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European Soap Operas: the Diversification of a Genre 251

In the dyadic form, the absence of cultural content is the point. This form, we
suggest, lacks stability. Hence the primordial quest for blood relations. While
this type makes no attempt to debate social issues, in its pursuit of viewers (and
ratings) it harps on the despair of too much freedom and too little trust that goes
with the modern and postmodern loss of a sense of place. In a destabilized social
environment, where families have disappeared, no biological ties may be relied
on as ‘real’, as new ones keep cropping up, romantic dyads are precarious, as no
emotional ties are sustained for long (nor is it believed to be possible); seeking
‘real’, enduring ties becomes a major concern for the characters, taking the form
of a quest for the most primordial biological relations – a parent, a sibling, a son.
The sources of melodrama reside in the turmoil of losing and finding transient
lovers, and in losing and finding ‘genuine’ blood ties. Thus, new experimental
lifestyles, which transcend the family, and primordial longings which precede it,
operate side by side in the pursuit of happiness, creating chaotic kinship pat-
terns. In other words, the invention of a cohort of ‘self-imagined orphans’, who
go on not only with the losing battle of securing their own romantic relation-
ships, but also with trying to reinvent (or reconstruct) the biological ties they
rejected, has jeopardized the structure of kinship itself, put it into constant flux,
and (having all but destroyed it) attempts to recreate it by trying out various
options of dyadic relationships, and various candidates for ‘blood’ relatives. In
effect, then, this dyadic form is less expressive of any particular cultural envi-
ronment; insofar as this form is coming to represent the global form of the soap
opera, this makes it increasingly difficult for nationally produced soap operas to
reflect the cultural concerns of their country.
From the beginning of the 1990s, the trend of both community soaps and
dynastic soaps seems to be developing in the direction of the increasing success
of the dyadic form. Thus, Die Schwarzwaldklinik and Châteauvallon, both dynastic
forms, have ended. New soap operas are either dyadic or combine dynastic and
dyadic. Older soap operas, rooted in either community or dynastic forms, such
as EastEnders, Coronation Street and Lindenstrasse, may be said to be moving
increasingly in the direction of the dyadic. Thus while European soap operas
have traditionally become established by expressing, in various ways, significant
national cultural concerns, this has depended upon incorporating both formal
and content features of the genre. Thus, the move away from culturally specific
contents towards a more ‘empty form’ may be seen to threaten cultural expression
through the soap opera.
More optimistically, it may be that where the broadcasting capability exists,
countries may produce soap operas on more than one model. For example, in
Germany, both the community and dyadic models exist; and in the new Greek
soap operas, again, one fits the dyadic model, the other the dynastic. The excep-
tions may require national explanations. As discussed in Liebes and Livingstone
(1994), British soaps are always community soaps, and attempts to produce
dyadic models have not succeeded. In the Netherlands, both main soaps are
dyadic: this may reflect a combination of factors in the broadcasting system, first
as a country with no tradition of local soap opera production, and second as
a country which, because of its size and geographic location, has a tradition
of receiving programmes from multi-channel cable channels, from diverse