Core Response #1

 Modeleski's draws a mirror relationship between the form of daytime television and the domestic work of women. I find her focus on the gaps of the flow of soap operas to be interesting, in her focus on quiz shows and soap operas, these gaps can be commercial breaks that deter climaxes and confrontations, but perhaps contradictorily in a way that only emphasizes her point, she also states that the relationship that daytime televisions creates with its viewers, a participative 'nearness', is reflective of the mental world that the domestic space requires, one of connection. These gaps foster a deeper sense of connectivity, an enmeshing and a consciousness of reading the emotional realms of other, push and pull. I think Modeleski here gets to the heart of identification and the comfort of television, especially in melodramatic serialized forms. In relating to these ongoing networked narratives, I think there is a deeper sense of 'reading' then one would assume when engaging with these texts formally, the frequency of close-ups that Modeleski describes could be interpreted as a guiding emotional hand through the world of the characters, but as she states, there is layered, conflicted emotions beneath the performances that simply by being externalized are open to reduction to accusations of shallowness, but these externalizations are often countered by an aspect that Modeleski touches upon but that I would be interested in reading more which is not just the frequency these episodes come out, accompanying one throughout the week, but also the longevity of connection with the characters that provides simply by its nature, a denser symbolic world that in its discarding through time of plots, of characters, of sets, I think creates a mutating sense of comfort in the viewer that is perhaps more complex and more inherently televisual than other serialized forms of TV narrative.