ABSTRACT
Genre contracts should rather be viewed as floating structures that are negotiated between industry, text, and audience in a specific socio-cultural setting, and as such subject to historical change. The industrialised production process creates structures and formats that cross national borders and socio-cultural divides: genre products form a possible framework for cultural and ideological mainstreaming. The fiction-machine of modern television is both a mythical, a narrative, and a poetic machine. The development of rock videos is an already fairly well-analysed example of the same phenomenon, which can also be found not only in European films, but in popular American cinema and American network shows. The increased intertextual consciousness in the production and reception of television mainstream series and the use of a playful, meta-fictional dimension does not mean that commercial television has become ‘critical’ or, as a whole, non-narrative.
