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A Comparative Analysis of the Reception of Domestic and US Fiction 85

threats to cultural identity posed by an increased supply of US fiction. Although
many current concerns are understandable and have to be taken into account,
they must not stand in the way of a fuller contextualization of the prevalent
essentialist statements about the impact, decoding, functioning and characteris-
tics of US commercial fiction. What new elements have to be brought into the
discussion?

The Active Process of Negotiation with US Fiction

If ‘negotiation’ refers to the process of exchange between the actual position of
the viewer and the one proposed by the text (cf. Fiske, 1987), one can say that in
this case the negotiative actions between the group of recipients and the
American sitcom were not exceptionally developed. Although this programme
was certainly not consumed passively, it did not invite open discussions or
applications to real life. People paid more attention to the narrative strain of this
programme.

High Involvement with US Fiction

The same arguments can be applied to the (much-praised) high involvement
with US drama – a central issue in the functioning of popular commercial fiction.
We found that Flemish Belgians’ involvement with the US television drama was
not all that high, penetrative or personal. This observation certainly does not
imply that one has to adopt an extreme opposite position. As observed in the
study, the reception of both sitcoms was shaped by a constant interaction
between involvement and distance. However, compared with domestic drama,
the involvement with US fiction was not that high and was less personal; its
decoding looked quite linear and less complex.

The Polysemic Decoding of US Fiction

This case study also questions the open, polysemic character and decoding of US
drama – mostly considered as crucial to its international success. This question
is very important because, as indicated by Jensen (1990), it is in the different
decoding practices that the relative power of media and audiences has to be
explored.
In our study strong arguments can be found to question and contextualize the
link that has been made between the (potential) polysemic character of US
fiction and its concrete divergent decoding. It was much more the domestic
drama that functioned as an open forum for discussion of viewers’ own identity
and problems. The case study clearly showed that the (so-called) ‘closed’ domes-
tic Flemish drama provoked in this context extremely open discussions, multiple