LAUSR

ABSTRACT This article examines the interactions between Ivorian television genre and global genres, such as telenovelas and sitcoms. During the 2000s, Ma famille, an Ivorian TV show, was an unprecedented success throughout French-speaking Africa. The show presents family relations in a modern urban Africa, until then a topic hardly seen on television screens. Many attribute this innovation in Ivorian televisual genre to telenovelas’ omnipresence on West African screens since the 1990s. However, based on directors’ interviews and on a method informed by genre innovation dialectic, this article argues instead for the important role played by edutainment television shows in this process, which adapted the telenovela modalities to local formats. This strategy used by edutainment demonstrates the importance of tropes and themes recurring across a genre, highlighting a surprising course for telenovelas in Côte d’Ivoire and the centrality of Ivorian endogenous popular tradition in the process.