Breadcrumbs Section. Click here to navigate to respective pages.
Chapter
Chapter
Within this field of serial fiction, American product leads, French ranks second, and British third. This triangular force field explains Neighbours’s anomalous position in the French market. American serial fiction is, in the form of Dallas especially, very well known in France. Such American imports are treated with a culturally characteristic ambivalence: admiration for the narrative drive and polish of American product counterposed by distaste for its spectacularization and superficiality. As seen with reference to the American market, a serial fiction market dominated by Dallas and Santa Barbara offers a less than congenial soil for a Neighbours to take root. French serial fiction production offers few more televisual referents to make Neighbours accessible/familiar/popular on French screens. Crucial here is a long history of French distaste for continuous television serial fiction: “you might say that French serial fiction quickly runs out of steam” (Bianchi 1990: 92). One French forte in this field is the series, the sequence of narratively discrete stories engaging the same characters (more or less) across (usually) weekly transmissions for some months. The best known examples are Les cinq dernières minutes, dating from 1958, Commissaire Moulin, and Maigret. Besides the series, the other forte of French television serial production is the mini-series. And the reasons underpinning the dominance of these two modes, especially the mini-series, will explain both the limited field of the French soapscape and the difficulties for a Neighbours. First, a cultural snobbery attaches to the mini-series, indicated by one critic’s sneering at the genre as representing “a serial of interminable insipidity, the television equivalent of the photo-novel or romance, destined above all to housewives [sic]” (Oppenheim 1990: 43; the sexism of this account may further point to certain assumptions about soaps among French television executives). High(er) cultural literature, in other words, commonly supplies the mini-series’ source material and cultural cachet. Second, then, French television scriptwriters have long traditions of the skills of literary compression and visualization of the psychological, skills which would be seen as wasted on scripting soaps. A further occupational/industrial factor working against the imminent success of soaps focuses on the reluctance of directors of mini-series and longer series to cede the dominant creative role to scriptwriters, the major creative force in continuous serials. And finally, actors in a country with vibrant film and theater industries are loath to commit themselves to the lengths of term required by soaps (Bianchi 1990: 96). These factors militate against the continuous fictional serial which involves a large number of characters engaged by multiple, interweaving plot strands of indeterminate duration and with limited resolution at the end of any given episode (usually 30 minutes long, and often stripped across three–five days weekly). Thus there were, at the time of Neighbours’s launch on French television, only four home-grown French soaps, of which the longest-running, Voisin, voisine, launched by La Cinq in September 1988, ran to only 360 episodes; contrast the British Coronation Street which started in 1960 and is still going! French soaps, then, “were far from proven successes” (A.W. 1989: 7). “The French have been uneasy about soaps” (Pélégrin
DOI link for Within this field of serial fiction, American product leads, French ranks second, and British third. This triangular force field explains Neighbours’s anomalous position in the French market. American serial fiction is, in the form of Dallas especially, very well known in France. Such American imports are treated with a culturally characteristic ambivalence: admiration for the narrative drive and polish of American product counterposed by distaste for its spectacularization and superficiality. As seen with reference to the American market, a serial fiction market dominated by Dallas and Santa Barbara offers a less than congenial soil for a Neighbours to take root. French serial fiction production offers few more televisual referents to make Neighbours accessible/familiar/popular on French screens. Crucial here is a long history of French distaste for continuous television serial fiction: “you might say that French serial fiction quickly runs out of steam” (Bianchi 1990: 92). One French forte in this field is the series, the sequence of narratively discrete stories engaging the same characters (more or less) across (usually) weekly transmissions for some months. The best known examples are Les cinq dernières minutes, dating from 1958, Commissaire Moulin, and Maigret. Besides the series, the other forte of French television serial production is the mini-series. And the reasons underpinning the dominance of these two modes, especially the mini-series, will explain both the limited field of the French soapscape and the difficulties for a Neighbours. First, a cultural snobbery attaches to the mini-series, indicated by one critic’s sneering at the genre as representing “a serial of interminable insipidity, the television equivalent of the photo-novel or romance, destined above all to housewives [sic]” (Oppenheim 1990: 43; the sexism of this account may further point to certain assumptions about soaps among French television executives). High(er) cultural literature, in other words, commonly supplies the mini-series’ source material and cultural cachet. Second, then, French television scriptwriters have long traditions of the skills of literary compression and visualization of the psychological, skills which would be seen as wasted on scripting soaps. A further occupational/industrial factor working against the imminent success of soaps focuses on the reluctance of directors of mini-series and longer series to cede the dominant creative role to scriptwriters, the major creative force in continuous serials. And finally, actors in a country with vibrant film and theater industries are loath to commit themselves to the lengths of term required by soaps (Bianchi 1990: 96). These factors militate against the continuous fictional serial which involves a large number of characters engaged by multiple, interweaving plot strands of indeterminate duration and with limited resolution at the end of any given episode (usually 30 minutes long, and often stripped across three–five days weekly). Thus there were, at the time of Neighbours’s launch on French television, only four home-grown French soaps, of which the longest-running, Voisin, voisine, launched by La Cinq in September 1988, ran to only 360 episodes; contrast the British Coronation Street which started in 1960 and is still going! French soaps, then, “were far from proven successes” (A.W. 1989: 7). “The French have been uneasy about soaps” (Pélégrin
Within this field of serial fiction, American product leads, French ranks second, and British third. This triangular force field explains Neighbours’s anomalous position in the French market. American serial fiction is, in the form of Dallas especially, very well known in France. Such American imports are treated with a culturally characteristic ambivalence: admiration for the narrative drive and polish of American product counterposed by distaste for its spectacularization and superficiality. As seen with reference to the American market, a serial fiction market dominated by Dallas and Santa Barbara offers a less than congenial soil for a Neighbours to take root. French serial fiction production offers few more televisual referents to make Neighbours accessible/familiar/popular on French screens. Crucial here is a long history of French distaste for continuous television serial fiction: “you might say that French serial fiction quickly runs out of steam” (Bianchi 1990: 92). One French forte in this field is the series, the sequence of narratively discrete stories engaging the same characters (more or less) across (usually) weekly transmissions for some months. The best known examples are Les cinq dernières minutes, dating from 1958, Commissaire Moulin, and Maigret. Besides the series, the other forte of French television serial production is the mini-series. And the reasons underpinning the dominance of these two modes, especially the mini-series, will explain both the limited field of the French soapscape and the difficulties for a Neighbours. First, a cultural snobbery attaches to the mini-series, indicated by one critic’s sneering at the genre as representing “a serial of interminable insipidity, the television equivalent of the photo-novel or romance, destined above all to housewives [sic]” (Oppenheim 1990: 43; the sexism of this account may further point to certain assumptions about soaps among French television executives). High(er) cultural literature, in other words, commonly supplies the mini-series’ source material and cultural cachet. Second, then, French television scriptwriters have long traditions of the skills of literary compression and visualization of the psychological, skills which would be seen as wasted on scripting soaps. A further occupational/industrial factor working against the imminent success of soaps focuses on the reluctance of directors of mini-series and longer series to cede the dominant creative role to scriptwriters, the major creative force in continuous serials. And finally, actors in a country with vibrant film and theater industries are loath to commit themselves to the lengths of term required by soaps (Bianchi 1990: 96). These factors militate against the continuous fictional serial which involves a large number of characters engaged by multiple, interweaving plot strands of indeterminate duration and with limited resolution at the end of any given episode (usually 30 minutes long, and often stripped across three–five days weekly). Thus there were, at the time of Neighbours’s launch on French television, only four home-grown French soaps, of which the longest-running, Voisin, voisine, launched by La Cinq in September 1988, ran to only 360 episodes; contrast the British Coronation Street which started in 1960 and is still going! French soaps, then, “were far from proven successes” (A.W. 1989: 7). “The French have been uneasy about soaps” (Pélégrin
ABSTRACT
STEPHEN CROFTS