Lecture: "Television Soap Operas"

Robert C. Allen: Soap operas ignored in traditional histories of broadcasting (96-97).

Why? Related to gender of spectators (woman’s shows) and daypart (daytime).

I. Motivations for studying the soap opera

A. Institutional. Economic definition of television. The soap opera might be the definitive televisual form: a narrative designed to get the audience to return every day in order to listen to commercials for products of everyday use (soap, pain medication, etc.).

Allen: "The soap opera is and always has been a narrative text in service of an economic imperative" (100).

--> Close relationship between show and sponsor: Proctor and Gamble: Begins advertising during the daytime b/c rates were ½ that of prime time, and since viewers targeted were female anyway, this was a good way to reach them. Used the mailhook to measure how many listeners there were: write in for a product. Surprised to find out how many viewers there were.

B. Narrative: Radio vaudeville offered on model for gaining listeners: stars. The soap opera as serial form offered another: audience interest in character and narrative. Amos ‘n’ Andy demonstrates this. Note that seriality is discovered in the "sitcom", comes to roost in the soap opera, only to return from the soap opera toward prime time in the early 1980s.

C. Ideology: The open-ended serial narrative has been seen as offering a potential resistance to patriarchy, because it does not enforce closure.

II. Television soap operas have their roots in radio

The Guiding Light was a radio show for 20 years before becoming a television show. The features of One Man’s Family: about a family in relationship to a community, but a focus on the familial not the communal. An open-ended serial narrative that refuses to permanently solve a problem. It continues to remain open. In the marriage plot, we keep thinking the lovers will break up or finally get married, but they never do. Each episode produces a mini resolution, but it gets opened up again by a problem introduced near the end of an episode. This cliffhanger then gets us to listen to the next episode, when another mini resolution will be offered, only to be toppled by another crisis. Example: One Man’s Family chapter 25: They get married, but then she runs back to the army to work in the middle of the Honeymoon!

A. Post-war America

1. Psychoanalysis: the beginnings of a culture of therapy. Will blossom into today’s talk shows, the ratings replacement for the soap operas.

CLIP #1: One Man’s Family (Book 78, Chapter 19): Elwood figures out Teddy’s oedipal fixation on Paul

2. Momism: Philip Wylie, Generation of Vipers

CLIP #2: The Secret Storm (The Masquerade Ball, 3/8/55, CBS): Peter describes how his mother dominated him

B. 1990s

Narrative openendedness of the soap opera makes it able to respond to

1. social change: the principal site on TV where social argumentation is narrativized (and its "child" the Made-for-TV Movie).

--> Race: Soap operas respond to social change. In the 1980s, they began trying to integrate the shows. Not very successful. Black characters on shows, very rarely fully intergrated. And if fully integrated, then tokens, not part of a larger African-American community.

CLIP #3: One Life to Live (2/15/91, ABC): Black family at the wedding always framed together

2. demographic change: In the late 1970s, soap opera ratings began to decline. The child-rearing women from the post-war era grew older. Their children grew up and were now working women. The soaps responded by invigorating the plots with youthful characters. 1980: General Hospital plotline with Luke and Laura’s affair and wedding. At this time, teenagers in high school (tell about me and Guiding Light) and college began viewing soaps. Strategy to a) increase viewers immediately and b) hook viewers about to enter the buying force as consumers.

IV. A Comparison of 1950s and 1990s Soaps

A. Differences

1. Aesthetic practices

1950s soaps have restrained aesthetic practices: cheaply produced, few camera movements.

1990s soaps are aesthetically complex

CLIP #5: Days of Our Lives: Revelations in the courtroom precipitate glance-object cuts

2. Generational differences

1950s soaps feature elderly parents worrying about adult children (example: The 50s Guiding Light episode I showed a clip from previously)

1990s soaps feature daughters helping mothers

CLIP #6: Days of Our Lives: Jennifer and Laura share an International Foods coffee moment

B. Similarities: Both are therapeautic narrative forms, in which talk is the way to rid oneself of the past

CLIP #8: Days of Our Lives: Laura tells Bill why she went insane 18 years ago

V. Ideological Features of the Soap Opera

A. Serial form: The Refusal of Closure

Annette Kuhn, Women’s Pictures: "It has been argued that closure is a feature of certain types of textual organization, such as that of classical narratives. The structure of classical narratives works in such a way that stories are opened by a distruption of some equilibrium (a murder or a disappearance) and work towards a resolution of the initial disruption, so that the resolution coincides with the end of the story. Roland Barthes makes a distinction between the pleasure to be obtained from the closure or resolution of this classical form of narrative, and the "bliss" (jouissance) of the text which challenges such closure. Both are clearly relationships of reading: the pleasure of the first is the satisfaction of completion, of having all the ends tied up, whereas the bliss of the second is the unsettling, the movement of the subject produced by the reading, which goes beyond, or is outside, the pleasure of the fixation of the subject-reader of the classical narrative." Quotes from Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text.

CLIP #9: Days of Our Lives: Discovery of Fred dead in his cell just before he is about to reveal where Stephano is hiding

The final answers will never come. Hermeneutic satisfaction will always be delayed. If this is so, how can we ever offer an interpretation of a soap opera?

B. Gender Politics

1. Conservative? The Unruly Women’s Transgressiveness is Contained

CLIP #11: One Life to Live: Clint yells at Vicki for having hurt the kids

2. Progressive? Tania Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance

Anticipation is an end itself in the soap opera. There is pleasure in having the central condition of the female viewer’s life represented: waiting. The family in the soap opera is always in the process of breaking down, yet stays together no matter how intolerable the situation is. As long as the children are unhappy, as long as things don’t come to a satisfying conclusion, the "mother"/viewer will be needed as a confidante and adviser, and her function will never end.

CLIP #12: Days of Our Lives: Kate, as a mother, wants to bring her feuding family together

3. Ideological contradictions offered by the soap opera/commercial metatext

CLIP #13: One Life to Live: Taylor laments to Cort that her wedding has been ruined by Nicki

vs.

CLIP #14: Coke commercial represents idealized wedding

Click Here to Return to the MTA 400 ("The History of Television") Syllabus

This page was last updated on January 8, 2001

Questions or comments?  Please phone me at (406) 994-6403 or send e-mail to:  metz@montana.edu

Walter Metz, Department of Media and Theatre Arts, Montana State University--Bozeman