Warner Bros. Discovery and Doğuş Team Up for Turkish Scripted Shows, Starting With 'Tuzlu Kahve'

Warner Bros. Discovery has struck a strategic partnership with Turkey's Doğuş Media Group to co-finance and co-broadcast Turkish scripted series, with a romantic comedy-drama called Tuzlu Kahve (Salted Love) lined up as the first title out of the gate Deadline.

Produced by Poll Films, Tuzlu Kahve will premiere on the free-to-air network Star TV, then land on HBO Max in Turkey and internationally 24 hours later Deadline. That sequencing — broadcast first, streaming second — is a windowing model that keeps the show available to terrestrial viewers (who watch via aerial, no subscription needed) while giving the streaming platform a near-simultaneous slot for its own subscribers.

Content produced under the partnership will not be exclusive to WBD or Doğuş, according to Deadline's reporting. That leaves the door open for the shows to be licensed to other platforms or broadcasters down the line.

The deal deepens a relationship that goes back more than a decade. In 2015, Discovery Communications — one of the companies that later merged to form Warner Bros. Discovery — formed a strategic relationship with Doğuş, appointing the Turkish group as its exclusive advertising sales representative in the country and acquiring the free-to-air frequency of CNBC-e Hollywood Reporter. That earlier arrangement was built around ad sales and channel infrastructure. The new partnership moves into scripted production — a different part of the pipeline, where the money and creative decisions happen earlier, at the commissioning stage.

WBD's local operation in Turkey is run by Deniz Şaşmaz Oflaz, who holds the title of Group Vice President, Local Original Productions Lead for Turkey, Italy and Spain, and Channels & Operations Lead for Turkey Deadline. On the Star TV side, the content director is Şebnem Aksoy Açıkalın Deadline.

WBD's footprint in Turkish streaming grew at the end of 2023, when the company bought the Turkish streaming service BluTV and subsequently rebranded it as HBO Max Deadline. That acquisition gave WBD an established local subscriber base and a library of Turkish-language originals to sit alongside its global catalogue.

For viewers, the practical effect is straightforward: Turkish scripted shows can now move from a free broadcast slot on Star TV to an HBO Max stream the next day, with WBD and Doğuş sharing the cost of making them. Whether Tuzlu Kahve finds an audience will depend on the same thing it always does — whether people tune in for the broadcast, click through on the platform, or both. No ratings data exists yet because the series has not aired.