Page 88 - Communication Theory and Research

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74 Communication Theory & Research
Case Study Design: The Reception of US and Domestic Fiction

In this study we explore how people in a small European language community
(in this case Flanders, the Dutch speaking part of Belgium) develop different
strategies in decoding commercial US and domestic fiction. The choice of domes-
tic drama as the ‘different text’ seems quite obvious because there clearly exists an
opposite relationship between the (in this case Flemish) audience and the two
types of drama, as one of them is strange and the other closely linked to the
indigenous cultural background. In keeping with most television drama pro-
duced in European countries (Silj, 1988), Flemish domestic fiction is made for
local consumption. As it often uses very specific regional accents, dialects and
expressions, and also shows specific regional situations, Flemish TV drama is to
a great extent comprehensible only from a specific cultural-historical background.
In contrast with American commercial television programmes, mostly consid-
ered as ‘open’ and more or less ‘culture-free’ texts, Flemish drama can be seen as
relatively ‘closed’ texts.
A second reason to choose domestic drama in this comparative analysis arises
from its popularity. Research on the amount of television consumption (audience
ratings) has shown that in many European and other countries US fiction loses
when competing directly with comparable domestic productions (Silj, 1988;
Tracey, 1985). While the dominance and popularity of US television drama have
been widely studied on several levels, the significance of the higher popularity
of home-produced drama still forms a complete wasteland from a research point
of view. The success of US fiction seems to have overshadowed the fact that, as
Ellen Seiter et al. (1989: 5) put it, ‘other forms of television might also please us
(and, possibly, please better)’.

Choice and Characteristics of the Programmes

Considering the question of the resemblance between the programmes, we
selected one episode from the Flemish situation comedy De Kollega’s (The
1
Colleagues) and another one from the American sitcom She’s the Sheriff. Both
sitcoms, that may be considered as representative for other programmes of
this type in their culture, were tremendously similar in generic, narrative and
other respects. So they can be considered as typical ‘careercoms’, where leading
characters are for professional reasons obliged to work in one room.
Also on a narrative level both episodes showed strong similarities: in both
series one of the younger women falls in love with a man, an actor not usually
in the show. In both programmes this love affair has to contend with problems
concerned with the environment of the professional situation. At the end these
love affairs end badly for the women. In this sense both sitcoms relied on similar
types of characterization (Eaton, 1978). One could say that the differences here
were mainly situated on the paradigmatical level in a common narrative scheme
(e.g., the American sitcom was situated in a police department, while in the
Flemish one the action took place in a ministry).