Genre is a way of organizing products into different categories. It helps mass medium to produce consistently and efficiently and to relate its production to the expectations of its customers. It helps to understand similarities and differences in a piece of product. Products in the same genre tend to hold similar patterns and codes and conventions that are both predictable and expected.
Consumers want it so that it is similar, but different, but not different enough so they don’t like it but instead a window between them.

saddled with conventions and stereotypes, formulas and
clichés and all of these limitations were codified in specific genres. This was the very foundation of the studio system and audiences love genre pictures – Scorsese, A personal Journey through American Cinema (1995)

Steve Neal

predictable expectations –
reinforced – 
amplify –
repertoire of elements –
corpus –
verisimilitude –
realism –
construction of reality –
historically specific –
sub-genres –
hybrid genres –