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The writer is A contributory columnist, based in Chicago
The American Midwest invented one of the most durable art forms in history: the soap. They were created in the 1930s to sell soap in Housewives, and I can still watch some of the same shows today that captivated my mother and grandmother in the 1960s. Millions of people took advantage of the hot hot melodramas and this year saw the Prime Minister of Beyond the doorsThe first new soap in the United States in over 25 years.
In the 1960s, my mother and I listened to every afternoon of the week General hospital,, Guiding light And While the world turnsOn a black and white television in our subsoil by Suburban Detroit. She pushed back, while I held the bells and the summits of Smock – and together, we spent more time looking at “our” soaps than socializing with parents or an extended family.
The soaps are at the heart of my beloved cultural heritage of the Midwest Lowbrow-just up there with demolition derbies, the navigation of the band and the visits to one of the first franchises of American McDonald's. Barbara Irwin, soap operator and Professor Emerita at the University of Canisius, tells me that they draw a former hunger: “They intend to return to Scheherazade and the Thousand and one nightor serialized novels by Charles Dickens. . . Continuous stories that leave a cliffhanger every day “, and often follow the same families for generations, she says.” This gives the public the opportunity to really connect with the characters. ”
The shows have also played a socially pioneering role. “The soaps have addressed social problems in a revolutionary way,” said Elana Levine, a media expert from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Cancer made its debut on American television in 1962 in a soap opera, she said.
Guiding light (What my mother listened to with her mother on the radio in the 1940s before watching him on television) gave the matriarch Bert Bauer Uterine Cancer. “The show then received letters from women saying” You saved my life “, by educating them about the early detection of cancer, explains Levine. The soaps were often the first to tackle subjects such as AIDS, drug addiction and gay marriage.
They certainly pass the test of time. General hospital62 last month, recorded more than 15,000 episodes – against less than 250, even for a popular program in prime time such as Friends. “The soap operas obtained almost 100 years (old),” said Levine, adding: “In the 1960s in the 1980s, when they were the most popular and profitable, they supported a large part of what the networks did in prime time.”
“Right now, we are seeing an increase in interest in soaps,” says Irwin. Beyond the doorsAbout a wealthy black family, launched in February by a partnership between the CBS television network and the organization of NAACP civil rights, is already more popular than the talk show it has replaced, she said.
Of course, they were reduced by a peak of less than 18 titles to only four (plus an old network program which is now streaming) while alternative entertainment choices have exploded. But when I spent recently to catch up to 50 years of missed episodes General hospitalI found a lot of things that seemed familiar – like improbable intrigues. The random episode that I chose included an attempted assassination at the hospital, a presentation of the newspaper of marital infidelity which implied that the husband was addicted by a paid seductress, and a character changed at birth who joined a commune – all in an hour.
But I also found something new: a screed during the reaction of social media in real time. As the show broadcast, I watched hundreds of comments pass on X, many of them with animated gifs – and all passionate. “No willow, that's not all of Drew's fault if you lose your children, it's up to you too!” This online fandom is a community that I want my mother to have in the 1960s: she liked to talk about the characters with me – but how funny it would have been on Facebook.
Despite Beyond the doorsIrwin says she is worried about the future of soaps. While titles and the public decrease, the “generational passage of the visualization of soap dies”. But even if the soaps do not reach 100, the conventions on which they live. I don't look General hospital with my daughter – but we attract Survivor Every Wednesday evening. It may be his own heritage.
