In spring 1999, the daytime serial All My Children ended thirty years of family and community intrigue and relationships, presented every Monday through Friday. It was soon replaced by the younger and steamier Passion. Demographics and settings may change, but the idea scarcely varies. Soaps provide dramas of emotion and conversation over coffee and cocktails rather than politics or work. Women are central, as peacemakers and bitches, although men have a variety of roles from paterfamilias to villain to stud. The sheer endurance of soap operas means that they have invited generations of fans to enter webs of romance, affairs, cat-fights, consumption, weddings, births (not in that order) and murders among the men and women of Pine Valley Glen Cove and other “typical” American places.

Soaps easily made the transition to television from long-running radio serials (taking their name from detergent sponsors). These family-centered dramas related to the viewers of new media, especially the housewife whom writers and advertisers have taken as the long-term viewer. Feminist scholars have examined how the form of soap operas fits into a woman’s daily routine. Soap operas do not always demand continuous concentration; hence, the ideal woman viewer can come in and out, watching the show while doing other chores. Multiple plot lines take away the clear beginning and end in a strict narrative, allowing the viewers to start watching the show at any point.

Soaps are also cheap to produce—writers create up to 5 hours of programs every week, taped by three studio cameras, with the actions rolling along without cuts (different scenes are put together in post-production). These are grueling scripts for actors, although soaps have provided both security and a sure proving ground for many stars.

Over decades, soap operas have added serial divorce and infidelity company battles, crime, sex and nudity which may have shocked their fans. Dark Shadows (ABC, 1966– 71) cast the soap into Gothic shadows. African American characters arrived in the 1980s (although black viewers have learned to watch the scandals of whites in many media).

Teens and young hunks were increasingly promising in the 1990s.

Audiences have also varied. Educated professionals and college students videotape their soaps daily although daytime soaps do not have the same public appeal to straight males. Celebrities, however, have turned fanship into participation; Elizabeth Taylor and Carol Burnett have made cameo appearances in their favorite shows. Soaps, as prominent television artifacts, have been skewered in other series (the ironic evening comedies Soap (ABC, 1977–81) and Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman (1976–77, syndicated) even as networks vied to create glamorous prime-time soaps. Tootsie (1982) and Soapdish (1991) also imputed other layers of human complication to dramas on screen.

Cable television has brought telenovelas and other long-running dramas from around the world to American screens (and PBS has come close with some more sophisticated British imports). Yet these scarcely rival decades in which Days of Our Lives, All My Children, The Bold and the Beautiful and others have become everyday worlds as well as stories.