Cultural theory has been heavily influenced in the postmodern era by the idea that an incredulity towards meta-narratives shapes experience and that sceptical cultural consumers are aware of this. Melodrama offers an alternative conceptual frame for understanding global structures of feeling in a mass media age. This paper argues that the relationship between the melodramatic worldview and the postmodern is dialectical rather than oppositional. The mutually constitutive relationship between absolute and relative ideologies has tended to evade even those theorists of ‘post-postmodernism’ who have sought to reinstate the importance of belief into prevailing intellectual narratives of scepticism or suspicion. Drawing on Vermeulen and van den Akker's concept of ‘metamodernism’, this paper identifies a contemporary form of melodrama that we could label ‘metamodern’ – a term which indicates a dual sensibility which incorporates both scepticism and belief. Focusing on reality TV and sports broadcasting, this paper argues that melodrama is the modern form of the utopic, rooted in the belief system of myth, yet born in response to what Peter Brooks calls ‘the void’ of the modern world.