In Britain and Belgium home-grown community soap has proven instrumental in the public service’s wooing of the national/regional audience in terms of ratings, image building and the process of enculturation. The community subgenre, characterized by social commitment and realism, imposes itself as the public service’s privileged soap model and the culturally most specific soap model. As such Thuis/At Home, a home-grown nonexportable regional community soap, produced by the Flemish public service VRT, lends itself to an investigation of the articulation/construction of Flemishness conducted against the backdrop of a comparative study between Thuis and its British counterpart EastEnders. Through an examination of the construction of the community, social class and gender, as well as thematic preoccupations and a narrative/ideological analysis of representative storylines, I attempt to distil the unarticulated givens of Thuis’s social structure as indicative of the agenda of the society that watches the soap. Thuis’s preoccupation with conflict and crime coupled with authority-in-crisis, the influence of American soaps in terms of female stereotyping and lack of a common ground geographically, historically and in terms of class conspire to the construction of an imaginary, inward-looking community and a conservative worldview at the expense of female-centred narratives and difference. Cultural tropes and most importantly, an informal standardized language which has become the point of resistance against Dutch and French linguistic and cultural hegemony unify the heterogeneous Flemish community on and offscreen.
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