GENRE

Genre
Genre gives the audience expectations and determines the way they interpret the text. Genres are used in a whole variety of texts from tabloid newspapers, radio chat shows to soaps. A well known genre is that of horror. The audience expects to be scared, and the mediators play with these expectations. Mise-en-scène is vital in helping an audience determine the generic expectations.

Characters are often generically determined in certain texts. Audiences recognise these key elements of a genre and respond accordingly, if they read the text in the way the mediator prefers. These key elements can be called paradigms and two types have been identified:
1. Iconographic: signs and symbols
2. Structural: how structures in the text deal with issues such as ideology and gender.
Generic subversion is becoming stronger and stronger in contemporary texts. A good example of this subversion is in the film Scary Movie where virtually every generic code is first identified, then played with, to the delight of many audiences.

Genres tend to become ‘tired’ over time, with audiences becoming less interested. The theorist Christian Metz identified four phases in this process: the initial phase, the classical phase, the declining phase and finally the parody phase. The disaster genre is a good example with The Towering Inferno in the classical phase and Airplane! as the final parody. To survive, genres mutate and join with others to form hybrid genres, such as Blade Runner, which was a hybrid of the Sci-Fi and Film Noir genres.
Going further
Genre can be linked firmly to the key concept of institution in media studies. Genres appeal to certain target audiences, for example, soap operas tend to have a gendered appeal (to women), which allows institutions to precisely market goods and services to this audience during commercial breaks. Genre also allows institutions to save money by standardising production – using the same sets, actors and scriptwriters for a series keeps costs down in a business where costs can spiral upwards and audiences can become easily bored. When costs can be accurately predicted, financial planning is easier and long-term contracts can be awarded to suppliers and actors. This generic approach to production can lead to predictability and can stifle creativity, as happened under the old Hollywood studio system that began to collapse in the 1970s.

A contemporary development has been genre hybridisation and the creation of cross genre texts where different genres are combined together to create a newer, fresher genre, which appeals to a new audience. A good contemporary example is the popular TV series CSI that combines the police procedural, crime and whodunit genres to create a new genre. Genres are no longer separate and unique, they increasingly lend and borrow from other texts; this is known as intertextuality and can be seen as a defining aspect of post modernism.

Genre can link naturally with the key concept of audience. Audiences like genre texts and actively seek them out for their own pleasure. Genre texts are reassuring to audiences because of their familiarity and promoting a God-like understanding of knowing roughly what the outcome will be. Audiences know what to expect and usually get it from a generic text. A genre that pleases audiences is reality TV; a good contemporary example is Big Brother that has predictable elements such as interactivity, where the audience votes unpopular members of the house out, and engineered disputes between the different characters, which are focused on in the editing phase of the production. The producers of the show call the genre a format, which seems to have become an interchangeable term.