docusoapn.
/ˈdɒkjᵿsəʊp/, U.S. /ˈdɑkjəˌsoʊp/ Chiefly British.
A television documentary series following people in a particular location or occupation over a period of time.These programmes are considered to have several elements redolent of soap opera: fixed professional or domestic settings, recurring ‘characters’ whose lives become increasingly familiar to viewers as the series progresses, and narrative threads running through and between episodes.Docu-soap opera in quot. 1979 has the sense ‘a soap opera based on actual events’.
ΚΠ
1979 Christian Sci. Monitor 17 May 14/1 ‘Blind Ambition’ is based on Dean's book of the same name and ‘Mo’, his wife's autobiography. Together, they constitute what is rapidly becoming a new television form: the docu-soap opera.]
1991 Newsday (N.Y.) (Nexis) 7 Mar. 69 ‘Yearbook’ is the Oxy 10 of docusoaps. ‘Yearbook’, the story of a year in the life of a high school, has no narrators.
1993 Independent (Nexis) 24 Aug. 3 ‘We don't call it fly-on-the-wall now,’ said a BBC spokeswoman. ‘It's a cross between a soap opera and a documentary, so the word is soapumentary, or docusoap.’
1998 Daily Tel. 14 Jan. 42/5 Chris Terrill's 12-part docu-soap..charted the journey of the Galaxy, a 2000 passenger cruise ship bound for the Caribbean.
This is a new entry (OED Third Edition, June 2001; most recently modified version published online March 2022).
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n.1991