ABSTRACT
It is commonly presumed-especially among film scholars-that daytime soap operas have no style, that their harried production schedule does not permit the luxury of stylistic embellishments. How could it when soap-opera production companies must churn out 30-60 broadcast minutes five days a week, with no breaks for holidays and, more significantly, with no reruns? But this attitude toward style views it as something extra that is added to a television program, an accouterment that might aid the signification process but is not central to it. In this book, I have argued that all television texts have a style born of a conThuence of economic necessity, industry trade practices, aesthetics, and network standards. In this context, soap opera becomes a particularly interesting test case, because it illustrates narrative-television production under extreme time constraints. In a sense, it is narrative production without pretense, designed to present the maximum amount of narrative as eftciently as budget, time and technology will allow. Analyzing soap-opera style offers an opportunity to examine Caldwell’s “zero-degree style,” to see just how eftciently diegetic spaces may be constructed.1 Soap opera analysis is also important because of its position in media studies at the end of the twentieth century. At the time, the study of television soap opera lured scholars from cinema studies, myself included, to consider how melodrama might cross over from one medium to another. Film melodrama as a genre and directors such as Douglas Sirk, John Stahl, and Frank Borzage attracted heightened interest in the late 1970s. Feminists were particularly interested in unpacking the ideology of the “woman’s picture.” Several of these film scholars subsequently became interested in the equivalent television genre-the soap opera.2 Consequently, soap opera was the first television genre to receive sustained attention from cinema scholars. In the 1980s critical commentaries on soap opera’s narrative structure-modeled on cinema studies and literary criticism-became as commonplace as child custody conThicts in the genre itself. In Charlotte Brunsdon’s assessment of “e Role of Soap Opera in the Development of Feminist Television Scholarship” (1995) she incidentally chronicles the vanguard role of feminist film theorists in the deconstruction of television soap opera as a signifying system.3 e work done by feminist television scholars up until that time, she maintains, can be grouped into four categories:
1. Studies of the position of women within television industries. 2. “Content analyses”—as they are called within the tradition of mass-com-
munication research-of women in soap opera programs. 3. Considerations of the soap opera as semiotic text. 4. Research on soap-opera viewers and their relationship to the text.4
