Generations & the construction of identity

Generation, South Africa's longest running and most popular soap (is it viewed by many more than 4.9 million people daily) tracks the vicissitudes of black business people in the advertising and marketing fields. Themes of co-option into white capital, loss of concern for roots, gender discrimination, homophobia in the light of cultural expectations and so on drive a fairly standard family saga. It confronts the problems which arise from the post-1994 changes in social milieu, especially among the younger generation.
We re-watch Generations, from the first episode that aired on SABC 1 in 1994 to the present, exploring the character development, the fashions, the lifestyles and the underpinning ideology, to understand and interrogate its role in sustaining social-political life and relations, and in constituting the social-political self in post apartheid South Africa.

Generations website (get blow by blow summaries of each episodes)

There have been a view academic studies in this regard

Mediating the Neoliberal Nation: Television in Post-Apartheid South Africa by Sarah Ives
An analysis of South African television’s political economy as a “public theaters of late capitalism” that is tied up with notions of national belonging.

"Soap operas like Generations, South Africa’s most popular television show, depict a ‘modern,’ urban, world of Black upper-middle class business elites. The show, with its emphasis on the emerging Black middle- and upper-classes presumably made possible by the new elections, encapsulates the hope of the post-apartheid era. Generations’ website makes frequent references to the links between the show and the post-apartheid era. Generations, the website proclaims, “can proudly claim to have not only survived political and social changes during this exciting period, but also to have evolved in tandem with our nation from the birth of its democracy in 1994 to the present time.... Equality, in this discourse, is measured by being able to succeed in the ‘masculine,’ ‘Western’ business world. In Generations these goals remain unquestioned.”

Making meaning, making a home: students watching Generations by CATHERINE MARY O'SHEA JUNE 2004

And Watching Soap Opera by Miki Flockemannn in Senses of Culture : South African Culture Studies by Sarah Nuttall, Cheryl Ann Michael (Oxford University Press, 2000)