ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the historical development of popular programming in Vietnamese national television. It explains how television serves as a crucial means to disseminate news, entertainment, and ideology, and more importantly, to establish and promote a novel sense of daily normalcy, regularity, and pleasure in post-reform Vietnam. The case of popular television demonstrates how Vietnam is actively open to the influence and profit of popular media, although this country remains a conservative place for journalism. Empirical inputs of this chapter are derived from archival research of various Vietnamese newspapers from 1990 to 2000 and semi-structured interviews with Vietnamese television producers and viewers from 2014 to 2016.
