European soap operas : the diversification of a genre

Liebes, Tamar and Livingstone, Sonia ORCID: 0000-0002-3248-9862 (1998) European soap operas : the diversification of a genre. European Journal of Communication, 13 (2). pp. 147-180. ISSN 0267-3231

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Abstract

Analysis of the most popular locally-made soap operas in each of five European countries reveals that the soap opera is not simply an imported American genre. The study of British, Scandinavian and European soaps, based on an ‘ethnographic’ approach to the social networks in the world of the soaps, shows that these countries have developed three distinctive sub-types of the genre: the Community soap, the Dynastic soap, and the Dyadic soap. For each of these sub-types, we analyze the gender and class context for narrative events as portrayed within the soaps. While the kinship structure in both the Dynastic (or Patriarchal) and the Community soaps constitutes a hegemonic, taken for granted framework for the programs, the Community soaps tend to be produced in the spirit of public service broadcasting and so are more likely to problematise gender issues in their conscious attempt to transmit social messages. The Dyadic form, which appears to be taking over in the 1990s harps on the modern and post-modern despair of too much freedom and too little trust. It operates in a destabilized environment, in which families have more or less disappeared, romantic dyads cannot be sustained, and women’s quest for enduring ties takes the form of seeking primordial, biological, ‘genuine', blood ties.

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	http://ejc.sagepub.com/
Additional Information:	Published 1998 © SAGE Publications. LSE has developed LSE Research Online so that users may access research output of the School. Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Users may download and/or print one copy of any article(s) in LSE Research Online to facilitate their private study or for non-commercial research. You may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. You may freely distribute the URL (http://eprints.lse.ac.uk) of the LSE Research Online website. Reproduced in website for McQuail's Mass Communication, 5th Ed.
Divisions:	LSE
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General)
Date Deposited:	05 Oct 2005
Last Modified:	01 Dec 2024 19:48
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/402

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