Social issues in television fiction

As stated in the introductory chapter, the overriding concern of this book is with ‘the power of the media to shape public attitudes and beliefs about public issues’ (p. 8). In this respect, it stands between research that focusses on the ability of media to influence public opinion, which usually takes texts from news and current affairs genres, and media studies of the consumption and pleasures of fictional media. Furthermore, the study reported in this book covers not only media texts, but also their conditions of production and reception, thus achieving something of an ideal in critical studies of discourse. Three social issues are used as case studies and traced through a number of British soap operas: child sexual abuse, breast cancer, and mental distress. The soap operas are Brookside, East Enders, Coronation Street, and Emmerdale. While the first two of these have been seen to lead the way with social issues, this has been less so with the latter two. The first three have also ‘successfully conveyed a sense of commitment to a working-class world’ (p. 33) while Emmerdale is based around a rural community. Non-British soap operas are mentioned in passing; however, international comparisons are beyond the scope of the book. The book starts by contextualizing soap operas within the television industry where they attract larger audiences than other fictional or factual programs and provide content for other media formats. Immensely popular and relatively cheap to produce, they are ‘a crucial part of a channel’s image’ and generate the income that enables the production of more prestigious television drama. Each of the programs discussed in the case studies is introduced with an emphasis on its distinctiveness and approach to social issues. Soap operas have broken new ground in bringing discussion of social issues to television fiction, yet this has not been without controversy. Part of the contextualization is a brief overview of the history of soap operas as education in various countries and how the threshold of what is acceptable has gradually increased. The chapter that follows demonstrates this point in relation to the programs selected as case studies. The researchers have interviewed writers and program makers, not just producers and station executives, about their philosophies and decision-making processes, thereby highlighting the tensions between the commitments of the former to storylines and social issues and the overriding decisions and enforcement of commercial imperatives by the latter. They also discuss the relationships with experts and lobby groups, noting the different levels of research and consultation by program makers depending on the issue under consideration, their commitment to the issue, and the dramatic needs of the script. Not all issues have the same level of social prestige, and this is reflected in the way that they are dealt with by the program makers in terms of the amount of research undertaken and the characterization. For instance, Henderson demonstrates how depictions of mental distress are much less likely to be produced in consultation with health experts than is a socially acceptable illness such as breast cancer. This is discussed in terms of characterization as well, such as the ease with which the issue of breast cancer was incorporated into the storyline of East Enders as a way of rounding out a regular character while new characters had to be introduced in Brookside