30 Years in Holby: analysing Casualty’s anniversary

Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Television Studies, 2010

Between December 2000 and February 2001 the Irish soap opera Fair City ran an unprecedented, risky and controversial abortion storyline. This came before a looming referendum on the legality of abortion. Here, Fair City was not just offering entertainment, but provoking debate and discussion on a divisive issue in Irish society. In this case, and many others, it appears that soap opera, by promoting such discussion, may contribute to the formation of public opinion in contemporary civil society. Heretofore, most academic studies have overlooked the possible consequences of soap opera for civil society, public opinion and the democratic process. This study breaks with this by using Habermas's concept of the public sphere to describe and explore the ways in which soap opera may affect social and political life. In a further departure from former studies that have studied audiences or soap operas texts, this work offers an in-depth investigation of Fair City's production process. It explores the programme's potential contribution to public life by uncovering how its production system shapes what social issues it can and cannot address and how it may address them. Habermas offers an underlying conceptual structure for the study. Production research, however, necessitates a conceptual model that can explain everyday production work and decisions within a complex globalised broadcasting environment. To this end, the study employs a Bourdieuian perspective as a middle-range theory. This allows Fair City to be understood as the emergent product of numerous struggles to define the show's form and content.

Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Television Studies

Considering a range of recent BBC TV programme anniversaries, this article analyses how the BBC has utilised different modes or zones of ‘liveness’ to promote the value of public service television via ‘event’ TV. Such anniversary events strategically collapse together the ‘hyper-ephemeral’ (having to be there) with the ‘anti-ephemeral’ (commemorating TV history), as longer term audience memories of public service television’s trustworthiness and durability are evoked. Contra scholarly debates which have positioned media anniversaries simply as a matter of (hyper-)commodification, I address Doctor Who’s 50th, Casualty’s 30th, Match of the Day’s 50th and EastEnders’ 30th anniversary as each shaping a sense of remembered ‘public service ephemera’. Through this process, audiences’ recollections of past programmes, and their integration with memories of everyday life, are articulated with emotional attachments to the BBC, thus making an affective case for the British Broadcasting Corpor...

Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, 2006

In this thought-provoking book, James Wittebols has made a serious contribution to current debates on the media, not only in the USA to which the work is addressed, but internationally. His argument is that, because it is commercially successful, the soap opera has become the dominant format for the US television. This, he argues, applies across all genres from sports, to drama, and to news coverage of elections and politics.

2005

“POST”-DILEMMAS, 2008

SMART MOVES JOURNAL IJELLH, 2023

Archives tell us more about individuals, institutions, customs and cultures. They increase our sense of identity and understanding of cultures by telling old stories, narratives, histories and travel tales. Women have a significant role in modern culture. The vital role woman can play in improving themselves, their family, and society is being established via efforts. The advancement and development of civilization are largely driven by women. They are essential components of a thriving society needed for the advancement of the country. Regarding women, television has a very high level of communication effectiveness. Their thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes are significantly shaped and influenced by television especially the primetime soaps. This paper aims to investigate how women are portrayed in popular Indian soap operas and how do they reconstruct and digitize new tradition.

This article explores the artistic legitimation process of U.S. daytime soap operas through analysis of commentary published in The New York Times from 1930 to 2010. While soap operas gained economic legitimacy over time (due to profit-earning potential) and were popular with audiences, they were never widely classified as an " art " form. Through examination of 3 aspects of The New York Times articles—tone of critical commentary, viewership of critical commentary, and themes of critical commentary—we explore the role of evaluative press coverage in the validation, or lack thereof, of the soap opera form. Implications for the decline of the genre are also discussed.

Canadian Journal of Communication, 2006

The argument of this book unfolds in two stages. First, since roughly the early 1980s, forms and conventions associated with the soap opera have become more prevalent across the full range of television programming (sports, news, drama) and across all time slots (afternoon, prime time, weekends). Second, this transformation is attributable to changes in ownership of the main U.S. networks in that same time period and is intended to guarantee corporate profitability. The author, who is chair of the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Windsor, builds his argument through a series of case studies: an examination of sports (World Wrestling Entertainment and baseball), of news (coverage of natural disasters and political campaigns), and of reality TV (in particular Boot Camp). These studies are finely observed with a lot of interesting information. In each case, the author finds that in the time period under consideration, soap opera elements that had previously been absent or marginal acquired a greater importance, such that, in the present day, it becomes fair and reasonable to speak of a "soap opera paradigm" when discussing U.S. network television content. The soap opera elements in question are (1) "seriality," the use of cliffhangers and teasers to keep audiences glued to the narrative; (2) "real time orientation," the keying of diegetic events to the rhythms of daily life, civic holidays, births, deaths, et cetera, as well as "camera motion.. . designed to resemble the perception of an actual event" (p. 36); (3) "seeming intimacy/play orientation," the cultivation of a sense of knowing "insiderness" among viewers and a simultaneous encouragement to gossip about characters and events (for example, exchanges around reality programs); (4) "story exposition," the highly redundant construction of the soap opera narrative that gives viewers a feeling of omniscience and also allows them to appreciate the narrative ironically (for example, they can acknowledge and revel in the absurdities of many soap opera plots); and (5) "soap opera themes," the focus on interpersonal conflict (love/hate relations), the ritualistic repetition of conflicts, and the projection of "the good life." Overall, this seems like a reasonable breakdown of the contemporary soap