The Age of Melodramatic Miniseries: When Glamour Ruled on Television, 1980-1995

by Scott Humphries

Overview

Glamour, power, champagne breakfasts in satin sheets—welcome to television's most dazzling and overlooked genre: women-centric melodrama miniseries of the 1980s and 1990s. Decades before Real Housewives, rags-to-riches fantasies depicting strong women overcoming tragedy to take charge of their destinies were a big hit with TV audiences.

Reflecting the "greed is good" ethos of the day and encoded with feminist messaging, these glitzy, often camp stories depicted statuesque superwomen facing off with square-jawed men in boardrooms and bedrooms. This book explores the shows that epitomized the prime-time soap era and gave us such memorable scenes as Stefanie Powers trading lovers with her twin sister, Joan Collins fighting Nazis in haute couture and Phoebe Cates demanding, "Which one of you bitches is my mother?"

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781476691626
Publisher:	McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Publication date:	03/17/2023
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 10.00(h) x 0.43(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Scott Humphries is an aficionado of melodrama, especially the “trashy” kinds of popular literature, film and television from the 1980s. He has degrees in English literature and urban planning and lives in Canberra, Australia.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction
Part One—Defining the Genre
1. Overview of the ­Female-Centric Melodramatic Miniseries
2. Novels for Television…. Lost in Adaptation?
3. Women of Substance: Character Types and Tropes
4. Reception of the Melodramatic Miniseries
Part Two—Analyzing the Texts
5. A Woman’s Place: Mother, Family, and Home
6. Lady Bosses: Work, Power, and Conflict
7. Lifestyles of the Rich and Vacuous
8. Melodrama, “Down Under”
Afterword
Appendix A: List of Cited Miniseries
Appendix B: Methods for Reception Analysis
Chapter Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

A deep literary dive into all those sumptuously over-ripened, over-the-top miniseries we can never forget…lyrical, deliciously witty, and backed-up with a myriad of good, solid facts.”—John De Vito, co-author of Epic Television Miniseries: A Critical History

From the Publisher