to less prosaic representations. That five of the commentaries are positive in their evaluation of Neighbours, two neutral, and only one negative suggests the broad potential acceptability of the program to the US market (only one publication, the Wall Street Journal, has the kind of highbrow readership which might encourage its television critics to sneer at popular material such as soaps). The two textual features of Neighbours which do draw comment – the everyday, and the domestic and suburban – point to a crucial first feature of the US “mediascape,” in particular its “soapscape,” namely the preference for the exceptional, the non-domestic, the non-suburban. In US soaps, it is well known, the pole of melodrama exercises greater attraction than the pole of realism (cf. Geraghty 1991: 25–38) – in contrast to Australian and British soaps. These two textual aspects of Neighbours are a central theme of the US commentaries, combining under the rubric of the non-exceptional, the “realistic.” All the commentaries bar the sole negative one (Kitman 1991: 23) refer positively to Neighbours’ “realism,” often in contradistinction to the perceived artificiality of US soaps. Peter Pinne, the program’s executive producer, is twice quoted to just this effect (Goodspeed 1991: 22; Mann 1991: 28), while USA Today (Roush 1991: 15) applauds “how close the residents of Ramsey Street seem to our own suburban counterparts,” and notes that “its casual gossip and unexceptional lifestyle [are] closer to the early days of Knots Landing than to any current soap.” The redoubtable Wall Street Journal does not sneer, but praises a television version of middle- and lower-class life that is at ease with itself and singularly lacking in . . . the self-consciousness and discomfort that attends American television’s efforts to portray uneducated white working-class types . . . . [Its] characters . . . ought to be more recognisable to Americans than the peculiar beings that inhabit the worlds of our home-grown TV dramas . . . . [They] actually converse with one another in the way that people do – without declaiming or the rat-a-tat of one-liners, or recitals of a position on the latest hot social theme. If the beat of their daily lives is unhysterical – quiet, in fact – it is also eventful. (Rabinowitz 1991: 17) The Wall Street Journal takes a refreshing distance from the infamous “Greed is good” dictum voiced in Oliver Stone’s film, Wall Street! Given Neighbours’s atypicality in the realm of US soaps, its American reference points are either Knots Landing – which one British journalist described as “the nearest the Americans can bear to get to a soap about ordinary people” (Kingsley 1989: 226) – or US sitcoms (Kelleher 1991: 36; Rabinowitz 1991: 17). Buyer and seller agreed that its non-exceptional “realism” was one reason for Neighbours’s failure in the US “soapscape.” KCOP described it as “less raunchy than US soap operas, too wholesome” (Moran 1992). Its seller, Bob Cristal, added that