Genre definition question: Downton Abbey
We started watching Downton Abbey; we approve. We're just starting the second season now. (On disc, from Netflix: it fell off the streaming just after we watched the pilot. Apparently Amazon has exclusive streaming rights now, or will soon, or something. This further strengthens my belief that Amazon is a dick, and I wish I could invest more energy in not buying shit from them, but it's freaking convenient and that's hard to get past.)
What genre would you call Downton Abbey? My opponent in this discussion thinks it's like a soap opera, albeit a high-quality one. I strongly disagree; although it has a few cases of melodrama, it isn't nearly the complex, intricately intertwined wtf'ery you get out of soap opera plots.
I kind of want to call it just "drama", but I don't actually watch much of the "drama" genre and I bet that's a pretty wide field, containing multiple subgenres. "Period drama", maybe?
What genre would you call Downton Abbey? My opponent in this discussion thinks it's like a soap opera, albeit a high-quality one. I strongly disagree; although it has a few cases of melodrama, it isn't nearly the complex, intricately intertwined wtf'ery you get out of soap opera plots.
I kind of want to call it just "drama", but I don't actually watch much of the "drama" genre and I bet that's a pretty wide field, containing multiple subgenres. "Period drama", maybe?