About Ethos
Ethos (Turkish: Bir Baskadir, literally It Is a Different Thing) is an eight-part 2020 Netflix drama written and directed by Berkun Oya and set across modern Istanbul. Rather than a glossy dizi, it is a quiet, novelistic ensemble piece that lets a handful of lives from opposite sides of Turkey's social map slowly knot together. At its center is Meryem, a gentle, devout young woman who cleans houses on the city's outskirts and begins suffering unexplained fainting spells.
When Meryem is referred to Peri, a secular, well-educated psychiatrist who openly carries prejudices about religious people, the series turns their sessions into a fragile bridge between two Turkeys that rarely truly listen to one another. Around them orbit Meryem's protective, short-tempered brother Yasin and his withdrawn wife Ruhiye, a charismatic preacher and his family, a soap-opera star, a nightclub singer, and a therapist of Peri's own. Each thread carries its own wound, and Oya patiently reveals how class, faith, gender, and old family silences shape every misunderstanding.
Praised by critics as one of the finest works of recent Turkish television, Ethos probes the country's secular and religious, urban and rural, rich and poor fault lines with unusual empathy and restraint. It refuses easy villains, granting every character interiority and the chance to be understood. The result is a humane, profoundly affecting prestige drama about loneliness, prejudice, and the small, halting acts of connection that might close the distance between people.