In February 2025, European Journal of Cultural Studies published a special issue entitled "Semi-Peripheral Europe," featuring a joint study by Veronika Hermann and László Strausz entitled "Past Imperfect: Transition Narratives, Popular Discourses, and The Informant. In the article, the authors examine the memory politics of the HBO series The Informant.
In the last decade, there has been an emerging scholarly and public interest in the Eastern European region’s geopolitical and cultural status, which was accompanied by a trend of locally developed and globally distributed Eastern European quality television series on SVoD platforms like Netflix and Max (formerly HBO). These contents have targeted cosmopolitan, international audiences, but they have utilized local themes and settings in order to make sense of the region’s turbulent past and present. They have initiated public and academic debates on the nature of post-socialist nostalgia, the question of moral responsibility, and on historical authenticity, and have also developed ways of understanding political processes in their cultural context. Scholars have approached these texts from the perspectives of transnationalism, cultural adaptation and cultural appropriation. They have argued that the television series are important spaces of making sense of the past.
After the appearance of other pay cable streamers in the early 2010s (Netflix, Sky and later Apple and Disney), HBO changed its business strategy in Europe; a response to the appearance of the competition that probably came with a significant delay. HBO’s European expansion coincided with critical and scholarly discussions that elaborate on potentialities for decolonization and de-westernization of global media productions and channel these concepts in a locally situated industrial and cultural milieu.
Introduced in April 2022 on HBO Max, Hungarian coming-of-age espionage dramedy set in the mid-1980s, The Informant fits seamlessly into the trend of Eastern European contents that utilize global waves of nostalgia and socialist allegories to reference contemporary political issues. In this article, we propose that due to the specific situation of the totally centralized Hungarian media industry, and its capacity to rearticulate history in favor of the populist vision of the Orbán regime, the series goes much further than the aforementioned global trend.
The television series effectively thematizes a fundamental doubt in the transition narrative as a teleological story with a universal moral lesson and injects an alternative interpretation of history into public discourses by proposing a third, critical space not overdetermined by the bipolar logic of contemporary right-wing populism. As such, the show utilizes a transnational – often highly stylized – image of socialism with the explicit goal of distancing itself from the discourses on individual moral responsibility, collaboration and resistance. The significance of this detachment consists in the fact that the language of moral responsibility has been effectively monopolized by the post-globalized, nationalist Hungarian state media, in which the forces of the nation are always cast in the roles of heroes, and anybody who does not agree as antiheroes. This in turn highlights the gap between the operational aesthetic of a transnational television series created for global audiences and the blind spots of the local cultural memory of the 1980s.