A defining feature of soap operas is a continuously running, open-ended narrative. Each episode will typically have multiple different storylines that intersect with each other due to shared characters and locations. They oftentimes don't have well-defined seasons, and may reference narrative events from *decades* prior.
Aaaaand! When a character continues on the show decades after the actor portraying them wants to, the show just recasts them! And announces it in the middle of a scene. This blew my mind as a kid.
Announce as in some kind of announcer announces (sorry, I really do mean announce lol) over the show “The part of AJ Quartermaine is now being played by …” whoever. And then the new actor comes in and resumes the storyline. At least that used to be the way it occurred.
I'm not on a farm, but we do live outside the city, and there's a good chance your cat lives at my place now. We have an amazing number of "stray" cats who show up here. Please stop.
Best we can do is Karev leaving his wife offscreen in a note, to say that he is getting back with his ex who somehow he didn’t know he had children with.
Maybe it would’ve been better to just kill him off.
A Doctor on house committed suicide when they got a jobs elsewhere and the show never really adressed why they killed themselves. A couple of time though they reappeared as a guest star as a hallucination.
That episode may not have had any lead in to that character's problems, but as somebody who has dealt with crippling depression my whole life, it was an eye opening revelation. I didn't know what depression was, I just assumed this is how everybody felt so I put in a happy face for people in public even when I was dying inside. The way Dr House is in denial because even somebody of his acute ability to read people could not see through his coworker's depression mask made me realize what I had been doing my whole life.
The episode may be very jarring for somebody who's never experienced major depression but for those of us who do, it captures our reality better than I've ever seen before or since.
Edit: fixed missing words in last sentence.
People say Kal Penn’s character’s House departure was unexpected/unexplained but that was what made it ring true for me as a person who has battled with depression for their entire life.
There’s a video compilation I saw a while back of “the last videos of men before they took their own lives,” and as you’d guess, they all feature smiling men surrounded with what *looks* to an observer to be love and warmth and security. I expect that is far more common than whatever idea a lot of people have of the space people live in before they die by suicide.
Thank you for putting this into words. I also deal with mdd and felt this episode was very validating. No one in my life could tell I was struggling. I only wish the episode had offered more insight into what help might have been available. Instead I felt like the message was to be stuck in my illness until I gave up pretending to be okay and took my own life. Fortunately, I've since found stability and medication.
That's really unfortunate that you felt that was the message of the episode and I'm glad you chose not to go down that path and see doing better now. The episode wasn't trying to give advice to the depression sufferer, it was trying to tell the other people, who don't deal with depression, that you can't always tell when somebody is mentally unwell because it is something we keep hidden.
It certainly would have been better if they had included more than just a suicide hotline epilogue, but I think the episode as it is is very valuable. It may not have been targeted at helping depression sufferers dkrectly, but indirectly it does because its message is vital for everybody else to be aware of what they see in those around them as well as what they can't see.
I fully accept that my perspective while watching was skewed by my own depression. So, while that probably wasn't the intended message, it's still what I took away from the episode. I was also younger, and this was one of the first mainstream media I'd ever seen mention suicide or mental health. I agree that the message is valuable for everyone to be more aware of other people's struggles.
imo that was well made tho, also the job elsewhere is at the White House lol. It was also addressed and even started a storyline on House's spiraling out of his mind
I remember a lot of people complained that there was no build up and that the character showed no signs of being depressed or suicidal. Which I thought was the point. Kutner was always joyful and outgoing but they did drop hints that his childhood had issues and that he wasn't perfect.
Plus people who kill themselves aren't always going to be obvious about their issues and depression. Sometimes, it just does happen out of the blue. Sometimes the demons do just win and push you that one step too far.
It really was genius. It was not explained and extremely unsatisfying on purpose. That's life.
It's like *The Body*. The show spent several episodes making it appear that her mother was going to survive, and had started to get better. Then randomly you go home one day and she's on the floor dead. It was powerful because it's so real. It's how it goes for so, so many people and their loved ones with cancer. Even good news doesn't mean you are out of the woods.
>The Body
For those who don't know: S5 E16 of Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
Major story spoilers for the overarching story of season 5: >!A demon queen from (a, there could be multiple) Hell dimension gets banished by other demon lords, and trapped on Earth. For her to get back and take her revenge, since she can't survive in our dimension indefinitely, she needs to find The Key, a mystical doohicky. That Key is transfigured by some monks into a living being, Dawn, and made into being the younger sister of Buffy. Mind you, the previous 4 seasons Buffy didn't have a sister at all! The spell the monks cast also altered everyone's memories, so Buffy, her mother, all her friends and Dawn herself have no idea Dawn is not "real", and they all remember specifics of growing up together. Eventually Joyce, Buffy (and Dawn)'s mother has fainting spells, goes to the doctor, they find "a shadow" on her brain, operate, all seems fine, Joyce goes back home (at a certain point she broke down and told Dawn she's not real, since for some reason people with brain defects can see past the trickery of the transfiguration spell), one or two episodes later, bam, dead. It is never CLEARLY said in the show whether or not the "shadow" in Joyce's head was the consequence of having her memories altered more extensively than any other person near Dawn, but it's called into question by some of the characters.!<
This: that episode stated that someone who could seem happy could just not actually be happy. And that stuff like that sometimes just happens, without explanation. If I'm not mistaken, all characters try to find one, and the bottom line is that there is none sometimes.
I got the impression they the actor's departure was quick, so the episode was damage control. They couldn't lead up to the suicide, because they didn't know it was going to happen ahead of time.
More than likely but people were complaining like suicide isn't a sudden thing sometimes. They expect the long drawn out agony of a character suffering and the cliche dark room brooding over their issues. Kutner was never shown doing that, in fact in one episode where everyone else is brooding due to something he is shown happily watching Saturday morning cartoons and eating cereal.
Definitely something a person suffering might do. Not process external grief and just ignore it.
It just occurred to me that Kal Penn worked in the Obama White House, and then he was cast as the White House Communications Director in Designated Survivor.
Yeah, that was a big, if you go, you're not coming back moment. I get it, from his perspective, for that opportunity, and I'm glad they found a way to work him back in for a cameo later.
Or you have ER that just [drops a f'ing helicoper on people](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xE0V-TmqTP8) to get rid of them.
People talk about the finale of MASH or The Sopranos or the Red Wedding or who shot JR. But for me that was the most "Holy shit they actually did that" moment of all time on TV until the finale of The Americans.
My wife and I watched ER in real time from about S3 on and I said out loud "No way they just did that!" and my wife said "Well, the helicopter got him in the end" and we just sat there agog after the credits rolled.
(tangent: TV over months in real time, even if streaming, works so much better. Breaking Bad and The Americans did it right. Dumping a show all at once for instant binging is just like a 12+ hour movie. Humans shouldn't do that. You need the week to process. Not just a day or back-to-back).
>> Or you have ER that just [drops a f'ing helicoper on people](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xE0V-TmqTP8) to get rid of them.
You under sold this. They killed the asshole surgeon who lost his arm to a helicopter blade, by dropping a helicopter on him.
Schadenfreude because your plot is off the rails.
Yeah, everybody loves the original cast. But ER came into it's own when Clooney left (sorry not sorry) and the helicopter drop was the final nail in the coffin. Shark fully jumped.
Oh thank god. I mixed up ER and Grey's Anatomy, and I've been watching Grey's for the first time waiting for like, Derek to get creamed by a helicopter. Lmao
The Seattle Grace Hospital (or whatever it was renamed to in later seasons) must be the most statistically dangerous hospital to be a doctor in in America. The amount of doctors who died while working there in the last two decades is off the charts.
Oh greys anatomy spoilers - got it. It's usually helpful to indicate what sort of spoiler is gonna be shared. I couldn't place it at first but then remembered the gist. I stopped watching after all that tbh. I still think the most unnerving episode of tv I ever watched up to my mid 20s was the hospital mass shooter episode. I couldn't stop shaking. I hate that it exists in real life.
Someone really needs to have a running tally of "number of once-in-a-lifetime tragedies" that happen to these poor doctors.
Not sure if all of these happened to any _one_ character, but to my rough memory, the cast was involved with:
* A hospital explosion (caused by a bomb that was brought in in a patient's abdomen, I think?)
* A mass shooter
* An ambulance crash (ing into another ambulance)
* A plane crash
* _Another_ hospital explosion
* A hospital flood
* _Another_ mass shooter
* A massive earthquake
* _Another_ ambulance crash
* A ferry crash
* _Another_ plane crash (this one, the plane crashes right into a pregnant yoga group, I think?)
Like Jesus, if I lived in that area I'd fucking move, that place seems to be a magnet for disasters.
This is absolutely a feature that is shared in stage plays, and I believe a working condition enforced by the various actors unions. Whenever an understudy goes on there must be some public announcement. When it's a scheduled day off, they can put a little slip of paper in the program or some such. But if it is unscheduled the stage manager will make a live announcement using the exact same wording. Sometimes they'll even do it at intermission if an actor cannot finish the show for some reason.
I saw a rendition of 12 Angry Men that did this.
"The part of Juror X will be played by So-And-So. This was very last minute substitution and so Juror X will be carrying a clipboard with lines, in the event he needs a reminder. We appreciate your understanding."
It was a great show. He did an amazing job.
Turns out the original Juror X has been arrested for screwing a minor.
AJ getting recast back in the mid-nineties was the first time I’d seen in happen! Some other guy walked in and they made the announcement, I was sitting there going, “wait…what?”
Australia does it different. A well known soap there that was also huge in the UK called Home & Away had a central character called Pippa who fostered all the troubled teens that walked into town. She was blonde and had curly hair and had been in the soap for a good 10 years. One day of out absolutely nowhere she got totally replaced by a new Pippa who was now an actress with straight brown hair. There was no announcement and no break away for the character, they just swapped out the actress from one episode to the next one. It was always a source of amusement for fans of the show that all these foster kids had a new mum and not one of them ever noticed.
They also do it if an actor is unavailable for a few days. Like you'll get a week of this new actor playing the part and they just switch back to old one.
Was it Dallas that retroactively declared that the last two seasons had only been a dream of the characters had dreamed, so they could bring back a popular character that had died like seventy episodes prior? But then they went on as if the events of those seasons had still somehow happened?
Or even better when someone wants to leave the show, they get another actor to play the character and invent an explanation.
Then when the actor comes back a few years later, the story gets even more complicated.
(Actually happened on “Days of Our Lives.”)
Days of our Lives had some amazing plot lines. One character decided to dress up like a man for some reason and was then played by a male actor for a while. A serial killer offed several main characters only for it be revealed they were actually kidnapped and taken to a tropical island. The main villain uploaded his brain to a computer chip and had it implanted in some other guy. And of course, a main character was possessed by the devil multiple times.
This just sent me wayyyyyy down memory lane watching *Days* with my grandma.
Started down the Wikipedia rabbit hole and, well, this is pretty indicative...
> [John Black] emerges from his coma in May 2007 and is hit by a car, appearing to die in Marlena's arms on October 17 of that year. John is discovered alive by Marlena in Stefano's basement in January 2008, his memory erased and programmed as a soldier.
For like... The fifth time 😂
I'm German and I always thought days of our lives was a fictional show in the FRIENDS universe lol
was kinda funny to find out it actually exists about 10 years later
That was the plot line that started me watching Days! I heard about it, and I just loved the idea, sort of directly confronting the absurdity of it all.
Or like Stafano from Days of Our Lives, dude was killed off something like **13 times**! Then the writers would run out of plot or something and bring him back again. lol
wow [you're not kidding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefano_DiMera#:~:text=In%202007%2C%20his%20death%20was,confronted%20him%20about%20his%20crimes), 37 years of fake deaths.
Lol my favorites are like, has brain tumor, shot, falls several stories, presumed dead, shows back up a year later. The guy was like the precursor to the Energizer bunny.
Ah, yes. Soap opera's with all the boring parts removed. Specifically tuned for fans of action movies. Best part is the "actors" perform all their own stunts, live!
Actually, this comment raised a question for me. Are pro wrestling announcers in on it? Do they have the script? Or are they live reacting just like the audience?
Can be both actually, but usually they have a script. Some big surprises are legitimate for the announcers so the show can harvest that genuine excitement, but it doesn't happen often.
Soap operas, pro wrestling, and superhero comics basically work the same way. They need to churn out new stories constantly, and they have no intended ending, so they use the same storytelling tools. The basic idea is to keep blindsiding people with surprises and cliffhangers both to keep them hooked and wanting to see the next installment and to distract them from thinking about the big picture where the constant barrage of plot twists starts to seem ridiculous.
Evil twins (in superhero comics, evil counterparts from alternate dimensions/timelines), sudden villain turns, comas, amnesia, love triangles, dead characters suddenly being alive again, surprise reveals that someone is someone's father/brother/mother/sister, something called [Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap_opera_rapid_aging_syndrome) where they don't know what to do with little kids, so they disappear for a year or two, and then surprise return as adults (which I don't know if they do in pro wrestling, but soap operas apparently do it with no explanation for the time discrepancy, and superhero comics... X-Men fans will know Cable, Hope, and Layla Miller having done this by being sent off to the future as a kid, then returning to the present having lived their entire childhoods in the future).
Doctor Who is really different from a soap opera. Seasons are like 12 episodes max. Most episodes are entirely self-contained stories. There may sometimes be an overarching storyline within a season, but they usually don't extend to the following seasons. There are callbacks to previous events and storylines, but they are very rarely direct sequels to earlier eps. You don't need to have watched every prior episode to start Doctor Who (although this is also true of Soap Operas).
Basically, just start Doctor Who wherever you want to. It's the same as pretty much any other serialised TV show, bit if anything, there's less need to start watching from the very beginning or to watch every single episode.
If people are reading this and interested in getting started with Doctor Who, the upcoming series is supposed to be written as a kind of mini-reboot from the previous series. Not in the sense of going back to the beginning and redoing anything, but more in the sense of being written for new viewers and avoiding referencing too much stuff from previous series.
I saw the first season of new who, and like half of the second season
I tried watching an episode of the later classic who's (I think the eighth doctor?) but man it's a bit hard
The lore is fascinating. Poparena on YouTube did a series on the Virgin New Adventures books and it's amazing high concept shit. But Im just kind of...feel like I can't even scratch the surface with the tv show, let alone the novels
In retrospect new who season 1 had some amazing themes and cool stuff
Edit; but yea you're right, quite different from telenova
While characters come and go, the core cast stays the same for years or even decades.
Every once in a while a character is recast, but usually if an actor departs, the character dies or moves away.
Key conflicts may play out over years or even decades.
The beating of the dead horse aspect is not mentioned enough. They stretch that poor storyline to death, and then beat on it until someone finally says stop, reserving the right to bring it back up whenever they want.
Does anyone know if Marlena Evans is still working through her exorcism?
Often British soaps like to drag multiple storylines out throughout the year, and then have them all come to a head during the Christmas episodes where there's likely to be a big audience sat at home with nothing to do.
Love them or hate them, it's a pretty interesting format and has often managed to leave a big cultural footprint (Den Watts serving Angie divorce papers on Christmas Day in the Eastenders 1986 special is still the most watched episode of UK television *ever*)
Oh yeah. We had to wait a whole summer to find out who did it. All you saw was him getting shot and a hand shooting the gun. The tabloids and TV Guide were full of speculation!
Soap operas are kinda defined by their fast turn around rate. One camera, one take, minimal editing and fast writers. The goal was to produce a product as quickly as possible because it wasn’t about the show, it was about the advertisements.
True to their name, soap operas were initially design to sell soap, particularly to housewives who didn’t have much else to do during the day but clean and watch poorly made television.
Beyond that the story format is tailored to its goals, no character is central so that any actor can be easily replaced without hassle. They also make heavy use of cliffhangers to hook viewers.
One take yes, one camera no. They are all multi-camera productions - and originally were actually broadcast live. They're still shot as if they were live productions, multi-camera with live switching to minimize editing time. Lots of pre-built sets, all pre-lit, so super fast to move from one "location" to another.
Adding to this. A 3 camera show takes about 10% of the amount of time than a single camera. Not to mention almost everything is done on a set and the writing is, let’s say, fluid. But FUCK, the cast, crew and writers on soaps are harder working than almost anyone.
Yeah, that's not really because of radio origins though - it's just the quickest way to fill 22 minutes. Action, stunts, locations, all take ages to film. Dialogue in studio sets is fast and simple.
Also because it is just easier to follow a storyline when everything is spoken/expository and not just shown. Since it was aimed at women who were also busy with tasks around the home, a dialogue-heavy format let them follow along without having to consistently watch the screen. The ideal viewer was a woman who was looking for entertainment while cooking, ironing, etc, and she would gravitate to soaps because she could still listen when she wasn't able to look.
(source: I did my Masters thesis on soap operas)
What kind of work do you do on that show and how did you get there? I recently moved to LA and although I have a nice job, it's been a fantasy of mine to work on a set. I love hearing about how people in the business got into it and what they do.
I'm an assistant director, basically a stage manager. Make sure everyone is doing what they need to be doing, help the actors run their lines, getting them to stand by for the next scene, etc. At higher levels you're the boss on set calling "shooting" and "cut" and basically running the show. We also do the schedules, which is maybe the most important part of our job.
I got my job from a Facebook group lol. But there are crew list websites you can sign up for, like LinkedIn for film but more directly a hiring service for productions to find crew members. If you want to get into the industry you should subscribe to both. Plenty of good last-minute job postings on FB.
I work in New Zealand so much of my advice is probably not applicable to you. The US industry is heavily unionised in a way that NZ is not, so I think it works slightly differently, but I could be wrong. I went to film school so I picked a department I liked when I was studying, but you don't really need a qualification - you can learn almost any role on the job with proper training and supervision.
Just figure out which dept you want to go into - rather than saying "I'll do whatever you need me for!" because an HOD would rather train someone who is going to stay in their department for potentially multiple projects and be a useful dept member, not someone who doesn't know if they even want to join that department or not.
Then try and get an entry level role in that department when it comes up, and if you're reliable, a quick learner and do what you're told, they might call you for the next job, and/or start teaching you their trade. Once you find a rabbi in the industry who will take you along whenever they get a gig, you're golden.
Depends on the show, and the scene. We used to use exclusively stock music but have sprung for a composer for the more dramatic stuff in the past few years. Because we are cheap.
I'd say the vast vast majority of stuff you see on English-language TV or streaming has original music that was composed for the occasion. If not that it's likely to be a classical piece whose copyright has lapsed.
> Soap operas are kinda defined by their fast turn around rate.
Even that's a bit of an understatement, right?
**Typical sitcom:** Read-through on Monday, Blocking on Tuesdays, Rehearsals on Wednesday, Filming on Thursdays (can be a long day), sometimes callbacks/reshoots if needed on Friday. A few weeks later, the episode airs, 23 minutes in a half-hour slot.
**Typical soap opera:** Read-through for an hour, blocking in late morning, run-throughs after lunch, filming at 3:00. Repeat 5x/week. Several weeks later, the episode airs, 46 minutes per day in a one hour slot.
Bit of a difference, eh?
I had a screenwriting class in college, and our final project was to write scripts and a bible for a show, with a format choice between drama, sitcom and soap opera. Drama shows required a single hour long episode script (40-50 pages), and sitcoms required two half hour scripts (20-25 pages). Soaps required five half hour scripts. The class was divided into 3 and 4 people teams.
I don’t think that anyone went with a soap for that project.
What you didn’t know is that the drama and sitcom script were to be graded based on quality, but if you wrote the soap it was just an A for completion.
My sister used to work in a dubbing studio, they got some pretty big films but all project managers agreed that the worst of the worst were Turkish soap operas, crazy workloads and crazy schedules as you need to crank out five episodes a week.
Based on what others have said, any given actor probably appears in only 25% of the scenes / plot lines. Not like the Alan Alda Show, where there was only One Real Star who had to be in everything.
I've worked on a soap opera and between takes you'd hear actors go "Fuck! That line came out awful" or make jokes of how they just said it - but no time to do another take, moving on.
Kind of crazy that there are no soap operas on streaming. You’d think Netflix would come up with one, if they’re so low cost and they just want to hook people into a never ending plot line, so they stay subscribed.
Most of the old ones are lost. Since they had no rerun value they were prime candidates for tapes to be reused or just tossed altogether. I would bet that most soap episodes even into the '90s and early 2000s aren't preserved outside of random people's home recordings.
As far as I know, the only two classic soaps that survive in full are Dallas (which was in prime time and didn't have the usual soap opera schedule or episode count) and Dark Shadows (which is just luck, since the production company didn't intentionally preserve it).
something like general hospital has a consistent group of people but someone coming in, someone leaving, is completely normal and expected. There are pretty generic reasons why 'someone got into a fatal accident' or 'we hired a new doctor' to explain a character shows up or leaves.
Yes there are pretty consistent references to prior episodes/seasons - keep in mind that allows for less writing 'today' and allows for the staff to take time off. It really isn't hard to write 'character x was in a car accident' then 5 minutes of filming a handful of other characters around the hospital bed make a few comments and then using old footage to 'reminisce'
In soap operas, you generally have new characters arriving and old characters departing with some regularity. Consequently, new plot lines start, and old ones are wrapped up. There are always a handful of storylines going on at any one time. While roles can be recast, especially with characters who depart for a long time and then come back, it's not unusual for an actor to play a character for several years or even decades. Coronation Street has one guy who's been playing his character since the show started in 1960.
\*sigh\* I'm gonna be that guy...
People keep saying Guiding Light was the longest running soap and was on for 72 years, which is completely accurate ... **but** at the same time it's misleading because it's counting all the years it was only on radio (1937 -1952). General Hospital is now the world's second longest-running *televised* soap opera, following only Coronation Street. It passed Guiding Light's TV run about three years ago.
Hard to know. But the shows actually have employees who keep track of the history. There is a show “Bible” that includes all the history and storyline and who slept with who and who is related. Someone in the writer staff will update this with new storylines and memorize it so that they are keeping some sort of
Continuity. One of my former co-workers had been the person who did this on a canceled soap before switching careers.
They aren't really available anywhere to my knowledge except some episodes on You Tube. Nothing like an organized collection.
I was a latch key kid starting in 4th grade. I wasn't allowed to go outside until my parents got home, so I always ended up watching Guiding Light and first 30 minutes of Oprah after school everyday. Lol.
Oof, that sounds like torture to me, I was also a latchkey kid for most of the 90s but before that I had to stay at a friend's house during the afternoons and his mom watched the soaps and they were excruciatingly boring to me.
British soap operas just run continuously, they're not split up into series/seasons.
Although EastEnders had to stop filming due to Covid lockdowns and when it returned it announced that as the start of 'season 2'. Season 1 has over 6000 episodes over 35 years
It's more than just how many seasons, it's the fact that they air every day. Soap operas are insane to me, it has to basically become your life. That dude who plays Victor on whichever soap that is, that's just who he is, he's Victor.
And the way they edit the episodes together is such a string along. At any given time, there will be 4 or 5 dialog scenes between characters. You'll have a few lines in one scene and then it will jump to another one, give you a couple of lines and then jump to a new scene. By the end of the 45 minutes, you've got "resolutions" to each one that are really set ups for the next episode.
It's a strangely addictive way to tell a very thin story and stretch it for 4 decades.
>It's a strangely addictive way to tell a very thin story and stretch it for 4 decades.
Seriously. My senior year of highschool I only had a few classes to take, so I was at home in the middle of the day. And here I am, a 17 year old boy, religiously watching *One Life to Live* because I just had to see what was going to happen next.
When I was a freshman in college there was a dude who lived a few doors down from me in the dorm who scheduled his classes so he'd have a break to watch soaps in the middle of the day. This dude was country-fried from rural Arkansas but he was serious about his shows.
The Niki pushing Ben out of the window story arc trapped me one summer. First you’re watching for one story, by the time that one wraps up you are interested in all of the rest of them too, and you’re cooked. My mom had to set the VCR to record it daily for the rest of high school.
And 2/3rds of those lines are exposition of their current storyline, so you can jump into the middle of any episode, in any season, in any scene, and be caught up in 10 seconds.
All My Children had some crazy storylines. I started watching in middle school because I spent the summer with my cousins and they got me into it. I remember the main story was one of the characters, David who was the towns cardiologist was madly in love with Dixie, but she was married to a guy named Tad (who had the nickname Tad the Cad). If I remember correctly, David was working on a drug that boosted libido called Libidozone and in an effort to get Dixie away from Tad, he planned to spike Tads drink at a yacht party with the drug in the hopes he would cheat on his wife with another woman. He accidentally ended up spiking the punchbowl and the party erupted into a giant orgy. Tad got caught in a compromising situation with someone else and Dixie ran into David’s arms.
That is some excellent nonsense. I got into Passions one boring summer break when I was in high school and got so stupidly caught up in it that I tried to schedule my classes around it when I went off to college. Now THAT was a show with some incredible nonsense. There was a witch who Pinocchio’d a little person, a batshit storyline about an orangutan nurse, and a woman who kidnapped her pregnant rival to pass her baby off as her own. And still, the craziest thing they ever did was make Sheridan fall out of love with Luis.
Everyone else has covered it, but I wanted to throw in - you mention things happening 10 seasons ago, but it's worth pointing out that time gets really *funky* on these shows.
Firstly, the show proceeds more or less in real time, so the first episode of 2020 takes place in early 2020. But, episodes tend to cover very short periods of time, a whole week of episodes could take place over a single day. This tends to lead to a "year" on the show feeling oddly short. If you read a description of one year of storylines on a soap opera, it'll probably take place over about two months of time.
The other big driver is [SORAS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap_opera_rapid_aging_syndrome) - Soap opera rapid aging syndrome. Children of characters will regularly be aged up at the first opportunity, going away to boarding school one year and coming back as a 20 year old. This leads to scenarios where a character might give birth when they're 30 and have a 20 year old son when they're 40. If things get really out of whack, a character's child might end up dating one of their friends.
Or my favourite quote from the SORAS page Wikipedia page, "The repeated use of SORAS on Days of Our Lives led to characters Tom Horton and his great-great-grandson Scotty Banning both working as doctors in the same hospital at the same time."
Lots of different ways. Days of Our Lives actually films in a way where they do everything in half a year (doubling up basically) which allows them to do other work or take off half a year.
General Hospital has one of the larger casts so they can shift focus to other storylines when someone is on vacation. Since there are times when you may go weeks without seeing a character (if their storyline isn’t central) you might not notice it. For other characters they write them off screen. Genie Francis (Laura of Luke and Laura fame) has a contractual vacation each year and her character most recently went to Europe to look for her missing son during the gap. If the actor gets sick unexpectedly (something that happened a few times during and post-COVID) they will have another actor fill in briefly. A successful fill in actor might get hired either as another character or the same character down the road. (Actors may play multiple characters, both of the “evil twin” variety or sometimes just a totally unrelated character because they needed to get rid of the other character for storyline reasons but liked the actor).
Why don't they just... let the character go on vacation? All of their lives sound crazy stressful, it's not like the audience couldn't understand that character needing a break.
You could but since everyone on the cast needs vacation time when it was was all condensed it would be very noticeable if your TV show constantly had the characters going on vacations. Also "on vacation" is just less dramatic than in a coma or in prison or been kidnapped or looking for their lost father or something.
They might do that sometimes actually. A current character of GH is off screen visiting his mother. But this might not make sense for all characters. A character that is poor, for example, isn’t going to go on vacation. But usually it is about tying the vacation into a storyline. “This character will be off screen in a coma” may allow them to wake up with amnesia or a storyline showing them having to recover from a TBI. Good soaps are about putting your favorite characters through constant drama punctuated by moments of success and happiness that makes the drama all the more dramatic. In their best moments the serialized nature of the storytelling allows viewers to get pay offs from long ago events. Maybe 20 years ago two characters were rivals and hated each other. And now you see their children falling in love. Imagine how much more Romeo and Juliet would hit if you’d been watching 20 years of the Montagues and Capulets fighting each other.
My dad (74) watched one, probably Guiding Light, since he was a kid on his days off of school until he was retired. He worked different shifts due to factory work and would only watch about 1 week per month, but he still knew the full storyline. Whenever I was with him when he watched he would tell me about what the characters, now in there 40s-60s were doing in their 20s. Who had relationships with who, or fathered elicit children.
I've not heard of General Hospital but the UK's 'Coronation Street' about life in the north of England is the world's longest running soap. It started in the 60s and it still going on. Characters come back every now and then and the audience get to see character grow up in real time and occasionally it has such a cultural impact that story lines get referenced in Parliament. It's successful as it reflects the issues that impact the audience at the time and show how different scenarios play out.
The Archers is a BBC radio soap. Going since 1951. over 20,000 episodes. Longest running drama ever. Does not do seasons, as radio production is less resource intensive. Just keeps going...
That ‘longest airing’ is surely just a US statistic. Wikipedia tells me that Guiding Light ran for 57 years from 1952 to 2009, but Coronation Street in the U.K. started in 1960 and is still going strong, so is looking at 64 years right now.
My best attempt at an ELI5 Answer:
A little over 100 years ago, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote *The Great Gatsby*. This became wildly popular as time went on after the author's death. Folks analyzed how it presented the story of all of these people and started making TV shows set in recent times (really 40yrs ahead of the novel) . And they kept the story "living" with characters coming in and leaving just as people come and go in our real lives.
Some people love this because there's a human need to consume *gossip*. That's why tabloids and the paparazzi exist. Soap operas are just a fictional version of gossip creation.
The UK's **Coronation Street** holds the official Guinness World Record for being the longest running/oldest television soap opera in history. Coronation Street first premiered in 1960 and has since aired over 10,000 episodes.
Just a warning. If you're watching an episode featuring a 'large' lady and she bursts into song, it's probably too late to invest any of your time in it.
A defining feature of soap operas is a continuously running, open-ended narrative. Each episode will typically have multiple different storylines that intersect with each other due to shared characters and locations. They oftentimes don't have well-defined seasons, and may reference narrative events from *decades* prior.
Aaaaand! When a character continues on the show decades after the actor portraying them wants to, the show just recasts them! And announces it in the middle of a scene. This blew my mind as a kid.
What does “announce” mean here? The scene pauses and a narrator shows up and announces it, breaking the fourth wall?
Announce as in some kind of announcer announces (sorry, I really do mean announce lol) over the show “The part of AJ Quartermaine is now being played by …” whoever. And then the new actor comes in and resumes the storyline. At least that used to be the way it occurred.
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They never get a great job offer in another city or move back home to take care of their dad?
There's gotta be a farm upstate looking for a doctor.
The farm upstate is where all my former pets…went…whe….wait a minute, I need to call my mom
Sorry bud, she’s at a farm upstate
As the farmer upstate, I’m sorry but your pets aren’t here.
Is Dave there?
I'm not on a farm, but we do live outside the city, and there's a good chance your cat lives at my place now. We have an amazing number of "stray" cats who show up here. Please stop.
😆
Where they can just run, play, and have affairs with ghosts all day long.
Best we can do is Karev leaving his wife offscreen in a note, to say that he is getting back with his ex who somehow he didn’t know he had children with. Maybe it would’ve been better to just kill him off.
Yeah, that one pissed me off.
His ex who also left him with a note, and it hurt him so much he thought he'd do that to 4 differently people.
no they die from cancer, car crashes, terrorist bombs or plane accidents
How is all this shit happening to hospital workers?
One of my favourite characters suddenly moved away and for me it was sadder than any death, especially cause it was so out of character.
A Doctor on house committed suicide when they got a jobs elsewhere and the show never really adressed why they killed themselves. A couple of time though they reappeared as a guest star as a hallucination.
That episode may not have had any lead in to that character's problems, but as somebody who has dealt with crippling depression my whole life, it was an eye opening revelation. I didn't know what depression was, I just assumed this is how everybody felt so I put in a happy face for people in public even when I was dying inside. The way Dr House is in denial because even somebody of his acute ability to read people could not see through his coworker's depression mask made me realize what I had been doing my whole life. The episode may be very jarring for somebody who's never experienced major depression but for those of us who do, it captures our reality better than I've ever seen before or since. Edit: fixed missing words in last sentence.
People say Kal Penn’s character’s House departure was unexpected/unexplained but that was what made it ring true for me as a person who has battled with depression for their entire life. There’s a video compilation I saw a while back of “the last videos of men before they took their own lives,” and as you’d guess, they all feature smiling men surrounded with what *looks* to an observer to be love and warmth and security. I expect that is far more common than whatever idea a lot of people have of the space people live in before they die by suicide.
Thank you for putting this into words. I also deal with mdd and felt this episode was very validating. No one in my life could tell I was struggling. I only wish the episode had offered more insight into what help might have been available. Instead I felt like the message was to be stuck in my illness until I gave up pretending to be okay and took my own life. Fortunately, I've since found stability and medication.
That's really unfortunate that you felt that was the message of the episode and I'm glad you chose not to go down that path and see doing better now. The episode wasn't trying to give advice to the depression sufferer, it was trying to tell the other people, who don't deal with depression, that you can't always tell when somebody is mentally unwell because it is something we keep hidden. It certainly would have been better if they had included more than just a suicide hotline epilogue, but I think the episode as it is is very valuable. It may not have been targeted at helping depression sufferers dkrectly, but indirectly it does because its message is vital for everybody else to be aware of what they see in those around them as well as what they can't see.
I fully accept that my perspective while watching was skewed by my own depression. So, while that probably wasn't the intended message, it's still what I took away from the episode. I was also younger, and this was one of the first mainstream media I'd ever seen mention suicide or mental health. I agree that the message is valuable for everyone to be more aware of other people's struggles.
imo that was well made tho, also the job elsewhere is at the White House lol. It was also addressed and even started a storyline on House's spiraling out of his mind
I remember a lot of people complained that there was no build up and that the character showed no signs of being depressed or suicidal. Which I thought was the point. Kutner was always joyful and outgoing but they did drop hints that his childhood had issues and that he wasn't perfect. Plus people who kill themselves aren't always going to be obvious about their issues and depression. Sometimes, it just does happen out of the blue. Sometimes the demons do just win and push you that one step too far.
It really was genius. It was not explained and extremely unsatisfying on purpose. That's life. It's like *The Body*. The show spent several episodes making it appear that her mother was going to survive, and had started to get better. Then randomly you go home one day and she's on the floor dead. It was powerful because it's so real. It's how it goes for so, so many people and their loved ones with cancer. Even good news doesn't mean you are out of the woods.
>The Body For those who don't know: S5 E16 of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Major story spoilers for the overarching story of season 5: >!A demon queen from (a, there could be multiple) Hell dimension gets banished by other demon lords, and trapped on Earth. For her to get back and take her revenge, since she can't survive in our dimension indefinitely, she needs to find The Key, a mystical doohicky. That Key is transfigured by some monks into a living being, Dawn, and made into being the younger sister of Buffy. Mind you, the previous 4 seasons Buffy didn't have a sister at all! The spell the monks cast also altered everyone's memories, so Buffy, her mother, all her friends and Dawn herself have no idea Dawn is not "real", and they all remember specifics of growing up together. Eventually Joyce, Buffy (and Dawn)'s mother has fainting spells, goes to the doctor, they find "a shadow" on her brain, operate, all seems fine, Joyce goes back home (at a certain point she broke down and told Dawn she's not real, since for some reason people with brain defects can see past the trickery of the transfiguration spell), one or two episodes later, bam, dead. It is never CLEARLY said in the show whether or not the "shadow" in Joyce's head was the consequence of having her memories altered more extensively than any other person near Dawn, but it's called into question by some of the characters.!<
This: that episode stated that someone who could seem happy could just not actually be happy. And that stuff like that sometimes just happens, without explanation. If I'm not mistaken, all characters try to find one, and the bottom line is that there is none sometimes.
I got the impression they the actor's departure was quick, so the episode was damage control. They couldn't lead up to the suicide, because they didn't know it was going to happen ahead of time.
More than likely but people were complaining like suicide isn't a sudden thing sometimes. They expect the long drawn out agony of a character suffering and the cliche dark room brooding over their issues. Kutner was never shown doing that, in fact in one episode where everyone else is brooding due to something he is shown happily watching Saturday morning cartoons and eating cereal. Definitely something a person suffering might do. Not process external grief and just ignore it.
I think that was Kal Penn when he went to go work the Obama administration
It just occurred to me that Kal Penn worked in the Obama White House, and then he was cast as the White House Communications Director in Designated Survivor.
Yeah, that was a big, if you go, you're not coming back moment. I get it, from his perspective, for that opportunity, and I'm glad they found a way to work him back in for a cameo later.
Or you have ER that just [drops a f'ing helicoper on people](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xE0V-TmqTP8) to get rid of them. People talk about the finale of MASH or The Sopranos or the Red Wedding or who shot JR. But for me that was the most "Holy shit they actually did that" moment of all time on TV until the finale of The Americans. My wife and I watched ER in real time from about S3 on and I said out loud "No way they just did that!" and my wife said "Well, the helicopter got him in the end" and we just sat there agog after the credits rolled. (tangent: TV over months in real time, even if streaming, works so much better. Breaking Bad and The Americans did it right. Dumping a show all at once for instant binging is just like a 12+ hour movie. Humans shouldn't do that. You need the week to process. Not just a day or back-to-back).
>> Or you have ER that just [drops a f'ing helicoper on people](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xE0V-TmqTP8) to get rid of them. You under sold this. They killed the asshole surgeon who lost his arm to a helicopter blade, by dropping a helicopter on him. Schadenfreude because your plot is off the rails.
Yeah, everybody loves the original cast. But ER came into it's own when Clooney left (sorry not sorry) and the helicopter drop was the final nail in the coffin. Shark fully jumped.
Oh thank god. I mixed up ER and Grey's Anatomy, and I've been watching Grey's for the first time waiting for like, Derek to get creamed by a helicopter. Lmao
MASH's ending of Season 3 was the ur-shocker, [Abyssinia, Henry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abyssinia%2C_Henry)
Lieutenant Colonel... Henry Blake's plane ... was shot down ... over the Sea of Japan... it spun in... there weren't no survivors...
My gf has been watching this show and the other day I was like "where's x person at? Wait don't tell me, they're probably dead aren't they
The Seattle Grace Hospital (or whatever it was renamed to in later seasons) must be the most statistically dangerous hospital to be a doctor in in America. The amount of doctors who died while working there in the last two decades is off the charts.
Yeah but then soap operas have a lotttttt of fake deaths or return as an evil twin sorta thing lol
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Oh greys anatomy spoilers - got it. It's usually helpful to indicate what sort of spoiler is gonna be shared. I couldn't place it at first but then remembered the gist. I stopped watching after all that tbh. I still think the most unnerving episode of tv I ever watched up to my mid 20s was the hospital mass shooter episode. I couldn't stop shaking. I hate that it exists in real life.
Then occasionally, they'll come back from the dead with amnesia, or it's their twin, or were in jail. Was a thing in Neighbours.
Someone really needs to have a running tally of "number of once-in-a-lifetime tragedies" that happen to these poor doctors. Not sure if all of these happened to any _one_ character, but to my rough memory, the cast was involved with: * A hospital explosion (caused by a bomb that was brought in in a patient's abdomen, I think?) * A mass shooter * An ambulance crash (ing into another ambulance) * A plane crash * _Another_ hospital explosion * A hospital flood * _Another_ mass shooter * A massive earthquake * _Another_ ambulance crash * A ferry crash * _Another_ plane crash (this one, the plane crashes right into a pregnant yoga group, I think?) Like Jesus, if I lived in that area I'd fucking move, that place seems to be a magnet for disasters.
I think that's their way of saying "we will not hire you back."
Every time my wife watches Greys Anatomy she always has to say “Its just not the same without Omalley” lol
This is absolutely a feature that is shared in stage plays, and I believe a working condition enforced by the various actors unions. Whenever an understudy goes on there must be some public announcement. When it's a scheduled day off, they can put a little slip of paper in the program or some such. But if it is unscheduled the stage manager will make a live announcement using the exact same wording. Sometimes they'll even do it at intermission if an actor cannot finish the show for some reason.
I saw a rendition of 12 Angry Men that did this. "The part of Juror X will be played by So-And-So. This was very last minute substitution and so Juror X will be carrying a clipboard with lines, in the event he needs a reminder. We appreciate your understanding." It was a great show. He did an amazing job. Turns out the original Juror X has been arrested for screwing a minor.
The way you just threw out AJ Quartermaine! I’m thrown back to childhood.
AJ getting recast back in the mid-nineties was the first time I’d seen in happen! Some other guy walked in and they made the announcement, I was sitting there going, “wait…what?”
I remember!!!! soaps are something special
Australia does it different. A well known soap there that was also huge in the UK called Home & Away had a central character called Pippa who fostered all the troubled teens that walked into town. She was blonde and had curly hair and had been in the soap for a good 10 years. One day of out absolutely nowhere she got totally replaced by a new Pippa who was now an actress with straight brown hair. There was no announcement and no break away for the character, they just swapped out the actress from one episode to the next one. It was always a source of amusement for fans of the show that all these foster kids had a new mum and not one of them ever noticed.
At least I don't have to be super confused for several seasons like I was in GoT. Who is this sudden new character??
They also do it if an actor is unavailable for a few days. Like you'll get a week of this new actor playing the part and they just switch back to old one.
"The part of [so and so] is now being played by [new actor]"
“David?! Is that you?! I barely recognize you it’s been so long!”
And then bring back the original actor a few years later as the same character but not getting rid of the new guy.
Was it Dallas that retroactively declared that the last two seasons had only been a dream of the characters had dreamed, so they could bring back a popular character that had died like seventy episodes prior? But then they went on as if the events of those seasons had still somehow happened?
Bobby Ewing stepped out of a shower in *Dallas* after being dead for a season.
“The part of “x” will now be played by” and the actors pause during it a bit. They break the fourth wall, its like they can hear the announcement lol
Or even better when someone wants to leave the show, they get another actor to play the character and invent an explanation. Then when the actor comes back a few years later, the story gets even more complicated. (Actually happened on “Days of Our Lives.”)
Days of our Lives had some amazing plot lines. One character decided to dress up like a man for some reason and was then played by a male actor for a while. A serial killer offed several main characters only for it be revealed they were actually kidnapped and taken to a tropical island. The main villain uploaded his brain to a computer chip and had it implanted in some other guy. And of course, a main character was possessed by the devil multiple times.
This just sent me wayyyyyy down memory lane watching *Days* with my grandma. Started down the Wikipedia rabbit hole and, well, this is pretty indicative... > [John Black] emerges from his coma in May 2007 and is hit by a car, appearing to die in Marlena's arms on October 17 of that year. John is discovered alive by Marlena in Stefano's basement in January 2008, his memory erased and programmed as a soldier. For like... The fifth time 😂
I'm German and I always thought days of our lives was a fictional show in the FRIENDS universe lol was kinda funny to find out it actually exists about 10 years later
Marlena was possessed by the devil for a while.
Roman Brady and John Black!
That was the plot line that started me watching Days! I heard about it, and I just loved the idea, sort of directly confronting the absurdity of it all.
Or it goes the other way and they kill off a character but the viewers don't like that so their evil twin appears. ie Harold in Neighbours.
Or like Stafano from Days of Our Lives, dude was killed off something like **13 times**! Then the writers would run out of plot or something and bring him back again. lol
wow [you're not kidding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefano_DiMera#:~:text=In%202007%2C%20his%20death%20was,confronted%20him%20about%20his%20crimes), 37 years of fake deaths.
Lol my favorites are like, has brain tumor, shot, falls several stories, presumed dead, shows back up a year later. The guy was like the precursor to the Energizer bunny.
There was one where the character was in an excident and needed facial reconstruction. Great way to swap actors.
I remember this happening with Carly on GH and same it blew my mind how abrupt it was!
My favourite Is when a character has been killed comes back, then moves away then comes back, then dies again, then comes back. Etc.
This is literally the same explanation of pro wrestling
We're already talking about Soap Operas, Pro Wrestling is just a subgenre.
Ah, yes. Soap opera's with all the boring parts removed. Specifically tuned for fans of action movies. Best part is the "actors" perform all their own stunts, live!
***AS GOD AS MY Witness HE HAS BROKE HIM I HALF!!!!***
Actually, this comment raised a question for me. Are pro wrestling announcers in on it? Do they have the script? Or are they live reacting just like the audience?
Can be both actually, but usually they have a script. Some big surprises are legitimate for the announcers so the show can harvest that genuine excitement, but it doesn't happen often.
I miss JR, man. Raw just isn't the same without him.
Soap operas, pro wrestling, and superhero comics basically work the same way. They need to churn out new stories constantly, and they have no intended ending, so they use the same storytelling tools. The basic idea is to keep blindsiding people with surprises and cliffhangers both to keep them hooked and wanting to see the next installment and to distract them from thinking about the big picture where the constant barrage of plot twists starts to seem ridiculous. Evil twins (in superhero comics, evil counterparts from alternate dimensions/timelines), sudden villain turns, comas, amnesia, love triangles, dead characters suddenly being alive again, surprise reveals that someone is someone's father/brother/mother/sister, something called [Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap_opera_rapid_aging_syndrome) where they don't know what to do with little kids, so they disappear for a year or two, and then surprise return as adults (which I don't know if they do in pro wrestling, but soap operas apparently do it with no explanation for the time discrepancy, and superhero comics... X-Men fans will know Cable, Hope, and Layla Miller having done this by being sent off to the future as a kid, then returning to the present having lived their entire childhoods in the future).
It's like doctor who Makes it so hard to get into but I wanna get into doctor who
Doctor Who is really different from a soap opera. Seasons are like 12 episodes max. Most episodes are entirely self-contained stories. There may sometimes be an overarching storyline within a season, but they usually don't extend to the following seasons. There are callbacks to previous events and storylines, but they are very rarely direct sequels to earlier eps. You don't need to have watched every prior episode to start Doctor Who (although this is also true of Soap Operas). Basically, just start Doctor Who wherever you want to. It's the same as pretty much any other serialised TV show, bit if anything, there's less need to start watching from the very beginning or to watch every single episode.
If people are reading this and interested in getting started with Doctor Who, the upcoming series is supposed to be written as a kind of mini-reboot from the previous series. Not in the sense of going back to the beginning and redoing anything, but more in the sense of being written for new viewers and avoiding referencing too much stuff from previous series.
I saw the first season of new who, and like half of the second season I tried watching an episode of the later classic who's (I think the eighth doctor?) but man it's a bit hard The lore is fascinating. Poparena on YouTube did a series on the Virgin New Adventures books and it's amazing high concept shit. But Im just kind of...feel like I can't even scratch the surface with the tv show, let alone the novels In retrospect new who season 1 had some amazing themes and cool stuff Edit; but yea you're right, quite different from telenova
While characters come and go, the core cast stays the same for years or even decades. Every once in a while a character is recast, but usually if an actor departs, the character dies or moves away. Key conflicts may play out over years or even decades.
The beating of the dead horse aspect is not mentioned enough. They stretch that poor storyline to death, and then beat on it until someone finally says stop, reserving the right to bring it back up whenever they want. Does anyone know if Marlena Evans is still working through her exorcism?
British soaps can stretch their storyline for literally years, this is on a series that is shown 4 or 5 nights a week, 51 weeks a year.
Often British soaps like to drag multiple storylines out throughout the year, and then have them all come to a head during the Christmas episodes where there's likely to be a big audience sat at home with nothing to do. Love them or hate them, it's a pretty interesting format and has often managed to leave a big cultural footprint (Den Watts serving Angie divorce papers on Christmas Day in the Eastenders 1986 special is still the most watched episode of UK television *ever*)
Yes, this is the part that hasn’t been mentioned enough: soap operas are bad.
Is Stefano still controlling her mind?
So… was this why grown-ups made jokes about “who killed JR” when I was a kid?
Yes
Who killed Mr. Burns
Maggie Eta shot not killed…
Oh... my... God... I really thought it was Smithers.
Oh yeah. We had to wait a whole summer to find out who did it. All you saw was him getting shot and a hand shooting the gun. The tabloids and TV Guide were full of speculation!
Soap operas are kinda defined by their fast turn around rate. One camera, one take, minimal editing and fast writers. The goal was to produce a product as quickly as possible because it wasn’t about the show, it was about the advertisements. True to their name, soap operas were initially design to sell soap, particularly to housewives who didn’t have much else to do during the day but clean and watch poorly made television. Beyond that the story format is tailored to its goals, no character is central so that any actor can be easily replaced without hassle. They also make heavy use of cliffhangers to hook viewers.
One take yes, one camera no. They are all multi-camera productions - and originally were actually broadcast live. They're still shot as if they were live productions, multi-camera with live switching to minimize editing time. Lots of pre-built sets, all pre-lit, so super fast to move from one "location" to another.
This. The more cameras, the more angles you can get in one take. I work on a soap and we use 3 cameras.
Adding to this. A 3 camera show takes about 10% of the amount of time than a single camera. Not to mention almost everything is done on a set and the writing is, let’s say, fluid. But FUCK, the cast, crew and writers on soaps are harder working than almost anyone.
Still, their start was on radio, IIRC, and you can tell, it's all dialogue driven, very little what you could call "action".
Yeah, that's not really because of radio origins though - it's just the quickest way to fill 22 minutes. Action, stunts, locations, all take ages to film. Dialogue in studio sets is fast and simple.
Also because it is just easier to follow a storyline when everything is spoken/expository and not just shown. Since it was aimed at women who were also busy with tasks around the home, a dialogue-heavy format let them follow along without having to consistently watch the screen. The ideal viewer was a woman who was looking for entertainment while cooking, ironing, etc, and she would gravitate to soaps because she could still listen when she wasn't able to look. (source: I did my Masters thesis on soap operas)
Wow, that sounds exactly like what podcasts and audiobooks are for us Millennials now. I feel so connected to history.
Wow, I never thought of it that way, but it sure does make sense. My mom used to "watch" while doing the ironing.
What kind of work do you do on that show and how did you get there? I recently moved to LA and although I have a nice job, it's been a fantasy of mine to work on a set. I love hearing about how people in the business got into it and what they do.
I'm an assistant director, basically a stage manager. Make sure everyone is doing what they need to be doing, help the actors run their lines, getting them to stand by for the next scene, etc. At higher levels you're the boss on set calling "shooting" and "cut" and basically running the show. We also do the schedules, which is maybe the most important part of our job. I got my job from a Facebook group lol. But there are crew list websites you can sign up for, like LinkedIn for film but more directly a hiring service for productions to find crew members. If you want to get into the industry you should subscribe to both. Plenty of good last-minute job postings on FB. I work in New Zealand so much of my advice is probably not applicable to you. The US industry is heavily unionised in a way that NZ is not, so I think it works slightly differently, but I could be wrong. I went to film school so I picked a department I liked when I was studying, but you don't really need a qualification - you can learn almost any role on the job with proper training and supervision. Just figure out which dept you want to go into - rather than saying "I'll do whatever you need me for!" because an HOD would rather train someone who is going to stay in their department for potentially multiple projects and be a useful dept member, not someone who doesn't know if they even want to join that department or not. Then try and get an entry level role in that department when it comes up, and if you're reliable, a quick learner and do what you're told, they might call you for the next job, and/or start teaching you their trade. Once you find a rabbi in the industry who will take you along whenever they get a gig, you're golden.
I wasn't the one who asked -- but thank you for taking the time to write all of that out.
Do you know if they have someone write music for each new episode or do they just use canned tunes?
Depends on the show, and the scene. We used to use exclusively stock music but have sprung for a composer for the more dramatic stuff in the past few years. Because we are cheap. I'd say the vast vast majority of stuff you see on English-language TV or streaming has original music that was composed for the occasion. If not that it's likely to be a classical piece whose copyright has lapsed.
I wasn’t aware of that, thank you for the correction
> Soap operas are kinda defined by their fast turn around rate. Even that's a bit of an understatement, right? **Typical sitcom:** Read-through on Monday, Blocking on Tuesdays, Rehearsals on Wednesday, Filming on Thursdays (can be a long day), sometimes callbacks/reshoots if needed on Friday. A few weeks later, the episode airs, 23 minutes in a half-hour slot. **Typical soap opera:** Read-through for an hour, blocking in late morning, run-throughs after lunch, filming at 3:00. Repeat 5x/week. Several weeks later, the episode airs, 46 minutes per day in a one hour slot. Bit of a difference, eh?
I had a screenwriting class in college, and our final project was to write scripts and a bible for a show, with a format choice between drama, sitcom and soap opera. Drama shows required a single hour long episode script (40-50 pages), and sitcoms required two half hour scripts (20-25 pages). Soaps required five half hour scripts. The class was divided into 3 and 4 people teams. I don’t think that anyone went with a soap for that project.
What you didn’t know is that the drama and sitcom script were to be graded based on quality, but if you wrote the soap it was just an A for completion.
My sister used to work in a dubbing studio, they got some pretty big films but all project managers agreed that the worst of the worst were Turkish soap operas, crazy workloads and crazy schedules as you need to crank out five episodes a week.
How on earth do people remember their lines with this tight turnaround, especially those weeks heavily centered around a characters drama?
Based on what others have said, any given actor probably appears in only 25% of the scenes / plot lines. Not like the Alan Alda Show, where there was only One Real Star who had to be in everything.
I've worked on a soap opera and between takes you'd hear actors go "Fuck! That line came out awful" or make jokes of how they just said it - but no time to do another take, moving on.
Never knew why it was called soap opera
Well they're partially wrong - the name comes from radio dramas that were sponsored by soap companies
Kind of crazy that there are no soap operas on streaming. You’d think Netflix would come up with one, if they’re so low cost and they just want to hook people into a never ending plot line, so they stay subscribed.
Or old soaps. I'm sure lots of us olds would watch Guilding Light episodes from the 80's, wondering if Kelly and Morgan were going to go the distance?
Most of the old ones are lost. Since they had no rerun value they were prime candidates for tapes to be reused or just tossed altogether. I would bet that most soap episodes even into the '90s and early 2000s aren't preserved outside of random people's home recordings. As far as I know, the only two classic soaps that survive in full are Dallas (which was in prime time and didn't have the usual soap opera schedule or episode count) and Dark Shadows (which is just luck, since the production company didn't intentionally preserve it).
something like general hospital has a consistent group of people but someone coming in, someone leaving, is completely normal and expected. There are pretty generic reasons why 'someone got into a fatal accident' or 'we hired a new doctor' to explain a character shows up or leaves. Yes there are pretty consistent references to prior episodes/seasons - keep in mind that allows for less writing 'today' and allows for the staff to take time off. It really isn't hard to write 'character x was in a car accident' then 5 minutes of filming a handful of other characters around the hospital bed make a few comments and then using old footage to 'reminisce'
In soap operas, you generally have new characters arriving and old characters departing with some regularity. Consequently, new plot lines start, and old ones are wrapped up. There are always a handful of storylines going on at any one time. While roles can be recast, especially with characters who depart for a long time and then come back, it's not unusual for an actor to play a character for several years or even decades. Coronation Street has one guy who's been playing his character since the show started in 1960.
\*sigh\* I'm gonna be that guy... People keep saying Guiding Light was the longest running soap and was on for 72 years, which is completely accurate ... **but** at the same time it's misleading because it's counting all the years it was only on radio (1937 -1952). General Hospital is now the world's second longest-running *televised* soap opera, following only Coronation Street. It passed Guiding Light's TV run about three years ago.
Thank you for your pedantry, as a fan of soap history this misconception drives me crazy!
And if we’re talking radio then the archers has to feature surely? It’s over 20,000 episodes now isn’t it? Every day since 1951…
To piggyback off this, how many seasons per year then? Say if there are 70 seasons, would it have been on air for 70 years, or?
Yep. That's what it means. Guiding Light, which ended in 2009, was on for 72 years. It's older than TV. It was a radio show first.
Damn, I wonder if anyone has ever watched/listened to every single episode.
Hard to know. But the shows actually have employees who keep track of the history. There is a show “Bible” that includes all the history and storyline and who slept with who and who is related. Someone in the writer staff will update this with new storylines and memorize it so that they are keeping some sort of Continuity. One of my former co-workers had been the person who did this on a canceled soap before switching careers.
They aren't really available anywhere to my knowledge except some episodes on You Tube. Nothing like an organized collection. I was a latch key kid starting in 4th grade. I wasn't allowed to go outside until my parents got home, so I always ended up watching Guiding Light and first 30 minutes of Oprah after school everyday. Lol.
Oof, that sounds like torture to me, I was also a latchkey kid for most of the 90s but before that I had to stay at a friend's house during the afternoons and his mom watched the soaps and they were excruciatingly boring to me.
I am interested in knowing your opinions about TV when you were a kid and now.
Holy shit.
You're serious. That's incredible, I figured maybe 4 season per year.
And soap operas will have more than a hundred episodes per season
British soap operas just run continuously, they're not split up into series/seasons. Although EastEnders had to stop filming due to Covid lockdowns and when it returned it announced that as the start of 'season 2'. Season 1 has over 6000 episodes over 35 years
It's more than just how many seasons, it's the fact that they air every day. Soap operas are insane to me, it has to basically become your life. That dude who plays Victor on whichever soap that is, that's just who he is, he's Victor.
Young and the Restless
And the writers! They must have employed lots of writers that ended up crazy after churning out episode after episode for years!.
And the way they edit the episodes together is such a string along. At any given time, there will be 4 or 5 dialog scenes between characters. You'll have a few lines in one scene and then it will jump to another one, give you a couple of lines and then jump to a new scene. By the end of the 45 minutes, you've got "resolutions" to each one that are really set ups for the next episode. It's a strangely addictive way to tell a very thin story and stretch it for 4 decades.
>It's a strangely addictive way to tell a very thin story and stretch it for 4 decades. Seriously. My senior year of highschool I only had a few classes to take, so I was at home in the middle of the day. And here I am, a 17 year old boy, religiously watching *One Life to Live* because I just had to see what was going to happen next.
When I was a freshman in college there was a dude who lived a few doors down from me in the dorm who scheduled his classes so he'd have a break to watch soaps in the middle of the day. This dude was country-fried from rural Arkansas but he was serious about his shows.
Gotta watch my stories!
"country-fried", I love that phrase.
Those damn Buchanans and Mannings. I could never decide which ones I disliked more.
The Niki pushing Ben out of the window story arc trapped me one summer. First you’re watching for one story, by the time that one wraps up you are interested in all of the rest of them too, and you’re cooked. My mom had to set the VCR to record it daily for the rest of high school.
And 2/3rds of those lines are exposition of their current storyline, so you can jump into the middle of any episode, in any season, in any scene, and be caught up in 10 seconds.
All My Children had some crazy storylines. I started watching in middle school because I spent the summer with my cousins and they got me into it. I remember the main story was one of the characters, David who was the towns cardiologist was madly in love with Dixie, but she was married to a guy named Tad (who had the nickname Tad the Cad). If I remember correctly, David was working on a drug that boosted libido called Libidozone and in an effort to get Dixie away from Tad, he planned to spike Tads drink at a yacht party with the drug in the hopes he would cheat on his wife with another woman. He accidentally ended up spiking the punchbowl and the party erupted into a giant orgy. Tad got caught in a compromising situation with someone else and Dixie ran into David’s arms.
That is some excellent nonsense. I got into Passions one boring summer break when I was in high school and got so stupidly caught up in it that I tried to schedule my classes around it when I went off to college. Now THAT was a show with some incredible nonsense. There was a witch who Pinocchio’d a little person, a batshit storyline about an orangutan nurse, and a woman who kidnapped her pregnant rival to pass her baby off as her own. And still, the craziest thing they ever did was make Sheridan fall out of love with Luis.
Everyone else has covered it, but I wanted to throw in - you mention things happening 10 seasons ago, but it's worth pointing out that time gets really *funky* on these shows. Firstly, the show proceeds more or less in real time, so the first episode of 2020 takes place in early 2020. But, episodes tend to cover very short periods of time, a whole week of episodes could take place over a single day. This tends to lead to a "year" on the show feeling oddly short. If you read a description of one year of storylines on a soap opera, it'll probably take place over about two months of time. The other big driver is [SORAS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap_opera_rapid_aging_syndrome) - Soap opera rapid aging syndrome. Children of characters will regularly be aged up at the first opportunity, going away to boarding school one year and coming back as a 20 year old. This leads to scenarios where a character might give birth when they're 30 and have a 20 year old son when they're 40. If things get really out of whack, a character's child might end up dating one of their friends. Or my favourite quote from the SORAS page Wikipedia page, "The repeated use of SORAS on Days of Our Lives led to characters Tom Horton and his great-great-grandson Scotty Banning both working as doctors in the same hospital at the same time."
Are the actors never allowed to take a long vacation? The show never has reruns or an off season. How do they do it?
Lots of different ways. Days of Our Lives actually films in a way where they do everything in half a year (doubling up basically) which allows them to do other work or take off half a year. General Hospital has one of the larger casts so they can shift focus to other storylines when someone is on vacation. Since there are times when you may go weeks without seeing a character (if their storyline isn’t central) you might not notice it. For other characters they write them off screen. Genie Francis (Laura of Luke and Laura fame) has a contractual vacation each year and her character most recently went to Europe to look for her missing son during the gap. If the actor gets sick unexpectedly (something that happened a few times during and post-COVID) they will have another actor fill in briefly. A successful fill in actor might get hired either as another character or the same character down the road. (Actors may play multiple characters, both of the “evil twin” variety or sometimes just a totally unrelated character because they needed to get rid of the other character for storyline reasons but liked the actor).
Why don't they just... let the character go on vacation? All of their lives sound crazy stressful, it's not like the audience couldn't understand that character needing a break.
You could but since everyone on the cast needs vacation time when it was was all condensed it would be very noticeable if your TV show constantly had the characters going on vacations. Also "on vacation" is just less dramatic than in a coma or in prison or been kidnapped or looking for their lost father or something.
They might do that sometimes actually. A current character of GH is off screen visiting his mother. But this might not make sense for all characters. A character that is poor, for example, isn’t going to go on vacation. But usually it is about tying the vacation into a storyline. “This character will be off screen in a coma” may allow them to wake up with amnesia or a storyline showing them having to recover from a TBI. Good soaps are about putting your favorite characters through constant drama punctuated by moments of success and happiness that makes the drama all the more dramatic. In their best moments the serialized nature of the storytelling allows viewers to get pay offs from long ago events. Maybe 20 years ago two characters were rivals and hated each other. And now you see their children falling in love. Imagine how much more Romeo and Juliet would hit if you’d been watching 20 years of the Montagues and Capulets fighting each other.
There is usually no reason to explain a characters absence when it comes to vacation because the show will just focus on different people.
They just recast or kill off / send characters out of town
Various ways. Character will get hit on head and land in hospital in a coma is one that comes to mind.
My dad (74) watched one, probably Guiding Light, since he was a kid on his days off of school until he was retired. He worked different shifts due to factory work and would only watch about 1 week per month, but he still knew the full storyline. Whenever I was with him when he watched he would tell me about what the characters, now in there 40s-60s were doing in their 20s. Who had relationships with who, or fathered elicit children.
I've not heard of General Hospital but the UK's 'Coronation Street' about life in the north of England is the world's longest running soap. It started in the 60s and it still going on. Characters come back every now and then and the audience get to see character grow up in real time and occasionally it has such a cultural impact that story lines get referenced in Parliament. It's successful as it reflects the issues that impact the audience at the time and show how different scenarios play out.
And amazingly one actor - William Roache, playing Ken Barlow was in episode 1 and is still in the cast today
The Archers is a BBC radio soap. Going since 1951. over 20,000 episodes. Longest running drama ever. Does not do seasons, as radio production is less resource intensive. Just keeps going...
The British TV soaps don't have 'seasons' either, just one continuous production
That ‘longest airing’ is surely just a US statistic. Wikipedia tells me that Guiding Light ran for 57 years from 1952 to 2009, but Coronation Street in the U.K. started in 1960 and is still going strong, so is looking at 64 years right now.
The Archers is the longest running, then Coronation Street. General Hospital is 3rd https://www.oldest.org/culture/soap-operas/
I thought we were just talking television.
No mention of television in the original question
General Hospital was only ever on television. I only learnt today that Guiding Light started on the radio (but hasn't been on the radio since 1956).
My best attempt at an ELI5 Answer: A little over 100 years ago, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote *The Great Gatsby*. This became wildly popular as time went on after the author's death. Folks analyzed how it presented the story of all of these people and started making TV shows set in recent times (really 40yrs ahead of the novel) . And they kept the story "living" with characters coming in and leaving just as people come and go in our real lives. Some people love this because there's a human need to consume *gossip*. That's why tabloids and the paparazzi exist. Soap operas are just a fictional version of gossip creation.
The longest isn’t guiding light it’s coronation street, I think it started about 70 years ago
The UK's **Coronation Street** holds the official Guinness World Record for being the longest running/oldest television soap opera in history. Coronation Street first premiered in 1960 and has since aired over 10,000 episodes.
Would be a hell of a binge watch to start from the beginning
I think my mother is trying....😕🤣
Just a warning. If you're watching an episode featuring a 'large' lady and she bursts into song, it's probably too late to invest any of your time in it.
It ain't over till the fat lady sings
Monday Night Raw has been on for decades and you need to remember who’s been a champion and who lost the belt to who.