Realism in TV dramas

Surface realism – also known as ‘getting the details right’ or ‘making it look real’. You can look at texts in terms of locations, or setting, or costumes and props, or even the right accent spoken by a character. It looks right, it sounds right therefore it is realistic creating a sense of realism.Inner and emotional realism – of characters. The audience ‘knows’ the character and identifies with him or her because the character behaves in a ‘realistic’ way or says the ‘right’ thing, or shows an identifiable response or emotion.Plausibility of the narrative or plot - What happens in the text is credible – could happen ‘in real life’. (If the plot is too far-fetched or ‘out of character’ then the audience won’t accept it. (Interesting idea here is to look at the Harry Potter films and ask yourself exactly why the ludicrous events succeed in capturing the audience’s imagination. Harry Potter’s world is utterly ‘unreal’, but it’s made to seem to be real.

Better than any other genre, social realism has shown us to ourselves, pushing the boundaries in the effort to put the experiences of real Britons on the screen, and shaping our ideas of what British cinema can be. While our cinema has experienced all the fluctuations in fortune of Hollywood's first export territory, realism has been Britain's richest gift to world cinema.Social realism in films is representative of real life, with all its difficulties. The stories and people portrayed are everyday characters, usually from working class backgrounds. Typically, films within the social realist canon are gritty, urban dramas about the struggle to survive the daily grind.