ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 provides a historical review of the birth and early years of television in Vietnam. This review serves as a background for further elaboration of the advent of television dramas in the 1990s and its associated cultural effects. Television drama, being the first popular genre of the Reform era, allowed viewers to enjoy their new condition of post-Reform ‘normalcy’ that had gradually replaced previous experiences of warfare and poverty. As the fabric of everyday life, television dramas engaged viewers in a pleasurable deviation from the partystate’s ongoing cultural orthodoxy. Such a tactical practice of freedom led viewers to a new space where private spheres of everyday existence were exposed to the possibilities of reprogramming.
