeks another return. Although the characters visibly age, chronological time does not deliver development. Life moves forward biologically while the narrative folds back upon itself.

Zeynep’s monologue to her husband, Mehmet, offers another striking disruption of time. As she speaks in old age, her younger and older selves appear to overlap. The past is not presented as a completed period recalled from a secure present. Different moments occupy the same emotional space. Time becomes the experience of being trapped within recurrent desires and disappointments.

This is why the series resists the usual logic of spoilers. Its force does not depend primarily on what happens next. It depends on the failure of “next” to produce progress. The final return does not solve the problem introduced by Metin’s birth; it confirms that the problem has never gone away.

Metin’s Refusal of Language

Metin’s reluctance to enter the world can be read as a refusal of language and ideology. The womb represents an existence before he is assigned a name, a role, a purpose, and a place within the symbolic order. Birth means becoming legible to others. The family, school, work, friendship, and class culture all begin to tell him who he is supposed to be.

An encounter before birth makes this conflict especially visible. Metin meets another unborn figure who is eager to enter the world, already equipped with a chosen name, a purpose, and a revolutionary self-image. Later, this confident figure becomes a celebrated writer whose adult behaviour seems far removed from those original ideals. The episode punctures the fantasy that a coherent identity imagined in advance can survive contact with social life. Even rebellion can harden into a role.

Metin, by contrast, cannot stabilize himself through a convincing personal narrative. He possesses sensitivity and talent, but not in forms that satisfy the expectations of parents, teachers, peers, or professional culture. The meanings he gives to himself remain weaker than those imposed upon him. His refusal to be defined prevents him from occupying a secure position within the social order, yet it does not produce freedom. It leaves him marginal, inarticulate, and increasingly detached from ordinary life.

His name gains particular importance for Turkish viewers. In Turkish, metin means “text.” The character can therefore be understood as a text across which competing meanings struggle. A text never contains a final, autonomous meaning: it refers to other texts, changes through interpretation, and becomes a site of cultural and ideological conflict. Metin is similarly interpreted by everyone around him. His parents, friends, and society attempt to turn him into a coherent story. He responds by refusing narrativity itself.

The series repeatedly stages this resistance through language. As a child, Metin reacts to his parents speaking English during an argument by speaking Icelandic, a language that further removes him from their communicative world. The scene flows into music by the Icelandic composer Olafur Arnalds, whose experimental work fits the series’ emotional register. Metin does not replace his parents’ language with a more authentic one. He moves towards a language they cannot share, using linguistic difference as a form of withdrawal.

Parenthood and the Demand for a Coherent Life

Metin’s resistance is inseparable from his relationship with Zeynep. She oscillates between recognizing that her child may want a life outside social expectations and trying to pull him back into a recognizable model of success. Her parenting is shaped by two incompatible demands: she wants to respect Metin’s difference, but she also wants society to confirm that she has raised him correctly.

This conflict makes Zeynep as unstable as her son. She cannot decide whether Metin needs protection from the world or adaptation to it. Her affection repeatedly becomes interpretation. Even when he appears to be doing almost nothing near Istanbul’s Kadikoy ferry terminal, she congratulates him as though his stillness must be converted into a meaningful occupation. She cannot allow his action to remain without a name or function.

The series therefore treats parenthood not as the transmission of a settled identity but as a struggle over meaning. Parents do not simply care for a child; they participate in the social process that turns the child into a legible subject. Zeynep’s anxiety arises from her awareness that this process may itself be violent, even when it is carried out through encouragement and love.

The Middle-Class World as Absurd Performance

Some of the series’ sharpest moments expose the rituals of Turkey’s urban, secular, culturally privileged middle classes. This context matters for international viewers because the characters do not represent Turkish society as a whole. They belong to a social world shaped by education, cultural capital, consumer distinction, therapeutic language, entrepreneurial aspiration, and an often self-conscious claim to open-mindedness.

In the opening episode, a visiting couple reveals its class position through a conversation about ordering food and its unequal treatment of service workers. Their apparently progressive lifestyle coexists comfortably with everyday hierarchy. The scene briefly suggests a wider demystification of bourgeois values, recalling Luis Bunuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, in which a group of affluent people repeatedly attempts, and repeatedly fails, to complete a meal. Bunuel’s characters perform refinement while absurd interruptions expose the fragility of their social world.

Later, Metin encounters his childhood friend Ahu, who has grown up with economic and cultural privilege and now speaks the language of start-up entrepreneurship through a project called “Plants & Friends.” Her presentation of herself is polished, purposeful, and fully compatible with contemporary capitalism’s demand that individuals become brands, projects, and stories. When she asks Metin to describe himself, he has nothing to say.

The scene then shifts into a conference-like setting in which society appears to put Metin on trial. Zeynep hides among the audience, simultaneously defending him and inviting him back into the rational order he resists. The contrast is revealing: Ahu possesses a language through which class privilege becomes innovation and personality becomes enterprise. Metin’s silence makes him socially unintelligible.

The Limits of Meaninglessness

I found A Round of Applause intellectually stimulating, but not entirely satisfying. Compared with Oya’s earlier Netflix series Ethos, whose intersecting characters offered a more sustained engagement with social division in Turkey, this work adopts a far more openly absurd and existential style. That difference is not in itself a weakness. Artists develop by changing forms, and each work alters how we understand the ones that preceded it.

My reservation concerns the relation between the series’ anti-narrative gestures and its social critique. The early episodes open several promising lines of inquiry into class privilege, secular middle-class culture, consumption, domestic dissatisfaction, and the moral performance of progressiveness. As the series continues, however, these observations often recede behind linguistic and existential play. Certain scenes appear designed primarily to resist interpretation or prevent the story from arriving anywhere.

That aim is entirely consistent with absurdism. A work committed to the absence of resolution cannot be criticized simply for refusing resolution. Yet absurd form need not abandon historical and class specificity. The series might have connected Metin’s crisis more insistently to the social structures that make particular versions of success, parenthood, creativity, and individuality appear compulsory.

This tension is also what makes the series worth discussing. A Round of Applause asks whether a human being can refuse every story through which society offers a meaningful life. Its answer is not liberating. Outside language and ideology, Metin does not discover an authentic self waiting to be recovered. He finds isolation, repetition, and the fantasy of returning to a condition before social existence.

The series finally leaves us with a distinctly absurd proposition: meaning is oppressive because it is imposed upon us, but life without meaning is impossible to inhabit. Metin cannot accept the world, yet he cannot remain outside it. His return to the beginning is neither victory nor defeat. It is the circular movement of a character who refuses to become a story, trapped inside a series that refuses to become one as well.