Italian Fiction as Viewed from a Distance: Anomalies in the Correlation between National and Regional Success

The article analyzes the regional consumption of mainstream Italian TV series, covering the four-year period from 2016-2019. It underlines the great heterogeneity of television fiction consumption across Italy, and it demonstrates how the correlation between national and regional success is often subject to the influence of factors that can produce anomalies. The most important factors responsible for anomalies appear to be the regions where the series are set, and the broadcasting channels. The article also compares and quantifies such phenomena to understand how the national success of Italian series can benefit from the polarization of consumption happening in the various regions of the country. As a matter of fact, the popularity of Italian mainstream TV series appears to be the result of the mutual entanglement of different regional patterns of taste and consumption. Moreover, audience consumption behaviors, while being interesting from an economic point a view, can also be good indicators of the level of socio-cultural fragmentation of a country.