ABSTRACT
A close relationship exists between soap operas and their audiences. Regular viewers are knowledgeable about soap stories and their characters. This is, in fact, part of the pleasure of watching soaps. This chapter examines the formal narrative strategies that soaps use to invite audiences into the fi ctional world, and allow, at the same time, that they stand back and view the formal conventions through which that world is constructed, what Christine Geraghty terms the “double action of engagement and distance … ’’ (1991: 10).
