Is drama even a genre? Some screenwriting theorists say it is too broad
Film and TV drama started as a leftover category: on the stage, a drama was a play that was neither comedy nor tragedy. Screen industries adopted that narrow meaning, and today the label splits into docudramas, satires, psychological studies and more, so much so that one taxonomy refuses to call it a genre at all.
On screen, drama means narrative fiction, or semi-fiction, meant to be taken more seriously than comedy. It is usually paired with a qualifier such as legal, political, historical, teen or police crime drama, which signals setting and subject. Whatever the flavour, the engine is conflict, emotional or social, and how the story resolves it.
There is also a much wider sense. Any fiction told by actors portraying characters, the process known as mimesis, counts as drama, which is what separates it from novels, short stories and narrative poems. Before cinema existed, theatre used drama for plays that were neither comedy nor tragedy, and film studies inherited that tighter definition. Radio drama has straddled both meanings, first describing live broadcasts and later the more highbrow end of radio output.
The Screenwriters Taxonomy argues that genres rest on atmosphere, character and story, making drama and comedy too sweeping to be genres. It treats drama as a type of film with at least ten sub-types. Docudramas, such as Zodiac from 2007, use trained actors to restage real events, with broadly true facts, whereas documentaries rely on real people. Docu-fiction mixes genuine footage with reconstructed scenes. Comedy dramas like The Truman Show put humour at the centre of serious stories, while light dramas such as The Terminal stay gentle in tone without losing weight.
Other branches push in sharper directions. Psychological dramas like Whiplash dig into characters' inner troubles. Satire, such as Thank You for Smoking, may be funny on the surface but uses irony and exaggeration to expose social faults. Film professor Ken Dancyger coined a category where characters and situations are inflated into fable or fairy tale, as in Fantastic Mr. Fox. Tragedy, as on the ancient stage, follows a central figure's suffering and fall, often ending in death, as in The Elephant Man.
Source: Drama (film and television)
