Chapter two

Bursting bubbles:

“Soap Opera,” audiences, and the limits of genre

Robert C. Allen

The shop seemed to be full of all manner of curious things – but the oddest part of it all was that, whenever she looked hard at any shelf, to make out exactly what it had on it, that particular shelf was always quite empty, though the others round it were crowded as full as they could hold.

“Things flow about so here!” she said at last in a plaintive tone, after she had spent a minute or so in vainly pursuing a large bright thing, that looked sometimes like a doll and sometimes like a work-box, and was always on the shelf next above the one she was looking at. “And this one is the most provoking of all – but I'll tell you what –” she added, as a sudden thought struck her. “I'll follow it up to the very top shelf of all. It'll puzzle it to go through the ceiling, I expect!”

But even this plan failed: the “thing” went through the ceiling as quietly as possible, as if it were quite used to it.

Lewis Carroll
Through the Looking-Glass¹

Genre is so basic to our notions of what literature is that, as Terence Hawkes has put it, “a world without a theory of genre is unthinkable, and untrue to experience.”² For most of its 2,000 years, genre study has been primarily nominological and typological in function. That is to say, it has taken as its principal task the division of the world of literature into types and the naming of those types – much as the botanist divides the realm of flora into varieties of plants.

When eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European biologists went out to arrange all living things into types and sub-types, they did so secure in the belief that their perception of similarity and difference corresponded to the way the world really was. They were merely the recorders – certainly not the creators – of ontological distinctions in the living world. Similarly, genre theorists have until fairly recently presumed that their classification of the world of literature was also based on features objectively and indisputably existing in the text itself.

Today, although the empiricism of much of modern science protects the biologist from self-doubt, the literary theorist finds it increasingly difficult to hold to the notion that a literary genre is a “thing” or that genre study is merely the disinterested mapping of the literary world. Genre describes not so much a group of texts or textual features as it does a dynamic relationship between texts and interpretative communities. To assign a name to a group of texts – fantasy, romance, western – is to appropriate a linguistic signifier for use within a particular discursive system. The appropriation of the same signifier by groups occupying vastly different positions within society implies that individuals within a culture share a common language, but not necessarily that they share the same discourses and hence the same meanings. Reframing genre as a classificatory discursive strategy allows us to reconnect perceived patterns of textual structure and reader expectation with the groups in society for whom those patterns are meaningful. It also helps to reconnect the uses of language by particular groups with their goals and aspirations.

My purpose in this chapter is to suggest that far from naming a static group of texts and thereby defining their nature and meaning, the term “soap opera” much more problematically describes several different sets of discursive relationships between a variety of perceived textual features and at least three different types of interpretative communities: what I will call the industrial, critical, and viewer communities. In other words, “soap opera” is appropriated within at least three different discursive systems. Further complicating matters is that fact that whatever it is to whom, the soap opera is a transnational and transcultural phenomenon, so that for each of these three types of interpretative communities and corresponding discursive systems there are distinctive instances for each national culture. Finally, each country's experience with the range of texts to which the term “soap opera” has been applied is different. It is a bit like ornithologists, taxidermists, and bird watchers from a dozen different countries all talking about birds, but in one country there are only eagles; in another pigeons and chickens but no eagles; in another macaws and pigeons but no eagles or chickens; and so on.

I want to concentrate on the use of the term “soap opera” within contemporary critical discourse,³ since as scholars we are the interpretative community with the greatest responsibility to be self-conscious and self-critical about our use of language. Also because media criticism seems to be moving away from a text-oriented notion of critical practice and toward an audience- or viewer-oriented one, the relationship between genre and audience emerges as all the more important in contemporary media studies. The appropriation of the term “soap opera” within contemporary critical discourse occurred at a particular historical moment, and within the context of larger and somewhat differing critical and political projects. By examining this history and recontextualizing the use of the term “soap opera,” I hope to suggest some of the reasons why “soap opera” has been constructed as it has as a figure in the discourse of contemporary media criticism. At the very least I wish to make a case for the obvious: that we cannot afford to assume an unproblematic relationship between the term “soap opera” and either its signified or its referent.

The practice of discussing contemporary television programming in terms of genre – at least that practice as I am familiar with it in British, Australian, and American media studies – developed as much out of cinema studies as literary studies. Genre analysis was a logical adjunct to the auteur theory of cinema, which so influenced Anglo-American cinema studies in the 1960s and early 1970s. Auteurism, in addition to providing the embryonic field of cinema studies with a mantle of “theory,” quite literally helped to define the object of cinema studies by perceiving and naming difference where earlier critics had seen only sameness, and, conversely, by “uncovering” unity and coherence (within the corpus bearing the name of an auteur) that had been unseen by those not predisposed to look for it. As Andrew Sarris put it, auteur critics were able to see individual trees within the forest of Hollywood cinema.

Given the nature of the Hollywood mode of production, it is not surprising that early auteur critics found the key works of Howard Hawks, John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, and other auteurs to be – in Hollywood argot – formula pictures, or genre films: combat films, westerns, screwball comedies, suspense films, etc. Industry, audience, and critical recognition of generic patterns of characterization, setting, and narrative organization both presented a challenge to the auteur theory and demonstrated its ultimate validity – at least in the eyes of Peter Wollen and others. The challenge came from the possibility that the “world view” of a director such as John Ford might actually emanate more from the conventions of the western genre than from Ford's manipulation of those conventions. The “proof” of the validity of the auteur approach came when the director's world view could be discerned across genres.

For our purposes, cinema auteurism and genre study are important not only for providing organizational schema for the study of screen narratives, but also for foregrounding popular narrative forms (and in some cases critically despised forms) and making them the object of “serious” scholarly discourse. Although there would continue to be a critical community for whom the science fiction or musical film would be critically illegible, by the early 1970s graduate courses at major universities were being taught on the later westerns of John Ford, the melodramas of Douglas Sirk, and the horror films of Val Lewton. Furthermore, the inherent link between commercial Hollywood genres and their mass popularity over time gave genre criticism a cultural, if not yet sociological, as well as aesthetic cast.

Genre study in the United States and Great Britain really came into its own as auteurism waned and the structuralist star rose in the early 1970s. Although some critics attempted to accommodate auteurism within the framework of structuralism and semiotics, auteurism's inherent emphasis on the vision (conscious or unconscious) of the individual artist made this at best an uncomfortable accommodation. The film genre, on the other hand, could be read as a sort of unauthored but culturally accepted narrative langue and each genre film a particular utterance. In Thomas Schatz' Hollywood Genres, for example, each genre was seen as embodying a different cultural opposition, the irreconcilability of which necessitated obsessive reworking within each film and accounted for the genre's popular appeal.⁴

From its inception, cinematic genre study has been caught in what Andrew Tudor has called an empiricist dilemma: a genre is defined in terms of features drawn from a set of texts already identified by the analyst as containing the defining features of the genre. This circularity afflicts genre study in literature as well, of course, but not so severely. Cinematic genre scholars were intrigued by the continuing mass popularity of certain types of Hollywood films and were interested in linking textual markers to audience desire and, presumably, to audience interpretation. Tudor's own solution to the empiricist dilemma, articulated in 1970, was to define genre as an interplay between film maker, film, and audience: genre becomes, in Tudor's words, “what we collectively believe it to be,” and, in turn, what film makers believe we collectively believe it to be.⁵ Tudor even hints that in order to establish what audiences expect a western to be like we might have to ask them. However, the textuality of the dominant semiotic model of film operation, in its ascendance in 1970, combined with a general anti-positivist suspicion of anything approaching empirical research, militated against genre analysts taking Tudor's sociological advice to heart. Genre study survived in film study without having to tackle its central conceptual contradiction in large measure, I think, because it contributed to a larger project of discovering useful analytical differences among popular texts and, within these patterns of difference, complex, coherent systems of signification and pleasure production.

With the hegemony of Lacanian/Althusserian film theory in the mid-1970s (sometimes referred to as Screen theory), the project of genre study was temporarily side-tracked as Hollywood cinema once again was analysed in terms of similarity rather than difference. The classic realist cinematic text came to be seen as an awesomely effective machine for subject production and interpellation, whose mechanisms functioned before and across any generic distinctions. But just when the trees of popular commercial cinema were in danger of blending imperceptibly into yet another critical forest, genre study – this time aligned with feminist challenges to the more rigid versions of 1970s film theory – once again pointed out the danger of assuming that all popular narratives operated on all spectators in the same way.

Feminist film scholars looked to genres in which the construction of masculine/feminine difference allowed for the possibility of more than one reading and/or in which the film's address seemed to be to a female rather than a male spectator: the film noir, melodrama, and the musical.⁶ The remapping of cinema studies that resulted from the strong feminist intervention in film theoretical debates not only pushed previously ignored genres into the center of film study, it implicitly highlighted the relationships of different groups of viewers to different types of popular narrative.

It is at this historical moment – that is, the late 1970s and early 1980s – and as a result, at least in part, of the conjuncture of these and other intellectual forces that the soap opera emerges on the critical agendas of scholars on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States especially interest in the soap opera also signals the increasing fascination of film scholars with television as an object of study. It is no coincidence that much of the important recent critical work done on American serial drama is by scholars trained primarily in cinema studies: Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, Jeremy Butler, Ellen Seiter, Jane Feuer, Patricia Zimmerman, and Louise Spence, among others. Some of this interest was no doubt stimulated by the somewhat belated practical recognition that television had long usurped film's position as the predominant form of popular entertainment in America. But film scholars were also fascinated by the challenges that the most mundane forms of television represented to film theoretical orthodoxy. For example, in his monograph on cinema genres, Stephen Neale maintains that

the coherence of mainstream narrative [a category that would include Hollywood film genres] derives largely from the way in which disphasure is contained as a series of oscillations that never exceed the limits of “dramatic conflict” (that never, therefore, exceed the limits of the possibility of resolution), and from the way in which such conflict is always, ultimately, articulated from a single, privileged point of view.⁷

The soap opera, by this definition at least, would not be a mainstream narrative at all, since it is predicated upon the infinite delay of closure. Furthermore, as Sandy Flitterman-Lewis argues with particular reference to the American daytime serial drama, “where in the cinema the reverse-shot structure works together with the point-of-view system to bind the spectator into a position of coherence and fictive participation, in television, the effect is just the opposite.”⁸

Interest in the soap opera can also be seen as part of a larger project among feminist scholars to work out the nature of the relationships obtaining between female viewers and readers and types of popular narrative primarily designed for and largely consumed by them. It is here, of course, that Tania Modleski's work on “feminine” popular narratives, produced first as her doctoral dissertation and then published in book form in 1982 as Loving with a Vengeance, proved to be crucial in framing much of the critical discourse on soap operas to follow. For Modleski, the daytime serial drama represents a narrative form diametrically opposed to more male-oriented novels and films: a feminine form of narrative structure, which inscribes its reader as ideal mother, values dialogue over action, disperses the viewer's attention over huge extended families of characters, and forever retards ultimate resolution.

In Great Britain, two other trends helped to open up a space for “soap opera” in critical discourse. The first was a concern over representations of class in popular media and a reconsideration of scholarship on class and “the popular,” as it had been promulgated by Hoggart, Leavis, Williams, Thompson, Gramsci, and others. As Richard Dyer makes clear in his introduction to the 1981 BFI monograph on Coronation Street, this particular “soap opera” allows three distinct but related lines of inquiry to be brought together: interrogations of “the popular,” representations of working-class life, and representations of gender:

The series lays claim to being “about” working-class culture and is also marked by the presence of strong and positive female characters. It thus supplies social images that are conspicuous for their rarity on British television, and that are necessarily of particular interest to anyone working within broadly Marxist and/or feminist perspectives, as is the case in this book.⁹

The second trend was one toward the inclusion of the audience – and not just their subject positions or textual inscriptions – on the agenda of media studies. In his 1980 monograph on Nationwide, David Morley is concerned “with the ways in which decoding is determined by the socially governed distribution of cultural codes between and across different sections of the audience.” The text, he goes on to say, “cannot be considered in isolation from its historical conditions of production and consumption.”¹⁰

Dorothy Hobson's doctoral dissertation-turned-book, “Crossroads”: The Drama of a Soap Opera, considers the production and consumption of what was in 1982 Coronation Street's chief ratings rival. For Hobson Crossroads represents an opportunity to explore media popularity as a cultural phenomenon and the curious relationship between that popular appeal and near unanimous disdain visited upon the program by critics in the popular press. Although she does not put it in these terms, Hobson recognizes that the term “soap opera” has been constructed within an “other” critical discourse – a discourse that conditions the relationships between programs bearing that appellation and both their producers and viewers. Hobson finds that the contradictory position of whatever is called a “soap opera” is bound up with its address to and popularity among women viewers. Thus, despite its status as an advertising vehicle within the commercial television sector, Hobson finds soap operas to be “progressive” texts by virtue of their “raising of problems which are seen as relevant to their [women's] lives.”¹¹

Finally, critical interest in serial drama in the late 1970s and early 1980s was prompted by the enormous success of Dallas in the United States in the mid-1970s and its even more startling popularity elsewhere – first in Britain in 1978 and then in countries around the world. Dallas was framed within critical discourse as a “soap opera,” I suspect, in part because it had already been framed that way by the popular and industry press in the United States, but also because its perceived narrative seriality, prominent female characters, and dramatic concern with heterosexual romance, kinship, and family sufficiently related it, on the one hand, to American daytime serials, and, on the other, to British serials such as Crossroads, for it to be brought under the same generic designation. Furthermore, as Jane Feuer makes clear in her 1984 essay on Dallas and Dynasty, these texts provided an opportunity to apply psychoanalytic, feminist, and ideological analyses of Hollywood melodrama to television. Thus, although she acknowledges important differences between daytime and prime time serials, she chooses to set them aside (“For the purposes of this article”) in order to examine the relationship between melodrama and the serial form. She coins the term “television melodrama” to describe a genre that includes daytime serials, Dallas and Dynasty, and serial cop and medical shows (Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere).¹²

The transnational popularity of Dallas raised a collateral but distinct set of critical and cultural issues that had not arisen with respect to “other” “soap operas”: the “Americanness” of Dallas and its representation of entrepreneurial capitalism, wealth, and region; the show's interpenetration of the realms of business, politics, sexuality, and family; the continuing cultural invasion of other countries by American popular media; and simply accounting for the mass popularity of Dallas among viewers around the world.

The five years since the publication of Hobson's book – the first British book that I am aware of that uses soap opera in its title – have seen the publication of many more books and articles about something called but seldom explicidy defined as “soap operas,” with still more research, books, and articles in progress. Some of the works have examined particular programs (Ien Ang's Watching “Dallas” and John Tulloch and Albert Moran's “A Country Practice”: ‘Quality Soap,’ to name the two most notable examples); others have considered a range of texts. All have invoked the term “soap opera” to frame their enterprises.

To this point in the history of the appropriation of the term “soap opera” in contemporary critical discourse, I would argue, it has not been particularly important to specify with great precision and in each case the relationships marked out by that term between programs and analysts, programs and institutions, programs and other modes of critical discourse, and programs and audience groups – any more than it was seen as necessary by feminist theorists a few years ago to specify the limits of the film noir or the melodrama. What was for them important and has been for the analysts of soap opera is the function of a particular generic designation to mark analytically productive difference. However vaguely defined and however related to particular programs, the term “soap opera” has provided a convenient and useful framework within which to examine programs whose narrative structure would seem to be fundamentally at odds with that of the classic realist text, whose “ideological problematics” (to use Charlotte Brunsdon's term¹³), modes of address, and methods of pleasure production would seem to be quite different from other forms of television, whose audiences would appear to be constituted differently from those for “mainstream” television, and whose place in the lives of many of those audience members renders soap time a special time of day.

However, as one reads back through these critical analyses, one can detect traces of a largely unspoken unease regarding what a soap opera is for whom. In the opening essay of the Coronation Street monograph, “The Continuous Serial – a Definition,” Christine Geraghty studiously avoids using the term “soap opera” at all and warns in a footnote that the definition she gives of the continuous serial applies only to British television and radio serials and not American ones. In the Introduction that precedes her essay, however, Richard Dyer conflates the continuous serial and the soap opera and by the beginning of the second paragraph has added a new term: the continuous soap opera. Coronation Street, he informs us, is a typical instance of one of broadcasting's most typical forms.¹⁴ To further confuse matters, Marion Jordon's essay refers to the style of Coronation Street as “soap opera realism,” placing the program in the same genre as The Liver Birds, although she admits that the latter is “a series rather than a serial, and not classified by the programmers as drama.” Having constructed a genre consisting of Coronation Street and perhaps one other program (she mentions no others), Jordon then tells us that “in terms of narrative management, [Coronation Street] fits the genre pattern of Soap Opera Realism perfectly,” as well it might.¹⁵

As already mentioned, Jane Feuer's 1984 essay collapses US daytime and prime-time serials into a single category, the television melodrama. However, Annette Kuhn's essay on “Women's Genres,” which follows Feuer's in the same issue of Screen, explicitly excludes “prime-time serials like Dallas and Dynasty” from her formulation of soap opera, even though it includes US daytime along with early evening UK serials. No explanation is given for this constitution of the genre.¹⁶

In her book on Crossroads Dorothy Hobson gives as “a very basic definition of soap opera” a program “that is a continuous drama serial which should be transmitted daily.” Thus, as she points out, “in this sense there are no soap operas on British television.” Although she relies upon Modleski's discussion of American daytime serials as the basis for her conception of the “soap opera's” narrative and thematic concerns, Hobson distinguishes between British and American soaps primarily on the basis of production values: “One major difference between the genre as it has developed in America and Britain is the vast budgets which are allocated to soap operas in the USA.” Many of the serials shown on the BBC are, she says, “imports of expensively produced, high gloss American television soap operas.” Since, so far as I know, American daytime serials rarely have been shown in Great Britain, these lavishly produced soap operas must be American prime-time serials such as Dallas, Dynasty, and Falcon Crest. Thus, the American soap opera is defined in relation to daytime serials and then stretched to include prime time serials as well.

Yet Hobson makes clear that the viewers with whom she spoke regard Crossroads and Dallas as two quite different types of viewing experience. Summarizing the comments of one viewer with regard to Crossroads' representation of Birmingham life, Hobson concludes:

What she is saying is that it does not present a glamorized image of life either in its contents or in its production style…. She also reveals how viewers watch a programme like Crossroads for one kind of appeal and expect an entirely different type of production and content when they watch a programme like Dallas¹⁷.

Here Hobson opens up the possibility – one she does not pursue or even comment upon – of disjunctures between discourses circulating around what she has called “soap opera” and of the parsing of viewing experience by viewers themselves in ways the analyst has not taken fully into account. Charlotte Brunsdon's quite useful essay on the “gendered audience” for Crossroads argues that “just as a Godard film requires the possession of certain forms of cultural capital on the part of its audience to ‘make sense’… so too does Crossroads/soap opera.” Among the three categories of such competencies, Brunsdon includes generic knowledge: “familiarity with the conventions of soap opera as a genre.”¹⁸ This is a point few would take issue with; however, it begs the questions: “How is that generic knowledge structured?” And “Of what terms is it constituted?”

But these two questions beg a third: “By whom is this generic knowledge used in making sense and deriving pleasure?” Again because of the legitimate desire of scholars to interrogate gender differences in film/television texts and viewing experiences, the “femaleness” of “soap opera” has been foregrounded in recent research.¹⁹ I certainly recognize the distinction between a feminine subject position – constructed through textual address, and through program publicity, scheduling, advertisements and other forms of situating discourse – and the social constitution of audiences for various forms of programming. The fact that the audience for various “soap operas” might not be 100 per cent female in and of itself no more vitiates an argument for the form's femininely inscribed spectator than does the sexual heterogeneity of the film-viewing audience vitiate the argument for the masculinely inscribed viewer for most forms of Hollywood cinema. However, as Annette Kuhn has asked with specific reference to soap operas,

what precisely does it mean to say that certain representations are aimed at a female audience? However well theorized they may be, existing conceptualizations of gendered spectatorship are unable to deal with this question. This is because spectator and audience are distinct concepts which cannot – as they frequently are – be reduced to one another.²⁰

By conflating audience and gender address we might be obscuring important differences among audiences for types of programs as well as differences in the relationships between audience groups and the spectator positions inscribed within texts. Just as feminist interrogations of spectator inscription in the Hollywood cinema opened up a theoretical space for a consideration of the relationship between social subjects and subject positions, might not opening up a similar space with regard to the soap opera illuminate the viewing experiences of different socially constituted groups?

I can only mention the fact that very little work has been done – at least by scholars not in the employ of the television industry – to pin down the social and demographic constitution of audiences for various types of serial drama in the United States, Great Britain, and Europe. On the basis of data provided me by the Office of Social Research at the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC), it appears that a majority of the adult audience for most forms of prime-time programming – not just serials – is female. Even the programs currently scheduled against Dallas and Dynasty (Miami Vice and Magnum PI) have adult audiences that are more than 50 per cent female. By the same token, the audience for Dallas is nearly one-third male. Daytime serial audiences, on the other hand, are on average nearly 80 per cent female. The above figures for male viewership of “gender-specific” forms may well under-represent actual male viewing, since some males are reluctant to admit they watch “soap operas” at all. David Buckingham's research on EastEnders viewers suggests that this is the case in Britain as well.²¹ Furthermore, the image of the male viewer of serial dramas staying in the living room only because he is outnumbered or overpowered by female members of the household is challenged by at least one Broadcast Audience Research Bureau study, which in November 1985 found that 69 per cent of a sample of male viewers of EastEnders specially chose to watch it, while only 15 per cent watched as a result of someone else's choice and only 7 per cent because they felt there was nothing else worth watching.²²

We must also be aware that viewing patterns vary within program types, by region, by class, and over time. In many instances, historical changes in viewer demographics do not occur by accident but are encouraged by campaigns to attract new categories of viewers or to shift the demographic center of viewership from one group to another. In the mid-1970s, for example, American daytime serial producers attempted to counter the “graying” of their audiences by introducing younger characters and plotlines thought more likely to appeal to teenagers and women in their twenties. By 1982, over 40 per cent of American college students were watching soap operas, and today one out of every seven viewers of General Hospital is under the age of 18.²³ In Britain, Coronation Street has added younger characters; Crossroads (before its demise) attempted to “upscale” its audience; and both EastEnders and Brookside appear to have been successful in attracting large teenage followings.

I hope my critique of the appropriation of “soap opera” in contemporary critical discourse does not obscure my admiration for and debt of gratitude to the work of these scholars who have done much to reinvigorate the study of television in the United States. I think that one reason for my concern over the minimizing or eliding of the discursive nature and functions of genre designations stems from a recognition that, in the United States at least, “soap opera” has been a term activated within the supervisory discourses of traditional mass communication research and traditional criticism (as well as in their more popularized variants) in order to hierarchize media experiences and texts by gender, and having done so to create a large, undifferentiated “other world” to which they (those gendered texts and viewing experiences) could be conveniently consigned.²⁴ I am not in the least suggesting that the scholars whose work I have discussed are unaware of the discursive “encrustation” of “soap opera” (indeed, for several it is precisely the marginalization by sex of certain television texts that has given impetus to their study of soap operas) or that they in any way share the assumptions or goals of these groups. It is just that I believe that for practical and political reasons it is important that we do not – however inadvertently – contribute to the reification of the term “soap opera” and, more positively, that we build on the work already done within contemporary criticism on “soap operas” (however defined) by refining our conceptualizations of audience, textual engagement, textual inscription, and the discourses in which they and their analyses are embedded.

Notes

1 Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass (London: Octopus Books, 1978).

2 Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (London: Methuen, 1977), p. 101.

3 By the term “contemporary critical discourse” I mean to mark out those approaches to the study of cultural production that have followed from or developed in reaction to the “structuralist revolution.” I also mean to differentiate this cluster of critical approaches from what might be called “traditional” or pre-structuralist critical practice. The figuring of “soap operas” within the latter is examined in my Speaking of Soap Operas (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), pp. 11–18. Differences between contemporary and traditional criticism as they relate to television analysis are discussed in Robert C. Allen (ed.) Channels of Discourse: Television and Contemporary Criticism (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press/Methuen, 1987), pp. 1–16.

4 Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres (New York: Random House, 1981).

5 Andrew Tudor, “Genre and Critical Methodology,” in Bill Nichols (ed.) Movies and Methods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 118–26.

6 See, for example, E. Ann Kaplan (ed.) Women in Film Noir (London: British Film Institute, 1978); and Rick Altman (ed.) Genre, the Musical (London: British Film Institute, 1981).

7 Stephen Neale, “Genre and Cinema,” in Tony Bennet, Susan Boyd-Bowman, Colin Mercer, and Janet Woolacott (eds) Popular Television and Film (London: Open University/British Film Institute, 1981), pp. 12–13. Extracted from Stephen Neale, Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1980).

8 Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, “Psychoanalysis, Film, and Television,” in Robert C. Allen (ed.) Channels of Discourse, p. 195.

9 Richard Dyer, “Introduction,” in Richard Dyer, Christine Geraghty, Marion Jordan, Terry Lovell, Richard Paterson, and John Stewart (eds) “Coronation Street” (London: British Film Institute, 1981), p. 2.

10 David Morley, The “Nationwide” Audience: Structure and Decoding (London: British Film Institute, 1980).

11 Dorothy Hobson, “Crossroads”: The Drama of a Soap Opera (London: Methuen, 1982), p. 35.

12 Jane Feuer, “Melodrama, Serial Form, and Television Today,” Screen 25 (1984): 4–16.

13 Charlotte Brunsdon, “Crossroads: Notes on Soap Opera,” Screen 22, no. 4 (1981): 34.

14 Christine Geraghty, “The Continuous Serial – a Definition,” and Richard Dyer, “Introduction,” in Dyer et al., “Coronation Street”.

15 Marion Jordon, “Realism and Convention,” in Dyer et al., “Coronation Street”, pp. 27–39.

16 Annette Kuhn, “Women's Genres,” Screen 25 (1984): 18–28.

17 Hobson, “Crossroads,” pp. 26, 27, 120.

18 Brunsdon, “Crossroads”.

19 In Dyer et al.'s Coronation Street monograph, a female audience is for the most part assumed, as is a corresponding dislike of the program by men. Terry Lovell (p. 50), for example, says the program provides a validation of a set of concerns women see as “theirs.” To which she adds: “No wonder men dislike it.” However, in his article on the production context of Coronation Street which follows Lovell's essay in the volume, Richard Paterson notes that between 1975 and 1980 the audience for the program in the Granada-controlled market included a “static but quite high male viewership” (p. 56).

20 Kuhn, “Women's Genres,” p. 21.

21 David Buckingham, Public Secrets: “EastEnders” and Its Audience (London: British Film Institute, 1987).

22 Broadcast Audience Research Bureau Audience Reaction Service, “Report on EastEnders,” November 26, 1985, Booklet Part B, p. 4. Eighty per cent of female viewers reported that they specially chose to watch, and only 7 per cent because someone else chose. Unfortunately for media scholars in the United States and Great Britain (and perhaps in Europe as well), studies conducted by BARB, Nielsen, and other companies are regarded as proprietary information and made available only to clients. Those clients are specifically enjoined from publishing or sharing these data with others – although in some cases sympathetic “clients” are willing to help scholars. The data on US viewing were prepared by Hans Stipp, Director of Social Research, NBC. I am grateful to him for his assistance.

23 “They're Watching,” Brochure, ABC-Television Social Research Unit, 1982.

24 In Allen, Speaking of Soap Operas, I discuss the encrustation of the term “soap opera” in social science discourse in the United States. Despite the recent fashionability of daytime serial viewing among American college students and the popularity of prime-time serials, soap opera viewing continues to carry with it a social stigma for many viewers. The nature of that stigma and viewers' strategies for dealing with it are discussed in a recent and as yet unpublished study by Alison Alexander and Virginia Fry: “Interpreting Viewing: Creating an Acceptable Context” (paper presented at the Conference on Culture and Communication, Temple University, Philadelphia, Pa., 1986).