Television Drama

Television Drama
(JDU)

There are a set of sub-genres or dramatic types that have different conventions:
• Teen dramas (which depend entirely on the target audience empathising with a range of authentic characters and age-specific and anxieties)
• Soap operas (which never end, convey a sense of real time and depend entirely on us accepting them as ‘socially realist’)
• Costume dramas (which are often intertextually linked to ‘classic’ novels or plays and offer a set of pleasures that are very different to dramas set in our own world contexts and times)
• Medical/hospital dramas (which interplay our vicarious pleasure at witnessing trauma and suffering on the part of patients and relatives with a set of staff narratives that deploy soap opera conventions)
• Police/crime dramas (which work in the same way as medical/hospital dramas but we can substitute the health context for representation of criminals and victims)
• Docu-dramas (which are set apart from the others by their attempts to dramatise significant real events which usually have human interest, celebrity focus or political significance).

Teen Dramas
This sub-genre in itself is fairly broad, as a comparison of Grange Hill, Hollyoaks and Skins will demonstrate. Generally these series are concerned with striking an entertaining balance between social issues that are of concern to the target age group (such as pregnancy, date rape, alcohol or dug abuse, sexuality, youth crime and relationships) and creating an attractive, representational range of recognisable character types. When analysing them, it is useful to consider how they serve to represent teenagers to the adult culture as well as to themselves.

Soap Operas
Soap opera has a range of conventions that make it distinct from other forms of television drama, and these conventions add up to an overall representation of domestic ‘real life’ that tries to be both recognisable to the public as ‘everyday’ and at the same time melodramatic and exciting.
Soap opera employ some distinctive conventions; the constant illusion of real time, precise continuity, tease devices and cliff hangers, combinations of action and enigma, the dominance of two-shots and over-the-shoulder shots of conversations, coverage of current social issues, meeting places that allow for gossip to circulate, narrative flow and a nostalgic and perhaps outdate depiction of community, interweaving storylines in each episode and partial closure of storylines.

Period Dramas
Not all period dramas are literary adaptations, but these account for a substantial part of the sub-genre and for many audience members. Period drama is famously expensive to produce.

Hospital DramasLike many examples of crime drama, hospital dramas balance two different narrative themes – public health and the treatment of the illness on the one hand, and workplace interactions and relationships on the other.
Hospital dramas feature a range of character types that are sometimes referred to as stereotypes. Hospital dramas have flexibility.

Crime Dramas
There are two kinds of TV crime drama, with important distinctions between them. One-off crime dramas tend to focus on the kinds of crimes that create the most anxiety among the viewing public (murder and serial killing in particular). They are distinguished by which aspects of law enforcement they focus on. Long running TV crime dramas will have a variety of sub-plots over time that help build up more sustained audience interest in the relationships between characters.