TV entertainment is back to distract Russians from grim reality of war

After months of wall-to-wall coverage of the war in Ukraine, entertainment shows are returning to Russian TV to tempt back viewers who have tired of relentless invasion news.

There’s the talent show We Sing in the Kitchen, The Whole Country, where contestants compete for millions of roubles while performing drinking songs. Here, you might be treated to the sight of a small boy warbling a hit by the Soviet rock band Kino as he attempts to win around £43,000 for his family.

For those not so keen on Kino, perhaps the return of two popular crime dramas to Russia’s Channel One will prove diverting. The state television giant will broadcast a new series of Trigger, a drama about a psychologist attempting to investigate the death of a client. And in Silver Spoon, audiences will return to the story of a reckless wealthy youth who finds himself in legal trouble. It’s a redemption tale for the masses as his father pulls strings to get him a training job in the police instead of a prison sentence.

As millions of Russians grow increasingly tired of the constant coverage of President Putin’s “special operation” in Ukraine, state media authorities finally ruled that things need shaking up a bit.

“Throughout all these months, we have been primarily engaged in discussing, analysing, and informing our audience,” said Konstantin Ernst, Channel One’s chief executive. “We will continue to do this now, but at the weekends we will begin the resumption of entertainment projects.” Weekday scheduling for Channel One will still show almost constant news broadcasts.

 “People are tired of propaganda,” said Max Alyukov, a postdoctoral fellow at King’s College London and the co-author of a recent report on Russian media trends. “In spring, TV managers cancelled entertainment shows, TV series and replaced them with political content.”

Alyukov suggested that while television audiences were attentive at the beginning of the war, it did not last — and the Kremlin took note. “Our own data suggests that the amount of war propaganda on TV decreased twice between February and July,” he said. “This suggests that state media understand that the amount and intensity of propaganda on TV is alienating the audience.”

Before Russia’s invasion in February, the three main television stations — Channel One, Rossiya 1 and NTV — were watched by 86 per cent of the population. This fell to 65 per cent by last month according to Rosmir, an independent research centre in Moscow.

“There’s a number of indications of the growing fatigue from the incessant war coverage on Russian TV on the side of the Russian public,” said Maria Snegovaya, a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University’s centre for Russian studies. “Channels noticed a radical decline,” she said, adding that the Kremlin is scared of losing these audiences. “TV in Russia remains the key tool of propaganda, brainwashing, in ensuring people’s loyalty to the regime.”

Despite the internet supplanting television in Moscow, TV remains the most common source of information for Russians more generally, according to the Levada Centre, an independent pollster. In April, 67 per cent of Russians said it was their main source of information.

The shift to entertainment programming may mean less of a direct political message during prime viewing hours, but politics will invariably slide into entertainment, Snegovaya said. “They may be infusing the amusement content with this political messaging.”

She raises the hypothetical scenario of a Russian soldier appearing on a popular dating show to tangentially discuss Ukrainian Nazis. In one recent comedy sketch show, KVN (similar to Saturday Night Live in the US), an actor asks: “Are you going abroad? Travel around Russia. It expands every year!”

The war in Ukraine is dragging on, with both sides anticipating a protracted conflict. Western estimates suggest that up to 80,000 of Putin’s forces may have been killed or wounded. Since the invasion began the Kremlin’s crackdown on television staff who question the war has intensified.

At the beginning of August, Russia’s state duma blacklisted 142 producers, directors or journalists who were either “against” the special operation in Ukraine or “silent” on the issue. Among those on the list was Ernst, the Channel One chief, whose original status, “against” was crossed out, with a question mark placed in the box instead.

One of the most memorable acts of protest on Russian television during the war was when Marina Ovsyannikova, an editor at Channel One, burst on to the set of the live broadcast of the nightly news and shouted “Stop the war. No to war,” while holding a sign saying: “Don’t believe the propaganda. They’re lying to you here.” It was signed in English: “Russians against the war.”

Last month, Ovsyannikova was placed under house arrest pending a trial related to another anti-war protest outside the Kremlin. She faces up to a decade behind bars for spreading false news about the military.

Meanwhile, the Kremlin revoked Novaya Gazeta’s licence to publish inside Russia last week, despite the editor-in-chief Dmitry Muratov winning the Nobel Peace Prize last year. Muratov called the ruling a “political hit job”.

In another sign of Putin’s crackdown on dissent, on Monday, Ivan Safronov, a correspondent who worked for the newspapers Kommersant and Vedomosti, was given a 22-year jail term after being convicted of treason charges unrelated to the war in Ukraine.

Filming on We Sing in the Kitchen, The Whole Country has been going on throughout the summer. However, if Ernst is hoping his name will be erased from the duma’s blacklist, he may do well to scale back the Kino songs. During widescale protests in Belarus in 2020, their 1989 song Changes! became an anthem of the political opposition.

On talent shows during a war, it pays to be careful of the songs you allow Russians to sing.

Bread and circuses

• The Roman satirist Juvenal wrote that the people had abdicated from their civic duties and now hoped “for just two things: bread and circuses” (Will Pavia writes). They were given both by a series of Roman emperors, in what historians tend to view as an effort to distract and entertain a disenfranchised populace.
• In the late years of the reign of Elizabeth I, amid a series of poor harvests and brooding social unrest, a new theatre-going public was treated to a series of history plays by William Shakespeare, that were dazzlingly entertaining, but also reinforced the idea that the Tudors rescued England from the chaotic era of Henry VI and the villainy of Richard III.
• The novels of Jane Austen, mostly composed during the Napoleonic Wars, from 1793 to 1815, contain plentiful allusions to the seemingly endless conflict but largely avoid mentioning it directly. Some believe that this reticence towards the war made her works a welcome refuge.
• During the Great Depression in the United States as radio rose to become the medium of mass communication, the vaudevillian comic Jack Benny reinvented himself as the presenter of a variety show that made him the butt of many of its jokes, as a vain and hopeless penny-pincher, struggling through dramas at home and at work.
• The West Wing’s optimistic vision of politicians and politics debuted a month before George W Bush was elected president. Many believed that it became required viewing for a generation of American liberals who saw in it the government they wished they had.
• As the coronavirus pandemic reached the US, in the spring of 2020, and large parts of the country were shut down, the Netflix documentary Tiger King became a sensation, with millions binge-watching the show.