Journal of Popular Television, The - Histories and New Directions: Soap Opera/Serial Narrative Research, Jun 2022

This article explores the resilience of soap screenwriters and the resilient characters they create in soap opera through interviews with screenwriters on the Dublin-based soap opera Fair City (1989–present). The article also draws on an interview with Brigie de Courcy, executive producer of Fair City, to highlight the effects of the coronavirus pandemic on soap operas. The interview reveals inherent characteristics of the soap genre, including the habitual viewing of its audience and the ways in which the soap narrative relies on the physical proximity of its actors. The interview also reflects the genre’s resilience and the resilience of the people who work within it.

The influence of soap operas on other forms of television narrative has long been remarked upon by television scholars, especially with regards to the increasing tendency towards serialized plotlines that contemporary dramas have exhibited over the last three decades. Nonetheless, the full impact of the soap opera form on the structural principles of ongoing television narratives is yet to be explored. A crucial part of this lineage is the privileged role granted to communities in soaps, a narrative strategy that has been embraced by an array of other types of serialized programming, including ‘premium’ dramas. Drawing on Christine Geraghty’s writing on soap operas’ construction of community, this article will examine how this storytelling strategy is reworked by contemporary ‘premium’ programmes. Using Orange Is the New Black (2013–19) as a case study, I will explore how the patterns of interplay between the individual and the group can shape both the form and diegesis of a programme. I will analyse how Orange Is the New Black gradually shifts from being structured around a single protagonist to being structured around the community as a whole, demonstrating that the tension between individual and collective identities can be a productive force that proliferates and expands the narrative of a programme.

TV Azteca is one of the biggest multimedia conglomerations in Mexico. From its beginnings in 1993, TV Azteca knew it had to offer something different to audiences so they had a reason to tune in to its telenovelas. Things have changed significantly as TV Azteca announced in the middle of 2016 that it would no longer produce telenovelas. However, TV Azteca still has a vested interest in TV production via its super series. This research focuses on the political economy of production and development of telenovelas and super series, the effect of delineating quality television and the regendering of melodramatic narratives and heroines. It proposes that new content does not need to eradicate women’s stories and melodrama in the service of quality.

Fans of teen drama television series often feel that their pleasures are devalued. The history of research into soap opera fans (the genre from which teen drama series derive) tells us that this is unsurprising, as women’s popular pleasures have long been denigrated. Gaining global popularity in the mid-2000s, teen drama fandoms have almost exclusively played out on social media, and this article asks how fans’ experiences of their ‘guilty pleasures’ might have changed in a social media age. The article argues that two things remain unchanged: (1) the stubbornness of gendered and classed assumptions about ‘acceptable’ forms of culture and (2) the policing of behaviour within fandoms. But a noteworthy change lies in the norms themselves; that is, laborious and emotional fan practices are now more valuable than ‘likes’ and other social media metrics, a shift that undoes decades-old understandings of acceptable attachments to popular cultures.

Australian soap Neighbours (1985–2022) was in active production for nearly 40 years. As a piece of popular television, it is still syndicated internationally and also sold as a successful format for new works. Neighbours has also served as an outlet to launch new generations of Australian on- and off-screen talent. Despite these successes, Neighbours has been overlooked by tastemakers, academics and critics. This article places Neighbours in context within the Australian television landscape; going on to explore how the soap has responded during the rapid technological, industrial and cultural evolutions that have occurred since its beginnings in the 1980s. Importantly, Neighbours has featured a variety of different types of Australian characters with a variety of narratives, including working class, migrant, LGBTQI+, and blended families.

This article seeks to build a bridge between approaches to television drama that explore form and style, and those that explore realism and representation. It proposes questions which can be applied to any television drama, and reveal meaningful distinctions. The argument is developed through comparative analysis of Sally Wainwright’s Happy Valley (2014–present) and long-running British soap opera Coronation Street (1960–present).