ABSTRACT
The serial form has an international, multi-media history. Television serials, distinguished internationally by their viewer loyalty, have proved themselves an indispensable element in most broadcasting economies. Soap opera, in Britain, has, as a genre, a very powerful metaphorical existence, even though we have no equivalent of daytime North American soaps. In Britain, with its long tradition of audience-improving public service broad-casting, this accretion round the term “soap opera” is particularly resonant, condensing as it does an opposition between good television and popular television. Good television in Great Britain generally draws its legitimation from other, already validated art forms: theater, literature, music. The absence of authenticity creates a founding lack in any relation television might have to already existent aesthetic discourse. Although differently motivated, and ascribing different moral qualities to the two terms, text and audience, feminist research too has moved from the “bad” text to the “good” audience.
