What is a soap opera?

The soap opera genre originated from the soap powder boxes, which contained a short comic strip which always ended a cliff-hanger. They were then made in to radio serials in the USA, before becoming the soaps we all know & love.

Television soap operas are long-running serials concerned with everyday life. 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 virtually 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. Mark Fowler for example has been in the show even before I was born; it’s only recently that he left for good.

Soaps compared with other genres

One related genre is the melodrama, with which it shares such features as 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 the same narrative in each episode. However, soaps do not share with these forms the happy ending or the idealized characters.

Some people in the media 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 stereotypes, such as, relation to power, authority, aggression and technology. Soap operas define women in relation to a concern with the family.

Subject-matter and style

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.

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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.

The openness of soaps

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.

Realism

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?

Stereotypes

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).