ABSTRACT
The daytime television soap opera has long been a staple of American broadcast network programming, making a significant impact both economically and culturally. In the soaps’ network-era heyday of the 1970s and early 1980s, the daytime schedule reportedly fed CBS and NBC 75 percent of their profits, and in 1981, just one of ABC’s hit soaps, General Hospital, generated one-quarter of the network’s yearly revenues.1 Fifteen such programs aired daily during the 1981-2 season, filling the late morning and afternoon hours of the Big Three broadcast networks; a single soap could draw as many as 10 million households.2 During this same period, daytime soaps became something of a national pastime: news magazines featured the programs on their covers, ancillary products from board games to T-shirts filled retail shelves, and hordes of college students designed class schedules and social gatherings around the daytime TV line-up. From the radio era of 15-minute serials into at least the early years of television’s multichannel transition period, the daytime soap was a vital player in the broadcast business model, serving as a valued vehicle for delivering female audiences to advertisers. But the soaps were also central cultural reference points for the multiple generations of audiences that faithfully followed characters and their story arcs over years and years of episodes.
