Summary
A Round of Applause will not – and this is putting things mildly – be for everyone. But it doesn’t need to be, and those who do find some meaning in it will be well served by one of the most original productions Netflix has released this (or any) year.
I can say with a reasonable degree of confidence that nobody who watches A Round of Applause will have ever seen anything quite like it before. The Turkish Netflix series is a defiantly original and deeply metaphorical examination of parental anxiety, growing up, relationships, and more, all wrapped up in a formally daring production that frames each of Season 1’s six episodes as an experimental vignette with a distinct concept.
A significant chunk of those who watch this will hate it. That’s inevitable. Many will simply not understand it, but some, like me, will probably love it. At least, I think I love it. It’s difficult to tell.
As ever, having a legitimately original approach is worthy of some respect, if nothing else. It’s not hyperbole to say that A Round of Applause is unlike most other TV shows; I mean it genuinely. As someone who watches television for a literal job, I understandably watch a lot of television. I’ve never seen anything like this.
It never would have been made in the West. The Turkish film and TV industry has been quietly excellent for years, and for all the very legitimate complaints that can be leveled at platforms like Netflix, it’s undeniable that their eagerness to acquire international productions is a tremendous benefit to everyone. It’s entertaining for me to imagine A Round of Applause being innocently piped onto the televisions of people who don’t know what to make of it; those expecting a cookie-cutter parenting dramedy suddenly forced to reckon with this.
But what is this? On a very surface level, it’s about the relationship between Mehmet and Zeynep, a couple expecting their first child. It’s about their anxieties leading up to his birth and their various failings after he arrives. But it’s also about the child, Metin, whom we meet as a chain-smoking grown man in utero, wistful for his previous life inside an orange.
I get that this sounds ridiculous written down. Sometimes, it’s ridiculous in execution. A Round of Applause is often metaphorical but never signposts its flights of fancy, so you regularly run into situations where, as in the premiere, a seemingly normal situation morphs into a nightmarish and off-kilter one. Even when the characters awake from dreams – a good chunk of that premiere is one of Mehmet’s – the weirdness just continues, as though a character simply having been asleep doesn’t suffice as an explanation. It’s fractal eccentricity, each layer being peeled back to reveal even stranger stuff beneath.
You can’t trust what you’re seeing. You can’t trust a single character’s point of view, since are all informed by their anxieties and delusions. The plot, such as there is one, exists in the gaps between ideas, where sometimes reality breaks the surface like it’s coming up for air. A profound moment of wordless understanding between two people who are realizing they no longer love one another immediately follows a five-year-old demonically reciting verse.
And yet in an odd way, the show makes perfect sense. I feel like I got what it was trying to say in (almost) every instance. Perhaps being a parent helps. Or, perhaps being a critic with a word count to meet prompted me to read too much into it. But I’m adamant the meaning is there if you’re open to finding it. And I’m sure that no other show has ever packaged it in quite this way.
A truly original production
As I mentioned up top, plenty of people are going to hate A Round of Applause, and it’s such an out-there production that I wouldn’t blame them for it. How well it’ll do for Netflix is anyone’s guess, though one imagines the easy answer would be “not well at all”. It’s too strange for a mainstream audience, and too slight for almost everyone else.
But there will be a middle category, which is what I belong to, who rightly or wrongly feel they get it, and think everyone should check it out for themselves to see if they do too. We could be imagining it, granted, and my interpretation of the various ideas might be different from yours. But maybe that’s the point, and maybe that’s much more interesting than a typical yay or nay. The word count’s met now, and yet I’m still thinking about this oddball little show. Take that as you will.
What did you think of A Round of Applause? Comment below.
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