Glamour, power, champagne breakfasts in satin sheets--welcome to television's most dazzling and overlooked genre: women-centric melodrama miniseries of the 1980s and 1990s. Decades before Real Housewives, rags-to-riches fantasies depicting strong women overcoming tragedy to take charge of their destinies were a big hit with TV audiences.

Reflecting the "greed is good" ethos of the day yet encoded with subversive feminist messaging, these glitzy, often camp stories depicted statuesque superwomen facing off with square-jawed men in boardrooms and bedrooms. This book explores the shows that epitomized the prime-time soap era and gave us such memorable scenes as Stefanie Powers trading lovers with her twin sister, Joan Collins fighting Nazis in haute couture and Phoebe Cates demanding, "Which one of you bitches is my mother?

About the Author
Scott Humphries is an aficionado of melodrama, especially the "trashy" kinds of popular literature, film and television from the 1980s. He has degrees in English literature and urban planning and lives in Canberra, Australia.

Reviews
A deep literary dive into all those sumptuously over-ripened, over-the-top miniseries we can never forget...lyrical, deliciously witty, and backed-up with a myriad of good, solid facts."-John De Vito, co-author of Epic Television Miniseries: A Critical History



Book Information
ISBN 9781476691626
Author Scott Humphries
Format Paperback
Page Count 277
Imprint McFarland & Co Inc
Publisher McFarland & Co Inc
Weight(grams) 272g