ABSTRACT
Indonesian television production relies greatly on media narratives and forms, linked
in popular constellations and disembedded from those global sources that comprise
the broad mediascape accessible to producers and programmers (Barkin, 2004).1 In
this article, I will focus on a particular case study*the pilot episode of a travel program that was aired at TransTV’s first broadcast*in an effort to demonstrate how derived form and narrative can be selectively and creatively incorporated into
local programs, and the resultant shifts in popular meaning and audience subjectivity.
I will argue further that the ‘culture of production’ and its orientation toward intra-
group prestige, which differentially permeates areas of the production environment,
contributes to the use of particular media narratives and forms for purposes that
transform their semiotics in unexpected ways. The primary finding of this article,
which is contextualized from the case study to other areas of Indonesian television, is
that producers’ heavy reliance on global media narratives, combined with the
community emphasis on certain forms of prestige, has led to content that positions
local audiences as foreigners when ‘gazing’ toward regional Indonesian cultures and
markers of tradition. This foreignizing gaze , most easily observed in travel and labeled
‘lifestyle programming’, is latent across a large spectrum of the Indonesian
mediascape and has its basis in the histories, tensions and exigencies of Jakarta’s
production culture, fueled by multinational corporate sponsorship.2
