Netflix as a Cross-National Storyteller of Human History

Netflix is the world’s most popular video-on-demand media platform, transcending cultural borders, reshaping global media consumption, and maintaining economic, political, and cultural streaming power. Historical TV shows represent a distinctive narrative text type that depicts diverse cultures and historical periods, immersing viewers in recreated story worlds rich in ethnographic legacies and historical-cultural symbolism. This study conducts a social semiotic reading of the multimodal resources used to promote and circulate media content on Netflix, addressing the material perception dimension proposed by Engebretsen in his text–user interaction model. The study argues that the multimodal content of history-based TV shows fulfill a promotional role through narrative, aesthetic, and hedonic dimensions. Using Halliday and Matthiessen’s Transitivity system and Kress and van Leeuwen’s visual grammar, the analysis of twenty-three historical show profile pages reveals patterns in the visual and verbal resources used to boost viewers’ curiosity, both cognitively and perceptually, by integrating the show’s cultural and historical nuances. Those promotional texts provide vivid experiential representations through various narrative and visual cues, foregrounding cultural resonance and heritage value while participating in the construction and circulation of cultural memory.