Exhausted and exhausting: television studies and British soap opera

This article responds to recent shifts in television studies and argues that those developments have resulted in the invisibility of the most popular form of British programming, the soap opera. Through analysing existing work on soaps it demonstrates that a critical orthodoxy has arisen, which stifles further analysis of the genre. Drawing on a range of possible approaches - including realism, melodrama, textual analysis and the role of the family - it is argued that the genre requires a reappraisal which not only takes into account its generic development but which also acknowledges the complexity of it as a aspect of television culture