Soap Operas and Telenovelas

The television soap opera had its origins in American radio serials in the first half of the twentieth century and has since then been adapted and experimented with around the globe as a highly popular television format. Its generic features (subplots, unresolved narratives, episodic structure), thematic attributes (interpersonal and professional rivalries, family values, relationships), and not least its reception by audiences, have all been the topic of much academic research. Often considered a “women's genre,” the soap opera, or “soap,” has been derided by many for its stereotypical portrayals of women and often also for its melodramatic style. However, soap audiences, like the readers of romance novels (see Radway 1984), have been seen to be active and involved viewers who derive pleasure from the genre, and who have often been found to resist its dominant stereotypes. As a popular televisual form, even as it has retained its recognizability across linguistic and cultural boundaries, the genre has of late been seen to diversify across platforms/formats, with fan communities now going online, episodes now available on online downloads, character destinies thrown open to fan polling right until the last few episodes, and hybrid formats such as sitcoms often borrowing elements from the soap opera in terms of style and content.

The telenovela, a Latin American television format similar to soaps, is a vastly exported form and has even inspired global variations of the genre. Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela have produced many leading telenovelas over the years. This genre too is episodic in nature, although not as long running as some Western soaps, for instance. Romance is a central element in the telenovela genre, where marital or relationship issues often define the central themes in the narrative. Increasingly the form is seen to reflect regional and cultural specificities and also adapts its content to cultural changes over time. Genre analysis has revealed the telenovela's thematic playing with national and social discourses, centering on issues of development, health, corruption, gender, and homosexuality, besides its continuously morphing form with a focus on melodrama, family life, “morality,” financial independence for women, gender equality, and so on. This is a form that travels across Latin America and occupies dominant prime time slots. Audience involvement with the genre is strongly dependent on class, gender, professional accomplishments, and recent works include a focus on audience reception and gendered readings, among other concerns (e.g., La Pastina 2004), with an emergent focus on the Brazilian miniseries. Entertainment-education has been the subject of much recent research in this regard, with some academic research exploring the use of telenovelas and television and radio soaps for addressing societal problems, especially in developing countries.

Both soaps and telenovelas have been found to reflect stylistic traits of diverse media and diverse genres—for instance, the episodic style of nineteenth-century serialized English novels, the heterosexual [Page 1300]romantic content of novels that perhaps inspired soap operas, the Latin American radionovela that perhaps inspired the telenovela, and so on. Whereas generic similarities such as open-ended plots, episodic narratives, and multiple central characters run through the form of the genre almost everywhere across the globe, marked differences prevail as well across national and regional variations. British soaps, for instance, have often focused on working-class families with most events happening around a central geographical and social space (e.g., Coronation Street), whereas U.S. soaps have often told stories of powerful upper-class business families and their personal and professional rivalries (e.g., Dallas). The soap form is increasingly hybrid although retentive of many stylistic similarities around the globe. The Japansese dorama, for instance, themed around romance, comedy, and so on, often short lived and intensely woven through a small number of episodes, could be taken to be a variation of the long-running soap format. The Brazilian miniseries, with a fixed number of episodes and a certain amount of predictability, is yet another form. An important difference to note is the difference between series and serials, where series have a fixed number of episodes and will not perhaps run on endlessly.

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