Some scholars make the case that telenovelas’ Latin American success has to do with the role that melodrama plays in facilitating the negotiation of Latin American modernity. Attending to the transnational context of media flow and consumption has lead to less concern about imperialism’s effects on Latin American audiences and more-extensive theoretical work on the relationship between telenovelas to formations of Latin American modernity. Telenovela scholars have placed their work in direct and fruitful conversation with scholars in other countries studying serial melodramas, particularly as telenovelas have grown into a significant global export. Other general areas of inquiry include nuanced discussions of the genre and its persistence, studies of its production and consumption in local conditions, and analyses of particular telenovelas. Early debates deliberated over the telenovela’s role-along with television in general-in pacifying audiences and participating in mass media imperial projects telenovela exportation success required the reassessment of these theories of culture, given Latin America’s growing role as a producer of media flow. Early research grappled with the popularity and influence of telenovelas, with studies about the history and structure of the genre, the conditions of melodrama, and the context of national television industrial formation.
While research in the field began in the 1970s, scholars agree that it was not until the effects and power of media globalization began to be seen in the 1980s that telenovela scholarship gathered traction. However, telenovela production, structure, and programming differ greatly from that of soap operas, with the most-notable differences being their “closed” structure-narratives generally last between six and fifteen months and, in most countries, are programmed nightly-and their popularity across demographic groups, with many telenovelas being tailored for the whole family.
Telenovelas are often compared to the US soap opera and do boast some common characteristics, such as their reliance on the melodramatic mode. Now they serve as one of the largest media exports of countries such as Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia, circulating widely within Latin America as well as around the world. Telenovelas are a television genre developed and produced originally in Latin America since the 1950s.
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