Why Audiences Love Drama Programmes

Drama programmes are popular because they show the audience themselves. In other words, they RE-PRESENT an image of what they think they are or would like to be. It helps to reinforce people's sense of their own identity, and their sense of belonging to a particular group of people with shared values and interests. The extent to which an audience identifies with a character depends on how the programme uses stereotypes of:

Gender
Age
Ethnicity
Sexuality
Class and status
Physical ability/disability
Regional identity

The concept of representation is explained in more detail by Stuart Hall, an influential media theorist, HERE.

So, TV programmes represent certain groups of people on screen, and that representation may or may not be what those people are actually like. The point is that society has ideas about what people should be like, and that set of ideas is what we call IDEOLOGY. There are other definitions of what ideology means if you're studying, say, Politics, but for our purposes, it is the system of stereotypes which society collectively holds about certain groups.

The consequence of this is that ideology is also about POWER. Who has power in society? Who gets to make the rules? Who is acceptable and who isn't? You may believe that because we live in a liberal democracy everybody is equal and nobody is more powerful than anybody else, but it's not the case. It's what we would like to believe about our society but it simply isn't true.

If you find this hard to accept, think about the following questions:
  • How would your friends react if you came out and said you were gay? (Especially if you are sporty.)
  • Does your Mum earn more money than your Dad?
  • Who stayed at home to look after you when you were a baby?
  • How many black or asian Prime Ministers have there been?
  • If you were in a wheelchair, how easy would it be to get into the Media classroom?
TV Drama programmes which show representations of people who conform to expected social stereotypes also reinforce entrenched power structures in which white, middle-class, heterosexual men are the most privileged group.