Horse opera is a term of disparagement or affection for a western movie or TV series. The term was constructed by analogy to soap opera, and tends to suggest that the movie or series is formulaic. Many western movies featured a singing cowboy, with many songs were sung to his horse on-screen. It did not come to specify a well-defined subgenre of the western in the same way that space opera is of science fiction. Broncho Billy Anderson, from The Great Train Robbery The Western movie is one of the classic American film genres. ... A western television show is a cowboy story which takes place in the old west and involves cowboys, cattle ranchers, miners, farmers, Indians, guns and horses. ... The first TIME cover devoted to soap operas: Dated January 12, 1976, Bill Hayes and Susan Seaforth Hayes of Days of Our Lives are featured with the headline Soap Operas: Sex and suffering in the afternoon. A soap opera is an ongoing, episodic work of fiction, usually broadcast on television... Western fiction is a genre of literature that is typically set in any of the American states west of the Mississippi River and between the years of approximately 1860 and 1900. ... Space opera is a subgenre of speculative fiction or science fiction that emphasizes romantic adventure, interstellar travel, and space battles where the main storyline is centered around interstellar conflict and character drama. ... Science fiction is a form of speculative fiction principally dealing with the impact of imagined science and technology, or both, upon society and persons as individuals. ...