...One of Sabido's favorite experts is the psychologist Albert Bandura, of Stanford University, whom he described as "the greatest American since Benjamin Franklin." Bandura's "Bobo doll studies," conducted in the late nineteen-fifties and the sixties, showed that children, observing adults in violent forms of play, mimicked those behaviors. The best way to teach new behaviors, Bandura found, was to give people models that they could bond with and who could guide them through concrete, realistic steps. Sabido visited Bandura at Stanford to discuss plot ideas.
In a Sabido soap opera,there is always one positive, aspirational character, usually someone whose social status is slightly higher than that of the typical viewer. At the other end of the spectrum is a negative character-a superstitious mother-in-law or a thuggish husband. The most important member of the cast is the "transitional" figure-the fallible character who struggles to behave decently. This is the person with whom the audience is meant to identify.
"A typical soap operareflects the values of the culture and rarely stops to question them," Alice Payne Merritt, the deputy director of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Center for Communication Programs, told me. "The women are generally passive and follow the leads of the men. They rarely step out of their expected roles to become agents of change." Characters in Sabido soaps who act in ways that international aid workers consider beneficial-who, say, don't ostracize a cousin because he has AIDS-often have a hard time at first, but in the end they triumph. The assumption-perhaps an optimistic one-is that viewers, even those facing extreme economic and social disadvantages, can gain much more control over their lives if they are shown how to go about it.
Telenovelas are, in some ways, the ideal vehicle for such messages. Unlike soap operas in the United States, they are aired during prime time and are not considered the sole province of housewives. An American soap opera follows a vortex structure, with a few central characters and several story lines swirling around them, and is meant to continue indefinitely. A telenovela has one main plot, with a principal heroine, and four or five subplots that move toward a conclusion within six months to a year.
In Sabido soaps, like most programs in the genre, high dramas are staged in mundane settings. In "Bai Xing" ("Ordinary People"), Luye, an unmarried rural Chinese girl, has a baby and moves to the city. In the third season of the show, which is now airing in China, two characters learn that they have AIDS. (This is almost unheard of on Chinese television.) "Tsha Tsha," a 2003 South African soap, is a sort of "Dirty Dancing" set in a fictional village. Viwe is a haughty, spoiled rich girl who steals her rival's dance partner, Andile. Just before the final round of a big dance contest, she finds out that she was infected with H.I.V. by a former boyfriend, and tells Andile, "You should find another partner. I'm gonna stop dancing."
He answers, "It is hard, but life goes on. You're healthy and fit, and you can dance. And this competition means a lot to me."...
The full article from the New York Times published in June 2006 is available to view here - Human Spirit
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