'Why Are Soap Operas So Popular?' Homework Reading Task

Why are soap operas so popular?

·         Soap Operas can be thought of by their regular audience as easy viewing and do not require much attention, but can also be demanding at times, especially if they are half an hour to an hour long and the viewers have to drop everything to watch them. Overall, the soap operas concern with the lives of everyday people seems to be the main reason why they are so popular.

·         American soaps are usually referred to as being ‘fantasy’ but British and Australian soaps are more realistic as they include everyday events in their storylines including problematic ones such as death, marriage and violence. Coronation Street is an example of a soap which uses its social realism by regarding the everyday life of inner-city working class residents of Manchester.

·         Eastenders and Home & Away who contain these social realist conventions gain a lot of audience as they enjoy watching these storylines that portray things that are happening every day. The popularity also comes partly from the viewers’ need, because of the realism of the soaps it allows the audience to gain pleasure from the notion that the everyday lives in the soaps are real and on-going like their own lives are.

·         It is also evident that the scriptwriters bring humour into the storyline to make it more pleasurable to watch e.g. Coronation Streets popularity comes from the realism and the language of the northern stand-up comic.

·         Viewers also feel they are part of the families on the soaps as they can relate to them and feel like they can ‘enter the characters’ because they are all so familiar. They also like to from a type of participatory relationship with the characters. This means that the viewers are concerned with their lives just as they are with their friends and colleagues.

·         It is this formation of parasocial relationships that make the viewers enjoy the soaps. This is because they can identify with the character and their emotions, sometimes because they have been in a similar situation to the character. It can be recognised in its extreme form when the viewer starts to feel what the character feels by putting them in the situation.

·         The viewers also sometimes form with the characters is that of personal identity. They often use the events and behaviour of characters in the soaps to justify their own real life behaviour to similar situations.

·         Viewers also enjoy the soaps because they identify themselves as being similar to the characters. For example, some female viewers may say that they wish they looked like an attractive female character.

·         These realism points mainly apply to the British and Australian soaps, but we can also identify with characters from American Soaps as they use realistic emotions and behaviours towards other characters even though their storylines are not as realistic.

·         Soap opera is also popular due to continuity, regularity and familiarity. This applies to the characters location and theme tune, and even the storyline continues on from the previous episode making it easy to watch and pleasurable.