Recent qualitative audience research on the reception of US fiction abroad has been presented as a valuable new perspective in studying the world-wide appeal and impact of American programming. However the concentration on the decoding of US fiction alone (usually Dallas) has stimulated an essential and decontextualized position on these issues. The results from a comparative reception analysis (comparing the reception of an American fiction programme and a similar domestic one by respondents in a small European country) show that several current concepts and arguments on the functioning, the appeal, the characteristics and the (possible) impact of US fiction should be revised. More generally, cross-textual comparative reception analysis can be useful in exploring nuances in audience activity and in the polysemic character of different texts. Methodologically, a multi-method approach is used to show that diverse techniques can be incorporated into a more elaborated scheme for analysis of the reception process, which consists of several substantial `moments'.
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