Comparison With Soap Operas
The standard American, British, or Australian soap opera is invariably designed to theoretically continue indefinitely, and indeed sometimes do endure for decades, with an ever-rotating cast of players and characters. However, most Latin American telenovelas have an average run of six months up to a year. The show's duration is pre-planned at the show's inception, with the overall story-arc and conclusion also known by the show's makers at its inception. Mundo de Juguete is one exception to the rule, with a total of 605 chapters (1974–1977), and a few cast changes during the course of the serial. Some earlier Argentine telenovelas (most of them penned by Alberto Migré) also ran for a few years.
Telenovelas also have a different type of story from English-language soaps, the typical telenovela story being focused on a rivalry between two or more people or families in romance or business. Many of them use stock themes like a cinderella (who is a rival of the male protagonist's evil girlfriend), two brothers after one woman (or two sisters after one man), mistaken/unknown parentage. Typically the hero gets shot (or something equivalent).
Telenovelas comprise the great majority of the dramatic productions by South American television networks whereas in the USA other formats like sitcoms or TV dramas are more popular on the English-speaking networks.
Read more about this topic: Telenovelas
Famous quotes containing the words soap operas, comparison with, comparison and/or soap:
“A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send cheques to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas.”
—Northrop Frye (b. 1912)
“Certainly there is not the fight recorded in Concord history, at least, if in the history of America, that will bear a moment’s comparison with this, whether for the numbers engaged in it, or for the patriotism and heroism displayed.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The comparison between Coleridge and Johnson is obvious in so far as each held sway chiefly by the power of his tongue. The difference between their methods is so marked that it is tempting, but also unnecessary, to judge one to be inferior to the other. Johnson was robust, combative, and concrete; Coleridge was the opposite. The contrast was perhaps in his mind when he said of Johnson: “his bow-wow manner must have had a good deal to do with the effect produced.””
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“A ‘spasm band’ is a miscellaneous collection of a soap box, tin cans, pan tops, nails, drumsticks, and little Negro boys. When mixed in the proper proportions this results in the wildest shuffle dancing, accompanied by a bumping rhythm.”
—For the City of New Orleans, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)