Drama is a popular genre for entertainment, with various types including romance, tragedy, comedy, and crime. Television has expanded the range of dramatic styles, including docudramas and legal dramas, captivating audiences worldwide.
Everyone, and not just drama queens, likes to kick back and watch a great show. Whether the play is on stage or screen, in a novel or performed by a hysterical couple in the middle of a restaurant, it offers audiences a chance to put their personal dramas aside and take a breather. Life is great and drama is greater. There are as many kinds of drama as there are dramatic moments.
Drama is passionate, and passion equals love. Romance is not only one of the most popular drama genres today, it always has been. Just as Shakespeare celebrated Romeo and Juliet, the ancient Greeks found a dramatic interest in the love affairs between gods and goddesses, sailors and sirens, and Odysseus and his mother.
In the case of Ulysses and his mother, those moments of romantic passion led directly to another hugely popular drama genre, tragedy. Realizing that Ulysses and his matriarch didn’t realize who they were to each other originally takes some of the “ewww” away and lends some sympathy to the situation. A truly beautiful tragedy sheds many tears, both on stage and on screen, as well as from the eyes of the beholder. Tragedy is really not entirely tragic because it serves a useful purpose. It allows viewers to overflow with emotion, to be transformed with compassion, and then to stand up and walk away when the story is being told.
A good heartbreak story inevitably leads to the urge to spit it out at you. There is a thin line, it is said, between the dramatic genres of tragedy and comedy, which could explain the tragicomic mask which is the symbol of the theatre. Whatever the reason, people all over the world love to laugh. A truly good comedy, like a truly painful tragedy, makes the audience laugh out of compassion for the trifles, real or figurative, which the characters in the drama undergo.
Television has spawned an extraordinary array of dramatic styles and types. Viewers around the world are frozen in horror and glee, eyes glued to the real-life journeys of the overweight trying to lose weight, lost love trying to be found, and the talented dancers and singers, or maybe not so much, waiting to be discovered. Tricksters are caught in the public eye, questions are asked, weddings are held, and babies are born in docudrama after docudrama.
The modern world is doubly entranced by both high crime and its legal ramifications. Thus two other dramatic genres were born. TV dramas about international espionage, serial killers, Internet hackers and other criminals rival crime shows featuring real criminals. Once those criminals, real or imagined, are caught, another one in the hit parade of drama genres is ready to unfold. Legal dramas that set the stage in the offices of top lawyers, the offices of money-struck public defenders, and real-life judges’ chambers leave viewers on the edge of their seats, deciding who’s right and who should hang.
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