Introduction

The three of us met serendipitously at back-to-back academic conferences in Budapest and Amsterdam in the summer of 2009, where the idea for this collection of essays first developed. At “Beyond East and West: Two Decades of Media Transformation After the Fall of Communism” in Budapest, we gathered frequently between sessions, talking excitedly about papers on Eastern European popular television in a conference otherwise largely devoted to journalism, democratic theory and communications policy. A week later, at the “Ends of Television” conference in Amsterdam, we found ourselves equally excited about several papers on Eastern European television, in a conference devoted mainly to Western European and American case studies, theories and concerns.