ABSTRACT
This chapter reports some recent research on girls’ viewing habits, the kinds of programs the girls favour and the reasons they give for doing so. It discusses some of the terms they use in their discussions and attempt to denaturalise their meanings. The chapter provides a discussion of some recent work on soap opera as a women’s genre, with special reference to Tania Modleski’s book, Loving with a Vengeance. The girls’ definitions of TV’s ‘realism’ and their active use of its content were made with friends, even though they watched TV at home with their families. They would discuss new programs with friends to decide whether they were the ones which their group would ‘follow’. The highest praise the girls had for these programs was that they were ‘realistic’; they were ‘true to life’ and ‘down to earth’.
