Melodrama

The term originated from the early 19th-century French word mélodrame. It is derived from Greek μέλος mélos, "song, strain"In modern usage, a melodrama is a dramatic work wherein the plot, which is typically sensational and designed to appeal strongly to the emotions, takes precedence over detailed characterization. 

Melodramas typically concentrate on dialogue, which is often bombastic or excessively sentimental, rather than action. 

Characters are often drawn and may appear stereotyped. Melodramas are typically set in the private sphere of the home, focusing on morality and family issues, love, and marriage, often with challenges from an outside source, such as a "temptress", a scoundrel, or an aristocratic villain. 

A melodrama on stage, filmed, or on television is usually accompanied by dramatic and suggestive music that offers cues to the audience of the drama being presented.

In scholarly and historical musical contexts, melodramas are Victorian dramas in which orchestral music or song was used to accompany the action. 

The term is now also applied to stage performances without incidental music, novels, movies, television, and radio broadcasts. 

In modern contexts, the term "melodrama" is generally pejorative, as it suggests that the work in question lacks subtlety, character development, or both. By extension, language or behavior which resembles melodrama is often called melodramatic; this use is nearly always pejorative.

The relationship of melodrama compared to realism is complex. The protagonists of melodramatic works may be ordinary (and hence realistically drawn) people who are caught up in extraordinary events or highly exaggerated and unrealistic characters. 

With regard to its high emotions and dramatic rhetoric, melodrama represents a "victory over repression." Late Victorian and Edwardian melodrama combined a conscious focus on realism in stage sets and props with "anti-realism" in character and plot. 

Melodrama in this period strove for "credible accuracy in the depiction of incredible, extraordinary" scenes. Novelist Wilkie Collins is noted for his attention to accuracy in detail (e.g. of legal matters) in his works, no matter how sensational the plot. Melodramas were typically 10 to 20,000 words in length. 

Melodramas put most of their attention on the victim. A struggle between good and evil choices, such as a man being encouraged to leave his family by an "evil temptress". 

Other stock characters are the "fallen woman", the single mother, the orphan, and the male who is struggling with the impacts of the modern world. 

The melodrama examines family and social issues in the context of a private home, with its intended audience being the female spectator; secondarily, the male viewer can enjoy the onscreen tensions in the home being resolved. 

Melodrama generally looks back at ideal, nostalgic eras, emphasizing "forbidden longings".