This essay is adapted from my Turkish-language CultPost podcast episode, first released in February 2024. It has been translated and edited for international readers while preserving the original argument and examples. I use the international titles “One Love” and “Red Roses,” with the original Turkish titles given on first mention.

Spoiler warning: The discussion reflects the episodes available when the original podcast was recorded.

The increasing visibility of religious-conservative lives has become one of the most significant developments in recent Turkish television. Two mainstream dramas are particularly important to this change: One Love (Kızılcık Şerbeti), which premiered in 2022, and Red Roses (Kızıl Goncalar), which followed in 2023.

Both series bring secular and religious characters into sustained contact. Through family, marriage, education, gender, and faith, they stage one of the central tensions of modern Türkiye: the relationship between the Republic’s secular tradition and Sunni Muslim conservatism.

The series also represent an important change in popular culture. Religious-conservative characters are no longer simply absent or reduced to caricatures. They are given families, internal disagreements, desires, and moral conflicts. Yet visibility raises another question: through whose perspective does religious-conservative life become visible, and who retains the cultural authority to represent it?

Representation and Cultural Power

Culture is not merely a collection of traditions or lifestyles. It is the field in which societies produce and contest meaning. Television does not simply reflect identities that already exist. It selects characters, conflicts, spaces, and points of view and arranges them into a meaningful account of society.

Representation is therefore connected to power. Groups with greater access to media institutions have greater capacity to circulate their understanding of the world. They can define which identities appear normal, which require explanation, and which become threatening or invisible.

Audiences are not passive in this process. They interpret and criticize what they watch. The intense public debate surrounding One Love and Red Roses shows that television remains a field of struggle over how secular and conservative identities should be understood.

For much of the history of Turkish popular cinema, religious figures were represented through negative stereotypes. In Yeşilçam—the classical era of Turkish cinema, especially from the 1950s to the 1980s—imams and self-appointed religious authorities often appeared as ignorant, deceptive, or hostile to enlightenment and progress.

Mainstream television in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s rarely offered detailed accounts of pious Sunni Muslim life. Popular neighborhood dramas generally centered urban and secular-coded families. Religious practice was associated with elderly relatives, rural tradition, or marginal figures rather than presented as a complex everyday identity.

This pattern reflected the cultural influence of the Republic’s secular modernizing tradition. It also produced a significant absence: a large section of society rarely recognized its own domestic and social life in mainstream television.

Over the past two decades, the balance has changed. Religious-conservative groups have gained political and economic power, conservative middle- and upper-class lifestyles have become more visible, and pious audiences have become increasingly important to broadcasters and advertisers. Continuing to exclude them from mainstream fiction has become culturally and commercially impossible.

What the Series Make Visible

One Love centers on the marriage between Doğa, the daughter of the secular and highly educated Kıvılcım, and Fatih, the son of the wealthy and devout Ünal family. Their relationship brings two households together and creates conflicts over religion, gender, family authority, marriage, and everyday behavior.

The Ünal family is significant because it is not rural, poor, or socially marginal. It represents an affluent religious bourgeoisie. Piety, business success, consumption, and modern urban life coexist within the same household.

The series also shows differences within conservative identity. Pembe and Nursema represent different generations and styles of veiling. Abdullah and his younger brother Ömer embody different masculine relationships to faith, authority, and public life. Religious conservatism is no longer represented through a single figure or visual symbol.

Red Roses enters a more enclosed religious world through the fictional Faniler order. In Türkiye, such communities are generally described as tarikat: religious networks organized around spiritual authority but also connected through education, family relations, social support, and economic life.

Meryem was married at fourteen within the community and now tries to prevent her gifted daughter Zeynep from experiencing the same future. Their lives intersect with those of Levent, a secular Kemalist psychiatrist, and his family. The series portrays religious discourse, domestic discipline, education, hierarchy, and the everyday organization of communal life.

This attention to internal life has democratic significance. A pluralistic media culture cannot represent a major social group only as an object of fear, ridicule, or discussion by others. Both series invite viewers into worlds that earlier television usually kept at a distance.

Visibility Through a Secular Gaze

Greater visibility does not necessarily mean that the power to represent has been redistributed. The institutions and professional networks of mainstream television remain largely metropolitan and secular-coded. Conservative characters receive more screen time, but their lives are still often interpreted for an audience imagined as standing outside them.

This does not mean that artists can portray only identities identical to their own. The issue is not the personal identity of an individual writer. It concerns the wider structure of cultural production: which groups control resources, which experiences are considered self-explanatory, and which must be translated into a language acceptable to the cultural center?

The situation reflects a wider hegemonic tension in Türkiye. Religious-conservative actors possess major electoral, bureaucratic, and economic power, but political dominance has not produced complete cultural hegemony. Secular professionals remain influential in television, advertising, art, and entertainment.

The new representation of conservative life therefore has a double character. It recognizes a social identity previously excluded from popular culture, but it also responds to that identity’s emergence as a powerful audience and consumer group.

The regulatory controversies surrounding both series reveal another limit. One Love received a five-week broadcast suspension after a storyline in which Nursema is forced into marriage and pushed from a window on her wedding night. Although the regulator formally referred to violence against women, many viewers interpreted the severity of the punishment as a response to the series’ criticism of coercive gender relations within a conservative family.

Red Roses was also fined and temporarily suspended after religious organizations objected to its portrayal of an Islamic community. The regulator argued that the series violated “national and spiritual values.” These interventions suggest that religious identity may become visible, but critical representations of forced marriage, patriarchal authority, or institutional power remain politically contested.

One Love: Romance Across the Divide

The principal narrative device of One Love is romance between secular and conservative characters. Doğa and Fatih’s marriage establishes the story, and the same structure appears through Kıvılcım and Ömer, Alev and Abdullah, and Nursema and Umut.

Romance is an understandable device within television melodrama. It brings conflicting families into the same spaces and turns an abstract political division into intimate experience. The international title One Love expresses the promise that emotional attachment can reveal a common humanity beneath cultural difference.

Yet romance can also become a shortcut. Love and sexual attraction repeatedly appear to overcome differences rooted in gender, class, religion, family authority, and everyday practice. These structures do not disappear simply because two people desire one another.

Love is itself shaped by culture. A secular and a devout person can certainly fall in love, but they must still negotiate marriage, work, children, autonomy, dress, and family expectations. By repeatedly resolving social conflict through romantic coupling, the series risks personalizing structural tensions.

One Love creates an important space by presenting internal differences within an affluent conservative family. Its melodramatic dependence on romance, however, limits the depth of its cultural analysis.

Red Roses: Transformation Through Encounter

Red Roses offers a more layered narrative. It examines the tension between religious ideals and the material institutions of authority and economic power built around them. In this respect, it recalls the 2006 Turkish film Takva: A Man’s Fear of God, in which a deeply religious man experiences a spiritual crisis after becoming responsible for the property and finances of a religious order.

The strength of Red Roses lies in its refusal to construct a simple opposition between enlightened secularism and irrational religion. Its characters are internally divided and capable of transformation.

Cüneyd, the grandson of the order’s leader, is a mystical and philosophical figure who can remain open to difference. Levent is a secular psychiatrist but can communicate with people whose beliefs are far removed from his own. Meryem has been formed within the religious community, yet she cooperates with secular characters when her daughter’s future is at stake.

Suavi, Levent’s retired academic father, is one of the series’ most rigid Kemalist figures. He had opposed headscarved women’s access to universities, but Zeynep’s mathematical ability forces him to reconsider his assumptions. He becomes willing to support her education without demanding that she abandon her identity.

Birgül is equally important. After distancing herself from the religious order, she seeks an individual relationship with Islam and expresses a position close to Islamic feminism. Her presence demonstrates that criticism of patriarchal religious authority can emerge from within religious identity rather than only from secular outsiders.

In Red Roses, encounters often produce more meaningful change than romance. Characters are transformed because they must listen, negotiate, teach, care, and struggle alongside people they had previously treated as Other. Neither the secular nor the conservative world is represented as internally uniform.

Representation Without Final Reconciliation

Together, these series demonstrate how substantially Turkish television has changed. Conservative characters now occupy affluent homes, workplaces, schools, religious communities, and complex emotional worlds. They differ according to generation, class, gender, interpretation, and ambition.

Yet visibility does not end cultural conflict. One Love frequently imagines romance as the force capable of reconciling secular and conservative Türkiye. Red Roses offers a more demanding model in which coexistence emerges through ethical encounter and gradual transformation without requiring difference to disappear.

The central question is therefore not simply whether religious-conservative people are represented on television. It is under what conditions they become visible, through whose gaze they are interpreted, and whether representation grants them genuine complexity.