What's the difference between drama and melodramatic?

Drama


Definition:

  • (n.) A composition, in prose or poetry, accommodated to action, and intended to exhibit a picture of human life, or to depict a series of grave or humorous actions of more than ordinary interest, tending toward some striking result. It is commonly designed to be spoken and represented by actors on the stage.
  • (n.) A series of real events invested with a dramatic unity and interest.
  • (n.) Dramatic composition and the literature pertaining to or illustrating it; dramatic literature.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Peter retired in 1998, when he was appointed CBE for his services to drama.
  • (2) The dramas are part of the BBC2 controller Janice Hadlow's plans for her "unashamedly intelligent" channel over the coming months.
  • (3) Here's a certainty: When you play out your personal dramas, hurt and self-interest in the media, it's a confection.
  • (4) While ITV1's Harry Hill and the final series of BBC1's Gavin and Stacey will stay put, Sky1 did manage to secure US drama House, starring Hugh Laurie, from Channel Five, paying an estimated £500,000 an episode.
  • (5) There could be no faulting the atmosphere or the football drama.
  • (6) A Catholic boys’ school has reversed its permission to allow civil rights drama Freeheld, starring Julianne Moore and Ellen Page as a lesbian couple, to shoot on location in New York State.
  • (7) Mr Bae stars in a popular drama, Winter Sonata, a tale of rekindled puppy love that has left many Japanese women hankering for an age when their own men were as sensitive and attentive as the Korean actor.
  • (8) "We don't think British drama is failing because these things are so good – it just shows that other countries do good drama."
  • (9) Limits are a relief, because they concentrate the drama and free the writer from the torture of choice, as Aristotle knew when he advised playwrights to preserve "the unities" by telling one story in one place over a single day.
  • (10) George RR Martin , whose series of novels inspired the HBO drama , has woven a tapestry of extraordinary size and richness; and most of the threads he has used derive from the history of our own world.
  • (11) He'd later carry this over into Netflix's House Of Cards but before that, TV had already begun to emulate this new, bleak, antiheroic maturity with a cycle of dark, longform, acclaimed dramas, commencing with The Sopranos and culminating in Breaking Bad .
  • (12) The prime minister told the Radio Times he was a fan of the "brilliant" US musical drama Glee, preferred Friends to The West Wing, and chose Lady Gaga over Madonna, and Cheryl Cole over Simon Cowell.
  • (13) He knew his subject personally, having worked with him on the 1993 romantic drama Poetic Justice , in which the rapper starred opposite Janet Jackson.
  • (14) Phoenix will next be seen in James Gray's Lowlife, a historical drama about immigrants in 1900s New York.
  • (15) Ellen Page is to make her directorial debut with Miss Stevens, starring Anna Faris as a teacher chaperoning a mob of high school students to a state drama competition.
  • (16) The first episode of the gothic drama pulled in 6.1 million viewers on Easter Monday but that number dropped to only 4.5 million for the second episode, prompting fears that the audience numbers could decline even further for Wednesday's finale.
  • (17) This House , his witty political drama set in the whips' office of 1970s Westminster, transferred from the National's Cottesloe theatre to the Olivier, following critical acclaim.
  • (18) Whatever conclusion the crowd might have drawn, what's striking is that Tempest's poem couldn't be ignored: the conviction and drama of her performance forced a reaction and coloured the rest of the evening.
  • (19) (Personally, I think a perfect contemporary drama would highlight the quiet, fraught, human, ongoing battle between those who want to live life and those who want to live life electronically.
  • (20) Meanwhile he is preparing a new double piano concerto by Kevin Volans with the Labèque sisters for a concert at the Edinburgh festival next week, and he tells me with a glint in his eye about ideas for the next two seasons: concert performances of Don Giovanni this October, more Brahms symphonies, and more Berlioz – an ambitious plan to realise the gigantic drama of Roméo and Juliette on a chamber-orchestral scale, following up his rapturously received performances of L'Enfance du Christ in February.

Melodramatic


Definition:

  • (a.) Of or pertaining to melodrama; like or suitable to a melodrama; unnatural in situation or action.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Ron Atkinson described one trip to Anfield as like going into the Vietnam War and, if that sounds melodramatic all these years on, his team had just been attacked with tear gas.
  • (2) In 1850 you could see Benjamin West’s ever popular vision of the apocalypse, Death on a Pale Horse , riding melodramatically back into view on Broadway for the fourth time in as many years; and a gallery of Rembrandts at Niblo’s theatre, where Charles Blondin once walked a tightrope.
  • (3) Old Trafford was once a Theatre of Dreams but now setting for a tragedy , melodramatics Russell Brand.
  • (4) The satirists were completely disregarded as news producers continued to make ever more melodramatic, repetitive and graphically absurd programmes.
  • (5) Adaptations Don Juan and The Corsair were both filmed in melodramatic black and white; the Byronic hero spawned a thousand celluloid imitations - Gabriel Byrne is convincingly Byronic as Byron in Ken Russell's hallucinogenic and slightly laughable Gothic (1986).
  • (6) A suspicion lingers among some that gothic answers only to the teenager's melodramatic instincts ( TS Eliot diagnosed a taste for Edgar Allan Poe as fatally adolescent), its terrors as ultimately unserious as saying "Boo!".
  • (7) I was making lyrics that would rhyme or flow or capture a mood, and looking back I think: ‘Why was I doing that?’ I don’t have a particularly melodramatic or exceptional life but at least I can sing about the things that are happening in my life and it feels so much better and more honest and more meaningful.” While hardly startling territory for a singer-songwriter, the juxtaposition of Dan’s wavering delivery with stirring dance rhythms functions as a kind of emotional double whammy.
  • (8) [The film] aches for more depth and warmth and humour, but this is spectacular sci-fi – huge, operatic, melodramatic, impressive.
  • (9) Without being melodramatic about it, I say, you are holding in your hands an example of the price that is paid for being a professional footballer at the top of his game.
  • (10) Lord Home who has died at the age of 92, was in manner unobtrusive and undemanding yet reached the height of his political career, first as foreign secretary and next as prime minister, in melodramatic circumstances.
  • (11) And then along came a Greek deal, and now a US debt deal, and you might presume I had been prematurely melodramatic.
  • (12) But the prosecution described his testimony as “Oscar-worthy” and said it amounted to a “melodramatic denial” of his sexual proclivities.
  • (13) The proximity of one of the Kremlin towers to the spot where Nemtsov was shot in the back is darkly melodramatic, and the symbolism could not be clearer.
  • (14) "In some senses they have reacted in a slightly melodramatic manner.
  • (15) That melodramatic, all-over-the-shop approach to vocal melody just screamed “hippy” at me, and seemed to be the aural equivalent of shawls, beads, headdresses and candles, all of which I suspected Kate Bush was wearing or surrounded by while she recorded the vocal.
  • (16) Trierweiler is forever dashing into bathrooms and collapsing while Hollande is an unfeeling prig who either ignores her or tells her to stop being so melodramatic.
  • (17) Rosa portrays himself melodramatically, and with a gnomic tablet saying that silence is the best policy.
  • (18) While he recognises that this may sound melodramatic, he points out that this is precisely what has happened with previous decisions to tighten eligibility for other disability benefits.
  • (19) "Sometimes the smallest little detail can change the course of history," he says, melodramatically.
  • (20) He was the first foreign secretary for 20 years to be a member of the House of Lords he was the first (and surely last) man ever to disclaim six peerages to become prime minister and he was responsible for arranging that his successor should be chosen by secret ballot held among Conservative members of the House of Commons, with equally melodramatic consequences.