This week, the world will stop turning; or at least it will for the daytime soap opera As The World Turns, which officially ends after 53 years. With its ratings plummeting for more than a decade, As The World Turns is only the most recent casualty of a changing daytime market. The American daytime soap itself, that long-maligned and much-loved genre, seems to be on its deathbed.
For those interested in the relationship between religion and American popular culture, the soap opera has been a fascinating case. Soap operas, like most media marketed to women, have long been preoccupied with right and wrong.
And while the soap has tended to promote a conservative emphasis on continuity, heterosexual romantic love, family, and Christian piety, the explicit use of religion in soaps (while certainly notable) is generally subservient to questions of morality.
Even when the plot seems ludicrous, characters are frequently put into situations that raise questions important to their audiences: Do I choose my true love or my career? Is it right to pursue a relationship with someone my family doesn’t approve of? Are there times when it is right to be dishonest? Is good behavior always rewarded with happiness? Can evil people truly be redeemed?
American Soap History
Although the soap opera had important antecedents in popular culture—the stage melodrama, the penny dreadful, the silent film, the comic strip—the genre we recognize today began on the radio in the 1930s with the establishment of a winning formula: stories of mostly-white middle-class family strife and love affairs punched up with dramatic cliffhanger story structures. Soap operas (nicknamed for the soap companies that were among their first commercial sponsors) almost instantly riveted their predominantly-female homemaker audiences. By the 1950s, many soaps had made successful transitions from radio to television.
From their earliest days, many programs chose titles infused with transcendent imagery and religious resonance: The Guiding Light, The Brighter Day, One Life to Live, Another World, As the World Turns, A World Apart, Days of Our Lives.
Yet also from early on the soap had a frivolous, ridiculous aesthetic reputation at best, and was considered an outright poisonous influence at worst. During the Second World War, at least one psychiatrist worried that radio soaps were undermining the war morale, distracting women with addictive stories that promoted destructive values. To label something a “soap opera” today still implies that what you are describing involves immature behavior, improbable plot twists, and/or unseemly sexual liaisons.
Soap opera fans themselves have consistently been characterized as immature, psychologically weak, or missing something crucial in their lives. As a result, those who watch soaps are often self-deprecating about their viewing habits, and make a point of emphasizing that they understand that the shows are just silly escapism. The criticisms of the soap as frivolous, oversexed, and overemotional have also often been gendered, as its audiences (as well as many of its prominent writers, producers, and favorite actors over the years) have been female.
Although the soap is still doing fineoutside of the U.S., particularly in the Middle East and Latin America, the American soap just isn’t what it used to be. In 1970, when American women were more likely to be at home during the day, there were fifteen daytime soaps on the air, with new shows continuing to debut every year. Forty years later, only seven soaps remain, all of them aging. (The newest of these is more than twenty years old.) More alarmingly for fans, timeworn favorites are being axed. As the World Turns vanishes this fall. Guiding Light (the longest running broadcast drama ever, after 57 years on radio and television), was cancelled in 2009.
Obsession with the Past
By definition the daily soap spends a considerable amount of time reminding viewers about the past. Soap plots rely upon their characters’ glamorous transgression of norms, but they also rely upon continuity for the viewer, linking daily episodes to longer plot trajectories. Martha Nochimson, in No End to Her: Soap Opera and the Female Subject, argues that this emphasis on continuity is a “feminine” story form, one that resists the closure and resolution of other forms of media in favor of open, ongoing plot lines with multiple perspectives. But appealing to continuity also provides reassuring stability, giving context to jarring plot lines and production choices. The past becomes the anchor that allows the show to create its wildly exaggerated moral conflicts.
Take the example of Days of Our Lives, which for a time held a reputation as one of the more youth-oriented soap operas. Days of Our Lives first aired in 1965, and in its early decades focused on the history of the Horton family in the town of Salem, a vaguely Midwestern city in an unknown state. The Hortons were an upper-middle class, apparently Episcopalian family; the patriarch, Tom Horton was a doctor. By the 1980s, they were increasingly overshadowed by the arrival of the working-class, Irish-American Brady family, but members of both of these families continue to play significant roles on the show.
The show was first heralded for its realism, but like nearly every soap, came to embrace more flamboyant storylines over time. In recent decades, characters have died and then miraculously returned two years later. One character buried her enemy alive. Hospital staff seem to mix up implanted embryos, newborn infants, and test results at a truly irresponsible rate. Child characters appear to be eight years old one day, and then show up the next day as teenagers primed for romantic entanglements—victims of what the online soap community affectionately calls SORAS, or “soap opera rapid aging syndrome.”
Yet despite all the herky-jerky storylines and production choices, one essential appeal of a show like Days of Our Lives today is its connection with fan memory. The show encourages a nostalgia for past plotlines, as well as a nostalgia for the small town life that Salem would seem to represent. Ancestry is important. Fan Web sites carefully lay out genealogy of important families, and present short histories of well-known couples for newbies to catch up with. There are repeating holiday traditions, and time is always devoted to rituals like Christmas, New Year’s, weddings, and funerals.
This June, an episode of Days of Our Lives provided viewers with an especially emotional funeral service. Alice Horton—the saintly, doughnut-making, advice-dispensing matriarch of the Horton family—was laid to rest by mourning residents of Salem. (Frances Reid, the actress who until late last year had portrayed the Alice Horton character for 45 years, herself recently died at age 95.)
Alice’s death was treated with careful reverence. Former cast members, some not seen on the show for decades, made special appearances so that their characters might attend the funeral. Characters spoke of Alice’s goodness, of her position as a role model in their community, and appreciated how she never judged their life choices but always gave them wise counsel.
In one emotional high point, the deceased’s granddaughter, Hope (Kristian Alfonso), dressed in black with a silver cross necklace prominent around her neck, tearfully stood over the coffin and addressed a framed 1960s-era photograph of the character. “I love you, Gran,” she said. “And I know that you’ll look out for us for all the days of our lives.” Cut to a montage of four decades’ worth of flashbacks.
Serious Moral Business
Within this context of attention to the past, programs devote intense energy to the day-to-day business of intense moral dilemmas, egregious moral violations, and agonizing moral questions. Personal morality, rather than social justice, has always been the domain of the soap. Those who watch soap operas regularly will not hesitate to tell you that the shows have incorporated select “big issues” into storylines over the years—alcoholism, abortion, racism, same-sex relationships—but these issues are always tackled within the familiar grammar of storylines about upper-middle class, mostly-white families.
As the Christian social ethicist James Luther Adams (himself a longtime viewer of soaps) once observed, the shows’ commercial sponsors would not have stomached serious social commentary, and there are typically no depictions of “alternative conceptions of society.” But of course calls for reordering of society aren’t especially typical for broadcast television of any sort.
What soap operas do is allow viewers to distinguish bad individual behavior from good, to take sides in conflicts about family and sex and romance in satisfying ways. Particular sets of moral logics (say, Christian notions of right and wrong or professional ethics) are pitted against one another in storyline after storyline.
For example, in an early 2000s storyline on Days of Our Lives, a teenager, Shawn (Jason Cook), was pulled in two directions by his love for his girlfriend Belle and his firm conviction that his friend Jan, pregnant as a result of rape, should not abort her pregnancy. Shawn is depicted as believing that abortion is wrong because of his deep love for children and his baby brother; not obviously from religious conviction, although Shawn’s family is Roman Catholic and he sometimes refers to his “beliefs.” To convince Jan to carry the baby to term, he agrees to falsely claim paternity of her child and to support her during her pregnancy. This naturally damages his relationship with his confused and hurt girlfriend, and Shawn is subsequently torn in two by this promise to Jan and his desire to be with Belle. The audience is expected to sympathize with Shawn, who cannot reconcile his desire to be true to both his convictions about abortion and his commitment to romantic love.
In the end, the secret is outed, and Shawn is chastised for not being honest with Belle, a serious violation according to the moral logic of romantic relationships on soaps. No ultimate value is held as reverently on a soap opera as heterosexual romantic love, and those that are dishonest with their beloveds are especially frowned upon, even when their motives are ostensibly good. After romantic love, the most important source of the good seems to be family, and thus the tension between the moral demands of romantic love and family is an especially favorite theme. For example, a married person who loves another, but cannot bear to break up his or her family to be with their beloved, is a recurring storyline.
Romantic love usually wins the day—although breaking up a nuclear family is an act that even usually-good characters will ultimately be made to atone for.
Religious Identity on the Soaps
Because soaps are looking for reassuring continuity and are so animated with moral concerns, references to religious practices and beliefs are common. In the genre’s early radio days, characters often modeled mainline Protestant piety. One of the oldest radio soaps, The Guiding Light, was originally in the late 1930s about a progressive Protestant minister in the Midwest and members of his family and congregation, although this focus fell by the wayside over the years.
And there is always a lot of prayer, particularly in hospitals and cemeteries. Characters often reference their faith in God, usually in the context of reaffirming that bad situations will be resolved for the best. Characters who claim not to believe in God are aberrations, usually identified as gravely troubled—perhaps grieving a deceased loved one—and will often be depicted as recovering their faith in the end. Clergy make appearances as minor characters, but sometimes, as was the case with an Episcopal priest on One Life to Live in the 1990s, have been major players, too.
It’s unlikely that many viewers noticed Alice Horton’s funeral was Protestant (a reference to a pastor, rather than the show’s established priest character, for example), but the inclusion of this detail was significant. For many years, most noticeable religious practice on the show had been Roman Catholic—and this nod to the Horton family’s original, 1960s-era Protestantism was unusual, yet another way of genuflecting to the show’s past.
In truth, as best as this viewer can tell, in recent decades Salem has appeared to be an entirely Catholic community. The only visible church in town for years has been St. Luke’s, where many characters are married and buried, priests hear confessions, and occasionally characters are murdered or babies are born. Since the arrival of the Catholic Brady family in the 1980s, Catholicism seemed to completely take over the faithful of Salem.
Catholicism has been prominent on other soaps as well. One suspects writers tend to view Catholicism as more fruitful dramatically than Protestantism, what with the possibility of storylines involving not only colorful expressions of ethnicity (Irish tempers and Italian mobsters, for example) but abstinent clergy and confessions and exorcisms. The particulars of Catholicism are not especially important, and the show has certainly never called attention to the unusually homogenous religious climate of Salem. It’s more that there is no denominationalism in this world at all, and Catholicism has functioned as a kind of default Christian spirituality. One that allows room for exorcisms.
Sometimes, religion has been integral to soap plots. In the early 1970s, one of the Horton daughters, Marie (Maree Cheatham), left Salem and returned as a Roman Catholic nun, despite her family’s previously established Protestantism. She joined a convent out of guilt about having unwittingly fallen in love with her own brother—a moral transgression that apparently calls for redemption on the level of conversion to Catholicism and holy orders. She stayed a nun until 1980, when she chose to leave the convent because of her desire to reinvest in family and romantic love.
One of the most notoriously over-the-top storylines on Days of Our Lives was the 1994-1995 demonic possession of the Dr. Marlena Evans (Deidre Hall). Marlena, normally an upstanding psychiatrist, secretly desecrated the Catholic church, burned down the town’s Christmas tree, and sent a swarm of bees to attack the Brady family patriarch before anyone caught on that a demon had taken up residence in her body. Because her true love at the time, John (Drake Hogestyn), was once a priest, he decided to perform the exorcism himself, with some back-up from other Salem priests. Thus the battle over Marlena’s soul was given explicitly religious meanings, but was also framed as John’s heroic battle to save his love interest’s life. Romantic love again seems to trump any other moral concern.
A Eulogy for an Influential Genre
Like the nineteenth-century melodrama or the anti-Catholic abduction novel, the soap opera has successfully combined romantic and/or sexual transgressions on the one hand, and the opportunity for reassuring and religiously-charged moral judgment on the other. It’s a combination aimed squarely at its target female audience. For the gender traditionally put in charge of maintaining the emotional and moral quality of personal relationships, the soap seems to offer a winning formula.
In fact, if daytime soaps are losing viewers today, this might be an unintended consequence of the genre’s success. The storytelling conventions of the soap have been adapted and co-opted by TV programs of all sorts. Today you see evidence of soap opera storytelling conventions in programs as diverse as The Bachelorette, True Blood, Big Love, The Real Housewives of New Jersey, America’s Next Top Model, or 16 and Pregnant, to take only a few examples. Because most women are no longer at home during the day to watch live TV—and because cable television and digital video recorders offer more daytime viewing options than ever—the daytime soap is now competing for smaller audiences with a wider variety of programs, many of which draw upon similar narrative strategies themselves.
So we may, in fact, be witnessing the end of the genre. And if these are the last days of the soap, let us remember them as programs that artfully represented the ambivalence of their audiences: that understood that storylines involving adultery, demon possession, and mistaken identity depended upon storylines that included family Christmas prayers, saintly matriarchs, and affirmations of faith in God. If we remember the soap opera solely as a torrid celebration of sexual transgression, or as a frivolous time-waster for bored housewives, we miss understanding something crucial about the relationship between popular culture and morality.
