Information AboutDramedy |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT COMEDY-DRAMA | |
| entertainment | |
| television genres | |
| comedy-dramaentertainment | |
| television genres | |
| comedy-drama | |
| comedy | |
| drama | |
| entertainment | |
| SHOPPER'S DELIGHT | |
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Traditional Theatre was divided from its earliest days into Comedy and Tragedy , terms which primarily indicated whether the story had a happy ending. The term "drama" was used to describe all the action of a play. In the early 1800s, as theatrical writing became more subtle and plays were less likely to end with multiple deaths, the term "drama" began to be used to describe plays that were more sober, with "comedy" meaning plays that were funny rather than plays which ended happily. Since then the terms have remained relatively subjective. Authors such as Anton Chekov and George Bernard Shaw famously blurred the line between comedy and drama. The advent of Radio Drama , Cinema , and particularly television created greater pressure in Marketing to clearly define a product as either comedy or drama. Though in live theatre the difference became less and less significant, in Mass Media , comedy and drama were clearly divided. Comedies, especially, were expected to maintain a consistently light tone and not challenge the viewer by introducing more serious content. By the early 1960s, television companies had adopted a universal practice of presenting half-hour long "comedy" series, or one hour long "dramas." Half-hour series were mostly restricted to Situation Comedy or family comedy, and were usually aired with either a live or artificial Laugh Track . One hour dramas included genre series such as police and detective series, Westerns , Science Fiction , and, later, serialized prime time Soap Opera s. Programs today still overwhelmingly conform to these half-hour and one hour guidelines.
The term "dramedy" first came into use in the mid-.
Hour-long comedic dramas have usually proven more successful in the Ratings than half-hour dramatic comedies. Though the great majority of shows still fall into either one category or the other, the comedy/drama line becomes more and more loose as viewers become accustomed to "off-beat" series, and as younger viewers who were introduced to genre hybrids at an early age become an older and more market-friendly audience (as well as becoming the television creators of today.) The divide is further diminished by the increasing popularity of subscription TV services such as HBO and Showtime , where the demands of per-show marketing are not as stringent and viewers are explicitly looking for a product different from traditional television. SEE ALSO |