Television melodrama has its direct roots in the early 19th-century stage play in which romantic, sensational plots and incidents were mixed with songs and orchestral music. The word “melodrama” evolved from the Greek “melos,” meaning song or music, and “drama,” a deed, action, or play, especially tragedy. In tragedy, the hero is isolated from society so that he or she may better understand his or her own and the society’s moral weakness; but once enlightened, the hero cannot stave off the disaster embedded in the social structure beyond the hero’s control. In contrast, the melodramatic hero is a normative character representing incorporation into society. Northrop Frye, in Anatomy of Criticism (1957), described a central theme in melodrama as “the triumph of moral virtue over villainy, and the consequent idealizing of the moral views assumed to be held by the audience.” Since melodrama exists within a mass-cultural framework, it could, according to Frye, easily become “advance propaganda for the police state” if it were taken seriously. Frye sidesteps this fear by positing that the audience does not take such work seriously.

Peter Brooks, in The Melodramatic Imagination (1976), finds melodrama acting powerfully in society, reflecting the socialization of the deeply personal. Brooks sees in the melodramatic aesthetic unremitting con flict; possibly disabling, excessive enactment; and ultimately clarification and cure. It is, according to Brooks, akin to our experience of nightmare, where virtue is seemingly helpless in the face of menace. “The end of the nightmare is an awakening brought about by confrontation and expulsion of the villain, the person in whom evil is seen to be concentrated, and a reaffirmation of the society of ‘decent people.’”

Melodrama demands strong justice, while tragedy, in contrast, often includes the ambivalence of mercy in its code. Melodrama provides us with models of clear resolution for highly personalized, intensely enacted conflict. Television melodrama may be considered a contemporary substitute for traditional forms of social control—the rituals of organized religion and, before that, of “primitive mythologies”—that provided easily understandable models of “primal, intense, polarized forces.” It is thus a powerfully conservative social artifact—a public ceremonial ritual, repositioned in politics and economics, drawing us into both the prescriptions and the proscriptions of mainstream cultural values.

The hero is central to melodrama. In classical Greek dramaturgy, the term applied to an individual of super-human strength, courage, or ability who was favored by the gods. In antiquity, the hero was regarded as an immortal intermediary between the gods and ordinary people—a demigod who was the offspring of a god or goddess and a human being. Later, the heroic class came to include mortals of renown who were deified because of great and noble deeds or for firmness or greatness of soul in any course of action they undertook. The hero was distinguished by extraordinary bravery and martial achievement. Many heroes were boldly experimental or resourceful in their actions. Punishment of those who violated social codes was harsh.

The world in which the classic hero operated was a world of heightened emotional intensity—a harsh world in which the norm included unending tests of both physical and moral strength and the constant threat of death. The hero represented a carefully defined value system in which good triumphed over evil in the end and in which the actions of the hero, with the assistance of the gods, produced order and stability out of chaos.

Heroes are “social types.” As Orrin Klapp notes in Heroes, Villains, and Fools: The Changing American Character (1962), heroes offer “roles which, though informal, have become rather well conceptualized and in which there is a comparatively high degree of consensus.” Drawn from a cultural stock of images and symbols, heroes provide models people try to approximate. As such, Klapp argues, heroes represent “basic dimensions of social control in any society.”

Reflecting the increasingly technocractic nature of contemporary American society, many “workplace” melodramas on television have featured what Gary Edgerton (1980) has termed the “corporate hero”—a team of specialists which acts as a unit. The corporate hero derives his or her identity from the group. He or she is more a distinct “talent” than a distinct personality. Heroism by committee emphasizes the individual’s need to belong to a group and to interact. The composite corporate hero tends to reinforce the importance of social institutions in maintaining social order. When violence is employed to this end, as in police or spy melodrama, it is corporatized, becoming less a personal expression for the corporate hero than for the traditional individual hero. Major examples of the corporate hero in television melodrama include Mission: Impossible, Charlie’s Angels, Hill Street Blues, and L.A. Law.

Heroes could not exist on the melodramatic stage without their dramaturgical counterparts—villains and fools. While heroes exceed societal norms, villains, in contrast, are negative models of evil to be feared, hated, and ultimately eradicated or reformed by the actions of the hero; villains threaten societal norms. Fools, on the other hand, are models of absurdity, to be ridiculed; they fall far short of societal norms. Within the television melodrama, these social types operate as images or signs, constructed according to our society’s dominant values, reinforcing commonly held beliefs regarding the proper ordering of social relations.

The aesthetic structure of television melodrama, as a form of popular storytelling, is clearly linked to its dramaturgical predecessors. It employs rhythmic patterns in its scene and act progression analogous to the metrical positions in the poetic line of the mnemonically composed classical Greek epic poetry. As in the grand opera of the 19th century, television melodrama is organized into a series of distinct acts, each generally signifying a change in either time or place, and linked by orchestral transitions. Superfluous exposition is eliminated. The spectator is offered a series of intense highlights of the lives of the protagonists and antagonists. Orchestral music introduces actions, provides a background for plot movement, and reinforces moments of heightened dramatic intensity. Television melodrama, like grand opera, is generally constructed to formula. Plot dominates, initiating excitement and suspense by raising for its protagonists explicit questions of self-preservation and implicit questions of preservation of the existing social order.

In 19th- and 20th-century literature, melodrama came to signify “democratic drama.” Critics condemned the form as sensational, sentimental entertainment for the masses. Rural-type melodrama—with its beautiful, virtuous, impoverished heroine; its pure hero; its despicable villain who ties the heroine to the railroad tracks; and the rustic clown who aids the hero (wonderfully satirized in the television cartoon “Dudley Do-Right of the Royal Canadian Mounties,” originally a segment of The Bullwinkle Show)—gave way to city melodrama focusing on the seamy underworld and to suspenseful crime dramas, such as those of Agatha Christie.

Television melodrama has drawn freely from all these precursors both structurally and conceptually. Highly segmented plots developed in four 12-minute acts, each with a climax, and a happy ending usually encompassed in an epilogue in which moral lessons are conveyed to the audience (a function assumed by the “chorus” in classical Greek drama), carried along by background music and stress peaks of action and emotional involvement. Suspense and excitement are heightened by a sense of realism created through sophisticated if formulaic visualizations (car chases being obvious examples). Characterizations are generally unidimensional, employing eccentric protagonists and antagonists made credible by good acting. Ideologically, the plot elements rein force conventional morality.

The rhythm of the commercial television melodrama depends on a predictable structure motivated by the flow of the sequence of program segment, music, and commercial. As suspense builds and the plot thickens, viewers are carried forward at various crucial junctures by a combination of rapid visual cutting and an intense buildup of the orchestral background music and ambient sound that create a smooth transition to the often frenetic, high-pitched commercials. This rhythm produces a flow that the audience implicitly understands and accepts as a genre convention in the context of the pecuniary mechanisms that define the regime of commercial television.

Raymond Williams, in Television: Technology and Cultural Form, refers to melodramatic structuration as commodified “planned flow.” By cutting down on exposition or establishing sequences that tend toward lengthy and deliberate characterizations, the purveyors of melodrama are able to break their tales into shortened, fast-paced, and often unconnected simple sequences that make the commercial breaks feel natural to viewers.

The production imperatives of television-series melodrama reinforce Williams’s concept of the commodification of flow. Noted producer/writers Richard Levinson and William Link (Columbo, Mannix, and Murder, She Wrote and made-for-television movies The Execution of Private Slovik, The Storyteller, and That Certain Summer) described these production procedures in Stay Tuned (1983). The network commits itself to a new television series in mid-April. The series premieres in early September, leaving four and a half months’ lead time for producers to hire staff (including writers and directors), prepare scripts, and begin shooting and editing. It takes four weeks, under the best conditions, to complete an episode of a melodrama; with luck, four shows will be “in the can” by the season’s premiere, with others in varying stages of development (at any time during the process, many series episodes will be in development simultaneously, one being edited, another shot, and another scripted). By October, the initial four episodes will have been aired, and the fifth will be nearly ready. If the show is renewed at mid-season, the producer will need as many as 22 episodes for the entire season. By December, there will be but a matter of days between the final edit and the airing of an episode, as inevitable delays shorten the turnaround time. In addition to normal time problems, there are problems with staff. Levinson and Link cite the frequent problem of having a good freelance writer in demand who agrees to write for one producer’s shows as well as those of other producers. The writer with a track record will be juggling an outline for one show, a first draft for another, and a “notion” for a third.

In the frenzied world of the daytime soap opera, actors get their scripts the night before the taping, begin run-through rehearsals at 7:30 the next morning, do three rehearsals before taping, and tape between 3:30 and 6:00 that afternoon. This hectic ritual is repeated five days a week.

The prime-time melodrama production process is driven by shortcuts, scattered attention, and occasional network interference in content, created by the fear of viewer response to potentially controversial material that may range from questionable street language, however dramatically appropriate, to sexual taboos (proscriptions change over time as standards of appropriateness change in the wider culture). Simplicity, predictability, and safety become the norms that frame the creation and production of television melodrama. Planned flow, the melodrama’s highly symbolic heroic ideal, its formal conventions, and its reinforcement of the society’s dominant values at any given cultural moment render the genre highly significant as a centrist cultural mechanism stressing order and stasis.

Perhaps because it is such a staple—and stable— form of television, melodrama has become a central feature of almost any other program formations in the medium, leading to “blurred” genres modified by melodramatic conventions. Thus, police procedurals such as NYPD Blue or Third Watch focus as often on the private tribulations of characters as on their professional activities, though the two types of event frequently intertwine and influence each other. One of the more notable examples of this genre blending and bending was Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which modifed a comic-adventure theatrical release into a compelling exploration of the lives of teens and young adults, providing powerful and poignant moments, such as in the episode in which Buffy’s mother dies.

The use of melodrama as a modifying factor even altered the concept of planned flow when cable channels began to produce serialized programming based on familiar genres. Home Box Office’s (HBO’s) The Sopranos, OZ, and The Wire have been cited as among the most complex offerings in television history, each of them trading on viewer knowledge of “mafia stories,” “prison stories,” or “police procedurals,” richly embroidered with melodramatic overtones. Indeed, it is likely that the sense of these basic story forms has now been altered by these uninterrupted, randomly available narratives, “rewritten” in melodramatic form.