Turkey's TV Housewives Are Desperate, Too

The Desperate Housewives of Wisteria Lane have a new address: Istanbul’s Gul Street. In Russia, Peg and Al Bundy of Married … With Children have morphed into Gena and Dasha, who squabble in their apartment in Yekaterinburg rather than a suburban home near Chicago. And Sony this summer released an Arabic version of Everybody Loves Raymond to coincide with the heavy Ramadan TV-viewing season, proving that dysfunctional families know no borders.

For decades, American situation comedies and dramas dubbed into other languages have been standard fare on TV screens worldwide. Now broadcasters in Turkey, Russia, and emerging markets are increasingly padding their prime-time schedules with locally produced versions of shows licensed from U.S. studios. The close-to-home strategy is working. The Istanbul housewives—Yasemin, Nermin, Elif, Zelis, and Emel, known locally as Desperate Women—star in the eighth-most watched series on Turkish TV courtesy of Walt Disney, which owns global rights to the show. And Sony has remade Married … With Children a dozen times for international markets. “Right now we see that in the Middle East, the TV world has an exploding appetite for everything,” says Andrea Wong, president of international production at Sony Pictures Television.