Fifty years since it was first introduced, television continues to be a significant and influential meaning-making system to South African audiences. Soap operas in this context enjoy high viewership numbers of audiences who are emotionally invested in the genre. In this chapter, I explore the evolution of television (ritualised and instrumental) audiences and how they make meaning of soap opera texts, and how they identify with characters through parasocial interaction and form a parasocial relationship with soap opera characters. To understand the relationship between texts and audiences using the reception analysis theory, prominent debates in literature were investigated. Using five focus groups, I explored not only the “what” and “why” questions surrounding the representation of black audiences in soap operas; it was also pertinent that I explored the “how”, hence the exploration of the production of soap opera texts using thematic analysis through the Atlas.ti qualitative software. Findings revealed that soap opera narratives contained representations of stereotypes and that soap opera texts are the preferred social and cultural interpreted meanings of those who produce soap operas. This means that this genre contains a mixture of language and pictures that parallel real-life experiences of both encoders and decoders of soap operas.