SMNTY Classics: Are soap operas underrated in TV history?

It's no secret that some people think soap operas are just junky TV for housewives. But is that true? Join Cristen and Molly as they trace the history and evolution of soap operas and see how these shows have influenced most of what we watch today in this classic episode. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, this is Annie and Samantha and welcome to Steph.
I've never told your protection to i Heeart Radio, and
today we have a throwback for you. This is from
a long time ago. I don't think we normally run

(00:27):
ones that are this old. But before I get into
why we're rerunning it, Samantha, have you ever watched any
soap operas? Yes, yes, I have so. For a while
I had a friend who was really in Two Days
of Our Lives. My mother was really into Young and

(00:48):
the Restless, so between the two I would watch during
the summers. Obviously UM and knew and there was one
character who was evil named Samantha No that I would follow. Yeah,
I do like the evil Samantha. You didn't like the evil,
I didn't, but I had to follow her, of course. Definitely.
I don't think I've ever seen a soap opara outside

(01:11):
of UM. You know. I love the funny cameos, like
remember when this big actor was in this like part
of the By the way, I inadvertently watched ten minutes
of one at I think of waiting. Oh, I was
waiting somewhere and I was like, wow, the acting is
really bad, like and and the actors in it. Some

(01:31):
of them are all school but it's because they're trying
to I'm so sorry, y'all. They're trying to become relevant.
And so the whole conversation was about social media, and
I was like, what is happening. That's a whole side note. Yeah,
I mean, I think soap operas are very specific type
of entertainment that shouldn't be dismissed. Like I think you

(01:52):
can like a thing like that, you should feel bad
about it, but it knows what it is clearly, it's
resonated and you know, I got us my random Star
Wars fact. But Star Wars is often known as space
space operas sometimes space soap opera because you've got all
your family connections and like, oh my god, that's my dad,
Oh my god, that's my sister. Uh So, I don't

(02:13):
think we should outright dismiss it. But the reason this
is on my mind is because, like a month or
so ago, as we're recording this, Days of Our Lives,
which has been on the air since the nine, has
moved to not a current sponsor, but could be a
future past sponsor. Peacock NBC Peacock streaming service is a

(02:36):
big deal. It was a big deal. Uh, it's a
lot of people were talking about it. A lot of
people were really upset, and a lot of people kind
of funnily and sometimes kind of agestly pointed out like,
no one who watches it is gonna be able to
figure out peacock. I mean, to be fair, my mother
would struggle. Okay, well it's I think it is fair

(03:00):
that all these streaming services can get complicated. And that's
all I'll say about that. Also, who wants to pay
extra money for soap operas that you were able to watch? Which,
by the way, again, my mother recorded these, yes, and
she would get piss if we accidentally recorded something else
on that VHS. She had one specific tape dedicated to it,

(03:24):
the tab. If you didn't put the tab incord, Oh
it was drama. I would love if somebody, a listener
would just right in and explain the plot of Days
of Our Lives and as condensed a method as you can.
I mean, these are long running, popular shows. They are

(03:44):
award winning eight Emmys for daytime drama I believe, for
Days of Our Lives, so they resonate people like them.
But please enjoy this classic episode brought to you by
the reinvented two thousand twelve cameras. It's ready. Are you

(04:04):
welcome to stump Mom Never told You? From House top
Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to podcast. This is
Molly and Kristen Kristin. I have news for you. I'm
not actually Molly and her evil twin Holly. Oh god no,
And I've been sent here to steal the baby that

(04:26):
was secretly put inside you by robot. There's a baby
in my womb? Where's the you don't even remember because
you have amnesia? Oh shoot, that explains everything. That explains
why I don't know where I am right now. And
you're in love with your cousin. He was always handsome.
That goes with a mind. Um, that's a perfectly plausible

(04:47):
way to start the show. If we were doing a
soap opera, Yes, because soap operas, I think we think
of them as these over the top shows with lots
of melodramatic plot points. There's always an evil twin. I've
always on an evil twin, well like minus the evil twin.
You're saying, if we were doing this a soap opera,
stuff Mom never told you? Pretty much? It is a

(05:09):
soap opera, you know, twists and turns, gender, heteronormativity, progress,
anti progress. I think we moved too fast to be
a soap opera because if you've ever watched a stip upper,
it takes two weeks for like the waffles to come
out of the toaster. Yeah, there was one incident. The

(05:29):
Time article did not state which soap it was on,
but it said that it took seventeen days for one
woman to get out of a revolving door to just
kept having flashback after flashback. I hate it when that happens.
It's really awkward. There's a revolving door to get into
our office building here in in in Atlanta, as you know, man,

(05:51):
imagine being stuck in that for seventeen days and to
keep having flashbash. I don't know if I have that
much shock too, flashback too. Yeah, they move super slow,
So I think we move a little bit faster than
a soap opera. We we may have the plots and
the ups and downs, and uh, the twists and turns
of a soap opera, but we do not move that slow.
And that is one of the characteristics of soap operas,

(06:14):
which is our topic for the Bay yeah, because we're
gonna cover like seventy years of soaps. That would take
two hundred and fifty years in soap time. And the
reason we decided to talk about soaps now is recently
some of the most long running soap operas were canceled.
All My Children and One Life to Live. These things

(06:35):
have been on the on the air for over forty years,
and now they're gonna be gone. They're gone and there
Now the network soaps are whittled down to only four
of them. The only ones to make the cut are
The Bold and the Beautiful, Days of Our Lives, General Hospital,
and The Young and the Restless. And not surprisingly, the

(06:56):
type of programming that is taking over these a time
slots where the soaps used to be reality TV, reality
TV and game shows, makeover show. Yeah, they're cheaper to
produce because, uh, soaps, even though they may seem like
they're taking forever. They employ a ton of writers, a
ton of actors. Uh, they do new shows fifty weeks

(07:17):
out of the year. Those shows just twain weeks out
of the year. There's no rehearsal time. They just have
to keep shooting and shooting and shooting. But it's an
hour every day. I mean, the resources to do that
are insane. So they're saying that reality is cheaper. Game
shows are cheaper, and uh, you know, people just start
watching them anymore. Yeah, who do you think makes more,
Susan Lucci or Snooky? Oh gosh, actually would be kind

(07:38):
of hard to tell. Maybe Smoaky does stuff. You just
got that that big speaking engagement where she's going to
make more than Tony Morrison. Oh yeah, it's kind of pressing.
Let's move, Let's let's do something not so depressing, like
the history of soap operas, which started in the nineteen
thirties on the radio. These were radio serials that were

(07:58):
produced specific for housewives, and they were great because it's
kind of like how I like to listen to NPR
while I um, while I cooked, while I cooked dinner.
I feel like I'm doing one of those, uh those
fundraisers you know for NPR, like her Glass does. Um.
But it's perfect because you can go about your work
and you can just listen along. You don't have to

(08:20):
sit there, you don't have to be a captive audience
in front of a TV. And but you were captive
enough that you were in the home and listening to that.
And that's why soap Oppera's got their name is because
the sponsors and sometimes the creators of these shows where
the manufacturers of household cleaning products. So let's say you're
sitting there, you know, making dinner for your husband and
your pearls before it comes home in the nineteen thirties, Kristen,

(08:42):
and all of a sudden, one of the characters on
your shows works in a reference to, you know, really
great mopping liquid or something. I love mopping liquids. I
don't know if that's what they're called, because I don't clean, Sorry,
mom um, but yeah, it's it's kind of slid in
there as part of the story. You don't even notice
that it's an ad. At the next time you're in
the story, you're like, oh, man, that character my favorite show,

(09:03):
she uses this mopping product. I'm gonna buy it. Yeah,
So it's like product placement. All the stuff in Jerry
Seinfeld's cabinets, you know, they were always mentioned on Yeah,
So that's how they get their name. The soap comes
from the people who are putting these shows on the
air and opera. According to the Museum of Broadcast Communications
from the very beginning was kind of set out to
be sort of an ironic, kind of uh, put down

(09:25):
on the on the form, because opera, in terms of
people singing, that's one of the highest art forms you
can be. And they're saying that this person's life and
it's melodrama. They're comparing it to that highest art form
and kind of making it into a joke. They're right

(09:53):
away from the beginning the term soap opera. It's kind
of a put down, and I don't think that it
ever regains any sort of cultural cachet, and so I
think that they're kind of, you know, they're always considered
a punchline, a joke, something that only women watched. And
that's why we kind of wanted to go through history
and show times at which soap operas were actually pretty great.
Perhaps they led all the things on television we enjoyed day,

(10:16):
such as Stucky or our our primetime soap drama like shows. Yeah,
they're incredibly formative for the type of TV that all
of us guys, gals, teens, adults watch today. And it
goes back to nineteen thirty to a Chicago radio station
w g IN and a lady named Erna Phillips, and

(10:40):
she started this serial called Painted Dreams About Um. It
was a fifteen minutes serialized drama setting the home of
an Irish American widow and her young, unmarried daughter. So
the window was giving her daughter all sorts of advice,
every little conversations that were instructed between mother and daughter

(11:01):
and UH, and the show really had its background in
the kind of fiction, little short stories that were in
women's magazines in the nineteen and nineteen thirties that were
so popular. So they're saying, these soap operas are sort
of a you know, kind of maybe a pit stop
on the way from those old melodrama books all the
way maybe to the romance novels that came later. And

(11:23):
then they borrowed the serialized format from shows like Amos
and Andy, which was a very popular comic radio serial.
So these things were super popular. Everyone was listening to
these most of the daytime programming in radio. Were these
kind of cereals. And then we've got old TV coming along,
and everyone at first thought this was not going to work.

(11:45):
These were not, uh, formats that were interchangeable, because you know,
if these housewives were cooking dinner or cleaning all of
a sudden, they'd have to sit down to actually watch
the show. So people thought it was not going to
work on TV at all. But little did they know
just how much stoves would take off on TV, as
we all very well know. And Guiding Light was the

(12:07):
first soap opera to make the transition from radio TV,
and actually from nineteen fifty two to nineteen fifty six
it was broadcast on both radio and television. Yeah, there
are a few years where they overlapped. Put by the
early nineteen sixties, most of the soap operas are on television,
and uh, they expanded. What was at first a fifteen

(12:27):
minutes show became a thirty minute show because there are
more actors. You you had more time to like set
your scene. Um. And this is where we get a
lot of the same conventions that we have today, like
the music to provide the theme, Um, the Cliffhangers on Friday,
so you'll come back on Monday. There's some soaps of
doing another article where nothing happens Monday through Thursday and

(12:48):
everything I'm on Friday, the Cliffhanger, so you just watch
on Friday because to get like up to date. But yeah,
they start, um coming on TV and they start getting longer.
Some of them moved to an hour just because you know,
they're making the families bigger, they're building more characters into it,
and and they're having a lot of success with the format.
And we also see the beginning of network rivalries. We

(13:09):
have CBS and Procter and Gambled team up for As
the World Turns, which was incredibly popular, and then NBC
and ABC did something quite groundbreaking they started the medical
soaps with the doctors and general hospital. Yeah. I think

(13:29):
if you're a fan of shows like er Gray's Anatomy,
you have nine three with these medical soaps to thank
for that, because, uh, setting a show in a hospital
allows you to bring in characters and have them leave
if they're not popular, but if they are popular, they
can stick around and be like the doctor's friend. So
it was a really good setting. These soap iers figured

(13:50):
out to to bring a lot of people in to
have a lot of really emotionally charged moments, because that's
what happens in a hospital, right. And speaking of emotionally
charged moments, one place that soaps are really under underappreciated
in TV history is for the social issues. Social and
cultural issues that they bring to the foreground. Granted it

(14:13):
is sometimes done in a highly dramatized and seemingly unrealistic way,
but many people not that many people have amnesia, right, um,
and you do have you know a little more, some
more far flung things such as murder as a result
of temporary insanity. But at the same time they we
have the first televised like dramatized abortion in nineteen sixty four.

(14:36):
I think it was Erica Kaine's character. I think Erica
Kane got one later, but we did have one even
before Rob Wade was passed. Oh yeah, this is nineteen
sixty four. This happens on another world. And then in
One Life to Live we have the first soap to
foreground class and ethnic differences in ninety eight by introducing
the first African American character who, as part of the

(14:58):
soap plot line, tries to pass as white, and then
later on probably like a million episodes down the line,
because we know how slowly soaps move, comes out as
a black person. We have some of the first gay
characters on TV who are featured in soap operas. Drug use,
domestic abuse, alcoholism is rampant, and and soap operas, and

(15:19):
then just random things like oh, incest impotence, dolls coming
to life in the Vietnam War. You know. So it's
like we have there's this grab bag of the most
sort of absurd to the most like legitimate social issues
that aren't being talked about anywhere else. Yeah, and soap
operas yea. And I think that that's sort of why

(15:40):
they do get that bad rap is everyone just remembers
the over the top things. The murderers who are on
the Lamb for like seventy five episodes, the people who
are in that revolving door, the doll that comes to life,
who is one of my favorites. Um, but that that
social groundbreaking, Uh, in terms of talking about these issues
on television, I think does get forgot and um, you

(16:01):
know because the people who were sitting at home watching
them are housewives. And we've talked before about how housewives,
especially one second wave feminism comes along, kind of lose
out on their respect they deserve because people were thinking, oh,
she's just a lazy housewives. She's got her feet up
watching her stories, her children are running crazy, and she's
not getting her husband's dinner on the table, and so

(16:21):
the fact that a women are watching them be there's
women as main characters on the show, and often women
are behind the scenes producing these shows. I mean, these
shows made some women writers a lot of money. They
were some of the highest paid, yeah, female writers in
the business, Agnes Nixon because um, because of the popularity
these soap opera. So because it's such a female art form.

(16:42):
I think that's another reason why it gets kind of
laughed at and only remembered for you know, the demonic
possession of that lady on the Bold and Beautiful Well,
I think that we should point out to that One
of the reasons why we have things like demonic possession
going on in these soaps is because advertise zers and
the producers of the shows realized, um, you know, decades

(17:05):
ago that their core audience, those housewives were kind of
aging out of that um prime demographics. So they started
to sensationalize a lot of the plot lines to draw
in more, um more viewers. Including today, it's not uncommon
for college students to get sucked into soaps. You have
your housewives, yes, but you also have even teenagers watching

(17:28):
them and dudes. Yeah, there was this time article in
nineteen seventy six, which I guess is kind of the
pinnacle of soap success Um, which pointed out some famous
fans of soap operas, included such luminaries as Supreme Court
Justice They're good, They're good, Marshal Uh, Sammy Davis Jr.
Texas Governor John Connelly, Andy Warhol Uh and a few others.

(17:50):
So it's it definitely when it when it reached his peak,
it was something that everyone was kind of participating in,
but it was still like this guilty pleasure. You couldn't
just admit, oh, I like this because I like the characters.
It's more like, you know, oh, I'm going to sneak
home and catch catch on my shouldern. And during this
heyday uh, as Time reports, people were getting so wrapped

(18:14):
up in soaps that some soap stars were actually physically
in danger when they would go out in public because
they were so vilified on on TV and then for instance, CBS.
This is according to Time magazine was obliged to eliminate
soap opper characters who were poor because the network kept
receiving piles of care packages and one woman kept delaying

(18:38):
her wedding and they got this angry letter from this
woman who had bought like Champagne to sit there and
watch while she had the weddings. Because I watch Champagne
four times, this lady hasn't gotten married yet. So yeah,
I mean, these are shows where it's easy to get
emotionally invested in characters, and people did um. But but
then it just sort of died out. I think that
in an effort to bring in some younger viewers, a

(18:59):
lot of the soaps were competing with each other. You
were loyal to one, so you couldn't branch out to another,
and all the viewership kind of got divided and more
women started going to work, they were not home during
the day, so they lost a big audience there at

(19:27):
its pinnacle. May I just may I just tell us
out this nugget? No, I can't wait, Okay, And I
think this, this, this statement in Time magazine represents the
climax of soap opera's place in our pop culture and
since since fallen. Okay, you ready for this? Soap operas
are the folk tales that tug it the soul of

(19:48):
a nation of strangers, for whom television itself is a bond. Wow.
The folk tales that tug at the soul of a
nation of stranger that's profound. I mean, this is seventies six,
So I mean, you know, you could maybe say in
a in a far crosser way that maybe reality TV

(20:11):
are now are horrifying folk tales of a nation of
culture obsessives. I don't know, well, I think so, I
think that this is um, you know, soap opera start
appearing at night, the nighttime soaps your your Melrose Places,
You're Beverly Hills nine, I too. One. I mean, these
shows have very clear lines from soap operas to to

(20:32):
that kind of format, something that was serialized. You have
to see every episode Alison Dynasty before that, all the
way to mad Men today. I think that that is
a pretty clear line from a soap opera. In fact,
the criticism that sometimes mad Men gets it's it's nothing
more than addressed up soap opera. So um, we've got
those shows, We've got reality now, We've got reality people
who just you know, live out their lives in the

(20:53):
tabloids and they're just as outrageous as anything you would
see on a soap opera. So I think that because
we learned so much about how to act over the
top and crazy in a soap opera. I think we
kind of grew out of them naturally because we learned
all we can learn from them well and sim And
similar to how reality shows are are so cheap to produce,

(21:18):
because reality you don't have to pay Joe Schmo that
much to get on film, soap opera stars aren't paid
that much either. They only get about thirty five grand
and which is about the same as someone who's on Broadway.
And they might have to memorize up to sixty pages
of dialogue per day because they're only recorded. We recorded,

(21:39):
That's not like I used the telegraph um a week
in advance. So yeah, they are sort of um unsung
heroes in terms of the work that went into them,
Um a lot of more. I mean, they were expensive
compared to reality shows, but from what you got from it,
You've got all these actors, all these stories. The chimpanzee
nurse who falls in love with a male character. Oh jeez,

(22:02):
I wish I'd been around for that one. Um. But
what's kind of amazing is, besides all the hours of
entertainment we all got from these kind of shows, our mothers,
our grandmothers, etcetera. There's evidence now that people around the world,
women around the world and developing countries are getting something
from these kind of stories. And for that, I want
to go to an article with the the enticing headline

(22:25):
soap operas boost rights, Global Economists says and basically they
did this research and it was kind of research on
what people in the developing world we're watching and they
are watching soap operas and seeing these programs with strong
female characters because most shows have a matriarch at the center. Um,
with all these offshoots around and the female characters are

(22:47):
quite brazen. You'r Erica Kin's um, this is really setting
an influence on these women who may be living under um,
you know, very outdated gender norms. And so what acording
to this researcher, not only are the names of soap
oper characters becoming very popular names in these countries, quote,
there's evidence to support the idea that strong female characters

(23:09):
help them and in these developing countries begin to challenge
the power relations between men and women. Whoa whoa, okay, yeah,
big woe my my knee jerk reaction to that is
one grain of salt. Two correlation causation I mean that
that is an interesting corollary uh to to draw. But

(23:31):
at the same time, you can also read studies about
the influence of TV in developing nations, and also you'll
have on the flip side more more body issues for girls,
races of eating disorders go up. Self image becomes uh
a lot more important in a sort of negative kind
of way. Beauty standards change and start to Western eyes,

(23:54):
so grain of salt. But I did read one article
about how um they've started this this um soap opper
in Afghanistan with local actors and storylines, and I think
that maybe using that model of exploring different social issues
within your own country, I think maybe in twenty years
or so, maybe we'll see more about how soap oppas

(24:14):
made in these developing countries can eventually influence the people
who are watching them. Yeah, I could definitely see that
rather than something that's being important in which is kind
of interesting to think about. When if if you've got
actors who are only being paid thirty five dollars and
shows that are being watched by literally hundreds of millions
of people around the world and potentially changing lives, that's

(24:38):
why every actor gets into show business. Change lives change life.
And you know, I think that's the perfect note to
in this Mom's Stuff Cereal podcast, it's our cliffhanger. We
always end with the cliffhanger where we ask for your thoughts,
what is your favorite soap opera? We should throw that
up on Facebook and we'll see how many General hospital
fans we have? How many all my children to vote? Yes,

(25:00):
we have passions anybody. We want to know what you
guys watched? Did you watch it with your parents? That's
how I got into soap oppers for my brief, very
brief stint in them. But do you buy our thesis
that soaps are totally underrated or are you ready to
wash the somatic clean? Well? In the meantime, let's read

(25:20):
a couple of the listener males. I have one here
from Jordan's and uh. The email begins. I wanted to
comment on the recent use of people with vaginas and
various forms thereof to mean women, and I think, yeah,
I think you do this, and it's it's kind of

(25:41):
a joke, but there's a good point here. There are
people who identify as women who don't or might not
yet have vaginas, or who don't have the other standard
issue lady parts, trans women, women who have genitalia that
have been damaged, or who's genitalia didn't develop into an
official vagina, etcetera. Our male dominated society's definition of women
as a sex organ from men's use, and any thing
that is not a sex organ and not useful to

(26:02):
men is thereby not woman. It's important to be inclusive,
um not to mention, important not to collude with the patriarchy.
So therefore the vaginant people phrasing, though meant to be funny,
you can have the unintentional consequence of saying to some
women that they are not women. And of course Jordan
and everyone else, that was not our intent. It is
sort of just supposed to be funny. So if you
if you spiritually feel like you have a vagina, that's yeah,

(26:24):
that's why we can't. I can't promise I'll stop saying
vagina a lot in the podcast, but that is an
excellent point to keep in mind. Well, I've got an
email here from Kristen on our Beer podcast, and she
writes it reminded me of my younger, more single days,
when I would look for guys to talk to you
at the bar. I never talked to the guys holding
the light beer bottles because one I wanted a guy

(26:47):
who drank craft beer like I did, and two, I
want a guy who drank to enjoy his beer rather
than get drunk. So he didn't have to have all
those low quality, yucky beers because he was worried about
increase se his waistline from all those calories and didn't
need to skimp on costs as if your high quality
beers usually suggested, he probably wasn't a cheapskate. I was

(27:09):
a beer snub then and continue to be one now,
and my husband and I regularly visit craft beer festivals,
events and local breweries. So if you have an email
to send our way, our address is mom Stuff at
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(27:32):
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