Television delivery throughout the world has changed rapidly over the past two decades. Within South Africa, much of this global narrative is repeated. The last 25 years have seen a move from a single monopoly broadcaster within the ‘public service’ tradition (but later subsumed into the apartheid political agenda), to the present situation of a multi-company, multi-platform, increasingly digital delivery, calling into question even the very definition of ‘broadcasting’. ‘Global difference’ in South Africa plays out through a relatively late start but surprisingly short catch-up period, emphasizing a demographic/socio-economic specificity that has resulted in a highly skewed television market in which the uptake of high-end technology is less widespread than in other more ‘developed’ markets, and where the taste of local programming dominates even the technologically advanced sectors. The move toward a digital regime, together with the introduction of competition, has provided challenges to the regulatory regime. The majority of the audience share, however, remains with local programming, regardless of its delivery.

In Hopeful Dystopias? Figures of Hope in the Brazilian ScienceFiction Series 3%, Michael Godhe asks if there is hope in dystopia. If utopias generate figures of hope, what could we possibly say about dystopias? And is there anything especially relevant in post 9–11 dystopias? Do they provide us with figures of despair? On the contrary, Godhe claims that dystopias as much as utopia generate figures of hope – although hope and despair could be hard to disentangle (Thaler, 2019,p. 2). In exploring these issues, Godhe quotes Tom Moylan, who recently wrote that our contemporary situation is “not yet the worst of times, but things are worse every day” and often described across media platforms as dystopian, producing “a resigned anti-utopian pessimism rather than provoking the prophetic awakening of which dystopian narrative iscapable” (Moylan, 2018).