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European Soap Operas: the Diversification of a Genre 239

and contexts (Herzog, 1944; Liebes and Katz, 1993; Livingstone, 1998; Press, 1991),
this agenda of concerns, values and metanarratives may be seen as indicative of
the agenda of the society which watches the soap opera. In short, while any
simple mapping of the soap world on to ‘real world’ is to be avoided, media
texts of diverse genres have always been read as revealing the society which
produces and views them.
In our own viewing of selected episodes of European-made soaps we were
accompanied by informants who were fans of ‘their’ soap and who belong to the
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soap-producing country. As long-term viewers, these informants supplied us
with expert knowledge on the world of the soap operas and enriched the study
by adding their ‘national’ perspective to the interpretation. Our point in empha-
sizing an ethnographic approach is to stress the importance of conducting this
analysis in terms of the generic and programme context, and, especially impor-
tant for long-running serials like soap operas, in terms of the web of intergener-
ational and intragenerational relations of blood and romance, together with the
meanings that these relations generate over the duration of the serial and which
are familiar to its typically long-term viewers. In this way, the meanings
analysed are not imposed a priori on to the text, as is the case with much formal
content analysis aimed at testing particular theoretical positions, but meanings
are revealed, bottom-up, through a detailed immersion in the text. The advan-
tage of a comparative approach is that if texts reveal something of the society in
which they are successful, then questions of local or global culture may be
addressed through textual analysis, provided one conducts an analysis of multi-
ple national soap operas using a common research methodology.
Our ethnographic approach also differs from attempts of more thematic
textual analyses of soap operas. These focus on the syntagmatic aspect of the evolv-
ing drama rather than on the paradigmatic, demographic structure (Allen, 1985).
These types of studies deal with the motifs of soaps and with the meaning of the
form and format of the genre. Cultural sociologists analyse the attributes of the
normative framework, asking about the transformation of the Horatio Alger
myth in American soaps, or about reflection of modern vs postmodern ethics
(Mander, 1983; Arlen, 1980). More literary scholars examine the characteristics of
narratives that do not end and the message inherent in a balance built on an end-
less sequence of unsolved crises (Thorborn, 1982; Braudy, 1982). Others look at
the structure of digressions, slow speed, the ‘openness’ and segmentation of the
multiple, never-ending, subplots, in an effort to answer questions concerning the
source of dramatic tension, the relationship between structure and ideology
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(Fiske, 1987) and between structure and the ‘constitution’ of viewers (Modleski,
1982). Our own analysis of the way in which the form positions the viewers
(Livingstone and Liebes, 1995) points to the socialization of the American soap
opera to popularized, psychoanalytic (anti-feminist) notions by the recycling of
the oedipal myth.
Our approach to the study of the texts of soap operas attempts to map the
social structures represented in the genre. How do the social networks of soaps
compare cross-culturally? Are there national differences? We start by charting
the kinship structures of the two most successful soap operas in each of several
European countries. Our comparisons attempted, insofar as proved practical, to