Tonight on ABC The Story Of Soaps premieres a 2-hour primetime television event that celebrates the impact of the soap opera and we have your The Story Of Soaps recap below. On tonight Tuesday, May 19, 2020, The Story Of Soaps special episode as per the ABC synopsis, “The Story of Soaps” explores how no genre of television has laid deeper roots into our cultural consciousness and serialized storytelling than the soap opera. In today’s shifting television landscape, “The Story of Soaps” traces how female creators migrated from radio to television to become the dominant force in the daytime for more than three decades.
“The Story of Soaps” takes an extensive look at this iconic, impactful genre and the cultural phenomenon its massive impact has had on the world at large.”
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When you look at soaps you see the bones of other shows in terms of very basic terms of good and evil. Daytime is the very foundation of television, everybody wants a romance, everybody wants that bad guy. Back in the day, it was like must-see TV. There are elements of soap operas in every dramatic television show that has ever happened. Every prime-time drama, every reality show, it’s all a soap-opera. Breaking Bad was a soap-opera. Soap-opera writers are smart, they know how to hook you into what is going on. It’s a magic formula, truly addictive. You can just escape.
We then get to see a montage of some classic soaps: Dark Shadows, Days of our Lives, All My Children, Another World, and Dynasty, to name a few. Soaps have been in people’s living rooms for almost 50 years; that’s longer than most marriages. From the beginning, it was groundbreaking. They got their storylines ripped from the headlines; gay, abortion, rape – subject matters that other people really didn’t want to tackle. They deserve more respect for sure. It was an industry born with an environment and you just hadn’t seen that before. But, the bubble had to burst.
Bryan Cranston, “there are those derisive comments made about soap-operas and it’s not fair and not accurate. You are there to learn, to try to bring as much reality and honesty to the moment, and its difficult. I was 25 when I got the job on Loving and moved from Los Angeles to New York. It felt like I crossed a threshold. This genre, this job, invited me in and put me to work like nobody’s business. It made me feel accomplished like a broke through a barrier.”
Mark Teschner, Casting Director – General Hospital 1989-20, “there was this stigma to daytime and people misperceiving the acting style as over the top, or soapy. But, I would say if you could do daytime, you can do anytime.”
Greg Vaughan, Actor – General Hospital & Days of Our Lives, “daytime television has opened the doors to many successful and talented actors.”
Andy Cohen, Creator – The Real Housewives, “Julianne Moore started in soaps, the great Kelly Ripa started in soaps, Meg Ryan, Demi Moore, Brad Pitt.”
Alec Baldwin, Actor – The Doctors, Knots Landing, 30 Rock, “it was probably one of the five most important times of my life. They had an important cast, that changes everything. You don’t care if it is a soap if you are working with someone that is great, everything goes up. I loved it.”
Vivica A. Fox, Actor – Days of Our Lives, Generations, The Young and the Restless, Empire, “Days of Our Lives was my very first job on camera, I was green but happy and with a really big wig. The ’80s was all about the hair, I had a wig, but my hair was bam! I learned hot to hit my queue, how to mesmerize, how to cry, how to do a hair toss.”
John Stamos, Actor – General Hospital, Full House, Fuller House, “I was working in my dad’s restaurant and I was barely just not a virgin. I filmed the first episode on Wednesday, it aired a week later. Some people say it was good learning, a training run, but some soap actors would find that insulting, but it was good training.”
Denise Richards, Actor – The Real Housewives of BH, The Bold and the Beautiful, “you really have to think on your feet, follow your instincts, know your lines. Every time I get my script I think how am I going to memorize this, but somehow I do.
Jon Hamm, Actor – Mad Men, “it’s a lot of work, you have to memorize page by page by page lines at a fast pace because it airs five times a week. Hats off to them, on Mad Men we shot one episode every ten days.”
Genie Francis, Actor – General Hospital, “why do I do this, why do I put myself through this – because I love to tell stories. I love it. I love to take people on that ride. And, if I get a really good story it’s fun to act it.”
Laura Wright, Actor – General Hospital, “it’s our job to sell it to you, that is really what it comes down to. It’s a soap-opera, so it is like being a kid in a candy store, there is nothing you can’t do or don’t do.”
Kate Coyne, Editorial Director – People Magazine, “It’s the most deliciously wonderful thing about daytime drama, there are literally no rules.”
Krista Smith, Consultant – Netflix, “my girlfriends and I would come home after school, you’re in middle school, you are not quite an adult, you still have crushes, but you don’t have a boyfriend yet and we would live vicariously through Guiding Light.”
Erika Slezak, Actor – One Life to Live, “my grandmother got everyone in her nursing home to watch, and they were all glued all the time.”
Chandra Wilson, Actor – Grey’s Anatomy, General Hospital, “my mom watched all the ABC shows, Ryan’s Hope, One to Live, All My Children and General Hospital. Then my grandmother was a CBS daytime person, so she turned me on to Young and the Restless. So, by the time, I was own, I was watching all of these shows.”
Marc Samuel, Actor – General Hospital, “daytime dramas have been literally in people’s homes for decades. And like traditions, it is passed down through generation to generation.”
The amount of money that these shows were able to generate because advertisers wanted to get on board, became really significant, really quickly. These were money-making shows. And, the way to engage that audience was to create content that spoke to women shows. If there is a queen of soap-operas, it is Irna Phillips. She took that formula of radio and put it on television, took it one step further. She created so many elements that we still use. Irna Phillips is the girl wonder of radio and television. She found a specific esthetic for this new medium of television in the 1950s. She said the camera should linger on moments of tension between characters.
On a character as their emotion is unfolding on their face. She also said I want a lot of closeups. That is what creates these long, drawn-out, intense shots that are known to soap-operas. She created a way to edit television that drew viewers in. That made people sit up and say, oh this is what television can do. Irna tutored Agnes Nixon who took it even further when her shows hit the air in the 1960s. Agnes figured out that soap-operas could be more than women sitting around talking about their problems over coffee. All My Children really started to tackle social issues. On the best level, the soaps mirrored what was going on in the culture and women’s lives in particular. Soap operas made TV come alive for millions of women.
Carol Burnett, Actor – The Carol Burnett Show and All My Children, “years ago my husband and I were going to take a month off and go to Europe. I asked a friend of mine if they would send me a telegram every Friday, recapping what happened on the week that I am missing on All My Children. We were in Lake Cuomo, we got there kind of late, and around 2 am, there was a knock on the door, was the manager of the hotel, with a telegram, it said that Erika is kidnapped and found in a coma, Mark slipped again and ran away from rehab, he hasn’t been found, Mona has to have exploratory surgery, it doesn’t look good, Chuck has learned that Donna who is carrying his baby was once was a hooker, Donna’s husband Palmer is still in the dark, the woman posing as Brook’s mother is wanted by the police, Phoebe is back on the bottle, hope you are having a great trip. I started to laugh so hard that I was crying, the manager thought I was hysterical and my husband said, for Lord’s sake, that’s her soap.”
Joyce Becker, Co-Founder, Soap Opera Festivals Inc., “this is what fans do, we sit here every day and watch the show. We eat, we talk, we laugh and we cry. We hate certain characters, we love certain characters, we fear certain characters and it’s almost like your own family.
There is no end, there is always another day, like our heartbeats. I used to be a Hollywood reporter for Hollywood movie magazines, and I had an editor who said to me, listen I think we should do soap-operas. And, I set up an interview on As The World Turns, in comes to this woman in this white furry thing wrapped around her blond hair and big sunglasses. In 1977, my husband and I did our first Soap Opera Festival, and that was the beginning of my love affair with soap-operas.
Maurice Benard, Actor – All My Children, General Hospital, “the most loyal fans in the world are soap-opera fans. Even if the show is not great, they think it is. That is just the way it works.”
There is soap addiction when the soap stars hit the road, the fans come running. If they visit anywhere in the country, fans come in the masses. John Stamos recounts how he became a teen idol. It is also men who love soaps, not just women.
Kristen Alfonso, Actor – Days of Our Lives, Falcon Crest, Melrose Place, “people will feel that daytime is just for women. But it is also men. The most letters I get are from the college guys. This gentleman came up to me and said, my wife watches the show, I don’t watch it, but I just have to ask, are you, Hope or Princess Gina.”
Tony Geary is used to playing second fiddle to Luke, when he goes in public he goes as Luke. It’s the fans know, it’s Luke the fans want to see.
Donna Mills, Actor – The Secret Storm, Knots Landing, General Hospital, “I was wondering why people were not that nice to me, but they thought I was going to steal their husband.”
John McCook, Actor – The Young and the Restless, The Bold and the Beautiful, “the people that watch our shows, know us for ten and twenty years, even forty years. We have grown together, we have aged together.”
Melody Thomas Scott, Actor – The Young and the Restless, “I was pregnant with my oldest daughter, not married, in 1981 this was huge news. I had thousands of Young and The Restless fans send me baby gifts to the studio and I didn’t get one negative letter. Which is outstanding when I think back. My character was certainly not perfect and still is not, but there is something about her, she is very vulnerable, and they always felt very protective of her and therefore of me.”
Susan Lucci, Actor – All My Children, “first of all, I loved playing Erica Kane, just loved playing her. I started playing Erika in 1970 when All My Children began, it was 41 years. It was such a range with her, she was capable of doing or saying anything. And I think the audience saw humanity in her stories. Fans identified with Erika so much and continue to love her. Erika had one of the first abortions on television, people were not talking about these issues, these were cutting edge issues.”
No matter how much we pull characters apart, we still love them to come back together. Everybody wants a romance, that super couple they can cheer for.
Maurice Benard, “you can’t talk about a super couple without talking about Luke and Laura. I’ve been doing General Hospital for twenty-five years, been diagnosed with bipolar for thirty years, and about a year and a half into the gig, they asked if it was ok to make my character bi-polar and I cannot thank them enough at all. Whenever I do something on method illness, there is always someone that says, my sister, my brother, and it keeps me going.”
Probably the most popular couple on daytime TV. So popular that Elizabeth Taylor wanted to be on the show to play Helena Cassadine, a huge part of their storyline. Their wedding was such a big deal in the media and took the country by storm. It was the right storyline, the right time. More people watched Luke and Laura’s wedding than anything else on television.
Gloria, the executive producer of General Hospital was told she two weeks to save the show or it was going to be canceled. In Luke and Laura, she saw potential there to make things happen, that shouldn’t happen, rape seduction, or what they would call it today, date rape. The night of the rape, they were dancing and it was very seductive, and that became the rape. They became popular despite the rape. After that, General Hospital addressed rape head-on for a year.
Finola Hughes, Actor – General Hospital, “the soaps are like the town square where people can come to have a discussion about what is going on.”
Chris Van Etten, Writer – One Life to Live, General Hospital, “for me, someone who was deeply closeted, Billy Douglas coming out as gay was something that was direct, up front. If I hadn’t seen a story like that I don’t know how long it would have taken me to come into my own.”
Gone were the days of housewives being home all day, they were having jobs and going to school. The soaps audience was no longer at home, this is when recording devices where invented. There was now a new normal. People still watched the shows, sponsors didn’t like it to much because people didn’t watch the commercials. It was a real big blow to soap-operas. Then there was the creation of nighttime soaps like Dallas, it was the first and filled a need that was out there. What made them popular is that men and women were watching them. Their creator says people liked to see people rich that miserable. They needed glamor, they needed sex, a hot looking guy, and a hot looking woman.
Soaps began by having it lead by a villain. One of the greatest examples of this is Erika Kane. She was the ultimate love to hate villain and enabled J.R. Ewing in primetime.
Who shot J.R. frenzies was front page news, the most-watched tv episode ever, 350 million people worldwide. It was on the cover of every magazine. Even the queen mother wanted to know who shot J.R. The campaign went on and on, and they milked it.
Its what soaps do best, they keep you coming back. Its part of the appeal, it keeps people hooked and they want to keep watching.
When OJ came up, it destroyed soap-operas. Suddenly everyone is watching OJ, the world went this is real drama. It was hard to compete with that daytime drama. When OJ came around, the chain got broken, and there was no greater soap-opera than OJ. It had a lot of fascinating characters and television took notice of the ratings. All of a sudden, there was a soap-opera in the trial itself. It was a better soap-opera than anyone could write. It was the birth of reality TV. After the OJ Simpson trial, people had an appetite for reality TV. OJ showed the world that when it is real, it is just more interesting. People couldn’t get enough of real life.
Soaps became a kind of unnecessary because real people were creating the drama. Reality shows are cheaper and easier to produce. And, they kind of had the same characteristics that soaps had. Mary Ellis Bunim was like the queen of daytime soaps, she had produced a number of them. In 1991, the real world was created, at first like a docusoap. They took so much of what had been learned in daytime soaps and applied it to these real stories. Season three of the Real World, they dealt with the aids crisis. Pedro did everything he could on the Real World to educate children. We learned that Reality TV could take big swings and teach people. The great advantage of telling a story in a soap-opera is that you can show so many dimensions of what you want to represent in characters that people already know and love.
Shelly Altman, Head Writer – The Young and the Restless, General Hospital, “when I started a quarter-century ago there were 13 daytime dramas, there are now 4.”
People were horrified when ABC canceled All My Children and One Life to Live for The Chew. It’s a shame, it took away something from people that they were invested in. Kelly Ripa says it was a sad day for her when All My Children was canceled, she grew up on the show. Carol Burnett is still angry and says that Susan Lucci rocks. Susan Lucci says that when they took All My Children off the air, the fans were like soccer fans. When you called ABC, it said if you are calling because you are upset that All My Children is being canceled press 1, for all other business press 2. And the fans crashed the phone system and the computer system at ABC.
Unfortunately, we are now living in a soap-opera and cannot change the channel. Sadly it is not an industry that many young people are interested in. People are getting their fix elsewhere.
Desperate Housewives, five or six networks passed on it and Marc Cherry knew it was the best thing he had ever written. And then, his agent was arrested and he had to get a new one. The new agent told him to change it from black comedy to a soap opera that has comedy in it. When it premiered, there were a lot of interviews saying they had gone too far, but they hadn’t, because everything they did, Agnes Nixon had already done. They were just doing it in prime time. Then networks starting taking more chances on writers. They were realizing to trust the writers. And now, the skies the limit.
Soap-operas lead the groundwork for primetime shows.
Storytelling is storytelling. Good drama is good drama.
John Stamos, “people want to get back to escapism, discord is at an all-time high, decency at an all-time low and people don’t know where to turn to. To lock into a different place with different characters, to escape into their world and lives, and out of your own is really needed right now. I’m glad the soaps are still around for us to escape.”
The stories of soaps is the stories of us.
Are soap-operas going to survive? Yes.
THE END!