Istanbul prodco Ay Yapim has been at the forefront of the boom in Turkish scripted TV exports, with the CEE playing an important part in that growth. Now CEO Kerem Çatay is on the look-out for international coproductions.
Kerem Çatay, CEO of Ay Yapim, has to go back almost two decades to name his production company’s first big international break.
Kerem Çatay
Entitled Fallen Leaves, the drama series started airing on Turkey’s Kanal D in 2006 and ran for five seasons, ending up selling into more than 50 countries worldwide. But the story of its global success began just over the border, in Bulgaria.
“I remember getting the news that the show was getting such an incredible share of viewership there. It was so successful,” says Çatay. “It’s how it all started: neighbour by neighbour, countries that didn’t have any idea of such content before.”
Fallen Leaves, adapted from the 1940 novel of the same name (Yaprak Dökümü in Turkish) is a family saga typical of a genre that has made Turkish TV drama ubiquitous at home – and so successful around the globe.
Çatay can’t quite put his finger on why the Turks are so good at storytelling, but he has no doubt that the intense competition at home has played a part in honing Turkish drama into something that has international appeal.
“The six broadcasters in Turkey are all airing Turkish dramas. The competition is huge. I don’t know of any other country in Europe that is airing six dramas each and every night,” he says. “The audience in Turkey is so quick to change drama if they find a better, more interesting or more exciting one. So, each and every day, each and every minute, the competition is so high, and somehow we have managed – we don’t know how, to be honest – to have this way of storytelling that works as well in Dubai and Saudi Arabia as in Vietnam, Chile, Bulgaria or Greece.”
For Çatay, the son of two successful Turkish media execs, TV and storytelling has always been present in his life. “When I was a kid, my father was head of drama at Turkish public broadcaster TRT, and my mother was directing [the Turkish version of] Sesame Street. So I mostly grew up on sets,” he recounts.
Fallen Leaves (Yaprak Dökümü) was adapted from a 1940 novel
After studying film and TV at UCLA, Çatay returned to Turkey and set up a production company with his father. However, the first two years were “a disaster,” he recalls, in part due to a financial crisis in Turkey. But in 2005, the company was rebranded as Ay Yapim (Moon Productions in Turkish) and the prodco’s fortunes took a decidedly better turn.
Today, as Ay Yapim approaches its 20th anniversary, it counts itself among the biggest production companies in Turkey with over 4,000 hours of programming, 60 TV series and 22 movies under its belt.
Meanwhile, its record on Turkish TV exports is difficult to surpass. Between the years 2016 and 2020, the Istanbul-based production company recorded the highest TV series exports of any prodco in Turkey, and in 2017 it became the recipient of the first International Emmy for a Turkish drama for its telenovela Endless Love, which has been sold into over 60 territories, including Eastern Europe. This was followed in 2023 by a second International Emmy for Family Secrets (Yargi), which has been picked up in 150 countries.
According to Çatay, international sales changed everything for Turkish drama. The trend began almost two decades ago, but it has become a veritable boom in recent years. According to data firm Parrot Analytics, between 2020 and 2023, global demand for Turkish scripted series grew by 184%, making it the world’s third largest exporter of that genre, after the US and UK.
International Emmy winner Family Secrets (Yargi)
The importance of this development is not lost on Çatay and is underscored by international distribution joint venture Madd Entertainment, created in 2018 by Ay Yapim and another Turkish production powerhouse, Medyapim.
“At the beginning everyone said the boom was going to last only five years, then seven, then 10. And now it’s almost 20 years,” says the CEO. “It started with MENA, then with the Balkans, then Lat Am and then the rest.”
Indeed, stretching right back to Fallen Leaves’ ratings success in Bulgaria, the Balkans have proven to be exceptionally fertile ground in Ay Yapim’s international export drive. In 2016, for example, Endless Love (Kara Sevda), became the most watched series in Greece, after it began broadcasting on Mega TV, achieving a rating of 24%.
“It started with Bulgaria and Greece, then, step by step, neighbouring countries, because what’s working with your neighbour, the other countries then want it as well,” explains Çatay.
2016’s Endless Love (Kara Sevda) was the most watched series in Greece
Ay Yapim’s success in licensing original dramas in the Balkans is only half the stor, however. The ratings successes achieved by the prodco’s TV series in the region has encouraged local broadcasters to create their own adaptations of them.
This is the case in Romania, where two Ay Yapim series – revenge thriller Ezel and action drama Içerde (Insider) – have each been remade by Romanian broadcaster Pro TV, titled Vlad and Clanul respectively.
“The remake of Içerde in Romania was very successful. It went to three seasons, whereas the original ran for only 39 episodes,” says Çatay.
In Greece, meanwhile, private TV network ANT1 was so eager to make its own version of Ay Yapim’s awarding-winning Yargi that it didn’t, as is customary, wait until the original series had finished airing on its home turf before buying the rights. The drama is about a respected public prosecutor and a young attorney who are forced to work together on a murder case.
“Normally the show needs to end in Turkey, or at least be two seasons in, but it was about the fourth or fifth episode of the first season when we got the call from Greece,” remembers Çatay.
Ezel was remade in Romania by Pro TV as Vlad
Today almost all of Ay Yapim’s dramas are licensed across not just the Balkans, but the whole of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), but it wasn’t always that way. In the early days there was resistance, recalls Çatay: “I remember, years and years ago, when we first offered our shows to the Czech Republic to broadcast, they said no. But when they did well in Hungary, they decided to try.”
Çatay is now happy to include the whole region as one of its longest-standing export markets. But the strong ties between Ay Yapim and CEE are not exclusive to TV exports and format sales. Last year the company completed filming period drama El Turco (The Turk) at Korda Studios in Hungary.
The English-language TV series commissioned by Disney+, has an international cast headed by Turkish star Can Yaman and is inspired by the novel El Turco (II Viyana Kusatmasinin Bilinmeyen Yönleri) by Orhan Yeniaras.
Period drama El Turco (The Turk) was filmed in Hungary
It tells the story of Ottoman soldier Balaban Aga, who, after being wounded in the Second Siege of Vienna in 1683, is cared for by the villagers of Moana in Northern Italy, where he settles and later organises a successful peasant uprising against the overlords and their harsh taxes.
“This is a real story that nobody knows about,” explains Çatay. “There’s a village in northern Italy and in August they still celebrate Turkish week because this guy saved them.”
El Turco is now in post-production with a release expected later this year, at which point Çatay expects the series to “do well” not just in Western Europe but in CEE “because of the talent.”
Having seen the appetite to remake Ay Yapim’s TV series in the CEE and beyond, looking ahead, Çatay is keen to move away from straight remakes of its TV series and instead be involved as a coproducer. A case in point is Spain’s Secuoya Studios, which is coproducing the Turkish prodco’s original format Brave & Beautiful for Atresmedia in Spain.
The series, which will run to 60×40’ episodes, is set to begin shooting in the Canary Islands in mid 2024. Ay Yapim and Secuoya have joint worldwide distribution rights to the remake. “We will not be giving up remake rights anymore; we want to be partners now,” says Çatay. “We have a good library to choose from.”
