Abstract
In this essay, I return to the soap opera - but in a context hardly ever explored – an urban Indian city in the twenty-first century. Deriving insights from an empirical study that make interpretive negotiations of a specific Bengali television text its analytical object, this article argues that interpretive practices around the broadcast media texts act as resources in understanding lived media cultures in a historical frame and therefore provide a continued impetus to keep audience analysis on the map of communication and cultural studies without prematurely proclaiming its race is run in the age of digital media.