What is a soap opera?
The soap opera genre originated in American radio serials of the 1930s, and owes the name to the sponsorship of some of these programmes by major soap powder companies. So, like many television genres (e.g. news and quiz shows), the soap opera is a genre originally drawn from radio rather than film.
Television soap operas are long-running serials concerned with everyday life. The serial is not to be confused with the series, in which the main characters and format remain the same from programme to programme but each episode is a self-contained plot. In a serial at least one storyline is carried over from one episode to the next. A series is advertised as having a specific number of episodes, but serials are potentially endless.
Successful soaps may continue for many years: so new viewers have to be able to join in at any stage in the serial. In serials, the passage of time also appears to reflect 'real time' for the viewers: in long-running soaps the characters age as the viewers do. Christine Geraghty (1991, p. 11) notes that 'the longer they run the more impossible it seems to imagine them ending.' There are sometimes allusions to major topical events in the world outside the programmes.
One related genre is the melodrama, with which it shares such features as moral polarization, strong emotions, female orientation, unlikely coincidences, and excess. Another related genre is the literary romance, with which it shares features such as simplified characters, female orientation and episodic narrative. However, soaps do not share with these forms the happy ending or the idealized characters. British soaps are distinctively different from these related genres in their debt to a social realist tradition (e.g. 'kitchen sink' dramas) and an emphasis on contemporary social problems.
Some media theorists distinguish between styles of TV programmes which are broadly 'masculine' or 'feminine'. Those seen as typically masculine include action/adventure programmes and Westerns; those seen as more 'feminine' include soaps and sitcoms. Action-adventures define men in relation to power, authority, aggression and technology. Soap operas define women in relation to a concern with the family. The relative 'openness' of soaps in comparison with other genres will be discussed shortly.
Recurrent events in soap opera include courtships, marriages, divorces, deaths and disappearances. Gossip is a key feature in soaps (usually absent from other genres): in part it acts as a commentary on the action. Geraghty notes that 'more frequently than other TV genres, soaps feature women characters normally excluded by their age, appearance or status' (1991, p. 17).
Broadcast serials have the advantage of a regular time-slot (often more than once a week), but even if some viewers miss it they can easily catch up with events. Any key information which might have been missed is worked into the plot when necessary. Nevertheless knowledge of previous events can usefully be brought to bear by habitual viewers, and doing so is part of the pleasure of viewing for them. Viewers are also in an omniscient position, knowing more than any character does. The form is unique in offering viewers the chance to engage in informed speculation about possible turn of events.
Unlike a play or a series there is always a wide range of characters in a soap opera (which means that no single character is indispensible). The large cast and the possibility of casual viewers necessitates rapid characterization and the use of recognizable 'types'. British and Australian soaps which are not in 'prime-time' slots typically operate on a small budget.
Soaps are frequently derided by some critics for being full of clichés and stereotypes, for having shoddy sets, for being badly acted, trivial, predictable and so on. Soap viewers (often assumed to be only women, and in particular working-class housewives) are characterized unfairly as naive escapists. Given the great popularity of the genre, such criticisms can be seen as culturally elitist. Robert Allen (1992, p. 112) argues that to emphasize what happens when in soaps (in semiotic terms the syntagmatic dimension) is to underestimate the equal importance of who relates this to whom (the paradigmatic dimension). Certainly relationships are more important than plot.
Some feminist theorists have argued that soap operas spring from a feminine aesthetic, in contrast to most prime-time TV. Soaps are unlike traditional dramas (e.g. sit-coms) which have a beginning, a middle and an end: soaps have no beginning or end, no structural closure. They do not build up towards an ending or closure of meaning. Viewers can join a soap at any point. There is no single narrative line: several stories are woven together over a number of episodes. In this sense the plots of soaps are not linear.
The structure of soaps is complex and there is no final word on any issue. A soap involves multiple perspectives and no consensus: ambivalence and contradiction is characteristic of the genre. There is no single 'hero' (unlike adventures, where the preferred reading involves identification with this character), and the wide range of characters in soaps offers viewers a great deal of choice regarding those with which they might identify. All this leaves soaps particularly open to individual interpretations (more than television documentaries, suggests David Buckingham 1987, p. 36).
Tania Modleski (1982) argues that the structural openness of soaps is an essentially 'feminine' narrative form. She argues that pleasure in narrative focuses on closure, whilst soaps delay resolution and make anticipation an end in itself. She also argues that masculine narratives 'inscribe' in the text an implied male reader who becomes increasingly omnipotent whilst the soap has 'the ideal mother' as inscribed reader. Narrative interests are diffused among many characters and her power to resolve their problems is limited. The reader is the mother as sympathetic listener to all sides.
Easthope argues that the masculine ego favours forms which are self-contained, and which have a sense of closure. 'Masculine' narrative form favours action over dialogue and avoids indeterminacy to arrive at closure/resolution. It is linear and goal-oriented. Soaps make consequences more important than actions, involve many complications, and avoid closure. Dialogue in masculine narratives is driven by plot which it explains, clarifies and simplifies. In soaps dialogue blurs and delays. There is no single hero in soaps, no privileged moral perspective, multiple narrative lines (non-linear plot) and few certainties. Viewers tend to feel involved interpreting events from the perspective of characters similar to themselves or to those they know.
Not much seems to 'happen' in many soaps (by comparison with, say, an action series or an adventure serial) because there is little rapid action. In soaps such as Coronation Street and Brookside what matters is the effect of events on the characters, This is revealed through characters talking to each other. Charlotte Brunsdon argues that the question guiding a soap story is not 'What will happen next?' but 'What kind of person is this?' (in Geraghty 1991, p. 46). Such a form invites viewers to offer their own comments.
Viewers differ in the extent to which they judge soaps as 'reflections of reality'. Whilst American soaps such as Dallas and Dynasty are seen (at least by British viewers) as largely in the realms of fantasy, British soaps are more often framed by viewers in terms of 'realism'. However, it is misleading to regard even 'realist soaps' as simply 'representing real life'. The representation of 'reality' is not unproblematic: television is not a 'window' on an objective and unmediated world. British soap operas are often described as 'realistic', but what this means varies. There are several philosophical positions underlying people's assumptions about the nature of 'reality':
§ Realism: The world has an objective existence which is independent of our use of any means of representation. An attempt to represent the world in words or images may 'distort reality', but at its best can 'mirror reality'.
§ Relativism: We unavoidably contribute to 'the construction of reality' - of the world - in our use of words and images. We do this within cultural frameworks (Stanley Fish refers to 'interpretive communities'), so realities are not entirely personal and unconstrained.
§ Idealism: 'Reality' (or 'the world') is purely subjective and is constructed by human interpretation, having no independent objective existence.
'Common-sense' theories tend to be 'realist' theories in this philosophical sense. Philosophical realism is involved when viewers consider soaps in terms of the extent to which they offer a 'distorted image of reality' of 'the outside world' (Ang calls this empiricist realism on the part of viewers). From the perspective of the programme makers, documentary realism (Colin MacCabe calls this classic realism in the case of the novel) involves foregrounding the story and backgrounding the use of the conventions of the medium (e.g. using 'invisible editing'). This 'transparency' of style encourages viewers to regard the programme as a 'window' on an apparently unmediated world rather than to notice its constructedness. Realism in drama is no less a set of conventions than any other style, and it serves to mask whose realities are being presented. 'Transparency' is associated with a close sense of involvement by the viewers. It is found in most soaps, although in American soaps such as Dallas and Dynasty lapses into implausibility may tend to distance the viewer.
British soaps also employ the transparency of classic/ documentary realism, but owe a great deal to the social realist tradition (associated with late 50s British films and kitchen-sink dramas). Social realism emphasizes 'relevance' - a sympathetic portrayal of everyday social problems recognizable to the working class (see Jordan, in Dyer 1981, p. 28). Plausibility and credibility is also valued more than in American prime-time soaps. Geraghty suggests that 'British soaps, because of their greater dependence on realism, are less daring [than US soaps] in displaying their own fictionality' (1991, p. 20).
John Fiske (in Seiter et al. 1989, p. 68) notes that minimal post-production work on 'realist' soaps (leaving in 'dead' bits) may be cost-cutting, but it also suggests more 'realism' than in heavily edited programmes, suggesting the 'nowness' of the events on screen. Published stories about the characters in soaps and the actors who play them link the world of the soap with the outside world, but they also allow viewers to treat the soap as a kind of game.
Ien Ang (1985) argues that watching soaps involves a kind of psychological realism for the viewer: an emotional realism which exists at the connotative rather than denotative (content) level. This offers less concrete, more 'symbolic representations of more general living experiences' which viewers find recognizably 'true to life' (even if at the denotative level the treatment seems 'unrealistic'). In such a case, 'what is recognized as real is not knowledge of the world, but a subjective experience of the world: a "structure of feeling"' (Ang 1985, p. 45). For many viewers of Dallas this was a tragic structure of feeling: evoking the idea that happiness is precarious.
I would argue that especially with long-running soaps (which may become more 'real' to their fans over time) what we could call dramatic realism is another factor. Competence in judging this is not confined to professional critics. Viewers familiar with the characters and conventions of a particular soap may often judge the programme largely in its own terms (or perhaps in terms of the genre) rather than with reference to some external 'reality'. For instance, is a character's current behaviour consistent with what we have learnt over time about that character? The soap may be accepted to some extent as a world in its own right, in which slightly different rules may sometimes apply. This is of course the basis for the 'willing suspension of disbelief' on which drama depends.
Producers sometimes remark that realistic drama offers a slice of life with the duller bits cut out, and that long-running soaps are even more realistic than other forms because less has to be excluded. However, dramatists do more than produce shortened versions of 'the film of life': the construction of reality is far more complex than this, and whose life is it anyway?
Jordan (in Dyer 1981) identifies several broad types used extensively in Coronation Street: Grandmother figures; marriageable characters (mature, sexy, women; spinsterly types; young women; mature, sexy, men; fearful, withdrawn men; conventional young men); married couples; rogues (including 'ne'er-do-wells' and confidence tricksters). Buckingham refers also refers to the use of the stereotypes of 'the gossip', 'the bastard' and 'the tart'. Anthony Easthope adds 'the good girl', and Peter Buckman cites 'the decent husband', 'the good woman', 'the villain' and 'the bitch' (in Geraghty 1991, p. 132). Geraghty herself adds 'the career woman' (ibid., p. 135ff).
Coronation Street is a Granada production which is broadcast nationally in the UK on ITV. First shown in 1960, it is the longest-running British TV soap opera. It is watched by about one-third of the British population, by rather more women than men, by older people, and especially by people from lower socio-economic groups (Livingstone 1990, p. 55). It offers a nostalgic perspective on northern industrial working-class life as group-centred, matriarchal, commonsensical and blunt but also warm-hearted.
It includes strong and positive middle-aged females who are the first to spring to mind when viewers are asked to recall the characters. It deals with personal events. Work away from the home is seldom shown. Political and social explanations for events are largely supplanted by personal explanations based on the innate psychological factors of individuals or (occasionally) on luck (Jordan, in Dyer 1981). People meet in shops and the pub to comment on events. Life seems to revolve around finding a partner. The introduction of outsiders to the community is usually presented as a threat.
It departs from realism in its use of caricature, stereotyping, bursts of stylised repartee and occasional use of melodrama, some of these features sometimes being employed almost self-mockingly. It has been criticized for the minimal role of non-whites. There is little of the inner searching of 'psychological realism'. Viewing ratings dropped when an attempt was made to introduce more contemporary themes, and there was then a move towards a lighter, more humorous style. One producer said in 1985: 'We are in the business of entertaining, not offending' (in Goodwin & Whannel 1990, p. 122). Rival soaps have led to some attempts to update the style. However, it has been criticized as having grown old with its audience.
The camerawork and editing is very conventional. Cutting is largely motivated by dialogue. Camerawork consists primarily of group shots, 2-shots or 3-shots (in medium to medium close-up), shot-reverse shot, occasional panning, and close-ups of single characters for emphasis.
Brookside, set in a modern Liverpool housing estate, first appeared in 1982, and it became Channel 4's highest-rated programme with around 6 million viewers (it also appears on S4C in Wales). Producer Phil Redmond declared that it would 'tell the truth and show society as it really is', dealing with what are seen as topical issues and problems such as unemployment (in Goodwin & Whannel 1990, p. 123). 'The Close' uses part of a real housing estate rather than a constructed studio set.
It features a range of characters from different social classes, and some of the actors are similar to the characters they play. It has a number of young characters (including some still at school) so not surprisingly it appeals very much to younger viewers. It also offers a wider range of male characeters than the traditional British soaps. Geraghty suggests that the programme has also given more prominence to 'male preoccupations': 'Brookside has developed story lines which depend more on action and resolution rather than the more soap-oriented narrative strategies of commentary and repetition' (Geraghty 1991, p. 169). It has sometimes drawn on the genre of the crime series.
The use of real houses tends to restrict it to a single-camera approach. There are no real meeting places, which makes it difficult to weave several stories together. And it has sometimes been criticized for being too didactic.
Eastenders, a BBC production, was first broadcast in 1985. It is watched by a little under a third of the British population, by more women than men, and more by those in lower socio-economic groups (Livingstone 1990, p. 55). The BBC is aware of its 'responsibility' as a public service (unlike commercial British television companies) to be of benefit to the public, and to produce 'serious' programmes of 'quality'. The characters tend to be mainly working class. In addition to women, young characters and men are given strong roles, so that the potential audience is wide. It has become particularly popular with teenagers. Buckingham notes that 'much of their fascination - and particularly that of the younger children - arose from its inclusion of aspects of adult life from which they were normally "protected"' (1987, p. 200).
Set in London's East End, it is in the social realist tradition. The programme makers emphasized that it was to be about 'everyday life' in the inner city 'today' (in Goodwin & Whannel 1990, p. 124). They regard it as a 'slice of life'. Producer Julia Smith disingenuously declared that 'we don't make life, we reflect it' (Geraghty 1991, p. 32). She has also reported: 'We decided to go for a realistic, fairly outspoken type of drama which could encompass stories about homosexuals, rape, unemployment, racial prejudice, etc. in a believable context. Above all, we wanted realism. Unemployment, exams, racism, birth, death, dogs, babies, unmarried mums - we didn't want to fudge any issue except politics and swearing' (ibid., p. 16).
Eastenders has also featured single-parent families, teenage pregnancy, prostitution, arranged marriages, attempted suicide, drug problems, alcoholism, generational conflicts, a protection racket, a cot death, extra-marital affairs and marital bust-ups, sexism, urban deprivation, mental breakdown, disappearances, muggings, a fatal road accident and a suspected murder: it has sometimes been criticized for being bleak! Perhaps in an attempt to attract more male viewers once can sometimes notice a tendency to shift a little towards the genre of the crime series. Nevertheless, much of the action remains deliberately mundane.
Although it was part of the intention to handle 'controversial social issues' the programme makers insist that Eastenders is not 'issues-based' (i.e. storylines are not developed simply to illustrate predetermined issues). They see themselves as pursuing 'documentary realism' and their dramatic use of conflict leads to issues arising 'naturally' (Buckingham 1987, pp. 16; 30; 83). They accept that the programme has an informational or educational function for viewers, offering a discussion of topics of concern to them, but they are more concerned with raising questions than with offering answers. Entertainment is seen as the main purpose. The programme makers probably seek to avoid putting viewers off by seeming to be patronising. However, critics have occasionally noted episodes involving a very didactic style.
The programme does not confine itself to the naturalistic mode, but sometimes shifts towards either melodrama or sitcom. Buckingham observes that the camerawork and editing is in the naturalist tradition, supporting an interpretation of the programme as a 'window on the world': the use of the camera is unobtrusive and largely static, with only rare use of close-ups and tracking; the editing seeks to be 'invisible'; the background sound has a 'density of naturalistic detail'; lighting is usually flat, with no harsh shadows (ibid., p. 74). However, he also notes that it tends to have more simultaneous storylines, more scenes, more meeting-places, more characters per episode, and a faster pace than either Coronation Street or Brookside (ibid., p. 54).
Dallas, a high-budget American weekly prime-time soap first screened in 1976, has been broadcast in over 90 countries. One fifth of the British population watched it; viewers included more women than men (Livingstone 1990, p. 55). Some theorists distinguish the American prime-time soaps Dallas and Dynasty from British social realist soaps by referring to these US soaps as 'melodramatic serials'. They certainly featured the villains, villainesses and emotional excess of melodrama and sometimes drifted into total fantasy. Elements of the Western were also employed.
These soaps focused, of course, on the rich: 'poverty is eliminated by the simple tactic of ignoring it' (Geraghty 1991, p. 121). Glamour was a key feature: locations were often exotic and the costumes of the main actresses were often extravagant; viewers were invited into a world of abundance. Most of the characters were physically very attractive, and almost all were white. Dallas also made more use of cliffhangers than British soaps: usually a 'psychological cliffhanger', Ang notes (1985, p. 53). Dallas featured the rivalry between the Ewing family and the Barnes family, but business life was far more central than in British soaps. The story also featured murder, marital crisis, adultery, alcoholism, illness, miscarriage, rape, air and car accidents, kidnapping, corruption, illegitimate children, secret pasts, chance meetings and so on.
Some critics say that 'too much happens' in US soaps by comparison with British ones: the pace tends to be faster. An episode typically featured 20-30 short scenes, most of which consisted of conversation. Camerawork and editing remained conventional, to avoid distancing the viewer. Facial expressions are sometimes shown in close-up and held for a few seconds before the next scene. Regarding soaps in general, Tania Modleski (1982, pp. 99-100) notes that close-ups (seen by Robert Allen as a key feature of prime-time soaps) provide training in the 'feminine' skills of 'reading people' - in understanding the difference between what is said and what is meant - as well as an invitation to become involved with the characters depicted.
This Australian soap was aimed at young people, and attracted many young viewers in the UK. It has been criticized for its bland stereotyping. It tends to feature primarily physically attractive people and there is also a notable absence of people of colour. Maire Messenger Davies suggests that 'nothing goes wrong in Neighbours for very long and that's why children like it' (in Hart 1991, p. 136).
Soaps in general have a predominantly female audience, although prime-time soaps such as Dallas and the most recent British soaps are deliberately aimed at a wider audience. According to Ang, and hardly surprisingly, in Dallas the main interest for men was in business relations and problem and the power and wealth shown, whereas for women were more often interested in the family issues and love affairs. In the case of Dallas it is clear that the programme meant something different for female viewers compared with male viewers.
In 'realist' soaps female characters are portrayed as more central than in action drama, as ordinary people coping with everyday problems. Certainly soaps tend to appeal to those who value the personal and domestic world. The audience for such soaps does include men, but some theorists argue that the gender identity of the viewer is 'inscribed' in programmes, and that typically with soaps the inscribed viewer has a traditional female gender identity. And 'the competences necessary for reading soap opera are most likely to have been acquired by those persons culturally constructed through discourses of femininity' (Morley 1992, p. 129).
As housewives and mothers, women need to be able to do several things at once, to switch from one task to another, to deal with other people's problems, to be interrupted. Redundancy and repetition make interrupted viewing possible; it has even been suggested that soaps are made to be heard rather than seen. Modleski argues that watching soap operas habituates women to distraction and fragmentation.
Dorothy Hobson interviewed women office workers in Birmingham and found that their free-time conversation was often based on their soap opera viewing. Some had begun watching simply because they had discovered how central it seemed to be in lunchtime discussions. It involved anticipating what might happen next, discussing the significance of recent events and relating them to their own experiences. Hobson argues that women typically use soaps as a way of talking indirectly about their own attitudes and behaviour (in Seiter et al. 1989: pp. 150-67). Geraghty (1991, p. 123) also notes that there is some evidence that families use soaps as a way of raising and discussing awkward situations.
Most viewers seem to oscillate between involvement and distance in the ways in which they engage with soaps.
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