Dilys: but do they also have poetry ?   Surely, once you strip away the eloquence of drama's prose and poetry ... what remains is the strategy of modern management speak

Dilys,

If you want poetry, why not try poetry? If you want drama, (& I'd be v. surprised if you don't watch a good deal of one kind or other), what you will get is not simply "modern management speak", but how a vast range of different types of individual in different walks of life speak and think, (including modern managers). A reasonable facsimile of their speech and thought.

How they debate their central dilemmas. And their typical styles of speech in their activities. How parents talk to children, and vice versa. Managers to subordinates, and vice versa.

How an adolescent in identity crisis, like Holden Caulfield, actually speaks and thinks. [A whole type of personality captured in just the first opening line of Catcher in the Rye]. How a modern equivalent like Harry Enfield's adolescent in his TV show, speaks and thinks.

This is extraordinarily valuable.

If you try and reduce this to something else  - criticise it because it is not some confused idea of high culture, per some confused philosophy of art, you are missing the riches of drama.

Interestingly, I was just reading McLuhan's reaction to somewhat similar criticisms a while back of the new mass media, because they were not like -&even corrupting -  supposed high art:

"Radio, film, TV pushed
written English towards
the spontaneous shifts&freedom of
the spoken idiom.
They aided us in the recovery
of intense awareness of
facial language & bodily gesture.
If these “mass media”
should serve only
to weaken or corrupt
previously achieved levels of
verbal & pictorial culture,
it won’t be because
there’s anything inherently wrong with them.
It will be because we’ve failed
to master them as new languages
to assimilate them to
our total cultural heritage..."

Drama primarily captures speech, thought, dialogue - and if movies, "facial language & bodily gesture. " To criticise it for not being poetry is to fail to master not so much, per McLuhan, the "language" of drama,  as drama-as-image[s]. What drama does is to hold up a highly selective mirror *and* recorder to people - thus creating both visual and sound images of their speech and thought . No other [non-artistic] part of our culture does this. [Other arts, like that of comedians, do it, though in somewhat different ways].