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A Comparative Analysis of the Reception of Domestic and US Fiction 77

Here the humour is very light and easy to enjoy. It strongly works on
specific moments full of humour. That’s why I prefer those American series.
As pure entertainment. (interview 6A)

In this sense, the critical horizon of expectations seems to contradict the tradi-
tional ‘popularity’ of domestic drama and the concrete appreciation of both
programmes. A possible explanation is that there is certainly no tradition or
‘folklore’ around the rarely produced domestic drama. US fiction, on the other
hand, seems to be driven by its tradition of strong entertainment programming.
This statement seems to be confirmed by the critical attitude towards the pro-
duction and technical qualities of domestic drama, a domain where American
commercial fiction products have traditionally high standards.
To understand this ‘contradiction’ one has also to distinguish people’s declared
needs and expectations from their concrete involvement in the reception process.
They do not always coincide (as in this case), nor do they exclude each other.
As is argued later, a higher involvement with domestic drama also embraces a
certain critical, normative attitude towards technical and other aspects.

Recognition

A central question in this approach is how the different cultural distance between
the audience and the two texts influences and structures the reception process.
So it is important to know if there really was a better understanding or recogni-
tion of the diegetical world, i.e. the world depicted by the programme (see
Genette, 1972). Here we identify recognition as the mere literal comprehension
of specific separate elements (configurations such as characters) in the diegetical
world. Still how can such loose concepts like ‘recognition’ or ‘literal comprehen-
sion’ be operationalized and objectively approached?
In this case study we translated the concept of mere literal comprehension into
the concept of ‘unanimity’. Is high recognition by a group of respondents not a
question of similar comprehension? When all respondents attribute the same
value to a particular property, this can be considered as perfect unanimity (low
variability or dispersion) and indicative of high recognition.
Operationalizing recognition into the ‘degree of unanimity within a group’,
we used data from the scaling phase, where respondents were asked to rate
twenty-one characteristics of six characters in each sitcom, using a five-point
scale. Focusing on characters provides interesting possibilities because charac-
ters may be considered as clean-cut units and as clearly recognizable bearers
of values. This method of using quantitative social psychology techniques in
relation to reception and textual analysis has already proved to be fruitful and
challenging (Livingstone, 1987, 1988, 1989).
Did the recipients really recognize the characters in both sitcoms in different
ways? Did they have a better control over the codes used in the indigenous
programme for designating the characters? This might be expected, especially
because De Kollega’s was firmly rooted in a Flemish sociocultural context.