ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 examines two pairs of multilingual drama series produced during the last decade in Israel, Germany, and Spain (Catalonia), which reflect linguistic struggles related to the implementation of nation-building projects. The first pair of shows consists of Israeli TV series Shtisel (2013-2021) and German American miniseries Unorthodox (2020), two multilingual fiction series that feature a significant use of Yiddish and revolve around Ultra-Orthodox Jewish characters. The second pair of shows examined in this chapter involves two bilingual Catalan-Spanish television shows, Merlí: Sapere Aude (2019-2020) and Drama (2020), coproduced by public and private Spanish and Catalan companies.
The chapter makes two central arguments on the bilingual/multilingual hybrid-drama shows it examines. First, bilingual drama series are connected to recent past or present nation-building projects. Second, despite their different generic and cultural identities, it proposes to think of the pair of Yiddish multilingual series and Catalan youth drama series as glocal television content, which corresponds to, and reacts to, the deluge of violence and sex in both highbrow and lowbrow audiovisual fiction.
