ABSTRACT
The concept of “preferred reading,” which has been developed in the context of news and current affairs television, raises a number of problems when applied to fictional forms. The hierarchy of discourses in television's fictional texts tends to be more ambiguous, preventing narrative closure on all levels of the text, and thus rendering the text more open to divergent meanings. In adapting Morley's and Radway's work to a study of the soap opera, our work focuses on a privileged object within television research. The genre's special status has a number of rather different sources. The groups ranged in size from two to nine participants. The interviews took place at one informant's home and in the company of friends and family members she had chosen for the purpose of the interview. The informants impressed us as remarkably open and secure in the uncontested and undisparaged status of their knowledge about soap operas.
