The unit studies popular television genres in their shifting industrial contexts and relations with audiences. It focuses on changes in television drama, including soap opera, and the rise of multiple 'reality television' formats that absorb aspects of drama and other genres. The unit investigates how television operates as a major form of cultural communication. It explores the ways in which its genres draw on, and create, wider cultural meanings and ideas of identity, and continue to evolve in a rapidly changing technological and cultural environment.