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European Soap Operas: the Diversification of a Genre 237

unigenerational – stretching to include parents of grown-up characters, as long as
2
they may participate in the game of romance – with few or no babies, children or
old women (e.g. The Young and the Restless).
These subgenres represent everyday life – particularly women’s lives – very dif-
ferently. The British soaps opt for motherhood, with various mother figures at hand
daily. When genetic mothers are in trouble, surrogate mothers often step in.
American female soap characters, on the other hand, are concerned mainly with
romance, and both career and motherhood are subordinated to the importance
of this. The differences between the soaps in the two cultures were interpreted in
light of (1) the choice of the US commercial networks to recycle romantic myths
while British television, drawing on social realism, sometimes emerges as too self-
consciously, paternalistically pedagogic, and (2) the different social ethos whereby
American society, which sees itself as open, individualist, non class based, and
where everyone is allowed to believe they are upwardly mobile, may be juxtaposed
with the relatively rigid British class structure (Hoggart, 1957; Williams, 1974).
But the picture is more complex. First, two distinct varieties of American soap
opera exist, the daytime and prime-time. Second, none of these forms are close
to the major soap opera form of the telenovella, strong both in South America
and most of Southern Europe. Using similar analytic methods to before (Liebes
3
and Livingstone, 1992, 1994), our present concern is to broaden the analysis of
soap opera by surveying European forms of the genre. For this, we suggest at the
outset that three main prototypical forms or models can be applied to the soap
operas of different countries.

Dynastic

This model focuses on one powerful family, with some satellite outsiders –
connected by romance, marriage or rivalry – on its periphery. Some have a parallel,
interconnected, ‘downstairs’ network.

Community

A number of equal, separate, middle- and working-class, multi-generational
families (including single-parent ones), and single characters, mostly not roman-
tically connected, all living within one geographical neighbourhood and belong-
ing to one community.

Dyadic

A destabilized network of a number of young, densely interconnected, mostly
unigenerational, interchanging couples, with past, present and future romantic
ties, continually absorbed in the process of reinventing kinship relations.