Organize İşler, BKM and the Class of Comedy
In Whose Safe Is Karun's Treasure?
In Whose Safe Is Karun's Treasure?
Organize İşler, BKM and the Class of Comedy
Two kinds of comedy in the same country: one gets eight episodes on Netflix, the other gets handcuffed behind the back at the airport
Summary: What Are We Saying, in Five Sentences?
Dear Young Comrades,
- Organize İşler: Karun Hazinesi (released in English as Money Trap: The Karun Treasure) is an eight-episode series produced by BKM and written by Yılmaz Erdoğan, released only on Netflix on 16 October. We watched it over the weekend. Its story is scattered, its script repeats itself, its scene transitions are disjointed, and it has no cinematic flavour. There are a few good actors, such as Uraz Kaygılaroğlu and Kıvanç Tatlıtuğ, but they too have surrendered to a weak script.
- The problem is not only aesthetic. The series portrays the mafia and the gang as a lovable "family", sells the dream of getting rich without labour, and turns society's cheapest clichés into material for laughs. It does this in a country where everyone knows how intertwined gangs and politics are.
- BKM's decision to put the work not into cinemas but straight onto a dollar-based global subscription is also a class choice. On 3 October Netflix raised its subscription prices in Turkey by more than 30 per cent. This choice determines who counts as an audience and who is left outside.
- The comedy of the Cem Yılmaz and Yılmaz Erdoğan type is not "unaware of class". On the contrary, it speaks from within class and in its favour. It turns society's wounds into a commodity to be laughed at and sells it, while never angering power.
- In the same months the comedian Deniz Göktaş was arrested on 3 July over a stage show. On the day a release order was issued he was re-arrested on another charge, and on 28 September he was released along with prison sentences. One of the charges was "praising" a gang. In a country where a production that makes a gang look lovable on screen is rewarded, while a comedian who mocks a gang on stage is put in handcuffs, comedy is not neutral. The class position is clear: we openly criticise bad comedy, and we stand unconditionally beside every comedian against censorship. We also organise our own laughter ourselves.
Now let us turn to the details.
One Weekend, Eight Episodes: What Did We Watch?
Let us first talk about it as a piece of work; ideological criticism must not become an excuse for avoiding criticism of the craft.
According to Netflix's announcement, a mysterious treasure map surfaces in the series. Asım Noyan and his gang enter a dangerous race against ruthless rivals and international treasure hunters. The adventure runs from the streets of Istanbul into underground tunnels. The cast is large: Yılmaz Erdoğan, Kıvanç Tatlıtuğ, Ezgi Mola, Uraz Kaygılaroğlu, Rıza Kocaoğlu, Ersin Korkut, Demet Akbağ and others. The director is Şenol Sönmez, the producer Necati Akpınar, the writer Yılmaz Erdoğan. (Netflix Turkey, in Turkish)
What we watched can be summed up briefly like this:
- There is no story, only a situation. A treasure, a map, everyone chasing after it. No structure has been built that could be spread over eight episodes. The episodes do not move forward within themselves; the same cycle of jokes repeats.
- The editing is disjointed. The scenes do not connect to one another, and the transitions are arbitrary. The viewer thinks not about how one scene leads to the next, but about when it will end.
- There is no cinematic flavour. The scenes look like sets. Location, light and camera do not build a world; they merely offer an image with the cleanliness of a commercial.
- The acting is wasted. Uraz Kaygılaroğlu's sense of timing and the gift for caricature Kıvanç Tatlıtuğ showed in 2019's Sazan Sarmalı shine here and there. But the script gives them nothing to hold on to.
The first Organize İşler film in 2005 had, to some extent, a genuine satire of swindling. Sazan Sarmalı, fourteen years later, turned this into a brand. Karun Hazinesi is selling the brand itself. There is no longer a story, there is a product line.
This is no accident. In the next section we will look at its class logic.
Asım Noyan's Class: Making the Gang Look Lovable
The romance of the lumpen
In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx describes the lumpenproletariat as a layer cut off from the lower strata of society, living not by labour but by cunning, swindling and patronage, and says that this layer is always a reserve force that those in power can use. Bonaparte's "Society of 10 December" is exactly that.
The whole world of the Organize İşler series is built on the romance of this layer. Asım Noyan is a boss, and his gang is a "family". Between them there is loyalty, tenderness and banter. The person swindled is either a fool or someone who had it coming. The one who steals is a lovable anti-hero.
Young comrades, the problem is not that the bad character is lovable; art can make evil look lovable too, and it does. The problem is that the gang is never questioned as a social relationship. Whom does the gang feed on, whom does it serve, what ties does it have with the state and with capital? The series does not ask these questions. The gang is presented as an ordinary way of life whose relationships remain invisible.
In this country the gang is not a subject for comedy but a form of government
Over the last ten years in this country, the relationship between gangs and politics has stopped being a conspiracy theory. Ministers were named in a mafia leader's videos. The names of gangs entered young people's conversations and the maps of fear in neighbourhoods. We saw it in our piece on Ankara too: in Ostim and in Siteler, young labour is squeezed between gangs and drugs.
In such a country, turning the gang into an eight-episode entertainment product is not innocent. It is normalisation. Gang life is told not from the point of view of the family in the neighbourhood that has lost its child, but from that of the subscriber watching from the living-room sofa.
Karun: The fairy tale of wealth without labour
Karun (Korah) is the figure in the holy scriptures who boasts of his wealth and in the end is swallowed by the earth along with it. In everyday Turkish the expression "as rich as Karun" is said not with admiration but as a warning.
The series turns this figure upside down. The treasure is something found, not earned. Wealth comes not from labour but from a map, from luck and from cunning. This is capitalism's oldest and best-loved fairy tale: "making it big". The lottery, crypto, betting, the dream of "getting rich in a single move". What is sold to the millions living below the minimum wage is exactly this dream.
The story of the real Karun Treasure, however, is far more instructive; but it does not appear in the series. In the 1960s, artefacts dug out by illegal excavations from the Lydian tumuli of the village of Güre in Uşak were smuggled abroad and sold to the Metropolitan Museum in New York. After a long legal struggle, Turkey got the artefacts back in 1993. Then it came to light that the most famous piece in the Uşak Museum, a golden winged seahorse brooch, had been replaced with a fake in the 2000s.
So the real story contains peasant poverty, a smuggling network, international collector capital, the museum's own bureaucracy and the plunder of public property. The story of the real Karun treasure is a class story. BKM chose to tell a map and a gang instead. The story not chosen is also a choice.
The cliché factory
The series' comedy is built on a template: the provincial is naive, the woman is either decoration or danger, the foreigner is either a sucker or a crook, and "our boys" are cunning but good-hearted. This template gives the viewer a feeling of belonging somewhere: That's how we are, what can you do?
Gramsci calls this common sense: the dominant way of thinking speaking through the mouths of the people, as truths "everyone knows". Cliché comedy reproduces common sense by making people laugh. The one who laughs does not question the cliché; he affirms it. Laughter here works not as criticism but as affirmation.
BKM: The Anatomy of a Comedy Company
From a cultural centre to a vertical monopoly
BKM was founded in the mid-1990s by Necati Akpınar and Yılmaz Erdoğan under the name Beşiktaş Kültür Merkezi (Beşiktaş Cultural Centre). At first it was a stage and a company of actors. Today it gathers the whole production chain of comedy under one roof:
- Raw material: Workshops and stage programmes where new comedians are trained.
- Production: Stage shows, television sketch programmes, series.
- Distribution: Cinema films, deals with digital platforms.
- Brand: Serialised product lines such as "Organize İşler" and "Güldür Güldür".
This is not a cultural centre but a vertically integrated comedy company. Here comedy stops being something an artist says to society and becomes a commodity the company puts on the market. And the first rule of commodity logic is this: the product must not anger the person who will buy it. The most important people it must not anger are the sponsor, the channel owner, the regulator and those in power. The audience comes after.
2019: Between the cinema and Netflix
This company's relationship with Netflix is not new. In 2019, before Organize İşler: Sazan Sarmalı was released, a dispute broke out between BKM and the Mars Cinema Group. The issue was that cinemas were selling tickets in "deal" packages bundled with popcorn and drinks. BKM postponed the release and sold the film to Netflix. In the meantime Parliament passed a legal amendment separating ticket sales from food and drink sales and making box-office figures transparent. The film opened in cinemas on 1 February 2019 and was released on Netflix shortly afterwards. (Habertürk, in Turkish)
Let us see the class content of this dispute: it was a fight between two capitals over the division of box-office rent. Production capital and cinema capital fought, and the law regulated their fight. The cinemagoer asking about the price of a ticket, or the cinema worker, had no side in this fight.
2026: Straight to subscription
Seven years later, BKM put the same brand straight onto a global subscription without it ever passing through a cinema. This is what that means:
| Cinema | Global subscription platform | |
|---|---|---|
| Access | A single ticket, a one-off payment | A monthly subscription, continuous payment |
| Price | Local market, deals and discount days | Indexed to the dollar; on 3 October 2026 an increase of more than 30 per cent in Turkey (basic plan from 189.99 TL to 259.99 TL) |
| Audience | The neighbourhood cinema, a collective experience, school and workplace groups | The individual screen at home, content recommended by the algorithm |
| Revenue model | Box office; the producer's income tied to audience numbers | An up-front payment from the platform; the risk passes from the producer to the platform |
| Oversight | Audience reaction, the cinema, criticism | The platform's data dashboard; "hours viewed" |
| Whose property | A shared hall, shared laughter | The subscriber's "right of access"; the content belongs to the platform |
(Netflix price rise: Habertürk, in Turkish)
The platform model gives the producer a guaranteed, up-front income. The producer does not have to persuade the audience; persuading the platform is enough. Whether the audience likes it or not is not as direct a sanction as the box office. That is why even a weak script can be a successful "deal". This is also the economic reason behind the aesthetic criticism at the start of this piece: in product-line logic, quality is a cost item.
On the audience's side, this is what happens: a brand once presented as the people's comedy is now the property of households that can pay the monthly fee. For the millions who cannot pay, or who have to share a password, laughter too becomes a subscription item.
Let us say one thing honestly here: we do not romanticise the cinema against Netflix. The Mars Cinema Group is also a capital group. The issue is not "which boss", but the question of whose property culture is.
Cem Yılmaz, Yılmaz Erdoğan: "Unaware of Class"?
At first glance it seems reasonable to call these names "unaware of class". It looks like a comedy disconnected from the agenda, amusing itself, in which it is never clear who is doing what.
But young comrades, we need to make a correction here: This comedy is not unaware of class; it is right inside it. It simply does not say which class it sides with.
The illusion of "all of us"
For a long time Cem Yılmaz's stage comedy was observational comedy: small situations we all live through, shared oddities, "our people". In its early years this comedy really did create a shared language. But the category "all of us" is a category that erases classes. A minimum-wage worker and his boss, a tenant and a landlord, a courier and a customer laugh at the same thing inside the same "we". While they laugh, the gulf between them becomes invisible.
The cinema and series world of Yılmaz Erdoğan does the same job in another way: either a nostalgic, sentimental tale of provincial Anatolia or, as in Organize İşler, a lovable lumpen world. In both cases labour, exploitation and property are absent from the stage. There is either an innocence left in the past or the dream of making it big without labour.
Profiting from society's wounds
How does this comedy turn society's wounds into money? We see four mechanisms:
- Turning anger into laughter. A real problem is taken: swindling, gangs, corruption, injustice. Then this problem is placed inside a lovable character. On screen people laugh at what in reality they should be angry about. The anger drains away; the problem stays where it was.
- Turning cliché into a commodity. Society's prejudices mean a ready-made market. The way to sell to the widest audience without disturbing anyone is to repeat what that audience already believes.
- Never angering power. The target of this comedy always stands below or alongside: the naive provincial, the bewildered civil servant, the petty crook. What stands above is rarely the target. When it is, the criticism is of a vague "system" that names no names.
- Merging with advertising. For years these names and companies have been the advertising faces of big corporations. When a comedian's face becomes identified with the campaign of a mobile operator or a bank, it is also clear whom that comedy will avoid angering.
Erşan Kuneri and Bahçeli: Where the line is drawn
In June 2022, Cem Yılmaz's Netflix series Erşan Kuneri became the target of MHP leader Devlet Bahçeli: "Netflix has now overstepped its bounds." (Cumhuriyet, in Turkish) This shows us something too: comedy within the order is also exposed from time to time to the moralising anger of those in power. But there is a difference. The series stayed on air, the actor was not detained, and no one was taken from the airport handcuffed behind the back.
This difference is no accident. The next section is about exactly that.
Deniz Göktaş: The Other Comedy in the Same Country
What happened?
Deniz Göktaş uploaded his show "Ölü Deniz" ("Dead Sea"), staged at Harbiye, to YouTube. The show dealt critically with domestic politics, police operations and President Erdoğan. The video was soon viewed around 10 million times, and then an access ban was imposed. Göktaş was detained at Istanbul Airport on his return from abroad. (Medyascope, in Turkish)
The chronology is as follows:
- 2–3 July 2026: On 2 July he was detained at the airport; on 3 July he was arrested on charges of "insulting the President" and "inciting the public to hatred and hostility", and sent to the high-security prison in Çorlu.
- 28 August 2026: On appeal, a release order was issued. Before Göktaş could leave prison he was re-arrested on a charge of "praising a crime and a criminal", on the grounds that a section of the show praised a known criminal group (the "Daltons"). His lawyer was not informed. (bianet, in Turkish)
- 31 August 2026: On the prosecution's appeal he was also re-arrested on the original charges.
- September 2026: The indictment was accepted; a prison sentence of more than 12 years was sought. (Evrensel, in Turkish)
- 28 September 2026: At the first hearing he was sentenced to 11 months and 20 days for "insulting the President" and 7 months and 15 days for "degrading religious values"; he was acquitted of "praising a crime and a criminal" and released. (Medyascope, in Turkish)
We made a detailed assessment of this process earlier in the piece The Deniz Göktaş Case and the Class of Humor. Here we focus only on the comparison.
Praising the gang, selling the gang
Note this, young comrades: a comedian is charged with "praising a crime and a criminal" and arrested over a few sentences he said on stage about a gang. In the end he is acquitted of this charge, but he spends a month in prison because of it.
In the same country, an eight-episode series that portrays a gang and its boss as a lovable, loyal, tender "family" goes on air on the world's biggest streaming platform without attracting the attention of a single prosecutor.
If the law treats the same act differently, the measure is no longer the act but who the actor is. As we have written before: if a legal rule changes according to the person when it is applied, it is no longer a legal rule but an instrument of classification.
Two comedies, two class positions
| BKM / platform comedy | Deniz Göktaş's stage |
|---|---|
| A company's product line; brand, series, sequel | A comedian's own voice, his own stage |
| Income: the platform's up-front payment, advertising, sponsors | Income: stage tickets, independent publishing |
| Target: the "naive", the "cunning", the "provincial" below | Target: power above, police operations, the judiciary |
| The gang is a lovable "family" | The gang is mocked in its relationship with power |
| Turns anger into laughter and drains it | Gives anger a language through laughter |
| Does not anger power; at most gets a moralising scolding | Angers power; detention, arrest, sentence |
| Result: a subscription price rise, a new season | Result: 88 days in detention, a prison sentence |
When reading the table, do not forget: this is not a "good comedian, bad comedian" distinction. We do not have to defend every joke Deniz Göktaş makes; he too may have sides to be debated and criticised. The issue is the social position of comedy. One is produced and rewarded within the limits of power; the other is punished for pushing those limits.
The Class Position: What Exactly Are We Saying?
Young comrades, in debates like this it is easy to fall into two errors. The first is to say "there's no accounting for taste" and push culture outside politics. The second is to declare everything we dislike an "enemy product" that ought to be banned. We reject both.
Our position has five points:
1. Entertainment is a worker's right, and bad entertainment is an insult to him. A worker who works six days a week and comes home tired in the evening needs to laugh. This need is nothing to be looked down on. But precisely for that reason, selling him a careless script, a clichéd world and the fairy tale of "making it big" is disrespectful to his intelligence and his labour. The people's comedy cannot be a comedy that looks down on the people.
2. Criticism is public and free; censorship is applied to no one. We criticise Organize İşler openly and harshly. But we would never want this series banned, RTÜK (the broadcasting regulator) to step in, or an investigation opened in the name of "morality". Bahçeli's anger at Erşan Kuneri is not our criticism; it is reactionary moral policing. Criticism is the people's weapon; censorship is the weapon of those in power.
3. The comedian's freedom is unconditional. Deniz Göktaş's case is not a "personal case". Through it a message is sent to every young comedian who will go on stage, every student who will upload a video to YouTube, every worker who will make fun of the boss at work. Standing in solidarity with Göktaş is defending our own right to laugh.
4. The silence of comedians within the order is also a position. Expecting a strong, open voice of solidarity from Cem Yılmaz, Yılmaz Erdoğan and the like when a colleague is taken from the airport handcuffed behind the back is not expecting them to be "revolutionaries". It is the most basic professional honour. This silence shows which class position they speak from.
5. We organise our own laughter ourselves. Turkey's tradition of popular comedy and theatre is rich: from ortaoyunu and the meddah storytellers to Dostlar Tiyatrosu, from Levent Kırca's Olacak O Kadar to the amateur stages of neighbourhood cultural centres. The problem is not a lack of talent but the ownership of the means and of the stage. When the stage belongs to the company, the platform belongs to the company and distribution belongs to the company, comedy too stays within the company's limits.
Concrete Tasks
Our proposals for putting what we have said into practice:
- Let us write and talk. Let us discuss the productions we watch with a class eye. Let a discussion after a "film/series night" become a habit in the union hall, the student club, the association. The questions are simple: Who is laughing, who is being laughed at, who wins, who pays?
- Let us follow the Göktaş case. Let us follow the appeal process, share the reports of journalists who attend the hearings, and support the initiatives that keep a record of censorship cases.
- Let us grow local stages. Let us support the amateur theatre in the neighbourhood, stand-up open-mic nights, and workers' theatre initiatives. A ticket can change more than a platform subscription.
- Let us see the set and stage workers. Behind every production we see on screen there are set workers struggling with long working hours, insecure contracts and lack of organisation. The union organising of film and television workers is the invisible but most important link in this debate.
- Let us explain the platform economy. Let us discuss subscription price rises, dollar-based pricing and production geared to "hours viewed" together with our other pieces on platform capitalism.
- Let us produce our own comedy. Fanzines, short videos, cartoons, sketches. The knowledge commons can be built not only in software but in laughter too.
The Treasure Map Is Ours
All the heroes of the series are chasing a map. Whoever finds the treasure will get rich; the others will go home empty-handed.
Young comrades, our map is a different one. Our treasure is not in an underground tunnel but in the shared labour of people who work together, think together and laugh together. That treasure fits neither on Netflix's servers nor in a company's product line.
Let us remember the story of Karun: he boasted of his wealth and in the end was swallowed by the earth along with it. The real lesson of this tale is not to chase wealth, but to question in whose hands wealth is gathered.
So it is with comedy. Laughter is a treasure, and it too has a property problem. Either it will stay in the company's safe, or it will be on the street, on the stage, in the workplace, in our hands.
We side with the second. With Deniz Göktaş's stage, with the amateur theatre in the neighbourhood, with the sketch night in the union hall.
In comradeship, Knowledge Commons
Sources
The series and the production
- Organize İşler: Karun Hazinesi on Netflix on 16 October — Netflix Turkey (in Turkish)
- Organize İşler Karun Hazinesi arrives on Netflix; the season has eight episodes — Teknoblog (in Turkish)
- An Organize İşler series is coming — Medyascope, 26 April 2025 (in Turkish)
BKM, cinema and the platform
- Why is Organize İşler: Sazan Sarmalı also on Netflix? — Habertürk, 2019 (in Turkish)
- A "Netflix" statement from BKM — Dünya (in Turkish)
- Netflix Turkey prices 2026: a rise of more than 30 per cent — Habertürk, 3 October 2026 (in Turkish)
- Bahçeli named no names but targeted Erşan Kuneri: "Netflix has now overstepped its bounds" — Cumhuriyet, 21 June 2022 (in Turkish)
The Deniz Göktaş case
- Deniz Göktaş re-arrested on the charges for which a release order had been issued — Medyascope, 31 August 2026 (in Turkish)
- Deniz Göktaş re-arrested as he was being released — bianet (in Turkish)
- Deniz Göktaş's indictment accepted; first hearing on 28 September — Evrensel, 4 September 2026 (in Turkish)
- Deniz Göktaş appears before the judge tomorrow — Medyascope, 27 September 2026 (in Turkish)
- Release order for Deniz Göktaş — Medyascope, 28 September 2026 (in Turkish)
- Release order for Deniz Göktaş, appearing before a judge for the first time — Evrensel, 28 September 2026 (in Turkish)
Theoretical background
- Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852): the lumpenproletariat and the "Society of 10 December".
- Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks: common sense and hegemony.
From Knowledge Commons
Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 — you may reproduce, distribute and adapt this work provided you credit the source and share it under the same licence.
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