CI5472 Teaching Film, Television, and Media
Module 7: Film/Television Genres ~ Different Genre Types
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The soap opera television genre is best characterized by its ongoing, open-ended serial narrative development that engages audiences with its “good” and “evil” characters and emotional conflicts in ways that keeps them tuning in week after week. One form of the genre consists of day-time soap opera: All My Children, Another World, As The World Turns, Bold and the Beautiful, Coronation Street, Days of Our Lives, General Hospital, Guiding Light, One Life to Live, Passions, Sunset Beach, and Young and the Restless. |
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In these shows, the settings in earlier shows, geared primarily for a female audience, were interior contexts inhabited by upper-middle-class characters—upscale homes/condos, doctors’/lawyers’ offices, or expensive restaurants/resorts. These traditional contexts referred to gendered oppositions between the “female” as associated with the home, personal matters, talk, and community, and the “male” as associated with public activity, work, action, and individualism. More recently, as audiences have broadened, there are a wider variety of settings, including exterior ones. The primary emphasis in these shows is on subjective, interpersonal conflicts associated with deception, miscommunication, infidelity, greed, jealously, need for control/power, or revenge. Dramatic events are built around talk: arguments, lies, shouting matches, gossip, accusations, false promises, etc., associated with a range of complex relationships within and across families and social networks. Underlying these events is an ethical dilemma as to whether certain social norms have been violated, norms that are continually being interrogated as society changes. While there are a number of on-going subplots, conflicts are never totally resolved, given the on-going nature of the program in which audiences can tune in at any time and understand the story. |
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In the 1970s and 1980s, some of these programs migrated to prime-time slots: Peyton Place, Dallas, Twin Peaks, and Dynasty, followed by Beverly Hills 90210, The Colbys, Falcon Crest, Knots Landing, Malibu Shores, Melrose Place, Pasadena, Savannah, Spyder Games, Titans, and Sex and the City in the 1990s. These often highly melodramatic programs continued to challenge traditional norms of behavior, as did Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place, presenting prime-time discussions of sexuality and relationships that serve to attract new adolescent audiences to prime-time viewing |
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An important component of soap opera is the highly active, loyal audience base, as manifested in the multitude of soap opera fan clubs: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
These clubs function to provide information about episodes audiences may have missed, as well as speculating about what may or should happen to characters. Chat room discussions also focus on issues of the lack of realism, ideological objections to story developments, and analysis of the actors and actresses. And, they serve as a vicarious stimulus for discussing related issues in audiences’ own personal lives. |
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| Analysis of soap opera audiences has moved away from the earlier assumption that the largely female audience adopted passive, deluded stances (Tulloch, 2001). One of the important issues for audiences is the extent to which they accept soap opera portrayals as realistic versus fictional representations of everyday emotional relationships. In an important study of audience response to Dallas, Ian Ang (1985) posited that audiences’ responses are constituted by a “structure of feeling” in which emotions associated with movements between happiness and unhappiness is central to female audiences’ identification with characters. More recent analyses of audiences’ responses have focused on the value of talk and gossip as important tools in females’ own lives (Brown, 1994; McKinley, 1997). And, issues of class may also shape audience responses. Cheryl Reinertsen, analyzed a group of her daughter’s female friends’ weekly viewing of two television programs, Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place. In responding to these programs, the females evidenced a tension between vicariously experiencing the pleasure of romantic relationships and their middle-class, achievement-oriented attitudes. For example, in one episode of 90210, a female college student becomes engaged to an older man. The group shared their displeasure with her decision to become engaged: “‘She likes him just because he’s rich.’ ‘She should stay in college.’ ‘She’s too young.’ ‘Wait until her parents find out. They will really be mad’” (Reinertsen, 14–15). These responses reflect a commitment to middle-class beliefs in the value of sacrificing immediate emotional needs in order to obtain economic success. In examining the tensions between the discourses of romance and the discourses of achievement-orientation, some of these females begin to reflect on how these discourses shaped their own responses to these programs. |
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TeachIt:
writing about soap operas |
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For further reading: |
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Alexander, L., & Cousens, A. (2004). Teaching TV soaps. London: British Film Institute. |
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Buckley, E., & Rout, N. (Eds.). (2004). The soap opera book: Who’s who in daytime drama. New York: Todd Publishers. |
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Fulton, E. (1999). Soap opera. Boston: St. Martin’s Press. |
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Hobson, D. (2003). Soap opera. New York: Polity Press. |
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Museum of Television. (1997). Worlds without end: The art and history of the soap opera. New York: Harry N. Abrams. |
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Witebols, J. (2004). The soap opera paradigm: Television programming and corporate priorities. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. |
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Soap Opera |
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Teaching activities on genre developed by students in CI5472, Spring, 2004 |
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