The roots of Hungarian television series trace back to the early days of television broadcasting in Hungary. After the start of regular TV broadcasts in 1957, the initial programming consisted primarily of sports and cultural broadcasts, news, political programs, educational shows, and reports, as well as studio-recorded television plays and films. It was in the early 1960s that Hungary’s first TV series were made. However, identifying the very first Hungarian TV series is not an easy and simple question.

If seriality is the defining criterion, then Mi újság a Futrinka utcában (What’s New on Futrinka Street, 1961), a puppet series based on Ágnes Bálint’s work, marked the beginning. However, if we consider the first example of serialized live-action fiction, either Honfoglalás (The Conquest), directed by Imre Mihályfi in 1963, or A Tenkes kapitánya (Captain Tenkes), directed by Tamás Fejér in 1964, could claim that title.

The Conquest, a three-part television film set during the final days of World War II and focusing on Hungary’s failed 1944 attempt to exit the war, was an anti-fascist miniseries. Meanwhile, Captain Tenkes was a 13-episode classic adventure series that told the story of the resourceful Máté Eke and his companions, during the Hungarian (Rákóczi’s) War of Independence against the Habsburgs in the early XVIII. century. Unlike multi-part television films, it presented itself as a serialized narrative and positioned itself in relation to two highly successful foreign series shown on Hungarian Television at the time: The Adventures of Robin Hood (1955–1959) and The Adventures of William Tell (1958–1959).

Director of the Hungarian series, Tamás Fejér explained his approach in an interview: „Each episode is a self-contained dramatic unit, a complete story. This was also true for the Robin Hood and William Tell series. However, in those series, the episodes did not form a larger dramatic unity; only the main characters remained the same. We wanted to go beyond that. This required us to create individual dramatic structures for each episode, which were complete in themselves, while also developing an overarching dramaturgy that treated the entire series as a single film in terms of character development and the unfolding of the story.” (Filmvilág, August 1, 1963).

The early 1960s thus marked a turning point in the history of Hungarian TV series. While the beginnings of Hungarian television coincided with the bloody rise of the Kádár regime (the restauration period after the opression of the 1956 revolution), the origins of Hungarian serial culture aligned with the regime’s period of consolidation, the early 1960s.