5
Television Genres and Formats
Identifying programme genre
When certain genres of programme are recognised as attracting large or valuable audiences,
broadcasting executives are quick to imitate popular formats for their own channel. In
programmes aimed at younger audiences the success story of 2001 was the ITV talent show
Popstars. Its success led to a string of ‘copycat’ programmes such as Soapstars and Pop Idol.
The Pop Idol format is owned by the production company Fremantle, who had sold it to 20
countries by 2003. Fremantle predicted that up to half of the company’s total revenue would
derive from income from licenses and merchandising by 2006. The entry of merchandising
and licensing into the television business, as opposed to Hollywood films, for example, was
marked in 1998 with Who Wants to be a Millionaire, when revenue from merchandise
exceeded the value of sales of the programme format itself. The Millionaire board game sold
one million units in its first two years, and the personal computer version of the game sold the
same number in only seven weeks, becoming the biggest selling game in Britain. Pop Idol
has the obvious attraction of a core audience of 16-year-old to 34-year-old men and women,
who comprised 72 per cent of the 14 million viewers of the final programme in the first
series. The programme’s sponsor, the food company Nestlé, was able not only to feature its
name at the opening and closing of the programme and its individual segments, but also
created animated chocolate characters representing pop singers performing songs in the
advertising breaks. Viewers could vote for their favourite chocolate pop idol, merging the
audience’s relationship with the sponsor’s products into the format of the programme as a
whole.
Although it is not yet the case that television programmes have budgets based on the
future income expected from merchandising and licensing, as is the case in the film industry,
this development may happen in the near future as reality TV formats establish the
programme as a loss leader whose profitability depends on the merchandise and spin-offs it
may generate. In the case of Pop Idol, the very structure of the competition ensures that it
will produce a person-commodity of one or more pop stars who has at least a partlyguaranteed market appeal and the prospect of getting to number one in the charts and
achieving major record sales. However, there is a significant risk of consumer exhaustion
with such a blanket product range, so when one of these series becomes a hit the companies
rush into producing the next one, sometimes straight after or just a few months later, so that
the ball can be kept rolling for as long as the series has a prospect of being profitable. That is
why there are so many quick sequels like the various series of Pop Idol and American Idol,
for example, because the format can only maintain momentum for a limited time. New
variations on the reality competition format have to be created to refresh the market.
Especially among young adult viewers, programmes featuring ‘ordinary people’ in
competitive reality TV formats remain significant in British television. But as long ago as
2001, Channel 4 launched its interactive cable and satellite channel E4, whose most
successful programme was not the expensive imported first-run showings (normally on
Channel 4) of the hospital drama ER or the long-running sitcom Friends but instead
continuous footage of Big Brother.
The first series of Big Brother was shown in the Netherlands in the spring of 1999,
produced by Jon de Mol’s television production company Endemol. The format has been
successfully sold around the world, and its value to television companies in attracting
audiences is shown by the willingness of CBS in the United States to pay $20 million to
Endemol for the rights to the format. Generically, the programme combines material from
several different television genres:

It is a competition in which there is a prize.

It is a real-life soap opera with that genre’s emphasis on the expression of emotion
and the formation of sub-groups in the community and the exclusion of outsiders from
those groups, and the use of bounded physical space as a symbolic representation of a
wider society.

It is a documentary featuring a social experiment that aims to explore the patterns of
interaction between people under various kinds of ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ pressures.
This latter form of realism was emphasised in the first British version by the prominence of
inserted sequences featuring the programme’s two resident psychologists analysing and
discussing the behaviour of particular participants. This psychological discourse appeared
both in the ‘serious’ form of the commentaries by Professor Beattie and Professor Collett and
on the Big Brother website, which alluded to psychometric data presentation in its flirting
index, its kissing index and its statistics on who had hugged whom. Psychologists and other
professionals also offered opinions in related television programmes, like Big Brother’s Little
Brother on Channel 4, for example.
The generic space of soap opera
This section focuses on academic studies of American soap operas. In the 1980s these
programmes were extremely popular with viewers, and academic critics explored how they
related to representations of gender identity for women viewers. Landmark studies conducted
by feminist Television Studies academics showed how programmes often regarded as of low
quality (such as soap opera) could be central to the everyday experience of women viewers,
who themselves were in a position of relatively low social power in comparison to men. The
results of these studies were important for redirecting attention from television texts to
television audiences, and making approaches to the decoding of the meaning of television
much more sophisticated. It became possible to see how the range of meanings in a television
text might be actualised in practice by viewers, who construct many different meanings from
the television programmes they watch. The political context of this issue is connected to the
feminist political agenda which states that ‘the personal is political’: in other words, that the
everyday experiences of ordinary people can both reveal much about how society is
organised and also suggest possibilities for change and models of resistance. The primary
emphasis of research on soap opera, and of much audience research by Television Studies
academics in general, has been on the viewer’s pleasure in television.
Television melodrama is marked by its focus on women characters, on the emotional
and the psychological, and on moments of dramatic intensity. The melodramatic mode
supplies the means to interpret dramatic turning-points and crises through a repertoire of
stock character types and familiar codes of gesture and expression. As Ien Ang’s (1997: 157)
research on Dallas showed, the appeal of prime-time soap melodrama in the 1980s rested
primarily on the central women characters, especially Sue Ellen Ewing: viewers who
communicated with Ang ‘assert that the appeal of Sue Ellen is related to a form of realism (in
the sense of psychological believability and recognizability); more importantly, this realism is
connected with a somewhat tragic reading of Sue Ellen’s life, emphasizing her problems and
troubles’. Sue Ellen hated her husband but lacked the strength to leave him. She was a
successful businesswoman in a masculine world, but her business (Valentine Lingerie) was
set up as a tactic to separate her husband J. R. from her rival, his mistress. While activity in
the masculine world of business intrigue was present, its significance lay in its relationship to
Sue Ellen’s personal dilemmas. In primetime melodrama, conflict between characters
produced emotional drama, and characters also experienced conflicts within themselves that
were expressed by rapidly alternating and conflicting emotions, often expressed through
physical, bodily behaviour. The repertoire of characteristics that define melodrama characters
are composed of a restricted repertoire of facial expressions, tones of voice and gestures.
In the other major prime-time melodrama of the 1980s, Dynasty, the central woman
character was Alexis Colby, whom the audience was invited both to admire and to despise.
Jostein Gripsrud (1995) has commented on Alexis’s ability to transform traditional feminine
weaknesses into the sources of her strength, through her uninhibited use of her (and men’s)
sexuality in her struggle for power, combined with her own skills at business manoeuvring,
previously deemed masculine. Alexis was regarded as the ultimate bitch, aggressive and
sexually manipulative, but all because of her untimely separation from her beloved children.
In other words, her masculine behaviour was the result of a thwarted and distorted femininity.
Alexis in Dynasty was fascinating because of the contrast between masculinity as a role and
the femininity expected of women. Alexis was determined to control the Colbyco
corporation, and manipulated the men around her.
The expression of emotion, as David Lusted (1998) notes, is a marker both of
femininity and of working-class culture. While masculine values entail the suppression of
emotion in favour of efficiency, achievement and stoicism, feminine values encourage the
display of emotion as a way of responding to problems. Similarly, elite class sectors value
rational talk and writing as means of expression, versus emotional release. These distinctions,
which are of course culturally produced rather than biological or natural, have been important
to Television Studies work on the relationship between gender and the different genres of
television, where news and current affairs are regarded as masculine, and melodrama as
feminine. On the basis of these gender, class and genre distinctions, the role of emotional
display takes on increased significance. The US prime-time soaps of the 1980s were set in a
world controlled predominantly by men, but offered pleasures to the woman viewer by
showing that male power can be challenged by moral questioning, and by women’s refusal to
be controlled. Masculine patriarchal power was critiqued by women using feminine and
masculine gender traits as weapons against male competitors. Melodrama presents characters
as simplified types, for example as good mother or bad mother, faithful spouse or unfaithful
spouse, conformist or rebel, princess or bitch. Christine Geraghty (1991) and other feminist
critics have argued that the world depicted in melodrama is potentially utopian, since the
suggestion is always there that it could be reorganised in terms sympathetic to women’s
desires for community, and for openness and honesty of feeling.
Blurred genre boundaries in documentary
This section discusses the genre of the docusoap, which combines the observation and
interpretation of reality found in documentary with the continuing narrative centring on a
group of characters in soap opera. Docusoap observes real people and structures this
observation into dramatic narrative, both denoting everyday experiences of ordinary people
and focusing on performance and narrative. But docusoaps have been criticised for lacking
the depth of insight into character or situation that television documentary has conventionally
aimed for. Formally, docusoaps use rapid cutting between scenes and characters to maintain
audience interest, and do not adopt the sustained focus on a subject that has signified
television documentary’s quest for understanding. Docusoaps adopt some of the conventions
of drama, and their own conventions have migrated in the other direction as a way of
invigorating scripted, fictional programmes. The conventions of docusoap were used in the
BBC situation comedy The Office, for example, where the camera seemed to be witnessing
action and interview material with the characters included reflection on events and analysis
by the characters of their own and others’ behaviour. Docusoap is already a hybrid genre, and
its extension into sitcom meant that The Office could blur distinctions between observed
reality and scripted performance. The characters normally behave as if they are not being
filmed, but sometimes acknowledge the presence of a documentary camera and then perform.
The series focused on the character of David Brent, who would like both to be a comedy
performer for his audience of workmates, and also an ordinary person who might become a
star through his appearance in a docusoap. The Office therefore demonstrates awareness of
the problems of docusoap as a genre, and its history of producing ordinary people as
celebrities in earlier docusoap series, like Jane McDonald in The Cruise and Maureen Rees in
Driving School. As Brett Mills (2004: 74) states:
By illustrating how docusoap ‘characters’ are capable of using the camera to their own
ends, The Office articulates concerns around documentary fakery. And by using the
conventions of documentary for humour, The Office undermines the distinctions between
sitcom and documentary, between seriousness and humour, demonstrating that the
outcomes of one can be achieved through the conventions of the other.
The 1990s witnessed other comic variations on the uses and effects of documentary
convention, especially the docusoap and video diary format, such as Marion and Geoff and
People Like Us. The imitation of documentary conventions for dramatic and comic purposes
gave new vitality to television at the turn of the twenty-first century.
Docusoap is a middle genre between documentary and drama. Docusoap subjects are
drawn from the ‘middle’ of society: neither members of a powerful elite nor powerless and
socially excluded. They are typically in service sector jobs – hotel workers, holiday reps,
driving instructors or shop assistants – and deal with the public. They are ‘like us’, as
ordinary as their audience, but being on television makes them not ‘like us’, and they occupy
a middle position between ordinariness and celebrity. Docusoaps focus on another kind of
middle by documenting their subjects’ public working lives as well as their private lives,
crossing a boundary between two kinds of experience. For Graeme Burton (2000: 159),
docusoap ‘stands for a growing use of viewers to entertain the viewers – an approach familiar
from the game-show genre and the use of studio audiences. It creates the illusion that
television recognises its audience and works for its audience.’ In docusoap the divisions
between television and ordinary reality, programme and audience, public and private,
stardom and anonymity, are crossed.