ZOOM

Abstract

Television narratives are a powerful yet understudied source of moral meaning in contemporary societies. As global streaming platforms expand their reach, shaping a shared cultural imaginary, it remains unclear how the moral content of popular media varies across countries and whether it relates to civic attitudes. This study quantifies the moral foundations embedded in the most popular television series across 28 OECD countries from 2019 to 2023, using semantic embeddings and the Moral Foundations Dictionary to classify virtue- and vice-related content across five moral domains. We find that televised narratives are predominantly structured around moral transgressions—especially in the domains of fairness, harm, loyalty, and authority—while depictions of moral virtue are more consistently expressed in purity-related themes. Despite increasing content convergence across platforms, cross-national differences in moral storytelling remain pronounced and align with broader cultural and ideological divides. A comparison with historical folktales reveals significant shifts in national moral profiles over time, suggesting a reconfiguration of moral narratives in the age of streaming. Finally, by linking regional-level measures of televised moral content to individual-level survey data from six countries (Canada, Czech Republic, United Kingdom, Japan, Netherlands, and New Zealand), covering 70 regions between 2019 and 2023, we show that exposure to more intensely moralized television content—particularly when vice outweighs virtue—is consistently associated with lower levels of trust, openness, and support for gender equality. These findings suggest that popular media may serve as a vehicle for “narrative capital,” with possible implications for civic norms and social cohesion.