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248 Communication Theory & Research
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Incestuous love occurs sometimes knowingly, in other cases innocently. Sex
or romance override professional relationships (between patient and therapist),
and work relations between bosses and employees. Traditional forms of inti-
macy are also unsatisfying. These include perverse forms such as women falling
15
in love with men who come to molest or kill them. Heterosexual love has to be
weighed against homosexual love (recall the lesbian relationship of Laura). The
idea of couples is put into question not only by the constant exchange of mates
but by trying out new forms, such as menage a trois.
Listening to our informants, it seems that these constant exchanges and experi-
ments are extremely casual affairs: ‘Vera recently fell in love with a man’,
recounts one fan of Gute Zeiten, Schlechte Zeiten, ‘she wanted to go round the
world with him on holiday but when Clemens [her husband] shows up in the
airport to give her something, she makes her decision to go back to her husband.’
But though characters act in a way which puts their lives in total jeopardy, these
acts are accompanied by what would seem outdated, intense, often violent
emotions of possessiveness, jealousy and suspicion which move the story along.
Melodrama is intensified not only by threatened and actual crime, but also by a
lot of disappearing and reappearing, looking for one’s ‘real’ mother or father,
and trying to discover one’s sexual identity.

Conclusions

The soap opera: a diversity of subgenres

Despite the common assumption that European television is undergoing, willingly
or not, a process of Americanization, we have argued that detailed examination of
the diversity of soap operas around Europe reveals that the soap opera is not
simply an American genre which is being imported – either directly, or by adapting
formats and conventions – into Europe. While undoubtedly American (and Latin
American and Australian) soap operas prove highly popular when imported into
Europe, we have shown that Britain, Scandinavia and Northern Europe, and, to a
lesser extent, Southern Europe, have developed three distinctive subtypes of the
genre – the community soap, the dynastic soap and the dyadic soap. Of these, only
the last owes much to the American daytime soap opera and an institutional analy-
sis of cross-national export and production would doubtless reveal a story which
might fairly be labelled ‘Americanisation’ (Mancini and Swanson, 1996). Following
the analysis of Dallas’s success offered by Liebes and Katz (1993), we suggest that
both America and Europe sustain, at various times, various examples of the dynas-
tic model because the patriarchal and primordial themes which structure social
relations in these soap operas draw on common and fundamental themes in west-
ern culture. In these cases, therefore, it is inappropriate to argue that influence flows
from America towards Europe, even though it may be true historically that the
overwhelming success of Dallas prompted the development of this version of the
genre in other countries. Lastly, the community subgenre – the most distinctively
European of the three forms – would seem to be associated with a strong public