Melodrama Examples in Literature Sometimes, the best way to understand a genre is to look at examples. Like many of our favorite kinds of movies and TV, melodrama came from literature.

It is unlikely we will ever see the earlier movie named after the Land Down Under, a Belgian, post-WWII-era drama starring Jeremy Irons as a wool dealer, given the same treatment any time soon.

Yet, as an actor himself, Slattery seems a little too eager to believe that people can blithely transcend their physical types. The late Hoffman, for example, was one of our finest performers, but ...