This study aims at finding out how the audiences make sense of Beloch drama and Â· thernintcrpreti vc lens they bring in their reception of the text as well as fac tors that might haverncontributed to such sense making. It also examines the grati fications the audiences derive fromrnthe experience of watching the drama.rnTo this end, act ive audience theory in relation to encoding/decoding model as well as uses andrngrati lications model were used as theoretical frameworks. According to the encoding/decodingrnmodel. audience can accept tile dominant/preferred meaning, generate oppositional meaning orrnsett le with a negotiated meaning in consuming a media text. Uses and gratifications model positsrnthat audiences actively seek and consume media texts that gratify their needs.rnA semi-structured in-depth interview was used for collecting a qualitative data in order to .findrnanswers to the research questions. Once the composition of the subjects was determi ned on thernbasis of literature on the topic, twenty-five subjects. excluding the producer of the drama, werernse lected for interview using convenience sampl ing. As per the literature on the subject, the st udyrn(during the data collection), took into account factors like age, occupation, gender, and educationrnwhi ch were considered to be among the factors that could have a bearing on the way audiencernconsume a media text.rnThe analysis of the data shows that most of the audience mell1bers intervielVed (regardless ofrndifference in gender. age, education and occupation) seell1 to, 1l10re or less, share si ll1ilarinterprctat ions of the drama tex ts, which wcre largely in line with the dominant readings onrnoffer. However, the analys is also re veal s instances whereby the audi ence rej ected the preferredrnmeanll1g and constructed oppositional readings to the tex t. It seems that such oppositionalrnreadings in the context of thi s study were partly anributable to factors, such as familyrnbackground, personal association and preferences. What is more, the study shed light on thernvaried gratifi cations the aud iences have derived from consuming i3eloch drama teoXt.rnAs noted earlier, irrespecti ve of the di verse nature of the audi ence selected for the stud y, therninterpretive lens they brought to the drama texts was not that much di verse as one would havernexpected. As Seiter ( 1999) argues, this might be because the encoding/decoding model (used inrnthis study) works bet1er fo r news and current affai rs programs than for entertainment programs.rnl:3ascd on thesc findin gs, the study has suggested that more academic research be carried out inrnthe area that aims at testi ng Hal l's encoding/decoding model with this genre. In addition, it isrnrecommended that relevant insti tutions should consider providing some form of sensiti zationrntraining to producers of entertainment programs so as to enable them to create entertainmentrntexts that would cater for the di verse group of audiences.