The political economy of Croatian television: Exploring the impact of Latin American telenovelas

This article explores the implications of the emerging new players in the global arena of telenovelas. Latin American telenovelas have had phenomenal success in the post-communist countries of Eastern Europe. There has been an effort to localize the genre of telenovelas in some of those countries. The Croatian case emerges as a specific example because of its recent trend in the domestic production of telenovelas. Studying the political-economic aspect of this imported genre by examining debates surrounding the domestically produced Villa Maria could help us understand some of the logic of the global media flow. Given the commercial development of broadcasting and the subsequent rise of U.S.- and Latin American-produced fiction, this article is an analysis of the political-economic and globalization debates that emerged in the Croatian press around domestically produced telenovela Villa Maria.