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More lives to live?: archiving and repurposing the daytime soap opera

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More lives to live?: archiving and repurposing the daytime soap opera

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MORE LIVES TO LIVE?:

ARCHIVING AND REPURPOSING THE DAYTIME SOAP OPERA

by

Mary Jeanne Wilson

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(CRITICAL STUDIES)

August 2012

Copyright 2012 Mary Jeanne Wilson

ii

Dedication

I dedicate this dissertation to my uncle, Robert Betlach. One day I hope that
you will tease me mercilessly about how long it took to me finish this. I promised
you I would and I did. Until then, I will love and miss you always.

iii

Acknowledgements

This dissertation is the result of a very long and sometimes arduous process
and I would have never made it to this finish line alone. I am very grateful to my
dissertation committee – Tara McPherson, Ellen Seiter, and Alice Gambrell - for
sticking with me through this process and being such invaluable sources of
knowledge and support. I am especially grateful to my chair, Tara McPherson, for
always encouraging me to continue and to believe in my abilities as a writer and
scholar. Tara never let me forget that I usually knew more than what I had written on
the page and that I shouldn’t be afraid to write what I really thought. Ellen Seiter was
both a source of great inspiration in her early work on soap operas and a great boon to
my confidence when she asked me to co-author an article with her that ended up as
part of this dissertation. Alice Gambrell’s course on feminist theory was where I
developed the original idea for this project and her enthusiasm and support of my idea
was a bright light in a sometimes very dark tunnel. I am also deeply indebted to the
many other professors had the privilege of working with during my years at USC,
including Tania Modleski, Rick Jewell, Lynn Spigel, Ed O’Neill, Jennifer Holt and
Miranda Banks. They were all were wonderful sources of knowledge and support at
different times during this process. Also a special thanks to Patricia White, with
whom I studied with at Swarthmore College, who inspired me to follow my passion
for film and television and opened me up to a whole new world of study I never knew
existed.
iv
I also want to thank my network of friends and colleagues that saw me
through this process. Without Karen Beavers and Elizabeth Ramsey I would have
given up on this project and myself long ago. I have no doubt that I would not be
here without all their hours of moral support and academic expertise that helped me
finish this dissertation. I also had a great network of support from my friends and co-
workers at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Margret Herrick
Library. Anne Coco was the most flexible, patient and supportive boss I’ll ever have
and is a treasured friend. Many thanks to Jessica Holada and Jen Kim for continuing
to push me towards the finish line with their great senses of humor and their belief
that I could do it.
Finally the most important thanks goes to my family, without whom none of
this would be possible. My father, David, my mother, Jeanette, and my sisters,
Jennifer and Jackie, have been the best band of cheerleaders that anyone could ask
for. Thank you for your unwavering support over these many years and during this
seemingly insurmountable task. I always knew that every member of my wonderful
family would support me no matter how hard things got or what decisions I made and
there is absolutely no way I could have done it without them.

v

Table of Contents

Dedication ii

Acknowledgments iii

Abstract vi

Introduction: Aren’t soaps dying? Why would you want 1
to write about them?”
Introduction Endnotes 25

Chapter One: Preserving Soap History: What will it mean 27
for the future of soaps?
Chapter One Endnotes 64

Chapter Two: The Fan as the Soap Opera Historian: 68
The unofficial archives of soaps
Chapter Two Endnotes 118

Chapter Three: Syndicating the Soap Opera 123
Chapter Three Endnotes 177

Conclusion: The Soap Opera is Dead! Long Live the Soap Opera! 183
Conclusion Endnotes 196

Bibliography 198

vi
Abstract

The soap opera genre is an extremely important text in early feminist
television criticism, yet the physical archiving of the programs is extremely
problematic for academic archives and has instead been taken on by female fans that
have created their own archives of the programs, which they circulate within their
own distinctive fan communities. Personal fan archives spotlight women’s work in
preserving popular history as opposed to traditional official historical pathways. This
dissertation argues that the history of the soap opera genre has been preserved largely
by female fan cultures rather than “official” or academic avenues. By researching
both official and unofficial television soap opera archives, this project examines the
disconnect that often exists between official historical repositories and fan based
historical collections when dealing with popular culture texts. The final component
of this dissertation explores the possibilities for soap opera archives in the future and
how they may offer insights into the changing television landscape. Specific soap
opera texts suffered a kind of erasure from television history by never airing more
than once, but the massive expansion of digital cable and satellite systems offers the
possibility of rerunning soap operas on boutique cable channels such as SOAPnet. I
examine how the advent of rerunning soaps may change the terms in which we have
previously studied soap operas and how this phenomenon points towards questions
surrounding the future of syndication for the growing number of current television
programs that depend upon their serial narrative format.
1
Introduction:
“Aren’t soaps dying? Why would you want to write about them?”

During the time in which I was writing this dissertation, four major U.S.
broadcast network daytime soap operas were cancelled; Guiding Light, As the World
Turns, All My Children and One Life to Live. If combined, the total run on television
of these four soap operas would be 195 years.
1
The fact that all four were cancelled
between 2009 and 2011 represents either a dramatic change in U.S. broadcast
television landscape or perhaps my own very bad timing. During the WGA strike in
2007, I was interviewing several soap opera writers on the picket lines, when I was
introduced to a head writer of a current daytime soap. When I told him I was writing
a dissertation about soaps, his response was, “Why would you want to do that?” As
the outlook for the remaining daytime soaps appears increasingly grim, I was asked
this question numerous times. Though I was disheartened by that particular writer’s
lack of enthusiasm for the genre, several other soap writers who have a more positive
outlook on the future of soaps assuaged me. While this is clearly a tumultuous time
for those who work on soaps in the television industry, this is also a crucial time for
those of us who study them. The soap opera genre represents an important part of
television history as well as the history of television studies, and, if it is truly living
out its last moments on our television screens, then we need to pay attention to how
its history is preserved. Although this dissertation centers on the history of soaps, it is
not the narrative histories or the industrial history of soap operas I am concerned
with, but rather the way in which the history of the soap opera is maintained. This is
2

perhaps all the more important of an undertaking at the moment of soap opera’s
potential demise.
My own timing aside, the movement away from the soap opera on network
television is the most drastic change in the daytime schedule in U.S. television
history, and, whether or not the daytime soap opera will remain part of that schedule,
soaps have made up a significant part of the television landscape since its inception.
Often when something comes to a close, we suddenly start thinking about how it will
be remembered. We take more pictures at the end of trip to make up for not taking
them throughout, we rush to record stories and memories of those who may not be
with us for much longer, we finally appreciate a place just before we are about to
leave it for the last time. This may be the moment when we realize that those daytime
soaps that are so familiar to us, even if we are no longer actively watching them, may
not always be around.
In today’s television landscape, we have increasing access to television of the
past, as both consumers and historians. Consumer sales of vintage television and the
expansive world of digital cable have greatly increased our opportunities to view
television history, and we were no longer forced to rely solely on what was
syndicated into reruns or what we were lucky enough to record with early home
recording technologies. The internet also provides increased access to vintage
television, although much of it is posted without the legal copyright to do so.
However, the daytime soap opera is an unusual case when it comes to accessing the
past due to the extreme volume of a soap opera text. The daytime soap opera was
3

created as a daily text, meant to move the serial narrative ever forward, rather than a
text suitable to rerun after its initial airing. The volume of daily episodes of a soap
opera along with its serial narrative structure made it a genre that never found its way
into reruns or onto the consumer sales market. As many daytime soap operas go off
the air, both viewers and academics alike will have less immediate access to the genre
and will therefore have to rely on other sources if they wish to watch or study soaps.
This chapter presents my central questions surrounding the collecting and
archiving of the soap opera text and how these processes influence our ability to study
the soap opera in the future. While soap operas are a foundational genre of television
and of academic television studies, physical copies of these programs are not
available in full to researchers, historians, or fans. Due to the tremendous volume of
episodes that make up the full run of a single soap opera, the archiving and
preservation of the individual soaps has often been overlooked. While there has been
in-depth work on the soap opera as genre, on soap opera fans and on the history of the
soap opera in the television industry, these methodologies have often looked at soaps
as a totalizing entity rather than at each soap opera as its own individual text. With
examples of the genre so plentiful, the differences between soap operas and, more
importantly, the ability to access a particular title, story, episode, etc., has not always
been taken into account when writing about the genre. Film and television archives
are relatively new in the world of archives, but the principles of the archival process
and the influence the archive has on ‘official’ history are the same as with any other
type of archive. Media history is partially shaped by which media texts are deposited,
4

preserved and even restored by the various film and television archives. If a genre is
culturally denigrated, such as the soap opera, but extremely commercially successful,
how do issues of taste and cultural value affect its position in an archive? Moreover,
if it is not archived, as other ‘quality television’ is, how will that affect the soap
opera’s place in cultural memory? As the questions around archives arise, we also
need to consider how issues of gender factor into archival decisions. The soap opera
is so highly coded as feminine (it was originally made almost exclusively by women,
targeted at female viewers, and has most often been written about in terms of feminist
academic studies) that it serves as an excellent example of how gendered texts are
handled in archives.
My focus on the specificity of individual soap operas rather than the genre as
a whole is driven by fans’ attachment to soap opera history and the role that fans play
as soap opera historians. I argue that the history of the soap opera genre has been
preserved largely by female fan cultures rather than “official” or academic avenues.
The soap opera genre is an extremely important text in early feminist television
criticism, yet the physical archiving of the programs has been neglected by academic
archives and instead taken up by female fans that create their own archives of these
programs, which they circulate within their own distinctive fan communities. I have
found fans that keep their own video archives, carefully preserving the visual text in
as much entirety as they can achieve. By researching both official and unofficial
television soap opera archives, I examine the disconnect that often exists between
official historical repositories and amateur or fan-based historical collections when
5

dealing with popular culture texts. Soap operas are significant in this case because
they have typically not reaired after their original daily broadcast until very recently.
Both Lynn Spigel and Derek Kompare examine the significance of the television
rerun in constructing larger notions of television history, both in popular memory and
in official institutions such as archives.
2
Because soaps were almost never shown in
reruns, looking at how female fans attempt to preserve the history of such a devalued
genre as soaps also illuminates the ways in which women have circumvented the
limited television history that has been provided by the television industry.
Whether or not soaps continue on the broadcast daytime schedule, looking at
the attempts made by the television industry to utilize the enormous back catalog of
soap operas provides a useful case study of how media conglomerates are attempting
to repurpose vintage content in order to fill the growing need for content on multiple
delivery systems, including the growing number of cable channels and web outlets
owned by a single conglomerate. If this is truly a transitional moment for soaps, as it
was when they moved from radio to television, will this just be a case of female-
targeted programming moving from broadcast networks to smaller boutique cable
networks or of television programming moving to the internet as its new primary
delivery medium? Is this a sign of changes happening to just women’s or daytime
programming or are there larger changes coming to the idea of ‘broadcast’ television
itself? As cable and Internet delivery systems continue to fragment the television
audience, will the big ad-supported broadcast networks be able to compete with
thousands of smaller competitors?
6

Feminist Studies and Soap Operas

While the soap opera has been a prominent staple in the daytime television
schedule since its move from radio in the early 1950s, its denigrated cultural status,
especially its association with the female audience, often minimized its status in
television histories. Robert Allen’s relatively early work on the genre in Speaking of
Soap Operas, which includes an early industrial history of soaps in the U.S., laments
the lack of attention paid to the genre despite its prominence in the history of
broadcast programming:
Furthermore, as one might imagine, soap operas manage but a mention in
standard histories of broadcasting. In his Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of
American Television, Eric Barnouw, the most thorough and thoughtful of
American broadcasting historians, devotes eight sentences out of his five-
hundred-page history to both radio and television soap operas…..Barnouw’s
treatment of soap operas tells much more about the peculiar position in
academic mass media discourse than it does about them as historical
phenomena.
3

Soaps consistent presence on the broadcast schedule always made them a part of the
academic study of television, but detailed attention to their history was lacking until
feminist studies championed the genre. Once taken up by feminist critics, the soap
opera has sustained interest within academic television studies for several decades.
Choosing to work on the soap opera places this project in dialogue with a long and
diverse history of soap opera studies by feminist television scholars. The sheer
volume of academic work on soap operas caused a sizable amount of trepidation on
my part when considering this project, especially when the status of the soaps still on
7

television stands in such peril. Nevertheless, I find myself asking why the soap opera
has remained such a powerful source of interest for feminist television scholars. The
sustained interest within the academy has moved far beyond trying to reclaim a
disreputable ‘feminine’ text for a place in television studies besides more ‘serious’
television texts. Still disreputable as ever among popular critics and the television
industry, the soap opera holds a powerful place within feminist television studies.
The form remains a lasting source of influence on scholars and audiences, not the
least of which is the form’s own longevity on television itself. Perhaps my continued
interest in the soap opera derives partially from the genre’s ability to sustain its own
appeal to changing generations of television audiences and how this particular
moment in time might determine how future generations will remember this
incarnation of the genre. I am also interested in how the soap opera’s serialized form
is becoming increasingly dominant across the televisiual landscape today, even if the
soap opera roots of the serial are not always acknowledged.
In reviewing the history of debates around the soap opera within feminist
television scholarship, I use some of the timelines laid out by Charlotte Brunsdon,
Julie D’Acci and Lynn Spigel in their introduction to Feminist Television Criticism
and several other of Brunsdon’s essays which focus on the development of the
feminist television critic and the soap opera.
4
I will focus on methodological changes
within soap opera studies and highlight the particular works I found most influential
for my own project.
8

In the introduction to Feminist Television Criticism, Brunsdon, D’Acci and
Spigel point out that early feminist television criticism was born of the political,
taking on both television itself, for its negative portrayals of women, and the
academy, for ignoring issues of gender in favor of the more “serious” or overtly
“political” aspects of television. While second wave feminism often rejected the soap
opera as perpetuating negative images of women and the marginalized nature of
“women’s genres” in general, feminist academics attempted to reclaim these genres.
The attempt to make the personal and domestic sphere a site of serious political
contestation led many feminist television critics to daytime television genres,
specifically the soap opera. Motivation for very early work on the soaps centered on
reevaluating this disreputable genre and making the invisible world of the female
domestic sphere and women’s interactions with television a viable object of study
within the academy.
Methodologically this early work on soaps largely concentrated on textual
analysis. These close readings of soap operas allowed critics to examine narrative
structure, iconography, and themes of the genre. Brunsdon, D’Acci and Spigel
attribute this heavy reliance on textual analysis to its previous prominence in critical
work in the humanities and the new availability of video recording technologies at
home for close readings of programs. The existence of consumer home recording
technologies is particularly relevant when thinking about how soaps are studied,
because they would be impossible to review in any other way due to their lack of
availability in reruns. I will divide this work in textual analysis into two categories,
9

those that deal with the feminine address of textual structures and narratives and those
that examine soaps strictly in terms of their genre tropes without hypothesizing
viewer interaction.
While this early work is classified as textual analysis, Brunsdon points out
that much of this analysis was evaluated in terms of its relationships to the “ways and
rhythms of viewing” of women in the domestic sphere rather than the previous textual
analysis of a particular film/text associated with early feminist film critics.
5
Tania
Modleski’s “The Rhythms of Reception: Daytime Television and Women’s Work,”
highlights the way soap opera structures addressed female patterns of work and their
role in the domestic sphere. Modleski also theorizes that soaps construct a maternal
position for their viewers, that of the ‘ideal mother,’ with multiple identifications to
different characters.
6
This is a particularly important piece in its attempt to specify a
feminine viewing position in response to feminist film theory’s arguments of classical
Hollywood cinema’s construction of a masculine spectator position. Modleski’s
work, along with other early works on soaps and their implied female audience, had
an important impact in bringing the soap opera as female genre to the table as a viable
object of academic study. Highlighting structures by which soaps addresses a female
audience, these early works are based on analysis of the structures of the text, rather
than research with actual female subjects. Later work on soaps will challenge this
methodology with a move toward ethnographic audience studies.
Modleski’s piece stands as a seminal work in soap opera studies and will
undoubtedly influence any new work on soaps. For my own project, the concepts of
10

lack of closure and delayed fulfillment are central to how soap fans use their own
video collections to disavow that particular aspect of soaps’ narrative structure with
edited compilation tapes in which they edit together scenes of one
story/character/couple, therefore removing it from the original narrative structure.
How does viewer reading change when all the interruptions of multiple storylines and
multiple identifications are edited out? A fellow fan and colleague of mine described
these fan compilation tapes as “all payoff.” My work examines how this might
change the terms of viewer engagement with the text and suggest new models of
cultural memory and amateur history.
Along with this work, textual analysis also yielded more traditional genre
studies work on soap operas. Christine Geraghty’s book, Women and Soap Opera:
As Study of Prime Time Soaps, stands as an exemplar of this type of work.
Geraghty’s book is a comprehensive study of women’s roles in soaps as well as the
pleasure and values offered to the implied female audience of British and American
Prime Time soap operas.
7
Geraghty uses the texts of these soaps to discuss their
appeal to women in their construction of ideologies of the family, the community and
the importance of emotion in the personal sphere. She also explores how the genre
tackles issues of race, class (which is somewhat more prominent within the context of
British soaps) and the changing nature of their audiences. While her work offers
descriptions of the many pleasures offered to female viewers by the genre, Geraghty
does not attempt to hypothesize about the female viewer herself and removes the
11

previous problematic of attempting to define a consistent subject position for the
female viewer.
While these methods of textual analysis allowed feminist theorists to explore
the complexity of the soap opera form, critics then turned to ethnographic audience
studies in order to test earlier hypotheses and psychoanalytic theories of how women
respond to the soap opera text. The turn to audience reception in research on soaps
produced an array of studies that differed in style and scope. Ien Ang’s work in
Watching Dallas, for example, is based on a small number of letters received by
viewers who responded to ads placed in a popular magazine. Ang expands on earlier
textual analysis work by combining her audience research with an extensive textual
analysis of Dallas and the pleasure it generated in watching. While this move into
ethnographic research signaled an engagement with actual soap viewers rather than
the implied female viewer, Ang is quick to point out that work with human subjects
by no means provide transparent results:
It would, however, be wrong to regard the letters as a direct and unproblematic
reflection of the reasons why the writers love or hate Dallas. What people say or
write about their experiences, preferences, habits, etc., cannot be taken entirely at
face value…they should be read ‘symptomatically’: we must search for what is
behind the explicitly written…
8

Another important feminist audience research work on soap operas is Ellen
Seiter, Hans Borchers, Gabriele Kreutzner and Eva-Maria Warth’s work “’Don’t
Treat Us Like We’re So Stupid and Naïve’: Towards an Ethnography of Soap Opera
Viewers.” Their project included ethnographic interviews with soap opera viewers
who volunteered to be interviewed. The study included an examination of soap
12

operas within the context of viewers’ everyday domestic life, much like early textual
work on soaps, but included the interview subjects’ own daily practices in relation to
their soaps. Their work also covers how viewers relate and interact with the soap
opera as genre, looking at how fans negotiate the enormity of these long running
texts, how they discriminate between their preference of storylines and their personal
investment in certain characters and situations.
9
This genre expertise will become an
important part of my argument on how soap fans use these strategies to function as
soap historians rather than just fans. The volume of the soap opera text almost
necessitates interaction between fans in order to navigate a soap’s history, and
viewers rely on other fans’ historical knowledge to fill in the gaps in their own
viewing history. The last portion of the essay interrogates Modleski’s earlier concept
of the soap opera viewer positioned as the ‘ideal mother.’ Because many of their
interviews yielded different identificatory positions, the authors use Modleski’s
concept of a maternal position as only a possible starting point, stressing that the
specific social identity of viewers alters their identificatory positions. Interrogating
their own methods, the researchers assert that ethnographic research must also factor
in their own subjectivities: “discourse analysis focuses on the practices of all
participants (including the interviewers) as social and historical beings.” This turn
toward autobiographical examination signals another important methodological shift
in soap opera studies.
By the mid to late 1980’s, this idea of investigating how “real” women
interact with television and soaps shifted towards a focus on the social construction of
13

gender, sexuality, race, etc. and the breakdown of self-evident social categories.
10
Ien
Ang and Joke Hermes’ essay, “Gender and/in Media Consumption,” challenged work
like Seiter, et al. for their use of social categories such as gender to interpret
audiences, in that it relies on essentialist assumptions about the category of gender.
11

According to Brunsdon’s work on the changing methodologies of feminist criticism,
Ang and Hermes “argue for a radical contextualism and particularism in the analysis
of data, and the absolute historical contingency of the articulation of all variables such
as gender.”
12
These cries of essentialism led to more emphasis on the heterogeneous
nature of television audiences and their varied reactions to genres such as soap
operas.
The continual contestation over methodology in feminist criticism of soap
opera necessitates the use of interdisciplinary methods to adequately explore new
questions surrounding a text as rich and complex as that of the soap opera. In Soap
Opera, Dorothy Hobson presents a structural model that I find useful for this
dissertation. Her book is divided into three main sections: Business, Content, and
Audiences.
13
My project is similarly divided, though slightly differently, situating
soap operas at the nexus of institutional, cultural and industrial practices. I have
separated my work into how the history of soap operas is utilized by television
archives, television fans and media corporations.
My first chapter on soap operas in television archives interrogates the
institutional structures of power that control what is deemed worthy of archival
preservation for the future. Methodologically, I approach my work on the archive
14

from three angles: One, I examine the theoretical models surrounding the institution
of the archive and its ties to cultural power over questions of history and memory.
Two, I look at several television archives’ collection policies and institutional
missions in order to investigate how soap operas are considered by these varying
institutions. Finally, I take a closer look at the soap opera content that has made it
into these archival collections to determine what picture of the soap opera each
institution paints for future researchers and fans.
Hobson’s section on Audiences incorporates her earlier ethnographic research
from her article “Soap Operas at Work” and new research to discuss how specific
types of fans relate to soaps in different ways. Her emphasis on the particularities of
these varied samples strives to examine small interpretive moments rather than reach
any grand theories of audience reception. My own audience research, primarily
discussed in Chapter Two, concentrates on a very small group of avid fans who
collect and trade soap operas, including creating their own compilation tapes of
particular storylines or characters. As this is a relatively small subsection of fans
compared to the millions of soap viewers, they cannot be used to make broad claims
about larger audiences. I use methodological examples from Hans Borchers’ work to
look at how fans develop their own skilled reading strategies to maintain and build
their knowledge of soap histories. In arguing that taking on the role of historian has
become a part of soap fandom, I use my own ethnographic research and well as
textual analysis of the archival collections these fans produce. These small
interpretive moments highlight the way these female fans have become historians for
15

a genre where historical preservation and record keeping were devalued by both the
academy and the television industry.
Hobson’s chapter on Business uses her insider knowledge of the British soap
opera industry to discuss the particularities of soaps as a commercial product within
the British broadcast industry and the influence of work done behind the camera, by
writers, producers, etc. The industrial structure of soap operas is a much under-
emphasized topic, and I pursue industrial research in Chapter Three on the formation
and business practices of SOAPnet, the first cable channel devoted to airing soap
reruns, in order to further my exploration of fan desire to re-experience the history of
soaps. Examination of the channel’s programming and marketing strategies inform
larger questions concerning the phenomenon of the rerun itself.
While feminist critiques of soap operas provide an intimidatingly large
amount of material, only a few of which are covered here, it also offers me a wealth
of models from which to build this project. By using selections from each of the
major methodological turns of soap opera studies, I hope to provide a balanced and
self-reflexive account of the institutional, audience and industrial practices used in
maintaining the history of soaps.

Key issues

Several key questions emerge through my approach to the soap opera and to
the importance of maintaining the history of the soap opera. The way in which
16

television archives and the television industry use, or choose not to use, the huge
volume of past soap opera content will hopefully illuminate the way such a feminized
form is maligned by institutions of power. The way female fans utilize and preserve
past soap opera content in turn responds to the limited scope of television history that
is sanctioned by television archives and the television industry.
I explore the concept of the archive and what qualifies as suitable for
preservation when it comes to soap operas. Archives are often used as the
foundations of recorded history, and television archives, and the practices of the
television industry, carefully shape what will become part of television history and
the television canon. The acquisition process addresses definitions of quality and
success as it relates to television, with the soap opera being successful in terms of
profitability (over the life of the soaps) and number of years on the air, but still not
considered ‘quality’ TV or securing a prominent place in television archives. These
issues of preservation also open up questions of archives and cultural definitions of
taste, specifically in relation to issues of gender. The denigration of the soap opera
because of its status as a women’s genre affects all three sections of research: within
television archives, by soap opera fans, and within the television industry.
The personal fan archives spotlight the work that women do in preserving
popular history rather than traditional official history. Whereas soap fans are often
pathologized, I want to emphasize their work in preserving histories that are often
discarded by official channels of cultural preservation. My research examines not
only television studies, but also the importance of gender when dealing with issues of
17

popular culture. Gender figures prominently in the divide between what gets
recorded as official history and what is part of popular memory. Soap fans fight the
erasure of soaps from television history and the television airwaves. Until the
appearance of SOAPnet, the industrial practice of never reairing a soap opera and its
many individual episodes basically served to erase those soaps from television
history. If we are indeed facing the imminent cancellation of all daytime soaps, this
fan archiving work also resists attempts to minimize the importance of the soaps’
prominence on broadcast television since its inception.
Even as the soap opera seems to decline on television, soap opera’s narrative
structure, with its reliance on heavily serialized plots, is emerging as a key component
of other successful, and even critically acclaimed, prime time series. The rise of the
serialized narrative within almost all television genres is an essential component in
the motivation behind this dissertation. A recent article in The New York Times
Magazine attempts to eulogize the soap opera by saying, “…it’s impossible for soap
operas to completely vanish. Strands of their DNA can be found all over network and
cable TV, in everything from The Sopranos to The Good Wife.”
14
If serialized
narratives are becoming such a mainstay of all television, will their trajectory be the
same as soap operas? If The Sopranos is labeled as “quality” TV and will be
archived, what about the soap opera is so different that it is overlooked in the
preservation process? Tara McPherson discusses the ways in which a prime time
melodramatic serial program such as 24 uses as many tropes of “quality” TV as it can
in order to avoid being associated with the soap opera: “...frequently voiced
18

perceptions of the show’s (24) innovation and quality may serve to mask its
deployment of what has long been seen as a particularly feminized form, the soap
opera.”
15
The prevalence of fan cultures has risen with the growth of serialized
narratives in all genres, and these fans are highly valued by the television industry as
important consumers among viewers. Niche fan cultures that are often heavily male
dominated, revolving around science fiction or comic book-based franchises, as
opposed to the heavily female world of soap fandom, are prized as tastemakers in the
media industry. Why do these other serialized programs, as well as the celebrated
rise of fan-boy/geek culture around such programs, have such a higher status in the
media than soap operas and soap opera fans?

Chapter Breakdown

In Chapter One: “Preserving Soap History: institutional archiving of the soap
opera,” my goal is to examine “official” venues where soap operas are archived. I
explore the implications of where, how and how much of the soap opera genre has
been deemed important enough to be archived in some sort of official capacity. I
examine institutional and academic archives, such as the The Paley Center, the
Library of Congress, and the UCLA film and television archives. In looking at the
institutional and academic archives, I attempt to place their collection of soap operas
within the context of their entire collection. I compare the other types of television
genres that make up the larger collection to the choices made pertaining to soap
19

operas. Most archives have a “collection statement” which outlines their goals for the
collection, providing a good starting point in characterizing the philosophy and nature
of each archive. Because television archives are still relatively recent institutions, the
broader examination of these archives will address questions surrounding the place of
television as a growing part of our popular history and its place in museum and
archival preservation.
Still seen as a “low” genre and associated almost exclusively with female
audiences, many television archives do not see the soap opera as a priority. As with
most genres associated with female audiences, soaps are considered less ‘important’
to preserve in terms of the creation of a television heritage by U.S. archives. I
examine each archive’s collection of soap operas, assessing what each collection
consists of: which programs they have, the amount of episodes, the time periods of
those episodes, what type of episodes they archive, etc. Investigating the acquisition
process of the archive is also essential in discussing the ideological underpinnings of
what portions of soap operas actually make it into official archives. What is the
archive’s goal in the acquisition process? Does it consist of certain types of episodes
and who determines this?
In looking at these archives, I break down these collections in terms of the
types of holdings and how they relate to questions of soap opera history. Do the
episodes that are preserved by these archives speak to the issues of the specificity of
different soaps’ histories and attempt to preserve these individual histories? Each
archive is different in terms of its attention to the history of each particular soap
20

opera. I discuss the lack of value placed on the preservation of specific soap opera
texts in their entirety and how official archives choose certain episodes or types of
episodes to stand in for a complete archive of these particular soap opera texts. These
selection processes also mirror much of the earlier genre work on soaps that uses
particular narrative strategies and themes to characterize all soaps, again leaving out
any emphasis on the specific history of each soap opera.
In Chapter Two: “The Unofficial Archives, fans as the real soap historians,” I
explore how soap fans have stepped in where archives have faltered. As discussed in
Chapter One, full access to the entire narrative of a soap opera is not available in
official archives, and I assume that archives like The Paley Center and UCLA are not
accessible to the vast majority of fans due to their locations. Soap fans pride
themselves on their knowledge of soap history, so my question in this chapter focuses
on how they access this narrative history. What do soap fans do when complete
archival collections and reruns of soaps didn’t exist until very recently?
One of the major avenues for viewers to access current and past information
on U.S. daytime soaps is through Internet fan sites. Fan websites and message boards
are not only a place for fans to express opinions and share their enthusiasm for a
particular object or text, but also a place to find out and share historical information.
Many of these sites chronicle the history of a soap and serve as a place where fans
can ask questions about past storylines and learn the narrative history of a particular
soap. In this section, I examine the way the exchange of historical knowledge
21

between soap fans functions differently from traditional pathways of historical
knowledge.
Soap opera fan sites function much the same way that many fan-based
television program sites operate, providing episode recaps and background
information. The obvious difference is that soaps are daily programs with histories
dating back decades instead of standard 22-episode seasons, and soaps have never
been reaired for fans to review or critique. On soap opera fan sites, fans take it upon
themselves to publish a history that is important to them, but not considered valuable
enough to be rerun or published elsewhere by the television industry or the television
archives that are supposedly saving them from erasure.
The real preservation of the soap opera comes through unofficial archives kept
by individual fans. Many soap opera fans keep their own extensive physical archives,
consisting of years and even decades worth of daily recordings of specific soap
operas. There is a significant fan culture around maintaining these histories, with
fans who have been watching the longest serving as historians and mentors for new
fans. These largely female fans have taken on the role of historians and archivists
where official archives have largely overlooked the specificities of individual soap
operas. While official archives may attempt to preserve representative samples of
the soap opera as genre, fan archives recognize that individual soaps are as distinct
from each other as individual sitcoms are from one another, and, therefore, when they
build their own archives of a soap, it is because of their attachment to a particular
soap rather than just the genre as a whole.
22

In Chapter Three: “Syndicating the Soap Opera,” I consider the relatively
recent occurrence of reairing classic soap operas with the introduction of SOAPnet,
the first cable channel devoted exclusively to the genre. SOAPnet rebroadcasts daily
episodes of currently running network soaps and airs cancelled daytime and
primetime soaps now in syndication. Attempting to address the changing profile of a
typical soap viewer, the cable network airs same-day replays of current afternoon
soaps in prime time, aiming for working women who still want to follow the daily
sagas of a daytime soap. Marketing itself as “the new way to watch soaps,” SOAPnet
targeted working women and addressed them as a more sophisticated audience with a
good sense of humor rather than the outdated idea of the domestic female daytime
viewer. The channel’s marketing campaigns were infused with ironic humor and a
camp sensibility to highlight the pleasure of the genre’s melodramatic excess. In
contrast to other cable “women’s networks,” SOAPnet re-imagined its audience as
loyal fans of the genre rather than trying to appeal to a totalizing and essentialist
concept of women. I explore how devoted soap fans re-experience these series and
thus keep their fandom of soaps, past and present, alive and thriving, much like other
‘cult’ fan communities who re-examine and remake their own fan texts.
Similar to talk shows and games show, daytime soaps had long been seen as
unsuitable for broadcast in syndication or on cable networks. Partially a result of
their low status as a trash genre and their prohibitively large volume of programming
hours, the television industry never conceived of soap operas as a feasible product for
syndication before the recent massive expansion of digital cable and satellite systems.
23

The ever-increasing number of “boutique” cable channels, which narrowcast to small-
targeted audiences, finally brought about the rerunning of American soaps. This
chapter particularly addresses the question of how the re-airing of the soap opera may
change the terms in which we have previously studied the genre and how this
phenomenon points towards questions surrounding the future of syndication for the
growing number of genres that depend upon their serial narrative format. I examine
how rerun soaps appeal to different audiences and provide for different viewer
pleasures when revisiting old narratives.

The Next Chapter for Soaps?
Perhaps now is a great time for a dissertation about the death of the soap
opera, but this dissertation is also about the future of soaps – about the possibilities
for reusing them and for continuing their history. While both of pioneering soap
creator Agnes Nixon’s long running soaps (All My Children and One Life to Live)
were cancelled in April 2011, the two soaps were quickly licensed by the production
company Prospect Park by July 2011, in a deal that would allow the daily shows to
continue, only this time on the internet with a possible subsequent run on a major
cable network. The future of soaps on the broadcast networks might not be bright,
but perhaps this is just another technological transition for the form. They made the
transition from radio to television, why not television to the internet? In my
conclusion, I’ll discuss some of the implications for the genre and the role that the
changes in the television industry, those that allowed for the advent of SOAPnet, may
24

have played in pushing soaps closer to cancellation on broadcast television. Soap
fans, especially the kind of fans who have created their own archives in order to savor
their favorite stories again and again, and their call to activism, also had direct impact
on this major move for the soap opera. Is the soap opera genre being saved from the
brink of death? It certainly wouldn’t be a surprise to me; we are talking about soaps
after all!

25

Introduction Endnotes

1
The Guiding Light aired on radio from 1937 to 1956 before transitioning to
television in 1952 and All My Children and One Life To Live were being developed
for a new incarnation on the Internet under a licensing agreement with the production
company Prospect Park.

2
Kompare, Derek. Rerun nation: How Repeats Invented American Television.
(New York: Routledge, 2005) and Lynn Spigel, “From The Dark Ages to the Golden
Age: Women’s Memories and Television Reruns,” In Welcome to the Dreamhouse:
Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).

3
Allen, Robert C. Speaking of Soap Operas. (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1985), 96-97.

4
Brunsdon, Charlotte, Julie D’Acci, and Lynn Spigel, Eds. “Introduction.” Feminist
Television Criticism: A Reader. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Brunsdon,
Charlotte. “Identity in Feminist Television Criticism.” Feminist Television Criticism:
A Reader. “The Role of Soap Opera in the Development of Feminist Television
Criticism.” Screen Tastes: Soap Opera to Satellite Dishes. (London: Routledge,
1997). The Feminist, the Housewife, and the Soap Opera. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000).

5
Brunsdon, 2000, 30.

6
Modleski, Tania. “The Rhythms of Reception: Daytime Television and Women’s
Work.” Regarding Television: Critical Approaches, an Anthology. Ed E. Ann
Kaplan. (Los Angeles: University Publications of America, Inc, 1983).

7
Geraghty, Christine. Women and Soap Opera. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 6.

8
Ang, Ien. Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination.
(London: Methuen, 1985), 11.

99
Seiter, Ellen, et al. “Don’t Treat Us Like We’re So Stupid and Naïve: Towards and
Ethnography of Soap Opera Viewers.” Remote Control: Television, Audiences and
Cultural Power. Eds. Ellen Seiter, Hans Borchers, Gabriele Kreutzner and Eva-
Marie Warth. (London: Routledge, 1989), 242

10
Brunsdon, Charlotte, Julie D’Acci, and Lynn Spigel, Eds. Feminist Television
Criticism: A Reader. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 9.

26

11
Ang, Ien and Joke Hermes. “Gender and/in Media Consumption.” Living Room
Wars: Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World. (New York: Routledge,
1996).

12
Brunsdon, 2000. 32.

13
Hobson, Dorothy. Soap Opera. (Oxford: Polity Press, 2003).

14
Traister, Rebecca. “The Soap Opera is Dead! Long Live the Soap Opera!” The
New York Times Magazine. September 25, 2011, 10.

15
McPherson, Tara. “Techno-Soap: 24, Masculinity and Hybrid Form.” Reading 24:
TV Against The Clock. Ed. Steven Peacock. (London: I.B Tauris & Co Ltd.: 2007),
173.

27
Chapter One:
Preserving Soap History: What will it mean for the future of soaps?

Television is by its very nature an ephemeral medium. Without home
recording or playback technologies, a television broadcast disappears from a viewer’s
reach as soon as it airs. This lack of permanence creates a constant struggle to
capture and preserve historical television texts, and viewers and researchers alike can
be regularly frustrated by a lack of access to programs not being currently broadcast
or rerun in syndication. Soap operas are a particularly ‘unruly’ genre when it comes
to accessing past programming.
1
Unlike other narrative television, you will almost
never see a soap opera episode broadcast more than once.
2
In addition, while the
commercial sale of television on DVD is becoming a more readily available option,
the sheer volume of episodes for a daytime soap opera has deemed them unsuitable
for DVD release thus far, a reminder that the content available for sale in this format
is only a very narrow slice of the scope of television history. With few-to-no
commercial options available for accessing historical soap episodes or storylines,
major U.S. television archives might seem a viable alternative; however, the soap
opera texts available in these archival institutions are surprisingly fragmented.
Without access to the soap opera in reruns, in the commercial marketplace, or even in
the collections of prestigious televisions archives, how can a fan, scholar or producer
access the rich history of television longest running genre? By exploring these
questions surrounding the accessibility of soap opera history, I expose how important
issues of preservation (or lack thereof) may be to the future of the soap opera genre.
28

The soap opera holds a prominent place in television history, with a presence
on the air from the very earliest days of broadcast television in the U.S. CBS’
Guiding Light (GL) was the longest-running drama in broadcasting history, lasting
from its radio debut in 1937 until its final episode in 2009.
3
Not only are soaps still a
permanent fixture of the broadcast day; they have also played a prominent role in
television scholarship. In the 1980s, the soap opera was one of the first genres that
feminist scholars examined in their attempt to reevaluate popular media labeled
“women’s genres.” The early works of Robert Allen, Dorothy Hobson, Christine
Geraghty, Tania Modleski, Ellen Seiter, and others established the soap opera as a
key genre within television studies, in part because of its status as a culturally
devalued genre due to its association with the feminine.
4
Lynn Spigel discusses
feminist scholars’ quest to reclaim these “feminized” cultural forms that patriarchal
society rejected: “It was an attempt to authenticate, or at least take seriously, genres
such as the soap opera and romance novel –genres that the canons of male-centered
literary and art criticisms deemed unworthy of study.”
5
With the intense academic
focus on the genre during the rise of television studies, one might assume that soap
operas would have become a priority for acquisitions during the formation of
television archives. Unfortunately, neither their popularity and continued broadcast
presence nor their prominence in academic circles has warranted soap operas the
amount of attention they deserve in television archives.
Part of the motivation behind the development of television archives in the
1960s and 1970s was to raise the cultural status of television, still seen as a derided
29

medium. In trying to raise television’s standings, archives often sought out what
would be recognized as ‘quality’ television and therefore would have lasting cultural
relevance. Soap operas fell far outside cultural notions of what would be considered
‘quality’ TV. The soap opera’s association with a female target audience, female
creators and writers, marked soaps with low cultural and artistic status and directly
affected their place in official television archives, regardless of their strong presence
during the broadcast day and in the growing field of feminist television criticism.
Hierarchies of taste and value by the popular press, cultural critics and the academy
all have substantial impact on the selection process of any archive. An archive is
often one of the key institutions involved in the upholding or building of a canon for
any discipline, even in the case of what was a fledgling academic subject such as
television. Charlotte Brunsdon discusses how, despite resistance to the development
of a sanctified canon in television studies, judgments are still implicitly made by
sources of institutional power even while they are theoretically rejected by the
academic field.
6

The development of television archives in the U.S. reflected the legitimating
of television as a cultural product worthy of serious study and preservation. But the
magnitude of U.S. television production leaves domestic television archives with the
unenviable task of selecting which television texts will be saved for future scholarly
research and rejecting other texts which will most likely be lost as part of television
history. We must remember that these collections are not comprehensive and that
their character is not without human design. Television archiving and preservation
30

are relatively recent phenomena and lack of early attention to “our television
heritage” may dictate some of the television histories we will be able to explore in the
future. This means that much local, off-network, and non-“quality” programming is
already or will be lost if it is not actively preserved. Unfortunately, many soaps have
already suffered this kind of erasure from television history with the lack of attention
they have received in the archives. In this study, I look at the state of soap opera
collections in three major U.S. television archives: the UCLA Film and Television
Archive; the Library of Congress Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound
division; and the Paley Center for Media. By exploring the relationship of each
archive with the soap opera genre, we can see not only how these institutions have
and will continue to shape soap history but also what these issues of preservation and
the loss of soap history might tell us about the future of soaps.
.
Theories of the Archive: power in preservation

Although an archive can serve as a great resource to both the scholar and the
community, it should also be recognized as a site of power. A document found in an
archive is imbued with a sense of authenticity, established provenance, rarity, and
therefore authority. Antoinette Burton defines the archive as “a site of knowledge
production, an arbiter of truth, and a mechanism for shaping the narratives of
history.”
7
That which is preserved in an archive reflects a conscious decision that it
is worthy of saving. An official archive, as opposed to a private collection, infuses
31

the cultural weight of its sponsoring institution on the objects within it. The archive
marks each text as a legitimate subject of future historical study by making it
available for scholars. In his article “Archives in Formation: Privileged Spaces,
Popular Archives and Paper Trails,” Michael Lynch defines the scholarly archive as,
The classical archive is a discrete collection of documents giving original
evidence about an historical event or figure. In the contemporary academic
world, unpublished writings that exist in one or very few sites are read by
specialist who selectively bring to light information drawn from the archive.
8

A scholarly work that draws on elements found in an archive uses these texts as
evidence to support their investigation or argument, thus adding an air of credibility.
Archival evidence can put the scholar in the position of ‘expert,’ presenting and
interpreting these rarified texts for their audience. Thus, the power of archival
credibility and the position of expert places the scholar as a kind of gatekeeper
between the public and these rarified texts which are used as the basis of ‘official’
history.
The television archive is unique in that it is a collection of pieces of work that
have already been seen by thousands of viewers, but the copies of these programs
may only exist in one of these specialized archives, therefore they do share the
rarified nature of documents contained in more traditional paper based archives.
Michael Lynch records his participation in building a specialized archive at Cornell
University detailing the presentation of DNA evidence in the O.J. Simpson Trial. The
archive included hours of off-air video recordings, court transcripts, interviews and
other published and unpublished documents related to the Simpson case, most of
which were downloaded from websites covering the trial. The Simpson Trial-DNA
32

Archive Project gathered the media coverage of the trial for scholars to examine
reactions to and the presentation of the relatively new DNA science, but it also
captured television footage that would quickly become unavailable to the viewing
public. Lynch asserts that,
the value of the archive for research purposes had nothing to do with the
originality or uniqueness of the materials in it. It had to do, instead, with the
selection, topical arrangement and textual preservation of electronic
broadcasts and records which in their original form were ubiquitous and
evanescent.
9

This idea of the television broadcast text as an evanescent form is key to our
understanding of how the television archive still meets the earlier definition of a
scholarly archive. These texts, whether they are broadcasts of the Simpson trial or
that of the daytime soap opera, are no longer accessible to their original audience.
Television texts may have been seen by thousands of viewers, but permanent records
of the text only exist in very small numbers. The physical record of a television text,
presumably in a film or video format, takes on the same rarity as precious documents
in a paper-based archive.
Without reruns or commercial sales, these television texts have essentially
disappeared. Unless a viewer uses some kind of home recording technology to
capture a particular text or moment, television images only exist as quickly fading
memories. Our memory is sometimes equated with a kind of personal archive
recording all the events in one’s life. Memories, however, are easily distorted and
changed with time, the very thing that an archive tries to prevent in preserving
original texts. In reference to Derrida’s use of the archive as a metaphor for memory
33

to discuss Freud in Archive Fever, Carolyn Steedman protests his idea that the archive
is analogous to the human memory or to Freud’s theory of the unconscious:
The Archive is not potentially made up of everything, as in human memory;
and it is not the fathomless and timeless place in which nothing goes away
that is the unconscious. The Archive is made from selected and consciously
chosen documentation from the past and also from the mad fragmentations
that no one intended to preserve and that just ended up there.
10

Steedman points out that archives are not unlimited sources of information or a
complete record of any event or person. Archives are simply repositories of texts that
a person or group of people decided to preserve for future use. Steedman also
emphasizes that along with that which is chosen for an archive there is also a
haphazard element to these collections and they should never be considered in any
way ‘complete.’
The image of the archive has historically been synonymous with objectivity or
neutrality. As a repository of historical texts, archives promote themselves as places
of preservation rather than manipulation. Once a text arrives at an archive all
attempts are made to preserve its original form, but we often forget about the process
through which texts are collected and consolidated to make up an archive. The idea
of selecting texts for an archive also implies the rejection of others. The creation and
building of an archive exists within a specific historical and cultural context itself and
thus every archive is shaped by the context in which it functions:
…archives do not simply arrive or emerge fully formed; nor are they innocent
of struggles for power in either their creation or their interpretive applications.
Though their own origins are often occluded and the exclusions on which they
are premised often dimly understood, all archives come into being in and as
history as a result of specific political, cultural, and socioeconomic
34

pressures—pressures which leave traces and which render archives
themselves artifacts of history.
11

The specific history and mission of every archive not only determines what it
contains, but has a direct effect on how it is used, who uses it and the narratives of
history that are written by using it. The archival goals and practices of television
archives determine the make-up of each collection, and therefore, the distinct image
of television itself that each archive creates. By examining these selection processes
and the subsequent arrangement of texts, we can discern each archive’s particular
vision of the soap opera genre and how that will shape future historical work on the
soaps.

The Question of Quality

The notion of ‘quality’ TV is debated by television scholars, industry insiders,
the press and viewers themselves. Quality can be discussed in terms of economic
success, aesthetic merit, or even personal preferences. While the television industry
continues to seek out ways to shape and profit from the idea of quality TV, academic
television studies has largely rejected the term as industry manipulation and an
expression of hegemonic taste cultures. Yet, the debate around quality has been
extremely influential to scholars’ choices of objects of study, whether it be
recognizing ‘popular’ texts that are rejected by notions of quality or interrogating
‘quality’ texts for their presumed value. The one thing that the industry, scholars and
viewers might agree upon is that the daytime soap opera does not fall under anyone’s
35

definition of ‘quality’ TV. Rarely have the differences between individual soaps been
looked at in terms of markers of ‘quality’ TV. While my intent is not to define soaps
as ‘quality’ TV, I do think soaps can be considered in terms of their qualitative
differences. Television studies debates around ‘quality’ have tended to limit the
discussion to certain genres, while others, like soaps, have only been discussed in
terms of the popular. My argument here is that the same debates around quality exist
within the production world of soaps and their fans. Not all soaps are created equal,
and fans make judgments on them according to specific taste cultures. In exploring
how television studies has debated this issue of ‘quality’ TV, I hope to suggest how
these debate around quality function within other ‘low’ genres as well.
Jane Feuer’s work on MTM Enterprises is probably the most well known
discussion of what is considered ‘quality’ TV. Feuer uses the MTM production
company to chart one of the first developments of a particular house style and
‘quality’ image of a television production company. Beginning with the Mary Tyler
Moore Show and its many spin-offs, and then on to such critically acclaimed prime-
time serial dramas such as Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere, MTM created an
image for itself as the premiere producer of quality television. While most of MTM
programs where not huge ratings toppers, they drew critical acclaim and ‘quality’
audience demographics. MTM, and the writers and producers who came out of it,
had such an impact on the television landscape and popular notions of ‘quality’ TV
that Feuer uses MTM’s style to unpack television’s current conception of quality.
36

One of the markers of quality Feuer discerns from her work on MTM is the
stamp of a particular author or producer on a body of work:
MTM’s image as the quality producer serves to differentiate its programs
from the anonymous flow of television’s discourse and to classify its texts as a
unified body of work...
12

Television programs have been most often associated with their stars rather than their
producers or writers. The advent of companies like MTM and Norman Lear’s
Tandem brought the signature style of a television ‘author’ to the attention of the
industry. An identifiable producer, whether it is a company or an individual, like
MTM alumni Steven Bochco, became a bankable marketing strategy and an indicator
of ‘quality’ based on past products. John Caldwell cites how authorial recognition as
a indicator of quality continues in the 1980s and 90s with signature television
producers, like Bochco and Michael Mann, and the import of well known film
directors, including Steven Spielberg, Barry Levinson, and David Lynch.
13

Associating a television text with a particular author invokes the image of the artist,
thus linking it to traditions of high art rather than a mass produced commodity.
While the mark of authorship is still in the relative minority of television texts,
a recognizable producer as author is not uncommon in the world of American
daytime soap operas. Strange as it may seem, some soap producers and writers are
well known for their signature style and image associated with their particular soaps.
Agnes Nixon is known for bringing controversial social issues to the forefront on
daytime in the 1970’s with her creations All My Children and One Life to Live.
Husband and wife team, William Bell and Lee Phillip Bell, are known for their high
37

production values, glamorous younger stars, and a focus on sexuality with their series
The Young and the Restless and later The Bold and The Beautiful. While there are
several other producers associated with particular soaps and changes in style, Irna
Phillips stands as the mother of all U.S. daytime soap operas. Phillips created
Guiding Light, As the World Turns, Another World, and is credited with starting the
careers of both Nixon and Bell. Ellen Seiter’s work on Irna Phillips traces her
influence on the narrative structure, themes and production structure of the soap opera
genre as we know it.
14
Thus while ‘quality’ debates have focused on the importance
of the television ‘author,’ soap opera studies have often neglected the influence of a
producer on specific soap operas (Seiter’s work being the exception rather than the
norm).
Another marker of quality Feuer traces back to MTM productions is a liberal
slanted politics. Unlike Lear’s more politically overt sitcoms, Feuer cites MTM’s
more subdued progressive slant as an appeal to capture both a mass audience and a
narrower ‘quality’ demographic:
(An MTM program) must appeal both to the ‘quality’ audience, a liberal,
sophisticated group of upwardly mobile professionals; and it must capture a
large segment of the mass audience as well…the quality audience is permitted
to enjoy a form of television which is seen as more literate, more stylistically
complex and more psychologically ‘deep’ than ordinary TV fare.
15

This appeal to a more ‘sophisticated,’ upwardly mobile audience signals quality TV’s
trade off between mass appeal (high ratings) and ‘quality’ demographics. A ‘quality’
demographic is seen as young affluent viewers, with money to spend, and the cultural
capital that translates into recognition by industry tastemakers with Emmys and other
38

prestige awards. The label ‘quality’ indicates audiences that would not otherwise
want to be associated with the debased television form and the audiences that
regularly watch it; “The quality audience gets to separate itself from the mass
audience and can watch TV without guilt…”
16

While ‘quality’ TV is often defined by its appeal to a certain audience
demographic, the audience itself can play an active role in defining taste codes and
the image of ‘quality.’ In her article “Fans as Tastemakers: Viewers for Quality
Television,” Sue Brower looks at the way the audience group Viewers for Quality
Television (VQT) negotiates markers of quality to suit their own definitions of taste.
Brower argues that although the group asserts itself as a “rational, well-organized
group engaging in aesthetic criticism and social activism” what lies beneath is little
more than basic fandom.
17
VQT was organized around letter writing campaigns in
order to save particular ‘quality’ programs from imminent cancellation by the
networks. VQT grew into a democratically structured, grass-roots organization that
circulated its own newsletter, voting on programs as representatives of ‘quality’ and
spearheading influential letter-writing publicity campaigns to support these ‘quality’
programs. Members’ status as socially active, mostly middle class, educated viewers
placed VQT firmly in the realm of a ‘quality’ audience. Brower contends that VQT
was able to influence the definition of ‘quality’ in the service of its own members’
fandom. What separates a group such as VQT from more pejorative images of fan
culture is their well-organized democratic form and the cultural and economic capital
of its membership. With a mostly female, but professional and economically
39

successful membership, VQT does not occupy the subordinate societal position often
associated with fandom.
18

While the professional women of the VQT are applauded for their ‘socially
conscious’ taste making efforts (at least by the industry, if not academics), active soap
opera fans would never be considered a ‘quality’ audience. Brower quotes Cagney
and Lacy producer Barney Rosenweig’s response to letter writing campaign support
from these ‘quality’ fans:
These (letters) were not the traditional fan letters written in Crayola by people
saying, “I kiss my pillow every night thinking of you.” They were affluent, well-
educated people. They were petitions from working women and college
students.
19

The quote depicts other types of active letter-writing fans as simpletons with
delusional fantasies. While his words are not specific to daytime fans, soap fans are
often seen as lonely women who can’t differentiate between fantasy and reality.
Similarly to members of VQT, active soap fans also participate in letter writing
campaigns to change certain storylines or save a particular character or actor.
Although Brower argues that VQT’s membership is actually quite similar to other
forms of fandom, studies of fandom rarely intersect with debates around quality.
Soap opera fans don’t have the kind of perceived cultural capital necessary to be
included in ideas of ‘quality’ audiences.
Charlotte Brunsdon adds to Feuer’s description of markers of quality in her
examination of Brideshead Revisited and The Jewel in the Crown as the premiere
emblems of ‘quality’ television for British television. These lush historical epics are
40

not endorsements for what quality should be, but represent the common conception of
quality on British television. While the terms and context are somewhat different,
Brunsdon’s ‘quality’ characteristics generally reinforce or expand on Feuer’s
American findings. The four key components of quality in these programs are
literary source, the best of British acting, cost, or at least look, of money spent, and
heritage export.
20
Tying a program to a literary source performs much the same
function as the invocation of authorship by producer or writer, as discussed earlier by
Feuer. The presence of a well recognized skilled actor or actress immediately lends
to a programs sense of credibility or ‘quality.’ American programs also use name
recognition of actors to boost their quality image, as seen in Martin Sheen’s presence
on The West Wing. While soap operas do not often boast big name stars going in, it
should be recognized that soaps serve as training grounds for many actors who go on
to be associated with ‘quality’ film and television, with countless examples such as
Julianne Moore or Sarah Michele Geller. While the acting style is often the most
critically derided aspect of the soaps, critical success often follows the best of soap
opera players.
Brunsdon’s third category, money, refers to the look of high production values
rather than the actual amount spent. In the American context, high production values
are a key component of what is deemed ‘quality’ TV. Extensive location shooting,
extravagant sets, expressive cinematography, special effects, etc. have all been uses to
raise a typical serial drama to possible status as ‘quality’ drama. Again, we can see
the same recognizable differences in production values within soap operas. Gloria
41

Monty’s heavy use of location shooting with adventure-oriented story lines boosted
General Hospital to the top of the ratings in the early 1980s.
While “heritage export” has very different connotations for these British historical
texts than it does for the export of current American television, designation as quality
TV dramatically influences which U.S. programs are exported around the world. For
soap operas, questions of quality might also be asked in terms of global exports and
success. CBS’s The Bold and the Beautiful is the most watched American soap
around the world, broadcast in more than ninety countries. Its popularity globally far
exceeds its low status on U.S. television. Discussions of exports are not always part
of the major debates around ‘quality,’ but if international success influences some of
our definitions of quality, ‘low’ genres, such as soaps, must be included in the
discussion.
Charlotte Brunsdon’s discussion also poses an interesting challenge to other
television scholars’ use of quality. Brunsdon asserts that the academy’s refusal to
deal in evaluative criticism with terms such as ‘quality’ leaves them at a disadvantage
in having any social or political influence into what types of television are available.
Speaking specifically about the infiltration of satellite and commercial television into
the historically state-sponsored British broadcasting system, she feels that scholars’
aversion to the judgment of quality will leave the direction of programming solely in
the hands of the economically interested parties and the most conservative of critics.
According to Brunsdon, “We do not defeat the social power which presents certain
critical judgments as natural and inevitable by refusing to make critical judgments.”
21

42

It is often media and cultural studies’ impulse to celebrate the popular and reject
traditional aesthetic evaluation with its history in disciplines of high art, which
reinforce distinctions of class and cultural privilege. While Brunsdon recognizes that
there are always issues of power at stake when making judgments of quality, she
encourages her colleagues to resist the “abyss of relativism” and engage in debate in
order to promote variety and diversity of both production and audiences.
22

I find it interesting to examine Brunsdon’s call to arms in terms of the debates of
quality within the industry and with fans concerning even the “lowest” of cultural
forms. There are indeed debates and measures of quality within the world of soap
operas, even if those outside daytime television aren’t looking. Certain soaps are
perceived as more ‘realistic’ and socially conscious, while others have a distinctly
camp sensibility with a good dose of satire, such as NBC’s fantasy/supernatural soap,
Passions. CBS soaps have higher production values and a richer look, with The
Young and the Restless consistently topping the ratings for years. The markers of
‘quality’ are measured and traded within the daytime production world, but academic
work on soaps tends to lump them together as a single product. In her plea for a
reconsideration of ‘quality’ within television studies, Brunsdon argues that “the
generic diversity of television must be taken into account in discussions of quality,
but not in ways which makes quality ‘genre-specific,’ creating certain ‘sink’ or ‘trash’
genres of which demands are not made.”
23
As I have argued, while many of the
markers of quality apply or at least intersect with the soap opera, it is rarely
contemplated in those terms.
43

This dissertation does not seek to somehow classify soaps as ‘quality’ TV,
they clearly will never be seen in those terms. Nevertheless, my focus on fan
attachment to particular moments and particular soaps demands the examination of
soaps as particular texts with their own particular appeals rather than an
undifferentiated genre. I am taken with Brunsdon’s assertion that television studies
should be wary of creating “trash” genres in which little distinction is made between
texts. Debates and evaluation of ‘quality’ exist within all genres and television
scholarship should attempt to discuss them accordingly. They will certainly inform
our understanding of the television archive.

The Rise of the Television Archive

Derek Kompare’s Rerun Nation traces the emergence of U.S. television
archives in the 1960s and 1970s, elevating the television text to that of a valid object
of scholarly research and one worthy of preservation. The rise of the television
archive was also an important marker in television studies struggle to gain legitimacy
within the academy, intersecting with ideas about quality programming. In 1965, the
Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Foundation sought to establish a national
television library to be maintained by Columbia University, American University, and
UCLA.
24
Library of Congress established a separate division for American television
and radio with the 1976 Copyright Revision Act, which also prompted a huge
increase in the television registrations to the U.S. Copyright Office. The Museum of
Broadcasting (later renamed the Museum of Television and Radio and again renamed
44

The Paley Center for Media in 2007) also opened its doors in New York in1976.
25

While the establishment of these museums and archives allowed greater access to
television’s past, their founders, their institutional structures, and their selection
policies would greatly influence and shape the prevailing television canon and
narratives of television history.
As the output of television production continues to grow exponentially, the
percentage that archives are able to preserve will continue to shrink. The particularly
“low” cultural status and unusually large broadcast volume of the soap opera makes it
perhaps an extreme example of the unwieldy and contentious nature of television
archiving as a practice. Worse, the extremely serialized nature of the soap opera
compounds the difficulties in archiving the genre, with financial and spatial limits on
acquisitions in direct conflict with the long-form narrative which requires that
viewers watch numerous sequential episodes to follow even one of many
simultaneous plot lines. For instance, while there is extensive academic work on soap
operas as a television genre, little attention is given to individual or particular sets of
episodes, as opposed to many primetime series. This lack of scholarly emphasis on
individual productions coincides with the lack of commercial and archival availability
of these shows, to watch historical runs or view individual episodes within the context
of the episodes that came before and after. What is saved today will determine what
academics, fans, and media industries professionals will know of television’s history
in the future; thus, we must examine the reasoning behind the selection of particular
soap opera titles and episodes for preservation.
45

Researchers must enact a careful scrutiny of the choices that archivists
perform in their selection process and be cognizant of other factors that limit the
availability of texts in a collection.
26
Television archives face a myriad of constraints,
both within and out of their control, and these constraints should play a vital role in
informing scholarly work on the texts that make it into any collection. The texts we
review as scholars in a television archive have already passed through a rigorous
selection process. Academic work should factor in the idea that a particular text was
selected as having some sort of “value” by the institution that houses it. Television
archivist Terry Cook warns archivists that “they are determining what the future will
know about its past, which is often our present…We are deciding what is
remembered and what is forgotten, who in society is visible and who remains
invisible, who has a voice and who does not.”
27
When looking for soaps in major
U.S. television archives, we discover just how much of their history has sadly met
this fate of invisibility.

UCLA

The University of California Los Angeles television archive contains more
than 100,000 titles, favoring American commercial broadcasting and cable. Their
strongest holdings are in fiction programming of the 1950s through the 1970s,
including a variety of soap opera episodes. In order to draw conclusions about the
archive’s soap holdings, they must be contextualized within the collection and the
46

archive’s larger mission. UCLA generates a formal television collection policy
articulating its goals and acquisition procedures, which I used—along with staff
interviews—to explore the makeup of the collection.
28
The policy breaks down their
acquisitions into three tiers:

Television Collected Extensively—entertainment programs judged as
milestones of popular culture or of “significant” historical or culture interest,
as well as news or public affairs programs dealing with topics of significant
historical or cultural interest, and Emmy Award winners and nominees, both
daytime and primetime.

Television Collected Broadly—programs that have historical significance,
cultural impact, or artistry. These are judged on several factors—popularity;
quality as judged by critics, historians, and scholars; influential subject matter;
or their contribution to popular culture, both positive and negative. The
collection proposes saving around 30% of the episodes from series in this
category, such as each season opener and finale, episodes of special note or
those that mark changes in the production, and a few typical episodes from
each season.

Television Represented by Sample Shows—programs in which the archive
acquires a limited number of sample shows to represent the whole. This is the
47

only description that actually lists specific genre headings such as game
shows, soap operas, talk shows, reality shows, cartoons, commercials,
infomercials, and music videos. The probable formula for this category is no
more than 10% of a show, with two or three episodes from each season.

While archives are often forced by limited resources to restrict their holdings, these
small “representative” samples in the third category can greatly influence future
characterizations of entire genres based on the relatively small samples that are
preserved. The soap opera is the only ongoing fully scripted genre that falls in this
“sample shows” category; and while the daily style of these shows may often be
similar, the content of each episode for each individual soap is always different.
A representative sample of soap operas doesn’t allow full exploration of the
cultural impact of particular shows or the genre itself. Particularly troubling is the
likelihood of losing those soaps that may not have reached critical or financial
success but articulated alternative expressions of this so-called ‘formulaic’ genre.
Many soaps never achieved the long-running status of those still on the air but are
significant for their innovations/experimentation within the genre. For example,
UCLA holds only ten of the 470 episodes of NBC’s Generations, the first soap
featuring an African-American core family, which ran from early 1989 to early 1991.
The archive holds only four of the 352 episodes of ABC’s The City, which ran from
late 1995 to early 1997. The show was a spin-off of the soap opera Loving, which
tried to incorporate heavy location shooting and the latest production styles of
48

nighttime television in hopes of giving the failing soap new life.
29
Shows such as
Generations and The City may not be a “representative sample” of the soap genre as a
whole, but their considerable contributions to the genre run the risk of slipping
through the cracks of soap history if they are not more strongly marked for
preservation.
30

While UCLA may have somewhat sparse numbers of certain soaps, they also
hold one of the largest blocks of consecutive episodes of any one soap opera in a
television archive. The archive received a large gift from ABC in the early 1990s of
approximately 24,000 shows, including large runs of both daytime and primetime
programming. (UCLA) A portion of this gift contained the complete run of General
Hospital from its premiere in 1963 until 1970, comprised of nearly 2,000 individual
episodes. Typically the archive would not accept such a large number of episodes of
a program which is part of the “represented by sample shows” category, but, due to
the nature of the gift, the archive was required to accept the donation in total. While
2,000 episodes is an impressive number, General Hospital entered its forty-eighth
year of production on April 1, 2011. With approximately 250 episodes each year, the
total run will be more than 12,250 episodes at the end of 2011. Still, 2,000
consecutive episodes of a program is a rare grouping when compared to the rest of the
archives’ soap holdings. With a large run of consecutive episodes, fans and scholars
will actually be able to access the unique narrative qualities of the soap opera genre,
which depends on long narrative builds, as well as the specific characteristics of
General Hospital during that particular time period. This large chunk of consecutive
49

episodes is the type of archival holding that will allow both television scholars and
fans to properly revisit a soap’s history in great detail.
After 1970, however, the cataloged holdings for General Hospital total
approximately 60 episodes between 1971 and 2000, and most of these episodes are
Emmy nomination screeners.
31
The archive’s second largest soap holding is The Bold
and the Beautiful, with 261 episodes of a show that has been on the air daily since
1987 and which will have produced almost 6,225 episodes by the end of 2011.
Compare this to only 91 episodes of Guiding Light, the longest running of all U.S.
soaps. These sporadic numbers persist throughout UCLA’s soap opera collection and
demonstrate that the block of GH episodes are an anomaly to a collection that
otherwise pays little attention to the strong importance of continuity across episodes
to soap opera storytelling. These choices also reflect the cultural hierarchies in
television preservation in which the least collected “sample show” tier includes a
genre that has both sustained popularity and broadcast presence, and one in which the
idea of sporadic episodes ignores the essential nature of the long-form continuing
narrative to the genre.

Library of Congress

The Library of Congress’ Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound
Division (MBRS) operates within a very different context than a university-affiliated
archive such as UCLA. The bulk of the television collection at the Library of
50

Congress was built by retaining deposit copies registered for copyright protection.
While most of the Library of Congress’ television holdings come from the U.S.
Copyright Office, only relatively small selections of the thousands of programs
registered in the Office are chosen to remain part of the MBRS collection.
32

At the 1990 symposium, “Documents that Move and Speak,” former MBRS
chief Paul Spehr presented the overwhelming number of considerations that his
archivists faced when selecting television programs for their collection:
Over the years many different standards have been proposed by the staff of
the Library... quality, popularity, program content, innovation, artistic
achievement, technical achievement, documentation of the times, social and or
political impact, tastes and/or trends, quality productions by or about
important persons and programming that has caused controversy…. Each one
of these has merit and we have used them all at various times over the years.
The problem is that if one uses many standards, it opens the flood doors and
we are once again overwhelmed with material.
33

Spehr emphasizes the difficulties that archivist face when it comes to such a
prolific medium as television. The Library of Congress acquisition policies are thus
constantly shifting, along with the unpredictable nature of copyright deposits. Until
the mid-1960s, the library acquired very few television programs, with an emphasis
on “quality” programming and extremely small samples of entertainment programs:
The Library simply underestimated the social and historical significance of the
full range of television programming. There was no appreciation of
television’s future research value…Of those registered for copyright during
these years, the Library chose only an occasional sample of entertainment
series…and the so-called “quality programs.
34

Spehr also notes that, at different points in the collection’s history, the library used
very tight limitations, eliminating entire genres, including the soap opera.
35
In 1966,
the acquisition of programming from copyright deposits changed hands to the Motion
51

Picture Section reference staff. The Library thus began to widen its retention of
copyright deposits to be able to satisfy current and future research needs and keep
pace with the continuing expansion of the television industry.
36
Until the massive
expansion of cable, and the high quality programming now produced specifically for
cable networks, the Library attempted to retain all prime time network programming.
Prime time original programming is now much more than three hours a night on three
major networks, so archivists must make even harder choices on what can be
preserved. The fast changing industrial structures of American television force any
firm acquisition practices into mere malleable guidelines.
Librarian Rosemary Hanes told me they often adopt a similar system to
UCLA’s “television represented by sample shows,” taking a sampling of shows they
feel are formulaic and which they already have a reasonable number of episodes. She
cited Cops or America’s Most Wanted as examples of such programming. Similar to
the soap opera, these reality shows have a very low cultural status and are seen as
being interchangeable and thus easily represented by any selection of episodes.
Soaps, with their prolific production and their negative image as indistinguishable
from one another, again find themselves at the bottom of the priority list when it
comes to preservation. This will have a great effect on future attempts to study soap
operas if, as the size of a single soap opera grows, only sample episodes have to stand
in for an ever increasing number of episodes actually produced.
The Library of Congress’s soap opera holdings reflect this uneven and
changing nature in copyright policy and their collection emphasis. Comparing the
52

number of episodes of a long-running soap like General Hospital with UCLA’s large
number of episodes, the Library of Congress’ holdings are smaller and more sporadic.
The collection contains approximately 1,200 episodes of General Hospital. The
library has a complete run of the program’s premiere year in 1963 and then not a
single episode again until an almost complete run of episodes from 1980 through
1984. This is followed by only five episodes in 1985 and nothing again until 1988.
The irregular nature of the Library’s television episode holdings often have as
much to do with the emphasis production companies put on copyright registration as
they do the library’s selection policies. ABC, which produces General Hospital, was
often the most diligent about registering their soaps during these time periods, with
very little registered by CBS and NBC.
37
These uneven registration practices suggest
that large chunks of significant shows, or even whole programs, may be forgotten and
prevent our ability to characterize the specific nature of soaps aired on different
networks or created by one production company versus another.
Take for example, the cancelled NBC/DirecTV soap opera, Passions. Known
for its use of supernatural plotlines and camp sensibilities, Passions aired from 1999
until 2008. Less than ten years is a relatively short run compared to many U.S. soaps,
but because of diligent copyright deposits by NBC Studios, the Library of Congress
holds copies of more than 500 individual episodes of Passions.
38
In comparison, the
library holds only 5 individual episodes of the only other current NBC broadcast
soap, Days of Our Lives, produced by Corday Productions, Inc., which premiered in
1965 and has currently been on the air five times longer than Passions’ was. While
53

having such a high volume of episodes for an experimental show like Passions is
fortunate, the disparity between the holdings will make characterizing the success or
failure of one soap verses another on NBC during the 1990s and 2000s very difficult
if a researcher wants to examine the content of both programs.

The Paley Center for Media

The Paley Center for Media, formerly the Museum of Television and Radio,
has a different emphasis than the other television archives examined here: it operates
as a public museum rather than a traditional archive.
39
In comparing differing images
of museums and archives, Derek Kompare uses the analogy that “museums are for
‘teaching,’ while archives are for ‘research.’”
40
Publicly funded archives like UCLA
and the Library of Congress are both open to the public, but The Paley Center
specially tailors itself toward the general public and industry audiences. Founded by
CBS chairman William S. Paley, the museum’s main mission has been the general
cultural legitimization and shaping the public image of the television medium. The
Center cites public access and exhibition as one of the main impetuses for founding
the museum:
…the history of – and the history captured by- television and radio was not
being exhibited and interpreted for the general public. Outside of university
level media/communications courses, the significance of television and radio
was not being analyzed and interpreted in public settings.
41

Paley’s vision was to elevate the medium by presenting and preserving what he, and
his industry colleagues, considered the very best of television’s offerings. Because
54

they are publicly funded, archives like the Library of Congress and UCLA’s
institutional objectives can be quite different from a private museum like The Paley
Center. While the Center’s selection policies have expanded much like other
television archives, its close relationship to the industry is reflected in the collection.
For instance, rather than librarians or academics, Paley insisted that the museum’s
board consist of network executives and industry colleagues.
42
With a television
industry based board, the goals of the museum would naturally focus on shaping the
public image of television in positive light. Additionally, the Center has long-
standing contractual agreements with studios, networks and production companies to
regularly donate programming selected by the Center.
43
Perhaps these industry ties
account for the Center’s emphasis on popular programming as well as the critically
acclaimed, and may help to explain why the soap opera genre is so well represented
in this collection in comparison to other archives.
While the Paley Center does not have complete runs of any U.S. daytime soap
operas, their collection of soap operas and material about daytime serials is
comparatively large. Unlike the other archives, the center has a more deliberate soap
opera collection, including recordings related to daytime soap operas in addition to
regular episodes. In an interview, Ron Simon, television curator for the Paley Center,
indicated that the museum selects and requests particular episodes from the
production companies that produce each soap opera.
44
The Center tries to obtain
tapes that somehow highlight popular characters and storylines to present a
representative sample of the programs, made up of single episodes focusing on
55

climatic events in the program. The museum must make selective decisions about
which storylines and characters will be highlighted and ultimately which episodes
will be preserved for public viewing. The museum’s selection process is shaped
substantially by the relationships the museum has with various soap opera production
companies (such as TeleNext Media/Procter & Gamble and Bell-Phillip Television
Productions), which is evident in the comparative volume of some programs in the
Center’s archive.
45

The Center’s daytime drama holdings can be roughly divided into three major
categories. The first group consists of a selection of regular daily episodes for a wide
variety of soaps, similar to those collected by UCLA and MBRS. Rather than random
episodes from donations or copyright registration, these episodes were chosen to
highlight major events and characters within the narrative.
46
These episodes contain
special events like births, weddings, and deaths or other major plot points in soap
opera narratives, such as affairs, kidnappings, and murders. This group also includes
many series premieres and finales. While the Center holds a fair number of these
single episodes, these single episodes must still be viewed out of their narrative
context. These climactic events are the results of months—even years—of
complicated story lines and character development. While these episodes may
provide a useful glimpse into the narratives and characteristic styles of particular
soaps, they represent only a very small portion of the complicated histories of the
programs themselves.
56

The second group of programs might be classified as anniversary episodes.
This group consists of both primetime specials and regular daytime episodes that
celebrate an anniversary or the history of the program. These shows celebrate the
soap’s history by revisiting favorite storylines and rewarding longtime viewers with
series of clips from the past. Primetime specials are more often reflections on a
specific soap opera as a whole, with interviews of cast members and producers
alongside longer montage sequences, while the daytime anniversary episodes are
often contained within the current narrative of the program. The daytime episodes in
this group also include many holiday episodes where core families of the show gather
and reminisce about family history and viewers are treated to “memories” of the
characters in the form of historical clips. This group of the Center’s holdings
suggests the importance of narrative history to viewers. These episodes allow for an
abbreviated look at the history of the program in a manageable size but skip the
complicated storytelling surrounding these revisited moments.
The third group of programs could be classified as The Paley Center’s original
programs or special events. The museum has produced several public programs and
seminars about the soap opera genre. These programs are recorded exhibitions and
seminars held at the Center featuring soap operas and their production. For instance,
in 1998, the museum held a special series “Worlds Without End: The Art and History
of the Soap Opera,” which featured events focused around the current daytime soaps
and particular tropes or attributes of the genre, such as “The Supercouples,” “The
Divas,” and “The Rituals of the Soap Opera.” Most of these seminars contained
57

discussions with cast and crewmembers, and almost all featured elaborate clip reels—
like those seen in the prime-time anniversary shows—to introduce the particular show
or topic of the night.
Particularly notable about these programs is their emphasis on an individual as
‘author’ of a soap opera, with attributes of a particular series associated with that
show’s creator or producer at the time, such as with “The Agnes Nixon Seminars” in
1988.
47
This emphasis on authorship is somewhat unusual for a genre such as the
soap opera, as it is usually only associated with notions of ‘quality’ television. Soap
opera production actually depends on the lack of visible authorship, so that one writer
can be replaced by another over the years without being too jarring for the audience,
but The Paley Center recognized that certain writers and producers stood out despite
the industry’s need to suppress an authorial signature for the sake of continuity. In
addition to their original programs, The Paley Center’s “She Made It: Women
Creating Television and Radio” initiative honored the important achievements of 150
women in the television and radio, including legendary soap opera producers and
writers Irna Phillips, Agnes Nixon, Gloria Monty and Claire Labine. This recognition
of individual women in the soap opera genre and their individual contributions
signifies the particular attention the Center has put on the soap opera genre, especially
its connection to women, not seen in other television archives. Recognizing
authorship in individual soap operas opens up the possibilities for the examination of
differences between specific soap operas and the contributions of different soap
writers, producers, and other creative talents. Yet, any kind of in-depth scholarship
58

on a individual creator or producer’s influence would be impossible with just a few
episodes of a particular show and it suggests the need for more complete archival
collections of soaps.
These special events celebrating the soap opera genre highlight the differences
between the Paley Center and archives like the Library of Congress or UCLA. The
Paley Center has a more significant investment in the soap opera genre than the other
archives, paralleling the Center’s attention to the tastes of the public rather than the
critical opinions of scholars and archivists. Fortunately, the elevation of television’s
public image has not caused the Paley Center to eschew the popular and discard a
genre with such low cultural status. In recognizing the soap opera’s longevity and
popularity, the Center also acknowledges the importance of women in soap opera
production and the power of the female audience that sustains the genre, a focus that
dovetails with its prominent place in the rise of television studies.

The Future of Soap Opera History

What does the preservation of soap operas in archives have to do with the
future of the soap opera form? What does it mean for soaps’ future if we cannot
reassemble the genre’s past? For scholars, the loss of these early episodes makes it
extremely difficult to discuss soap opera content and performance in the early days of
television. Television archivist Samuel Suratt laments the loss of many early
kinescopes due to cost-cutting management and points out that “virtually none of the
59

early soap operas have survived, the soap manufacturers, which owned them, being
even more parsimonious that the networks which broadcast them.”
48
Archival
research reveals that, despite all that is written about early soaps on television, only a
handful of these early recordings actually remain. While watching the content may
not be essential to all scholarly work about soaps, one certainly must make numerous
assumptions about the genre with so little content left for supporting evidence,
especially considering how poorly ‘representative samples’ provide context for the
complex narratives of this genre. The lack of complete runs of particular soap operas
may also prevent a scholar from accurately characterizing the unique qualities of their
object of study. Robert Rosen discusses the implications of archival acquisition
policies that have neglected to see the value in archiving the entirety of a soap opera’s
episodes:
The soap opera, of no particular interest to the student of television as an art
form, is of enormous import to the social historian. One may be tempted to
say we only need a sample of a particular series. But very often the heart and
soul of that series lies in the formula that evolved over time…The single most
important criterion for the archivist in making selections is humility, no
precluding the possibilities for future generations to discover for themselves
the value of these material.
49

The ‘heart and soul’ of a soap opera is very much the everydayness which becomes
part of its viewers’ lives. The ritualistic nature of soap viewing is again a favorite
topic of television studies, but without much attention to the specific content that
enters the viewer’s home on a daily basis. Without being able to watch the evolution
of a soap over time, much of the discussions about soap opera conventions and the so-
called formulaic nature of the genre lack the historical evidence to properly support or
60

challenge these claims. Furthermore, this lack of individualization among soaps in
scholarship also risks limiting the ways we can analyze the genre.
Returning to Rosen’s point that genres not associated with markers of
‘quality’ are often represented with samples rather than the entire series in an archive,
if soaps are merely represented by samples we lose the chance to study soaps in terms
of their individual characteristics and their relative quality to one another. If a scholar
examining television as an ‘art’ form has no interest in such a popular genre as the
soap opera, the lack of preservation of soap operas prevents the opportunity for he or
she to discover just how well the soap opera genre fits into Feuer’s notions of
‘quality’ television. Perhaps most importantly in terms of authorship, considering
that many soap writers and producers were female pioneers in the television industry,
the lack of scholarship around quality debates and soap operas will remain a lost
opportunity if the differences between individual soaps are not preserved in archives.
Examining the archival holdings of daytime soap operas can do nothing to
recapture lost episodes, but it can inform how we study what remains. When
conducting research on any television text, attention must be paid to not only its
production and viewing context but also the context in which the text is accessed by
the researcher. If it can only be seen in an archive, how did it end up there? How did
the character of the institution or their collection policy influence what programs, and
even which episodes of a program, they chose to preserve? How did business
relationships or copyright regulations help determine what we will be able to study as
part of television history? All of these questions will have serious effects on the ways
61

scholars will study the soap opera genre in the future. While the physical and
financial limitations of television archives will obviously continue, scholars need to
be aware of how these restrictions affect the field. The ‘representative samples’ that
have been preserved of an individual soap opera must be ruthlessly interrogated as to
how ‘representative’ they actually are.
As I’ve emphasized throughout this chapter, if soaps are simply archived as a
‘genre’ rather than as distinct programs, it precludes future scholars from analyzing
the content of a particular series, a particular creator or comparing various runs within
a series to one another. Dedicated soap fans often follow the particular styles and
careers of soap opera producers or writers, but the material has to be archived in order
to trace these characterizations and make comparisons in the future. Without
sufficient content, it may be impossible to discuss the different styles of particular
soap opera production companies or different networks’ soap opera line-ups. It
becomes more difficult to understand how soap operas acted as documents of precise
historical moments. Of particular importance to contemporary soap opera production
might be the ability to review historical content and analyze how particular storylines
coincided with previous ratings trends. While the vast decline in soap opera ratings is
commonly attributed to the increases in competing programming and home
technologies, content-based analysis between historically successful storylines and
contemporary ones may prove to be a valuable research tool for both television
producers and scholars.
62

Industrial-focused research on soap operas would also benefit from analysis of
the coinciding content and how it reflects industrial or technological shifts. Having
sufficient content of a specific soap available in public television archives would open
up a tremendous amount of research possibilities. Building stronger relationships
between soap opera producers and institutional archives would also insure that soap
operas achieve the recognition they deserve as part of television history. While
public archives may not be actively seeking out soaps for preservation, soap opera
producers are currently grappling with ways to capitalize on their own archives in the
digital era. New avenues for soap opera reruns such as SOAPnet, PGP’s short-lived,
internet-based ‘Classic Soaps’ channel, or episodes of the cancelled soap, Passions,
available via NBC.com, all indicate that the producers are eager to find ways to
maximize the profitability of their own archives and that there is desire by fans to
rewatch older soaps. While these offerings may not be motivated by ideas of historic
preservation, they still hint at the idea that daily soaps may have an afterlife after all.
Soap opera fans have already responded to the lack of accessibility of soap
history in the commercial marketplace by creating their own personal taped off-air
archives or posting their collections on public video sharing sites like YouTube, but
these collections don’t have the security of preservation and public access that they
would in an official archive. Fan clips posted on YouTube are always in danger of
being taken down because of copyright infringement, and personal fan archives rarely
have the physical requirements to properly store a video collection, not to mention the
fact they fans have no legal purview to do anything with their collections but view
63

them for personal use. Fan archiving may help to save some of soap history for the
future, but without the institutional weight of a public archive will soap history be
given its commensurate place within television history? All of these complications
highlight the need to increase archival emphasis on the soap opera genre, with its
unique long-format narrative structure recognized and accounted for rather than used
as an excuse to treat a singular episode as a generic example of the whole. While the
ability to examine the daily texture of many soaps is already lost, careful attention to
the archiving of current soaps will lead to greater resources for studying and
revisiting the pleasures of the daytime soap opera in the future.

64

Chapter One Endnotes

1
I use the term ‘unruly’ with reference to Kathleen Rowe’s work on women and excess.
As soaps are gendered as feminine texts, their ever-expanding size seems to fit Rowe’s
theories.

2
Soaps will occasionally rerun episodes on holidays or to celebrate a show’s
anniversary or memorialize an actor. This does not include the recent phenomenon of
daily rebroadcasts of soap operas on the cable channel SOAPnet.

3
Hyatt, Wesley. The Encyclopedia of Daytime Television. New York: Billboard
Books, 1997, 490.

4
See Charlotte Brunsdon’s Introduction and “Women’s Genres and Female Agency”
in The Feminist, the Housewife, and the Soap Opera, for a detailed explanation of the
rise of the soap opera in feminist and media studies during the 1970s and 80s.

5
Spigel, Lynn. “Barbies without Ken: Femininity, Feminism and the Art-Culture
System,” Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001, 313.

6
Brunsdon, Charlotte. “Problems with Quality.” Screen Tastes: Soap Opera to
Satellite Dishes. London: Routledge, 1997, 129.

7
Burton, Antoinette. “Introduction” Archive Stories: Facts, fictions and the writing
of history edited by Antoinette Burton Duke University Press, Durham NC, 2005, 2.

8
Lynch, Michael. “Archives in Formation: Privileged Spaces, Popular Archives and
Paper Trails.” History of the Human Sciences. Vol. 12, No. 2. London: Sage
Publications, 1999, 75.

9
Lynch, 78.

10
Steedman, Carolyn. Dust: The Archive and Cultural History. New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 2002, 68.

11
Burton, 6.

12
Feuer, Jane. “MTM Style.” MTM: ‘Quality Television. Jan Feuer, Paul Kerr and
Tise Vahimagi, Eds. (London: BFI Publishing, 1984), 33.

65

13
Caldwell, John. “Excessive Style: The Crisis of Network Television.” Television:
The Critical View. Horace Newcomb, Ed. (New York: Oxford University Press,
2000). (659-662)

14
Seiter, Ellen. “Women Writing Soap Opera: The Careers of Irna Phillips and Jane
Crusinberry.” Never Ending Stories: American Soap Operas and the Cultural
Production of Meaning. Hans Borchers, Gabriele Kreutzner, and Eva-Maria Warth,
Eds. Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier: 1994.

15
Feuer, 56

16
Feuer, 56

17
Brower, Sue. “Fans as Tastemakers: Viewers for Quality Television.” The Adoring
Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media. Lisa Lewis, Ed. (London: Routledge,
1992), 163-164

18
Brower, 181

19
Brower, 170

20
Brunsdon, Charlotte. “Problems With Quality.” Screen Tastes: Soap Opera to
Satellite Dishes. (London: Routledge, 1997). 142-143

21
Brunsdon, 130

22
Brunsdon, 130-133

23
Brunsdon, 134

24
All items were later consolidated at UCLA. “Appendix B: A Selective Chronology
of Events Relating to Television and Video Archives.” Library of Congress
Television and Video Preservation 1997: A Study of the Current State of American
Television and Video Preservation, 156.

25
Kompare, Derek. Rerun Nation: How Repeats Invented American Television. New
York: Routledge, 2005, 102-114. See Kompare’s section The Museum and the
Archive, 111-114, for a more detailed history of these institutions’ origins.

26
Marquis, Kathleen. “Not Dragon at the Gate but Research Partner: The Reference
Archivists as Mediator.” Archives, Documentation and Institutions of Social
Memory: Essays from the Sawyer Seminar. Ed. Francis Blouin Jr. and William G.
Rosenberg. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006, 36.
66

27
Cook, Terry. “Remembering the Future: Appraisal of Records and the Role of
Archives in Constructing Social Memory.” Archives, Documentation and Institutions
of social Memory: Essays from the Sawyer Seminar. Ed. Francis Blouin Jr. and
William G. Rosenberg. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006.

28
These categories come from my interview with UCLA archivist Dan Einstein and
the archive’s internal collection policy: “UCLA Film and Television Archive
Collection Policy: Television,” unpublished. Dated March 17, 2003.

29
Profiles of Generations and The City appear in Worlds Without End: The Art and
History of the Soap Opera. Museum of Television and Radio, New York: H.N.
Abrams, 1997.

30
Generations ran from March 1989 to January 1991 on NBC. BET Cable Network
purchased the 470 episodes after its cancellation. McNeil, Alex, Total Television, 4
th

Edition, New York: Penguin Books, 1996, 320.

31
UCLA has a donation relationship with the Academy of Television Arts and
Sciences. University of California Los Angeles, UCLA Film & Television
Archive Television Collections,
http://www.cinema.ucla.edu/collections/television.html.

32
Spehr, Paul. “Selection and Rejection at the Library of Congress.” Documents that
move and speak: audiovisual archives in the new information age: National Archives
of Canada, Ottawa, Canada, April 30, 1990-May 3, 1990: proceedings of a
symposium. Ed. Naugler, Harold. Munchen, Germany: K.G. Saur, 1992, 50. The
Library can also demand programs that have not been registered if they are
commercially traded and the Library has the right to record programs off-air if
necessary.

33
Spehr, 52.

34
Library of Congress Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division,
Television in the Library of Congress April 8, 2008
http://www.loc.gov/rr/mopic/tvcoll.html.

35
Spehr, 52.

36
Library of Congress Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division,
Television in the Library of Congress April 8, 2008
http://www.loc.gov/rr/mopic/tvcoll.html.

67

37
Personal correspondence and phone interview with Library of Congress librarian
Rosemary Hanes, February 2006.

38
A production company may register an episode for copyright at any time within the
life of the copyright, so there is a possibility that many more episodes will be added
to the collection in the future.

39
I am still examining the Palely Center as a museum even though they have taken
the word out of their official title.

40
Kompare, 113.

41
Gibbons, Douglas. Museum of Television & Radio submission to Library of
Congress Television and Video Preservation 1997: A Study of the Current State of
American Television and Video Preservation, V.5: Submissions, Washington, D.C.:
U.S. Government Printing Office, October 1997, 227.

42
Kompare, 113.

43
Gibbons, 227.

44
Interview with Ron Simon, Curator, Museum of Television and Radio, December
2002.

45
The Paley Center’s Los Angeles Board of Governors currently includes William J.
Bell Jr., president of Bell-Phillip Television Productions, Inc and son of soap opera
creators William J. Bell and Lee Phillip Bell. Bell-Phillip Television Productions
solely produces The Bold and the Beautiful and produces The Young and the Restless
in conjunction with Sony Pictures Television.

46
Interview with Ron Simon, Curator, Museum of Television and Radio, December
2002.

47
Agnes Nixon created All My Children in 1970 and One Life to Live in 1968.

48
Suratt, Samuel. “One Hundred Years: Television Heritage, the Mirror of Our
Society” Moving Image Review. Blue Hill Falls, ME: Northeast Historic Film,
Winter, 1995.

49
Rosen, Robert. UCLA Film and Television Archive written submission to Library
of Congress Television and Video Preservation 1997: A Study of the Current State of
American Television and Video Preservation, V.5: Submissions, 452.
68
Chapter Two:
The Fan as the Soap Opera Historian: The unofficial archives of soaps

What do you do when you can’t remember if Erica Kane has been married
seven times or eight? How many failed engagements did the character of Brenda
Barret have on General Hospital? Or how Days of Our Lives explained Hope
Brady’s return from the dead when the audience saw her being dropped into a vat of
acid? What if you would just love to watch Kim Zimmer as Reva Shayne declare
herself the ‘slut of Springfield’ again on The Guiding Light? You won’t find a handy
episode guide on the network’s web site as you might for their prime time shows or
on the official websites and Facebook pages for the soap operas still in production.
You also won’t find it on Netflix or at your local video store. Moreover, you are not
likely to catch an old episode or two while flipping through your cable channels. In
the past, the easiest way to get answers to these burning questions was to ask your
grandmother, or mother, or any friend who watched that particular soap. Now, the
best way to find out about the twists and turns of the complicated narrative history of
a soap opera is to go online and find one of the hundreds of fan created web sites
dedicated to soaps. Soap opera fans, whether in person or on the web, are the real
arbiters of soap opera history.
Access to television history has always been problematic for both scholars and
fans of any genre. Before the advent of the VCR, viewers had very selective access
to past programs through reruns, and therefore were dependent on which programs
were selected for reairing through syndication. Currently, viewers can access past
69

television programming through syndication, home recording technologies,
commercially sold VHS and DVD collections and in official archives. Soap operas
are significant here in that they have not been available through reruns or syndication
until very recently.
1
As discussed in Chapter 1, full access to the entire narrative of a
soap opera is also not available in official archives and I assume that television
archives like The Paley Center and UCLA are inaccessible to the majority of soap
fans simply by virtue of their locations. However, if soap fans pride themselves on
their knowledge of soap history, how do they access this narrative history? What do
soap fans do when official collections and reruns are unavailable to fill in the gaps?
One of the major avenues for viewers to access current and past information
about U.S. daytime soaps is through Internet fan sites. Fan websites and message
boards are not only a place for fans to express opinions and share their enthusiasm for
a particular object or text, but also a place to find and share historical information.
Many of these sites, and the individual fans running these sites, take it upon
themselves to chronicle the narrative history of a particular soap. Soap opera fan sites
pool the knowledge of their readers and fans to create records of a narrative so big
that its history does not exist for public consumption anywhere else.
2
The sites serve
as a place where fans can ask questions about past storylines and compare current to
past narratives. The free exchange of historical knowledge functions differently on
these user-created fan sites than in traditional paths of historical knowledge, where
knowledge is held by the few and dispersed through official channels to the masses.
Soap opera fan sites function much the same way that many fan-based television
70

program sites operate, providing episode recaps and background information. The
obvious difference here is that soaps are daily programs with histories dating back
decades as opposed to the standard twenty-two episodes per season of a prime time
program. On these sites, soap fans publish a history that is important to them, but one
that is rarely considered valuable enough to be rerun or published elsewhere by
anyone but the viewers themselves.
Other television fandoms often have the luxury of rewatching the program
they follow when it is reaired, whether in network reruns or even years of syndication
runs for more popular series (and increasingly on DVD or Netflix). Historically for a
soap opera fan, if you didn’t record a particular episode, there was little chance of
ever seeing it again. Due to the lack of access to past soap opera texts through
syndication runs or commercial sales, soap fans have taken it upon themselves to
record their favorite soaps and create their own fan archives. These video collections
are a rare commodity allowing fans to revisit particular moments and storylines that
were once an inaccessible part of their television viewing memories. These
collections not only open up the possibility of re-watching programming that was
thought to be a lost part of television history, they also allow fans to manipulate the
complicated narrative structure of the soap opera genre in order to maximize their
pleasure in revisiting these programs. In this chapter, I explore how soap opera fans
function as both historians and archivists for this unusually large television genre and
also examine how archives have allowed fans to explore the ability to manipulate the
object of their fandom to suit their own desires.
71

Part I: Home-Made Soap Opera Archives

Without reruns or an easy way to rewatch their beloved soaps, women began
saving what they loved by using new home recording technologies. In fact, it was
the proliferation of home recording technologies that allowed women to ‘save’ their
favorite soaps from fading into memories. As the number of women working outside
the home continued to grow, the opportunity to watch soaps live in the afternoon
shrunk. As the VCR became a common home technology in the 1980s, women
started taping their daily soaps. The introduction of such an affordable and relatively
simple home recording technology allowed women to time shift their soap opera
viewing. While time shifting is mostly a convenience for the viewer, it also means
viewers who taped their afternoon soap ended up with a physical record of that day’s
episode, a recording that, if the viewer experienced significant pleasure viewing,
could be saved and re-experienced in the future. The opportunity to transform a one-
time-only experience, which is essentially what watching a soap on broadcast
television would have been before the advent of SOAPnet or streaming episodes in
the late 2000s, into a physical item that can be owned, collected and even
manipulated has a tremendous effect on how viewers relate to television itself. This
growth in technology changed the way a viewer could relate to television’s past:
The digital and video revolutions have, in particular, transformed our ability
to access, circulate, and consume the cultural past. The surfeit of information
in contemporary culture, enabled by information technologies like computers,
cable television, VCR and digital recording, has had a dramatic impact both
on our engagement with the past and our sense of the archive.”
3

72

While the expansion of cable offered more outlets for television production
companies to profit from their back catalogs of programming and consumer video and
DVD sales provided yet another way for viewers to get hold of much of television’s
past, these were still of little help to soap viewers. While the industry didn’t see the
profitability in using the tremendous back catalog of soaps until the last decade or so,
home recording technologies allowed women to start building their own soap opera
archives. Women began doing what television programmers or official archives
refused to do when soap viewers thought enough of their own off-air copies of soaps
to start saving them.
Lynn Spigel labels this growth of the personal TV archive as the practice of
“’Do-It-Yourself TV’ history.”
4
Before the days of the internet, Soap Opera Digest
ran a classified section for fans looking for specific episodes to buy or trade for their
own collections. Louise Spence cites these trading and collecting practices as the
way soap fans hold on to their personal histories with the soap: “If it seems that
soaps go on forever, but are destined to disappear, these private archives are personal
viewing histories, allowing us to replay our memories. Without them, soaps are
ephemeral.”
5
So as the introduction of home recording technologies made personal
archives of soap operas possible, the evolution of the internet made the trading and
selling of soap tapes in order to build or expand one’s personal archives much more
accessible. I discovered many of these homemade or DIY archives of soap operas
online. Women were collecting tapes of multiple years of a single soap or even
multiple soaps to create their own personal soap opera archives. A simple internet
73

search for “soap opera tapes” or for example, “General Hospital tapes,” will
introduce you to any number of soap tape collectors. I came across collections that
spanned decades’ worth of one soap, concentrations of soaps from one network,
archives of multiple soaps for a specific time span, etc. The choices of what to collect
and how much to collect vary between each individual collector and his or her taste
preferences. The most extensive archive I found was a woman who had every
episode of General Hospital since 1984, along with episode descriptions (or links to
individual episode descriptions) for almost every episode in her collection. This
collector also had the most extensive collection of edited couple or character
compilation tapes that I came across, many of which I ordered and used in my
research for this dissertation. Her archive also held over 20 years of daily episodes
of Days of Our Lives, 18 years of All My Children and One Life To Live, plus the
complete runs of shorter lived series Sunset Beach and Port Charles and a large
number of ‘special event’ tapes from soap opera television specials or soap fan
events. This particular collector is quite well known among other collectors and had
networked with other collectors to increase the scope of her collection over time.
This was by far the largest private archive I encountered, with most private
collections concentrating on one particular soap or a multi-soap collection that
spanned a finite number of years. But using this one private archive as an example,
the ability to access soap opera history by trading or purchasing a tape from such a
DIY archive is far greater than that provided by official television archives (the
74

subject of Chapter One) or the producers of soaps themselves (which I discuss more
in the next chapter).
Kim Bjarkman’s discussion of amateur television archivists argues that “…in
creating private archives fan-collectors sometimes see themselves picking up the
slack for official archives.”
6
While none of her case studies cite collecting soap
operas, it is clear that the collectors express a desire to archive programs that they feel
will not get the kind of archival attention, and therefore preservation, because of
either their short life span on the air or their low status in terms of genre (science
fiction particularly). None of the collectors I encountered ever referenced the lack of
soap opera preservation in official archives as a direct motivation for their personal
archives, but lack of access to favorite past moments of a soap opera was usually a
primary motive for a fan to start saving their own off-air copies or seeking out
recordings of such moments from other fans. The following is from a fan lamenting
all the soaps she doesn’t have recordings of because she hadn’t owned a VCR:
So many things I WISH I had from the time before I had VHS...but after I
joined the 20th Century, Lucky's death...I was completely unspoiled at the time and I
bawled like a baby. I was SHOCKED when we found out he was alive. A few years
ago, a friend compiled all of the Liason (a nickname for a popular General Hospital
couple Liz and Jason) scenes pre-NOP (night of passion) on DVD. They are
treasured and would be one of the handful of things I would save in the event of a
catastrophe. I have most of the GH episodes since May of 2006 saved on my external
hard drive. As the show got more and more horrible, I haven't had the heart to watch
most of them but I guess I hold onto them for posterity.
7

The fan also states the intention to save her recordings “for posterity” even though
she admits to not having watched them. The lack of access to recordings of the
75

poster’s early soap memories drives her to save the current recordings of General
Hospital in order to prevent any future inability to rewatch favorite scenes or
characters. As discussed in the previous chapter, official television archives, along
with being very selective in their soap opera holdings, are usually not a practical
source for the vast majority of television viewers. Thus, the one-time only broadcast
airing of each soap episode clearly leaves the burden of collecting on the viewer if
they ever hope to rewatch a particular episode. While I most often found the
evidence of these amateur archives on sites that focused on the trading or selling of
copies of these recordings, tape trading and edited compilation tapes can usually be
traced back to individual collectors with personal archives. Other than the collections
held privately by the production companies themselves, and therefore not available to
the public, these home-made soap archives are by far the most complete existing
archives of daytime soap operas.

Soap Collectors – resisting erasure

The phenomenon of collecting television is not specific to the soap opera
genre, but collecting an ephemeral medium such as television has implications
beyond that which we normally associate with the act of collecting. The fact that a
television program is not an actual physical object (with the exception of video and
DVD recordings sold commercially by the program’s producers) can add to a
collector’s desire to capture and possess such a fleeting entity. Bjarkman argues that
a television collector’s “pleasure is bound up with anxieties about television’s
76

resistance to the world of physical objects and must navigate the paradoxes of a
medium that is at once pervasive and scarce.”
8
Not only does the television collector
strive to rescue a particular television program from erasure as part of television’s
history, but also from the loss of the tangible, and therefore personally accessible,
world of physical objects. The recoding and collecting of television as physical
object gives a collector the ability to preserve and control something that was not
originally produced as a physical object for sale directly to consumers.
In Bjarkman’s work on television collectors, she cites the derided cultural
value of certain television texts, in her case science fiction, as a motivation for the
television collector:
Media fandoms work toward this common end to the extent that members feel
they have a ‘shared culture’ to defend and preserve. By treating culturally
derided texts as collectibles, fans attach value where dominant society may
assign none, seeking legitimacy for texts dismissed as trivial, trashy, bizarre,
or altogether forgettable by mainstream audiences.
9

“Trashy” and “forgettable” are descriptors often associated with the soap opera genre.
Before the relatively recent airing of reruns of soaps on cable, collectors believed they
were saving these derided texts from being lost as part of television history. James
Clifford’s work on collecting maintains that, “collecting…implies a rescue of
phenomenon from inevitable historical decay or loss. The collection contains what
‘deserves’ to be kept, remembered, and treasured.”
10
Soap fans had no reason to think
that soap operas would ever show up in reruns, so taping daily episodes and keeping
all, or even a select few, of the episodes serves as a way of conveying value onto
something that held some kind of emotional resonance in their own lives.
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Bjarkman also asserts that fan collectors are “focused on saving or
resuscitating condemned text, using the home video archive to aid in a media
fandom’s communal struggles to revive canceled shows and to subvert or supplement
mainstream society’s “classic TV” canon.
11
The soap opera genre certainly flies in
the face of what would be considered the ‘classic TV’ canon. Soap fans are acutely
aware of the low cultural status of the soaps, especially when the expanding world of
cable and commercial television DVD box sets still excludes almost all of soap opera
history from their ranks. By recording and collecting soap operas, individual fans
preserve these moments for their personal archives and the recording itself then
becomes a valuable commodity when introduced into the larger soap fan community.
If a collector trades or sells copies from his or her collection, fans who obtain copies
from them often lavish the collector with praise for allowing them to revisit a part of
television history they thought was lost to them forever. In the guestbook of a Days
Of Our Lives archive, I found numerous fans thanking the collector for giving them
the chance to watch a favorite couple or storyline again: “I'm so glad I found your
site! I'm a big Days fan and have been for over 20 years. My favorite couple is Steve
and Kayla and I would LOVE to buy some tapes from you. I'm just so ecstatic that I
found someone who has copies.”
12
To this fan, the collector has validated their deep
love of this television couple by thinking the soap opera valuable enough to collect.
Thank-yous from soap fans who have ordered these historic soap tapes appear acutely
aware that without the collector’s forethought, they would never be able to see these
programs again:
78

I absolutely love that this is available. Being able to relive the beautiful
memories of a magical place Salem. I attribute this soap to a very happy and
joyous time in my life personally and professionally.
13

Despite the deep emotional resonance viewers have found in soaps and their once
massive ratings, these soap fans recognize that soaps’ low artistic status and
association as women’s culture will largely prevent them from becoming part of the
classic TV canon they see emerging on cable and therefore ripe for erasure from the
larger cultural memory in general. If they ever want to watch it again, soap fans have
realized that they have to do it themselves.

Soap Fan Historians – a group effort

While I’ve noted that there are some “official’ sources for histories of current
prime time programming (network websites, promotional books, etc.), most fans,
especially ones of complicated serial narratives, still rely on other members of the
program’s fandom to keep the most detailed records of their common fan object.
Frequently, but not always, the collectors/archivists are a fan community’s historians
as well, simply by virtue of organizing and cataloguing their own collections. Again,
Bjarkman describes this function as a serious part of the television collector’s world:
Fan groups rely on industrious scribes and record keepers who annotate self-
fashioned archives with historical records and documentation. Alongside fan
fiction, fanzines, and newsletters, fan authors chronicle broadcast history with
television themed web sites and meticulous episode guides. Episode guide
authors and compilers take the role of television chronicle-historian very
seriously…
14

79

While the collector fights to save the physical record of a program from erasure from
television’s history, the historian not only creates a document to chronicle the
program, they also share that knowledge with the larger community, whereas a
collector may not always share his or her tapes. The role of historian expands
beyond that of the archivist in that their historical knowledge marks them as not only
a resource to the fan community, helping initiate new fans or filling in gaps of other
fans’ narrative knowledge, but also as holding a position of authority, someone who
may point out inconsistencies within the present narrative (rewriting history is a
common practice in contemporary soaps) or correct other fans when they somehow
‘get it wrong’ regarding a soap’s history.
The extremely long and sometimes almost comically complicated narrative
history of any one soap opera poses a unique challenge to soap fans and fan
communities when it comes to the role of historian. While fan historians exist in most
television fandoms, the role of the historian in soap fandom faces unique challenges
because of the tremendous length of a successful soap opera. Nancy Baym’s work on
early online soap opera fandom discusses how online fans communities must share
knowledge of a soap’s history because the volume of narrative material in most
broadcast soaps is too large for any single fan to remember.
15

Hans Borchers’ also discussed this phenomenon in his section of “Don’t Treat
Us Like We’re So Stupid and Naïve: Towards and Ethnography of Soap Opera
Viewers,” which is particularly relevant when it comes to soap viewers as the arbiters
of soap history. In discussing how viewers negotiate the virtual impossibility of
80

knowing the entire “meta-text” of a long running soap opera, he finds that viewers
use different strategies to master the genre. One strategy involves fan reliance on the
community of viewers to comprehend gaps in their own knowledge; he calls these fan
activities collective constructions or collaborative readings.
16
This strategy pre-dates
online communities and may originate from the mentoring process that occurs when
new viewers begin watching with their mothers, older relatives or friends. The soap
genre has long relied on the mentoring process, in which current viewers introduce
new viewers to the program and its history, to build viewership because the
complicated narrative history is often seen as prohibitive to non-soap viewers.
Advancements in technology, which have resulted in the increasingly diverse and
individualized methods in which we watch television, have somewhat fractured that
essential mentoring process and thus become one of the contributing factors of the
genre’s steadily declining ratings. Watching a soap requires some knowledge of the
narrative history and therefore the genre necessitates some type of soap historian to
help initiate new members of the community.
The keeping of a soap’s history consequently becomes an important
community exercise and is linked to some of the unique pleasures of the soap opera
genre itself. Because of the enormous volume of a soap’s history, soap fans literally
must be part of some kind of community in order to accrue knowledge of backstory
that happened before they began watching. The fact that viewers voluntarily take up
this time and effort-consuming role of chronicler or historian is a testament to the
emotional investment these historians have already made in the soap opera itself. The
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following response on a “Frequently Asked Questions” page from a web-mistress of a
Days of Our Lives fan site (which focused on the history of the program), exemplifies
the kind of value soap fans place on sharing their knowledge of a soap’s history with
the larger community of fans:
Q: What made you decide to start this Days Fan Club website?
A: Well, I felt I wanted to contribute more to the DAYS fans, to keep you
updated, informed, and in the know. I know what its like going from site to
site trying to find ONE simple answer to my question and threading through
millions of sites wasn't any fun. So, here I am offering to do the dirty work for
you (since I already been to most, if not all the sites on the net) and I also
wanted a place where all fans could come and put their ideas into one site. I
try to make it for the fans by the fans, and as interactive as possible!
17

This sharing of historical knowledge with other fans is a way of opening up
new fans to the specific pleasures that historical knowledge brings when watching a
soap. Knowledge of the characters’ extensive histories in the narrative allows fans to
bring much more to bear in reading each scene than is possible for a first time
viewer.
18
The layers of history can be years if not decades long. For example, the
story of a young Bianca Montgomery on All My Children being raped and then
deciding to keep the child that resulted from it, is a much more powerful story when
you know that her mother, Erica Kane, was also raped as a young girl and decided to
give up the child that resulted from it, blocking out her memories of the rape and the
child altogether.
According to Robert Allen’s theory of the paradigmatic aspect of the soap
opera text, long time fans and faithful viewers derive much of their pleasure from
their knowledge of the complex history of the relationships and characters as they
watch the narrative unfold. With extensive knowledge of a soap’s history, a current
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viewer can experience the multitude of implications that a simple narrative action
might hold due to the specific histories of the characters involved.
19
So for a soap
fan, access and knowledge of the soap’s narrative history is not just a way to clarify
the background of current characters or events, but is extremely important in order get
achieve the maximum enjoyment when watching the current incarnation of the
program. Devoted soap fans know they have to keep track of the intricacies of a
soap’s narrative history in order to appreciate the program to its fullest.
This accumulation of historical knowledge is not only a way of increasing
one’s viewing pleasure and mentoring new fans into the fan community; it also gives
fans a sense of authority and ownership over the narrative. Soaps were designed to
appear as an un-authored text so that the story world can continue seamlessly while
different writers and producers come and go. While particular writers and producers’
styles are sometimes recognized and even followed by fans, the soaps themselves
have always been multi-authored so that they could outlast any single creative
contributor. A long time fan’s knowledge of the narrative history may span multiple
writers and they can often claim a mastery over the narrative even superior to the
actual writers, especially when a writer either violates that history (which happens
quite frequently for story and economic considerations) or when a writer fails to
capitalize on a historical element that could enhance a current storyline. Bielby,
Harrington and Bielby cite how this accumulation of historical knowledge is a result
of a large investment of both time and effort, thus leading to this sense of ownership
of a soap’s narrative history:
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The distinctive features of the soap opera genre and the institutional context of
the production of daytime serials permit their fans to make claims about
ownership of the narrative. The on-going, open ended narrative of soap
operas requires fans to make substantial cognitive and affective investments to
derive value from the product, and fans’ participation in public sites for
discussion and criticism in effect make them co-authors or co-producers of the
narrative.
20

The sense of authority over the history of a soap causes fans to be both intensely
critical and intensely loyal. The long-term investment keeps avid fans watching even
when they are dissatisfied with the narrative, in hopes that a new story or new writer
will be able to turn the program around. Longtime soap fans are both a soap opera’s
best selling feature, loyal viewers, and sometimes their most problematic, critical and
highly demanding viewers. The fact that part of the pleasure of watching a soap is so
tied to a viewer’s knowledge of history leads to the soap fan functioning as the soap
opera historian, rather than the studio or even the writers themselves. Maintaining a
history of a program usually falls into the hands of the production company or
network that creates it and then perhaps later into the hands of a television archive,
but in the case of soaps women fans have taken up the responsibility where no one
else would.

YouTube and Fan archives online

Sharing or distributing soap episodes from a personal collection can be extremely
time and labor intensive. First, there is the initial effort to record and collect episodes
of a daily soap opera, then the effort involved in publicizing your collection to other
fans and cataloging your collection so that other fans can search through it in order to
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trade with you. After letting other fans know that you have historical episodes you
want to share or trade, comes the physical labor of creating duplicates, shipping and
exchanging payments or reimbursements. This also does not include the labor
intensive editing that occurs in the character or couple compilation videos that many
collectors create. While fans trade and purchase episodes for their own personal
collections, many collectors have chosen to post much of their collection on video
sharing portals such as YouTube. Searching YouTube for soap storylines and
characters is probably the fastest, most convenient way to watch soap history.
Collectors seemingly upload their clips just to share them with other soap fans or to
publicize their own collections. David Sarno writes in the LA Times how YouTube is
quickly becoming the largest historical stockpile of all vintage television, not just
soap operas:
Indeed, as television collectors large and small continue to digitize and upload
thousands of rare old film reels and videotapes, YouTube is threatening to
become a repository of television history that could rival the nation’s leading
broadcast museums, both in the scope of its offerings and in the number of
people it can reach.
21

YouTube has become a kind of functioning DIY public archive for television
history.
22

Emma Webb’s discussion of soap opera fans using YouTube to post historical
clips of their favorite soaps illustrates how fan historians post their videos as a service
to the soap opera fan community by way of increasing other fan’s knowledge of the
past and therefore creating a type of collective memory for all of a particular soap’s
fans:
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YouTube has provided new avenues for GH fans to express their dedication to
the show, generating a collective memory of the show’s history through
archiving historical moments from their show, and analyzing character
motivations through both these videos and the online discussions these visual
works are embedded within.
23

Accessing these historical episodes is a way to review a soap’s past narrative in order
to analyze and discuss the current narrative, thus increasing fans’ participation and
the pleasure they derive from the soap. This drive to create a collective memory
among soap fans emphasizes the necessity for fans to take over this role as historian,
because they know that soap history is not being captured as part of television’s larger
historical cannon. Youtube is one of the most well know and easily accessible video
portals on the Internet. By posting their soap videos there, collectors can get
immediate feedback from other fans. If it is a favorite scene or storyline in the video,
the poster is quickly in touch with other fans that post comments on the video,
creating an almost instant community of fans who want to share their collective
memories about and surrounding that particular video. Posting on Youtube is a much
more public forum for fans to post their videos than the more specialized online soap
communities, where fans with extensive video archives tend to offer to sell or trade
tapes. Fans with large video archives and fans with just a few tapes are just as likely
to post on Youtube; there is no assumption that a poster has a larger collection to
offer. Fans also post compilation videos or fan music videos, which I discuss more in
the second part of this chapter, and Youtube provides a great space for feedback and
discussion a the poster’s particular interpretation of a particular character, couple,
etc.…
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One soap collector/trader I encountered told me she decided to post her
archival clips to YouTube in order to educate newer viewers because of the
frustration she felt when other online fans were ‘getting it wrong:’
People were getting the history wrong and it bothered me. You wouldn’t
believe how many people claimed to be fans but didn’t know the most basic
and one of the most important details about a character. I posted as a way to
show them what actually happened and because it was a good way to show
what I had in my collection to generate more trading.
24

This collector’s sentiments express both the soap historian’s desire to spread their
‘correct’ knowledge to less informed viewers, which would then theoretically
increase that newer viewer’s pleasure when watching the current soap, but also to
establish herself as a historian or ‘expert’ on the program, who keeps other viewers
from what she considers ‘incorrect’ readings of particular characters or stories. As
mentioned earlier, the knowledge of history not only increases the pleasure when
reading the text itself, but also creates status in the fan community, also increasing the
historian’s pleasure when participating in a community.

The Status of the Fan ‘Expert’

The ability to revisit past storylines and the details of those stories and build
their own sense of authority over the narrative is another element of fan pleasure that
videos from fan archives provide. For a genre that is so dependent on its own
narrative history, the lack of available reruns before the recent advent of SOAPnet has
made it impossible for fans to review that history, either for their own pleasure or to
better understand the current narrative by tracing its origins. Jennifer Hayward
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discusses how the problem of “serial ephemerality” prevents fans from reviewing the
past in her examination of the serial form in both daily comic strips and soap operas:
The sheer volume of textual production virtually negates the possibility of re-
experiencing earlier installments. Unless we save each day’s strip or
videotape or buy one of the histories created and marketed as a solution to
exactly this problem of serial ephemerality, there is no way to perform the
kind of reality check we often run on novels, glancing back through the text to
see what we have missed or forgotten.
25

Fan video archives stand in for the commercial histories that are rarely available for
soap operas, as opposed to the reruns or commercial DVDs available for most other
narrative television programming.
26
The few commercial histories created for soaps
are usually anniversary photo or trivia books and offer only a cursory history of the
soap, providing very few of the details fans pride themselves on knowing. By
acquiring these tapes or accessing them online, viewers can exercise a kind of
authority over a particular text that was previously unobtainable for soap fans. The
fans can now own a physical copy of the text rather than having to rely on their own
memories or even historical knowledge gathered from other fans when watching or
discussing a particular storyline/soap. The existence of this material evidence can put
soap fans in a position to judge current storylines and characters for narrative
continuity and accuracy. Because of the extreme length of the narrative and its
inaccessibility to fans, soap opera producers have begun to rely on the impermanence
of the text in order to revise the narrative history without fear of confusing most
viewers.
27
It becomes much easier to bring a character back from the dead if there is
no chance of viewers accidentally coming across his or her elaborate death scene
airing in reruns. These personal video archives allow fans to function as a kind of
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historical watchdog, often becoming very vocal when writers and producers violate
the narrative history too egregiously or without a plausible enough explanation.
Possessing this material evidence can give a fan a sense of power that daytime fans
have historically been denied, in both their low cultural status as soap viewers and
their inability to access a soap’s history. Webb discusses how classic clips posted on
YouTube not only provide historical context for viewers when characters return to the
soap canvas but it gives them,
the opportunity to evaluate whether the characters’ current actions are
consistent with their past… thus allowing them to judge whether the current
writer is as familiar with and loyal to the program’s history as the fans.
28

While fans don’t actually have any direct power over a soap's production, they can
still find pleasure in gaining the status of ‘expert’ on a particular storyline or show.
Even if a fan’s power can only be wielded within a particular fan community or in
conjunction with others in a fan campaign attempting to influence a show’
writers/producers, the possession of these compilation videos still allows him or her
to occupy a position of authority that would be impossible without them.
Establishing this position of authority, because of one’s knowledge of a soap’s
narrative history, and the ability to access a soap’s history through uploaded fan
archives, comes together in the following example of one soap fan’s success in
transitioning from soap viewer to professional soap writer.

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Fan Becomes Author: Sri Rao and the writing of General Hospital: Night Shift
Season 2

In July of 2008, SOAPnet premiered the second season of its General
Hospital spin-off series, General Hospital: Night Shift, a weekly prime time series
featuring characters from the daytime soap as well as new characters placed in the
hospital setting. The cable net launched the successful spin-off in July 2007, with
season one’s premiere ranking as the highest rated telecast in SOAPnet’s history.
While the ratings for the freshman season were good, the reviews were not. Soap
fans and critics panned the show and complained about the lack of continuity with the
daytime broadcasts of General Hospital.
29
Bob Guza and Elizabeth Korte, the head
writers for the first season of Night Shift, were also the head writer and associate head
writer, respectively, of General Hospital at the same time they wrote Night Shift.
Despite the fact the two shows had the same head writers, the continuity of the two
programs did not match at all, with one of the main characters of both shows
incarcerated on General Hospital while roaming free and performing community
service at the hospital on Night Shift. When SOAPnet announced that the spin off
would air a second season, they also announced that it would have a new, little-
known head writer, Sri Rao, and that there would be continuity between the two
shows. Soap opera writers, especially head writers, are well known for moving
between the different daytime dramas over the life of their career, and those achieving
head writer status is a very small group. Previously, Sri Rao had never written for a
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daytime soap opera, or even a major television show, gaining notice only for an
independent pilot and selling a series to Nickelodeon’s teen cable channel, The N.
30

Even with such little professional experience, Rao was embraced by fans because of
his self-proclaimed fandom for General Hospital. A large part of Rao’s success with
fans and critics, despite the season’s lackluster ratings, was his identification as a long
time General Hospital fan and his dedication to the history of the soap. He compared
his surprising appointment to a fantasy that most fans have; to become the writer and
make sure the stories work out the way you want them to:
I grew up on General Hospital. It is the show I’ve watched the most in my
life. I started watching at eight years old, and religiously tuned in for 15
years…I never considered writing for daytime TV, but when they called, it
was perfect. It really was a dream come true. As a fan, it’s like being given
the keys to the candy store. I think every fan headwrites a soap in their head
at one point or another. And I actually got to do it. It was a huge thrill and a
lot of fun.
31

Besides his own status as a long time General Hospital fan, Rao was also quick to
espouse his respect for the passion and intelligence of soap opera fans, a kind of
recognition soap fans rarely experience:
Soap fans are so loyal and so educated as viewers. The fact that they figured
out who I was and (that) I was the writer is so much more sophisticated than
prime time viewers. I was really flattered and honored by the response I got
from the fans and that meant a lot to me.
32

Though flattering your audience is pretty standard stuff for marketing and promoting
a new program, Rao’s public identification with fans made it easier for fans to
consider him one of their own rather than one of TIIC (the idiots in charge), as soap
writers and executives are commonly known on soap opera message boards.
Hopefully most television writers are at least moderate fans of the TV shows they
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write for, but Rao’s vocal identity as a soap fan provided instant credibility. It is
Rao’s use of the soap’s history and his use of the resources provided by soap fan
historians that makes his work relevant to my project.
One of the major components of Night Shift’s second season was the return of
several significant historical characters from General Hospital. Rao brought back the
characters of Robert Scorpio (played by Tristan Rogers), Anna Devane (played by
Finola Hughes) and Jagger Cates (played by Antonio Sabato, Jr.). All three
characters had been major players when they originally appeared on General
Hospital, and all three of the original actors returned when they appeared on Night
Shift. While long-term fans could recognize the characters instantly, Rao faced the
challenge of getting his current writers to write for historical characters, some of
whom had not appeared on the show in over decade, and not all of his writers
watched General Hospital religiously while growing up like he did. Rao was able to
hand pick his own writing staff for the second season, which he described as
consisting of a third who were current writers on General Hospital, a third who had
never written for daytime before but were fans of General Hospital and a third who
had never written for daytime and had never watched General Hospital.
33
While he
termed this combination of writers as an interesting experiment, it also created
challenges for the writers who had never written for or were not familiar with these
well-established characters (even some of the current General Hospital writers did
not write for the program when some of the historical characters were on the canvas).
Rao gave his writers the broad strokes of the characters and their histories and then
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had them turn to YouTube to familiarize themselves with the actual stories, the way
the characters spoke, their mannerism, etc.
34

Even for the professionals involved in creating the soap operas, the online
soap archives fans created on sites such as YouTube are by far the easiest way to
view historical episodes of a soap. While Rao could have had ABC pull specific
General Hospital episodes from long term storage, there would have been a great
amount of time and effort involved in selecting which episodes to pull for different
characters and stories, having copies made of those episodes and then distributing
them to the Night Shift writers. Webb’s discussion of the exponential growth of soap
opera videos on YouTube, highlights the easy access to soap opera history it creates:
YouTube provides an easy-to-access record of GH’s history, though often
this record is truncated so that only the highlights of a character’s history are
available. Viewers who no longer watch GH on television or who long for a
particular storyline or character from the past can go online and revisit that
history.
35

Webb points out some of the pitfalls of only having access to the highlights of a
character or story, similar to the ‘greatest hits’ type collecting I found in several of the
official television archives. Nevertheless, the availability of these historic episodes
and clips on the web is infinitely more accessible to most soap opera viewers, and in
this case, soap opera writers, than official television archives or the production
company’s own archive.
Rao used both his expert knowledge of General Hospital’s history and his
access to online fan archives in the actual narrative of his season on Night Shift.
Episode 13 of Night Shift, “Past and Presence (1)” features several very specific
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references to General Hospital’s history. Weaved into the narrative is an elaborate
dream sequence while Robert Scorpio is in a coma. In the dream, Robert returns to
his 1980s apartment to meet his now grown daughter wearing the same floral dress
and eating the same peanut butter sandwich she did in the original General Hospital
scene in 1985. Several then-current General Hospital characters and more former
GH characters visit Robert in his 80s apartment as he grapples with the choice
between life and death. Besides the appearance of guest stars and legacy characters,
the long time GH viewer will recognize the set as an exact replica of the set of
Robert’s apartment featured on GH in the 1980s. Another nod to General Hospital’s
history and long time GH fans, the episode included brief interstitials before cutting
to a commercial made up of short vintage clips from General Hospital featuring
Robert Scorpio and some of the major events in the character’s life during the 1980s,
including the original scene where he meets his young daughter for the first time in
his apartment.
In my interview with Rao, he indicated that fan uploaded videos on YouTube
played a direct role in these sequences, using the video site to find the specific scenes
for the interstitials that were personal favorites of his from his tenure as a fan: “In
order to actually find them I went onto YouTube and…it really has transformed the
way that we maintain the history of soap operas. (It) was really unbelievably
helpful.”
36
Rao even went so far as to write the YouTube link into his scripts as a
reference for multiple areas of the production:
I actually wrote them into the script, “interstitial one: Robert meets Robin for
the first time” and then I put in the link for YouTube, so that everyone reading
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it for the script meeting afterward. Because Kimberly (McCullough, the
actress who played Robin since the character’s first appearance on GH in
1985) needed to remember what it was like and because we wanted to recreate
the whole (scene) in the opening and the set designers needed to see it because
we recreated that set.

While the production eventually pulled the actual footage from the ABC archives and
had to get the proper rights and clearances to air the vintage scene, the availability of
vintage videos posted by fans made incorporating the writer’s vision into the
production both easier and less expensive – there would have been costs involved in
retrieving the multiple scenes the writer chose between from the archives. Most
soaps have a continuity person on staff and binders full of daily story summaries, but
these options are both labor intensive and would not have fulfilled the visual
references that Rao needed. The visual record of the actual program far surpasses any
written description when doing research.
Rao’s use of YouTube and fan uploads of vintage soap episodes serves as an
example of how fans function as the de-facto archivists for soap operas. By serving
their own desire to view these scenes or episodes again, the soap fan fills the vacuum
left by the lack of archiving and access to soap history that neither the television
industry or the television archives have been able to provide.

Part II: “Make them Wait”: Fan manipulation of the soap narrative structure

In addition to offering tapes from personal collections as a way to access the
history of soaps, tapes from fan collections are often traded to fans categorized by a
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particular storyline or character rather than by full episodes or specific airdates. One
of the most popular types of tapes that these fans offer is meticulous compilations of a
particular character, couple or storyline.
37
Instead of attempting to create new
storylines, as seen in many slash videos, these re-edits “speed up” the development of
a storyline by eliminating all other storylines and compiling months’ worth of scenes
onto one tape or DVD. These edited tapes no longer have the structure of constant
delay or interruption associated with early theories of the soap opera genre. Instead
of re-experiencing the often excruciatingly slow development of soap storylines, fans
can watch compressed versions that feature only the particular character or story that
they favored during the original broadcasts. This ‘instant gratification’ model is
antithetical to the original narrative structure of the soap opera.
Susan Stewart describes the archetypal collection as “a world which is
representative yet which erases its context or origin.”
38
When collectors edit together
specific storylines, they remove the context of other stories occurring simultaneously
within that particular show. This process of collecting and removing particular
storylines from their original context allows the fan to tailor make their own
collection. Stewart sees this removal of the item from its original context as an
important element of control in the collection process: “Once the object is
completely severed from its origin, it is possible to generate a new series, to start
again within a context that is framed by the selectivity of the collector.”
39
This puts
the emphasis on the collector’s personal taste and immediate gratification rather than
waiting through the constant delay and continual interruption offered by traditional
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broadcast soap viewing. The recontextualizing of storylines into their own separate
narrative also allows fans to subvert the continual lack of closure by seeing storylines
through to their ‘conditional ending’ or emotional peak in rewatching these
condensed versions.
While much of the academic literature on fan cultures focuses on the fan as
author or producer, in this section I discuss these soap collectors in terms of how their
re-editing challenges the structure of the soap opera rather than the content of the
narrative and thus challenges ideas surrounding the structural appeal of the genre for
female audiences. How does this structural manipulation differ from fan practices
that rework narrative outcomes, such as slash fiction or videos? What might this
temporal manipulation tell us about the contemporary soap opera audience or the
larger female audience in general? I want to consider how this change in generic
structure may change the source of fan pleasure and how this relates to the idea of
pleasure in fans’ roles as historians/guardians of a soap opera’s lengthy and
complicated narrative.

The Structure of Soaps: Playing the Waiting Game

One of the fundamental tenets of the soap opera and of virtually all serial
narratives is the constant delay of narrative resolution. Narrative resolution would
signal the end of the serial. The soap opera could be considered the extreme example
of the serial. Except in the case of cancellation, the soap narrative is never ending.
Any resolution is a mere respite in the world of soaps. Happiness is always fleeting
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and even death can be a temporary setback. In order to continue to hold viewers’
attention, the development of any storyline is often excruciatingly drawn out and
fraught with constant delay and interruption, both within the diegesis of the narrative
and through the structural format of the broadcast. Delay is built into the story as
well as into the arrangement of sequences between commercial breaks and between
daily episodes. Agnes Nixon, creator of All My Children and One Life to Live,
references nineteenth century British serialist Wilkie Collins in saying: “Make them
laugh, make the cry…and make the wait.”
40

The idea of waiting and interruption is therefore a key element in early
feminist academic work on soap operas. Tania Modleski’s “The Rhythms of
Reception: Daytime Television and Women’s Work,” uses this element of
interruption to highlight the way soap opera structures address female patterns of
work and their role in the domestic sphere. Modleski theorizes that soaps construct a
maternal position for their viewers, that of the ‘ideal mother,’ with multiple
identifications to different characters. Her work in this piece attempts to specify a
feminine viewing position in response to feminist film theory’s arguments of classical
Hollywood cinema’s construction of a masculine spectator position.
Much of the early academic work on soap operas is influenced by this
foundational work on soap operas and Modleski’s concept of the soap opera as a
“feminine narrative form.” One of the pioneering elements of Modleski’s work is her
specific attention to the narrative structure of soaps, which diverges from earlier work
on soaps that primarily focused on content. In the recent introduction to the second
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edition of her book Loving With a Vengeance: Mass –Produced Fantasies for
Women, Modleski explains part of her goal in the original project was to “dig beneath
the surface of supposedly escapist fare, to go beyond mere content analysis and to
look at the formal properties of the text”.
41
The narrative format of soaps offers a
unique structure that Modleski links to their popularity with female viewers.
According to Modleski, the structure of a soap opera suited the daily rhythms of
women working in the home and the emotional demands of viewers who were wives
and mothers:
Thus the narrative, by placing ever more complex obstacles between desire
and fulfillment, makes anticipation of an end an end in itself. Soap operas
invest exquisite pleasure in the central condition of a woman’s life: waiting—
whether for her phone to ring, for the baby to take its nap, or for the family to
be reunited shortly after the day’s final soap opera has left its family still
struggling against dissolution.
42

Modleski proposes that a woman’s work in the home is one fraught with interruption
and the choppy, repetitious structure of soap operas allows viewers to follow the
storyline even while being constantly interrupted. As a feminist scholar, Modleski
argues that concurrent with mimicking a woman’s work in the home, daytime
television also aids in habituating women to this mode of distraction and
interruption.
43
She claims that the interrupted narrative is both annoying and
pleasurable to the female viewer, but that this structure of interruption denies viewers
“total and prolonged absorption.”
44

In contrast, Louise Spence warns that the interrupted nature of daytime soaps
may create the atmosphere of interruption as much as they actually mirror the nature
of women’s work in the home:
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The rhythms of housework should not be seen as inevitable or even self-
generating. The way we conceptualize our work, our time, our pleasure—and
our gender—is intricately linked to our cultural environment and must be
interpreted in relation to the social contexts in which these conceptualizations
occur. Daytime television helps to create or sustain that rhythm as much as it
reflects it.
45

Spence cautions that as much as the narrative structure of soaps may indeed mimic
the disjointed nature of work in the home, it also reinforces the idea that this work is
essentially interruptible, and therefore somehow less important. So by making these
tapes do fans resist the habituating nature of interruption in daytime television and
demand one that necessitates concentration and commitment to the program they are
viewing?
In her study of the development of the serial narrative form, Jennifer Hayward
contends that the narrative structure should not be linked with a specific gendered
audience, but rather the development of the economics of the serial format:
(the lack of closure) was not developed in response to the desires of a
particular gendered audience but is an essential quality of the serial form
itself…(the serial genre) its intimate focus, emphasis on interpersonal
relations, melodramatic tropes, and deferred closure—among other qualities—
have been erroneously labeled “essentially female” by association with the
serial’s most visible contemporary incarnation, soap opera.
46

Thus, according to Hayward, the soap opera structure is designed around the
economic necessity of keeping fans watching day after day rather than its particular
correlation to female viewers’ daytime schedules. Whether it is a gendered address,
an element of economic strategy or some combination of both, the characteristics of
interruption and delay in the serial format consistently figure as an essential element
of soap operas in academic work.
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If interruption is such an essential part of the soaps, what happens when fans
diverge from this format when making their own compilation tapes? By compressing
a particular storyline into a compilation tape, the result changes the structure, rather
than the content, of the story. The concepts of deferred closure and delayed
fulfillment so intrinsic to the original narrative are lifted out of the content. In
looking at these fan compilation videos, they eliminate much of the structure that
Modleski and other critics discuss. There is no waiting, there are no multiple
storylines, and viewers are not required to divide their attention when watching these
tapes. How does a viewer’s reading of a soap change when all the interruptions of
multiple storylines and multiple identifications are edited out? How will this change
the terms of viewer engagement with the text? Are these viewers somehow claiming
that this structure no longer suits their needs? This condensed structure mirrors the
changing relationship that women have with technology and the amount of control
they can exercise over television programming. If waiting is supposedly an essential
part of soaps’ structure and women’s daily lives, perhaps these fan tapes signify the
changes in the women that are watching soaps and the new possibilities for pleasure
that fans have created in restructuring the original broadcast format.

Fan Compilation Tapes: Producing a New Narrative Structure

Fan videos and fan archives are not a new phenomenon. From Henry Jenkins
and Camille Bacon-Smith’s early discussions of Star Trek fan tape circulation and
slash videos to the explosion of fan material now posted on YouTube, television fans
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have long been active in collecting and circulating copies of their particular fan
object. So why take a second look at soap opera fan archives and their particular
brand of fan videos/DVDs? Much has been made of fan attempts to rewrite their
favorite narratives or insert stories or relationships where the original creator might
not have intended them, but the focus has mostly been on reworking content rather
than the specific narrative structure of a particular television series/episode. Rather
than rework the narrative content of their favorite soaps, these compilation tapes
allow fans to rewatch these stories and re-experience some of the pleasure they felt
during their first viewing, but without the constant interruption from other storylines,
commercial breaks, etc.
47
While these compilations do not attempt to change a
particular reading of the original story, by restructuring the format of the daily
episode these tapes defy this ritual of interruption and delay so closely associated
with the soaps.
By looking at examples of these compilations, we can see how these videos
disrupt the narrative structure of interruption and delay and showcase women’s
changing relationship to older models of television viewing. The first example is a
set of four DVDs I received from an extensive collector of ABC’s General Hospital,
48

which follows the popular love triangle of Robert Scorpio, Anna Devane, and Holly
Sutton through a four month period in the summer of 1985. Each DVD contains a full
eight hours of clips with all the scenes that featured these three major characters.
While following the story of this love triangle, several other of the major characters
of the soap come into play (most soap storylines tend to involve as many characters
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as possible), but scenes from other major concurrent storylines are absent from the
videos. Obviously, this speeds up the viewing time required to follow the evolution
of this love triangle. Disc four of the General Hospital DVD set covers the time
period of July 26th to August 28th, 1985. This time span covers twenty-four actual
one-hour episodes of General Hospital and thus eliminates approximately sixteen
hours of screen time.
49

By condensing weeks or even months of a storyline, these fan compilations
eliminate the sense of delay that is so crucial in the original broadcast format. While
the cliffhanger scenes (those before each commercial break, those at the end of each
episode and at the end of each broadcast week) are all included in these compilations,
they eliminate all the interruptions and waiting that typically followed each of them.
Within these particular compilation DVDs, it is difficult to pinpoint when one episode
ends and the next begins or the difference between the end of a daily episode and the
end of a Friday episode. The fan that created this compilation eliminated the daily
markers such as the opening title sequence or the “scenes from the next episode”
bumper that often follows an episode’s final cliffhanger. The viewer can move
through multiple episodes or even weeks worth of episodes without ever having to
acknowledge the original episode structure or all of the time they would have spent
waiting for the next episode to air. Gone are the excruciating weekends waiting to
find out if your favorite character is really dead or if the virtuous wife will finally
catch her cheating husband in the act. Many of the fans who order these compilations
would have already watched these storylines play out when they were originally
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broadcast, so viewing these compilations removes all that time spent waiting in
anticipation and thus making it a decidedly different viewing experience.
These fan compilations create a new viewing experience that significantly
contrasts earlier theorizations of how and why viewers watched daytime soaps. Hans
Borchers discusses the phenomenon of selective reading as a way soap viewers deal
with the volume of the soap opera text, citing that viewer’s discriminate between
storylines they like and dislike by the amount of attention they pay to the text while it
airs or by fast forwarding through storylines if they use a VCR to record the soap.
Borchers relates this ability to read soaps selectively to a sophisticated knowledge of
the genre and its codes. Borchers claims that the ability to put together a condensed
version of the text implies “a thorough and sophisticated knowledge of the genre” and
that viewers are thus aware of “the poetic and generic rules that governed soap opera
programs.”
50
When watching these compilations, the viewer doesn’t have to perform
that kind of selective reading for herself and now only watches the storyline they have
specifically selected without interruption. If a fan goes so far as ordering and
watching one of these fan videos featuring their favorite character or story, he or she
will undoubtedly watch the video with more attention and concentration than earlier
conceptions of the ‘distracted housewife,’ who watched while multitasking through
her day. These compilation tapes are most likely watched in some sort of dedicated
time period, and therefore not while performing other daily tasks. If this is the case,
both the narrative structure of the compilation tape and the viewing experience no
longer mimic the distracted and interrupted nature of women’s work in the home.
51

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So, if these fan compilation videos change the rhythm of daytime soaps, are these
fans’ challenging earlier concepts of female fans’ pleasure and its relationship to
ideologies of gender? If this new narrative structure no longer reflects this
discontinuous nature of “women’s work” (primarily that of homemaker and
caregiver), it may represents fans’ desire to break from this simplistic image of the
soap viewer as just female homemakers, whose lives center around delay and
interruption. The continuous nature of these compilations express soap fans’ wish to
watch these intimate stories, so often gendered feminine, with the singular attention
and focus that has usually been associated with primetime programming or film. One
fan offering clips for a popular couple on One Life to Live described her compilation
tapes as more akin to a feature film:
These are NOT clips.... they are edits from the show and tell the whole story
of their relationship. It's like a J&N Major Motion Picture, featuring primarily
John and Natalie, but also their interactions with others. While watching you
will not wonder when something happened, or why.... it’s the whole story.
52

C. Lee Harrington and Denise Bielby’s study of soap fans includes a short mention of
fan attempts to preserve their favorite moments or stories from soap history by saving
daily episodes or by creating these edited collections. Their study quotes one fan’s
description of her collection and the difference in watching the scenes of just one
particular storyline from a daytime soap:
I have saved every scene with Matthew Ashford and Melissa Brennan {actors
on Days of Our Lives} that has aired since April 1990! I became so captivated
by these actors and their storyline that I didn’t want to tape over their
scenes….Some of their episodes have become “classics” to me and my
friends…Our tapes are like one long, continuous movie.
53

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While Harrington and Bielby note that these tapes allow fans the pleasure of
rewatching or recapturing a previous favorite story, there is little discussion of the
change in the viewing experience because of the change in narrative structure.
This new structure does not necessarily question the ideological content of the
narrative, but may change some of the ideological implications that the traditional
soap opera narrative structure held in television studies. Modleski critiques work on
fan created texts, asserting that “The fact that in much (not all) fan writing many of
the ideologically troubling aspects of the source texts remain unquestioned and
unchallenged is disregarded.”
54
While these soap compilation tapes do not
necessarily take on the ideological content, they do play with the ideologies implied
in the form. The manipulation of the genre’s structure presents ideological
implications as to the way contemporary female soap viewers relate to a temporal
model that may no longer suit the contemporary woman’s lifestyle.
Modleski argues that the reception of films and prime time programs requires a
degree of concentration for comprehension that is unnecessary in the repetitious,
interrupted world of the daytime soap:
…soap opera is opposed to the classic (male) film narrative, which with
maximum action and minimum, always pertinent dialogue, speeds its way to
the restoration of order.
55

Allen also associates soaps with the opposite of the action and simplicity of
traditional film narratives, although in a more complimentary manner: “the soap
opera represents an alternative basis for narrative aesthetic pleasure in general—one
that values complexity, repetition, and speech over simplicity, telos and action.”
56

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These fan videos imply that there are viewers who want to watch soap opera stories
outside of this interrupted structure and that the compression of a particular storyline
from a soap into one continuous viewing experience creates a very ‘movie-like’
experience. Soap opera viewers and the female television audience’s lives and
patterns of work have changed drastically since the early days of soaps. Not only do
women work outside the home more often than not, women’s entire relationship to
television programming has changed with the advent of cable, narrowcasting and
changes in technology. All television viewership is rapidly shifting with the
expanding options in programming and delivery methods; with fewer and fewer
viewers watching a program live, or a program’s structure in this case, that does not
suit their particular desires and time constraints. Watching a daytime soap no longer
means you have to watch it live while at home during the afternoon. Technology now
allows television programming to be watched at virtually any time in any location,
with viewers controlling not only the where and when, but much of the structure of
traditional genres like soaps can also be avoided through fast forwarding or saving up
multiple episodes to watch them ‘on-demand’ in order to avoid waiting for the next
days’ episode. By using these new abilities to manipulate the delivery of television,
the soap fans that produce these compilation tapes undertake the labor required to
create a structure that produces the kind of focused attention on their favorite story or
characters that is denied them in the traditional broadcast format, mastering both time
and technology.
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These fan compilation videos expel all the extraneous narratives that do not
affect their main focus (be it storyline or couple) and tend toward this model of
maximum action and minimum wasted time by not delving into other stories.
57
The
compilations upset the careful balance of a soap’s multiple storylines, which are
specifically designed to satisfy different groups of viewers’ varying interest levels
and to unfold at different rates so that each is in a varying degree of crisis or
resolution, thus keeping viewers’ interest level high day after day in the traditional
broadcast format.
58
These soap collectors have distilled the soap text down to a
singular storyline that may have an entirely different tone that the original context,
without other lighter/darker storylines for balance, and has a much more rapid pace.
The viewer who purchases these compilation tapes does so for the purpose of
rewatching/watching these scenes specifically. So changed from their original
narrative structure, these videos also require a completely different viewing style.
These compilation videos are not designed to be watched in bits and pieces while
multitasking around the house. They indicate a high investment by both the viewer
and the producer. Soap fans who order these compilations are aware and appreciative
of the labor entailed in creating these tapes. The following is a thank you from a fan
on a soap trader/archivist’s site:
OMG, Seeing this website made my heart sing! Thank you for under taking
such a huge task, one meaningful one that helps the rest of us. THANK
YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
59

The production of these compilation tapes requires extensive watching and
cataloguing of each and every scene of the couple or storyline. Web sites offering
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these videos often indicate the huge amount of time and labor involved in making
these tapes. These producers are intensely dedicated to creating a version of soaps in
which they can focus on one singular storyline or another; clearly there is a desire for
a format that the broadcast version is not giving its viewers. Included in the website
where I acquired the General Hospital compilation were long descriptions of each
DVD available. All the DVDs I received have between a 6000 to 8000 word
descriptive summary, usually scene by scene. The producer also has detailed listings
on how her tapes are created, whether they are original edits from 1
st
generation
copies or having been copied from other sources. She is very upfront with describing
the quality of the edits that you might be ordering. This collector clearly takes her
role as soap opera historian seriously and the desire from fans for these types of
compilations is evident by her continued enterprise. Soap compilation tapes allow
other fans relish the complexity of a soap opera storyline, as is apparent in the time a
effort put required in making them, while breaking many of the confines of the
original genre format. Fans who have the historical knowledge and video archives to
be able put these tapes together not only thwart the television industry in allowing
other soap fans to watch these stories again, they also become producers in their own
right, asserting control over the rigid structure of the genre they love so much.

“Just the Juicy Bits”—Fan Pleasure in this Condensed Structure

As an interesting analogy to these compilations, Modleski’s more recent work
discusses a series produced by Harlequin publishing and Dark Horse Publishing to
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produce a Harlequin manga, closer to the explicitly pornographic manga known as
yaoi, which Matt Thorn has discussed as “not fully developed stories” but “only the
yummy parts.” Modleski writes,
Certainly, paring the stories back to only the yummy parts and then
adding a visual dimension changes the nature of the product significantly.
Not only is the sex more prominent but elemental feelings of betrayal,
revenge, loss and despair come more starkly to the fore, especially given the
delicacy and pathos of the graphics.
60

It is interesting to try to think about soap opera compilation tapes in these new terms.
While not pornographic, they often feature just the scenes of a building romantic
coupling. These new narratives embrace the detail of the story without having to
abide by the slow progression and delay in the broadcast narrative. Fans still desire
the intimate or overtly romantic content of traditional daytime soaps, but seem to
have a more aggressive desire to consume these stories on their own terms in a more
concentrated form with faster payoff. This “just the yummy parts” analogy seems to
fit what these fans are seeking, and thus challenging the notion that waiting and
interruption are essential to the pleasures of soaps.
Another set of compilation videos I acquired feature the romantic pairing of
the characters Rafe and Allison from the cancelled series Port Charles and provide a
good example of this condensed, yummy parts model. Port Charles was ABC’s
General Hospital spin off which ran from 1997-2003. The show was only a half hour
long and attempted to incorporate supernatural storylines and a thirteen-week,
telenovela-like format in hopes of attracting new and younger viewers. The “Rali” (a
fan nickname for the couple Rafe and Allison) compilation I ordered consisted of
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three two-hour videotapes. The first tape follows Rafe, an angel sent back to earth,
trying to reunite all the townspeople with their true loves, especially Allison and her
long time boyfriend, Jamal. While trying to help the struggling couple, he inevitably
falls in love with Allison, as does she with him. Allison fights her feelings, but Jamal
breaks up with her, and she finally admits her love for Rafe. The second tape begins
with the consummation of their relationship. They make love in an abandoned barn
and profess their feelings for each other. The consummation of any romantic
relationship in a soap opera is a big event for fans that have been patiently following a
burgeoning couple. Rali fans had waited through the six weeks’ worth of scenes now
compiled on the first tape and the scale of their love scenes matched the couple’s high
popularity with fans. The first twenty-four minutes of the second two-hour
compilation tape is basically one long love scene. The two characters never leave the
barn and are always in varying states of undress. Aside from a brief fantasy
sequence, where they imagine themselves on a tropical beach, the characters are
always snuggling under a blanket, kissing, or declaring their love for one another.
While their actual lovemaking scenes and nudity are tame enough to pass daytime
censors, the length of all the scenes compressed on a compilation tape by far out lasts
any love scenes from prime-time shows and even most feature films. This is not to
say that the focus of fan pleasure is just watching sex scenes. Nancy Baym contends
that sex scenes on soaps are often misleadingly taken out of context, “Clips (of sex
scenes) such as these obscure the deep emotions in which soap sex is contextualized
and exaggerated the amount of attention that soaps focus on sex.”
61
While there may
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be a twenty-four minute love scene in this compilation, it does not remove the
emotional context of the story that precedes it for the viewer who orders these
compilation tapes. This functions much in the way Modleski describes yaoi: by
eliminating all the other storylines these compilations brings not only the sex, but also
the intense emphasis on feelings of love, lust, and passion in soap operas to the
forefront. These compilations express fan desire to indulge in these drawn out
intimate sequences and soaps’ emphasis on purely emotional rather than action based
content.
In a discussion of fan music videos of the same sex couple Bianca and Lena,
or ‘Lianca,’ on All My Children, Eve Ng notes how the compression of a soap
romance storyline changes both the level of viewer engagement and fan pleasure:
Crucially, with their compression and focus, (fan) music videos facilitate a
unique intensity of media engagement: viewing a three-five minute video
where all or nearly all of the images feature the characters and relationships in
which a viewer is invested is an experience that cannot be derived from
watching the show…Fans sometimes comment that their consumption of fan
texts is so much more pleasurable that they have replaced their viewing of the
show with reading fan fiction or watching fan videos.
62

While fan music videos have many differences from fan compilation tapes, the kind
of compression of a romantic storyline and the omission of the multiple narratives
characteristic of a soap opera functions in much the same way. These soap couple
compilation tapes, created out of fan archives, attest to both fans’ desire to avoid the
structure of interruption inherent in soaps, but also the level of investment in the
highly emotional stories produced by soaps. The level of emotional attachment to
certain stories is so high that soap fans are willing to seek out or produce these
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compilations in order to re-experience them, in addition to, and even replacing, their
regular viewing of current soaps. While the structure of soaps focuses on delay and
interruption, the condensed emotional intensity of the stories is a driving motivation
behind these compilation tapes. Rather than rewatching complete episodes with their
commercial breaks and multiple storylines, if that was a realistic possibility, watching
these compressed storylines serves to reactivate all the memories and emotional
investment the viewer felt in a condensed, and therefore even more intense, way.

The Power in Selection

These compilation videos give fans the power of selection, rather than having
their attentions divided between multiple storylines. Soap fans can choose the
individual storylines which suit them or which they particularly enjoyed the first time
they watched. The choice of tapes from a particular soap or storyline reflects a fan's
personal emotional investment or taste preferences, thus reflecting their own sense of
self. Much of the work on soaps tends to treat different soaps and storylines as
interchangeable. The structure and conventions of the genre are so strong that they
are sometimes thought to overshadow any narrative specificity: Spence contends
that,
The conventions of soap opera storytelling are so strong that we can hardly
say that we are watching to see what will happen. Rather, we watch
anticipating what we know will happen one again and to see how it will
happen this time…”
63

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While the repetitive conventions of soap opera stories do lead to a certain
amount of expected predictability, I would argue against Spence’s notion that fans are
no longer watching to see the outcome of a specific story. The historic specificity of
the certain stories or moments that viewers attach themselves to are not
interchangeable with the repetition of familiar storylines or narrative tropes. In fact,
it can be argued that the conventions of narrative are so strong that any story in any
genre is only a variation on a limited number of plots. While storylines may be very
formulaic, the individual details of a particular story mean something to soap opera
fans. General Hospital’s Luke and Laura fans would not necessarily be interested in
Days of Our Lives’ Bo and Hope, even if their love stories followed similar paths.
64

Something differentiates these stories for fans so much so that they seek out these
compilation videos to revisit a particular storyline. With the production of these
videos, fans do not have to settle for a similar storyline that may be broadcasting
currently, but can actually revisit a specific storyline in its entirety. The particularity
of a storyline is allows the viewer to revisit not just the specifics of that storyline, and
how they related to it, but also to their own history and memories of when they
experienced it the first time.
Robert Allen also contends that soaps are not interchangeable like mass
produced products, disputing that soaps are really like producing ‘soap’:
The absolute standardization required for the mass production of consumer
items is inapplicable to the production of narratives. The consumer expects
each bar of Ivory Soap to be exactly like the last one purchased, but he or she
expects each new movie or episode of a television program to bear marks of
difference.
65

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In the previous chapter’s discussion of soaps in television archives, I noted that fans
often follow certain writers and producers from soap to soap exemplifying that
individual soaps may have very different identities according to their staff, channel,
etc. While some fans may want to buy vintage soap videos to revisit an entire soap or
a period of a soap’s history, they are still identifying that particular soap opera or
moment in time as something with specific emotional resonance for themselves.
Stewart’s work on the phenomenon of collecting argues that the collector
replaces production with consumption and then as they continue to consume objects,
they eventually become the “producers” of a collection mirroring the self: “the self
generates a fantasy in which it becomes producer of those objects, a producer by
arrangement and manipulation.”
66
The choice of tapes from a particular soap or
storyline reflect a fan's personal emotional investment or taste preferences, thus
reflecting their own sense of self. This production of identity through the process of
collecting signals the importance of personal taste and attachment to specific
narratives within soaps. Soap fan collectors save and reedit individual soaps and
stories. While some fans may have large daily archives of a particular soap, they still
exercise a selection process in choosing one show over another therefore emphasizing
the narrative specificity of each soap and storyline. This reinforces the idea that
individual soaps are unique and hold unique appeal for certain fans. Just as no fan is
exactly the same as another, soaps should not be viewed as a totalizing genre but as
individual shows, each with their own history and style.
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Webb echoes this conclusion in her discussion of uploaded fan videos on
YouTube. Although she uses an example of recently uploaded soap clips (having
originally aired within six months of the upload date), Webb tracks how these clips
allow viewers to pick and choose the current stories they want to keep up on, while
excising all the extraneous narrative:
Fans indicated that they do not want to “waste” their time on parts of the show
they dislike…YouTube has created an environment where fans can pick and
choose scenes/segments, in effect customizing GH to suit their particular
interests.
67

While Webb attributes a fan’s selective viewing as more of a time management issue
when it comes to keeping up with a currently airing soap, it also makes the point that
soap viewers watch for particular storylines (and particular histories) of characters,
not simply for a generic soap opera form. Soap fans’ attachment to different
storylines or characters and their eagerness to revisit these stories, either on the
internet or by ordering physical copies from other soap fans, underscores the desire to
access soap history and the need for the fan historians who provide access to the
specifics of soap history, a dynamic that is not satisfied by the ‘greatest hits’
collections in official television archives.

Conclusion

The significance of fan authorship in vintage soap opera compilation tapes
might not be immediately obvious in comparison to other fan practices and
productions, such as slash videos. Though these videos don’t create alternate
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narratives or attempt to subvert the dominant reading of the content, the soap fans
who produce these compilations express desires that have been consistently frustrated
by soap opera’s low cultural status and specific narrative form. While these fans still
desire the intimate, emotional content of the soaps, they resist the interruption and
waiting that they have had to endure in order to consume these narratives. By
creating their own archives and recording soaps’ narrative histories they defy the idea
that soaps aren’t good or interesting enough to be rewatched. These fans protest the
notion that these stories do not warrant the focused attention that is assumed during
prime-time programming. Refusal of this constant interruption reflects the way these
fans view their own daily lives and schedules, schedules that are no longer constantly
interruptible and at the mercy of others’ needs. Being able to revisit soap operas’ past
through these compilations or through larger fan archives in general also places value
on stories that no one thought anyone would want to watch again, much less be
financially profitable in rerun form. By creating these compilation videos and
archives, soap opera fans protest the idea that these stories are all basically the same
and therefore disposable. By taking up the mantel of historians and archivist, soap
fans resist the notion that there is no value in saving soaps, both as historical and
cultural documents. These tapes allow soap opera fans to express the fact that not
only are these stories still of value to them, but that soap opera fans are still a valuable
audience which television producers have failed to capitalize on. In the next chapter,
I turn to the television industry’s long overdue attempt to take advantage of the
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passion of soap viewers in terms of actual monetary value after years of letting soap
history vanish into obscurity, believing it no longer held any commercial value.

118

Chapter Two Endnotes

1
The cable channel SOAPnet, which premiered in 2000, was the first concerted effort
to rerun the daytime soap opera on American television.

2
Most of the production companies that have created American daytime soap operas
do have varying records of the programs’ long running narrative through scripts, story
summaries and the existing video masters themselves, but these are not always
complete (much of the early tapes and scripts have been lost) and they are not
available to the general public.

3
Grainge, Paul. “Nostalgia and Style in Retro America: Moods, Modes, and Media
Recycling.” Journal of American & Comparative Cultures. Spring 2000; 23,1. 32.

4
Spigel, Lynn. “Our TV Heritage: Television, the Archive, and the Reasons for
Preservation.” A Companion to Television. Ed Janet Wasko. Malden, MA: Wiley
Blackwell, 2005. 89.

5
Spence, Louise. Watching Daytime Soap Operas: The Power of Pleasure.
Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005. 80.

6
Bjarkman, Kim. “To Have and to Hold: The video Collector’s relationship with an
Ethereal Medium.” Television and New Media. Vol.5. No. 3. August 2004. 226.

7
Posted by doodleynoodle on August 3, 2011 at
http://daytimeconfidential.zap2it.com/2011/08/03/which-soap-episodes-were-so-
good-you-saved-them-on-vhs-dvd-or-your-dvr

8
Bjarkman, 230.

9
Bjarkman, 225.

10
Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography,
Literature and Art. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988. 31

11
Bjarkman, 239.

12
http://books.dreambook.com/soap_fan/main.html

13
http://www.freewebs.com/daystape/apps/guestbook/

14
Bjarkman, 225.

119

15
Baym, Nancy K. Tune In, Log Out: Soaps, Fandom and Online Community. Sage
Publications, Inc.: Thousand Oaks, CA, 2000. 83.

16
Seiter, Ellen, et al. “Don’t Treat Us Like We’re So Stupid and Naïve: Towards and
Ethnography of Soap Opera Viewers.” Remote Control: Television, Audiences and
Cultural Power. Eds. Ellen Seiter, Hans Borchers, Gabriele Kreutzner and Eva-
Marie Warth. London: Routledge, 1989. 223-247.

17
http://www.angelfire.com/ab/likesands/aboutme.html

18
Baym, 57.

19
Allen, Robert C. Speaking of Soap Operas. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1985. p. 69-71 and Levine, Elena, “Online Content and the Struggle
to Save Soaps.” The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformation For a New Media Era.
Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2011. 208.

20
Bielby, Denise D., C. Lee Harrington, and William T. Bielby. “Whose Stories Are
They? Fans’ Engagement with Soap Opera Narratives in Three Sites of Fan
Activity.” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media. 43(1) 1999. 47.

21
Sarno, David. “Golden Era TV meets the Digital Age.” Los Angeles Times. June
10, 2007.

22
While the use of YouTube as a television archive is providing access to a huge
number of people, most individuals who upload vintage television, including soap
fans, are not the copyright holders of the programs and are therefore in violation of
copyright law.

23
Webb, Emma. “The Evolution of the Fan Video and the Influence of YouTube on
the Creative Decision-Making Profess for Fans.” The Survival of Soap Opera:
Transformation For a New Media Era. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi,
2011. 230.

24
Personal correspondence with fan, 2011.

25
Hayward, Jennifer. Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions
from Dickens to Soap Opera. Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky,
1997, 135.

120

26
I did discover a few soap opera character, couple or themed videos produced by the
actual television production companies. They are now somewhat hard to obtain and,
according to sources at the production companies, they were not very commercially
successful. The titles I was able to find included: Luke & Laura: Volumes I and II,
All About Erica, Daytime’s Greatest Weddings (all produced by ABC Daytime), and
Guiding Light: Roger Thorpe, The Scandal Years (produced by Proctor & Gamble
and CBS).

27
Hayward, 138.

28
Webb, 227.

29
De Lacroix, Marlena "Savoring Soaps: General Hospital Night Shift: Good Night
and Good Riddance." Marlena De Lacroix: Soap Criticism for the Thinking Fan.
http://marlenadelacroix.com/?p=70 (October 11, 2007).

30
Branco, Nelson. “So Who Wants To Clone Sri Rao?” TV Guide Canada.
http://tvguide.ca/So+who+wants+to+clone+Sri+Rao/Soaps/Features/Articles/081015
_Sri_Rao_NB.htm?isfa=1 (October 15,2008).

31
Branco,
http://tvguide.ca/So+who+wants+to+clone+Sri+Rao/Soaps/Features/Articles/081015
_Sri_Rao_NB.htm?isfa=1

32
Newcomb, Roger. “Interview: Night Shift Head Writer Sri Rao.” We Love Soaps.
http://www.welovesoaps.net/2009/01/interview-night-shift-head-writer-sri.html
(January 30,2009).

33
Personal Interview with Sri Rao. February, 2009.

34
Personal interview with Sri Rao. February, 2009.

35
Webb, 227.

36
Personal interview with Sri Rao. February, 2009.

37
These fan compilations are available on videocassettes or DVD and sometimes both
depending on the fan and the extent of their archive/compilation production. I will
often refer to “fan videos” throughout this article, but I use the term generically to
refer to compilations that may exist on actual videotapes or on DVDs.

121

38
Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the
Souvenir, the Collection. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984.
152.

39
Stewart, 152.

40
Spence, 92.

41
Modleski, Tania. Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produces Fantasies for Women.
2
nd
ed. New York: Routledge, 2008. xvi.

42
Modleski, 80.

43
Modleski, 92.

44
Modleski, 93.

45
Spence, 64.

46
Hayward, 141.

47
Soap operas are one of the few television genres in which it is usually impossible to
rewatch particular episodes in reruns. Until the recent creation of the SOAPnet cable
channel, soap opera reruns were virtually nonexistent.

48
I will not use any names or online identities of the fans discussed here for both
privacy and legal reasons.

49
This does not include the screen time that would be devoted to commercials during
each original broadcast. The fan that creates the compilation would still have to
review the original broadcasts of 24 hours to create the compilation tape, but the
actual screen time for General Hospital would not equal the full 24 hours.

50
Borchers, Hans. “Don’t Treat Us Like We’re So Stupid and Naïve: Towards and
Ethnography of Soap Opera Viewers.” Seiter, Ellen, et al. Remote Control:
Television, Audiences and Cultural Power. Eds. Ellen Seiter, Hans Borchers,
Gabriele Kreutzner and Eva-Marie Warth. London: Routledge, 1989. 234.

51
There are certainly both male and female soap fans that create and watch these
compilation videos, but female viewers still make up the majority of daytime soap
fans. The idea that soap fans are exclusively female is almost always assumed by
both soap opera marketing and, unfortunately, by most academic work on soap operas
as well.
122

52
Private correspondence.

53
Harrington, C. Lee and Denise D. Bielby. Soap Fans: Pursuing Pleasure and
Making Meaning in Everyday Life. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995. 27.

54
Modleski, xxix.

55
Modleski, 91.

56
Allen, 94-95.

57
I do not include the idea of minimum dialogue, as scenes from any particular soap
opera storyline still rely heavily on dialogue.

58
Hayward, 149.

59
http://books.dreambook.com/galor5/curlyqgrl.html

60
Modleski, xxxi.

61
Baym, 41.

62
Ng, Eve. “Reading the Romance of Fan Cultural Production: Music Videos of a
Television Lesbian Couple.” Popular Communication, 6:2008. 110.

63
Spence, 77.

64
These two storylines/couples are actually vastly different.

65
Allen, 46.

66
Stewart, 158.

67
Webb, 226.
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Chapter Three:
Syndicating the Soap Opera

Lynn Spigel points out that “television even erases its own past; it selects only
a few programs for syndication and leaves out countless others.”
1
Similar to talks
shows and game shows, daytime soap operas were not considered suitable for reruns
in later broadcasts. Partially a result of the low status of the soap opera as a women’s
genre and for the practical reason of the sheer volume of programming hours that
must be played in succession, the industry never conceived of the genre as exploitable
for syndication. Although soaps have been popular since the early days of television,
the actual narratives and performances have been a one-time-only broadcast product.
Until recently soap opera texts have suffered this kind of erasure from television
history, but the expansion of digital cable, TV on DVD, TV on the Internet, Video on
Demand, and other forms led to an explosion in the repurposing of vintage television.
The increasing number of “boutique” cable channels, which narrowcast to small,
targeted audiences, offered the possibility of a new profitable prospect for the soap
opera genre. Fighting against the steadily declining ratings of broadcast television and
an outdated image, American soaps were searching for a way to revitalize the genre
and address the changing lifestyles of their audience. These industrial changes finally
brought about the prospect of the rerunning of American daytime soaps operas on the
cable network SOAPnet.
Premiering in January of 2000, the cable channel SOAPnet began
rebroadcasting daily episodes of currently running daytime network soaps and airing
124
several cancelled daytime and primetime soaps. ABC Daytime was in a unique
position to create the offshoot network as it is the only broadcast network that owns
and produces its daytime soap operas in-house. Disney is the parent company of both
SOAPnet and ABC, and therefore the cable channel began airing all of the ABC-
owned soaps, General Hospital, One Life to Live and All My Children. They have
since added the Sony-owned, NBC soap, Days of Our Lives, and The Young and the
Restless.
2
The channel also offered an afterlife to several beloved cancelled daytime
soaps, including Ryan’s Hope, Another World and Port Charles and prime-time soaps
such as Dallas, Dynasty and Melrose Place.
The advent of industrial changes, with broadcast market share shrinking and
cable channels expanding exponentially, and the changing nature of soap opera fans
and television fandom in general, finally opened up an opportunity to make
commercial use of the huge archive of soap opera’s past on television. The possibility
of rerunning soaps may change the terms in which we have previously studied soap
operas and raises questions surrounding the future of syndication for the growing
number of television genres that depend upon their serial narrative format, much like
that of a soap, including primetime dramas and the so-called ‘docu-soap’ reality
programs. SOAPnet’s attempt to profit from soap reruns encompasses discussions of
how the growing cable universe shifted television’s address towards women, how
branding programming became as important as the programming itself, and how
rerunning programming, especially one with as much emotional connection to its
viewers as soaps, alters the viewer experience. While the network announced its
125
cancellation in 2010 and the prominence of soaps on daytime television may be
waning, this early history of SOAPnet explores how it attracted current and lapsed
viewers to soaps on a cable net and how it repackaged heavily serialized programs as
successful reruns.

Narrowcasting and the rise of Women’s networks

The development and expansion of cable delivery systems would not only
change the television landscape in the 1980s, it would drastically change the way
television addressed its audience. The rise of cable signaled a transition between the
dominance of the major broadcast networks, with their trans-demographic address,
and the rise of cable networks that found it more efficient to ‘narrowcast’ to specific
demographics. Broadcast programming was designed to appeal to the largest possible
audience, a kind of general interest programming, which would hopefully appeal to
the entire viewing public. Cable programmers realized that with the possibilities of
more channels came the financial benefit of being able to draw a particular
demographic to their station. In drawing a smaller specified demographic, cable
stations could insure a greater return for advertisers who wanted to target a specific
market and insure their messages would reach the desired consumers. David Marc
describes this new selective programming strategy: “Narrowcasters eschew the
commercial carpet bombing of broadcasting strategy in favor of surgical demographic
strikes. Viewers are sorted and flattered with various suggestions of inside respect for
their special identities of age, sex, race, leisure pursuit, and so on.”
3
Cable networks
126
would scramble to define the identity of their target audience and then define their
channel around it. Whatever demographic group became the target, narrowcasting
compelled cable channels to present themselves as the perfect fit for the perceived
identity of that demographic. Marc’s mention of narrowcasters’ suggestions of
respect or insider understanding becomes key when the expanding cable universe
attempted to target female audiences.
While the three major networks of the broadcast era were accustomed to the
idea of trying to appeal to the broadest possible audience, there were instances in
which the big three networks chose to target narrower audiences. Targeting the
female viewing audience during daytime hours is one of the few examples of the
narrowcasting model within the broadcast era. Beginning in the 1950s, broadcast
television assumed that male viewers would be working outside the home while
women would be engaged in domestic labor within the home and, thus, the networks
targeted female audiences during the daytime daypart (commonly considered the
hours between 10am-4pm).
4
The genre of the soap opera was designed for this
daypart, around this domestic female audience. The emotionally focused narratives
and interior domestic settings spoke to women at home during the daytime and, more
importantly, the purchasing power of middle class women for domestic products
spoke to the corporate sponsors of early television. Women’s purchasing power and
the assumed lack of male viewers during the broadcast day was cause enough for the
networks to diverge from their strategy of programming for the broadest possible
audience for at least part of the day.
127
With a daypart structure that remains almost unchanged from the early
broadcast era until fairly recently, aiming the broadcast daytime hours squarely at a
female audience proved a very successful strategy. As cable expanded in the 1980s,
the narrowcasting model of the daytime daypart was an attractive one for new cable
networks. The new cable marketplace was eager to target this large female audience
and the race to create television for women began.
Lifetime’s targeted marketing towards women made it one of the most
successful of the early cable nets, and the channel still ranks in the top tier of all cable
networks. The channel itself was a merger of a Hearst/ABC’s Daytime channel and
Viacom’s Cable Health Channel, premiering in 1984. Jackie Byars and Eileen
Meehan’s in depth discussion of the beginning of Lifetime explores how this early
cable network refigured elements of broadcast daytime TV to create a gendered
narrowcasting model directed specifically at the ‘working woman’ of the 1980s.
Using the traditional daytime genres of talk shows, game shows, lifestyle
programming, melodramatic series and substituting soap operas with original
“Lifetime Movies,” the network set out to attract women, while not repelling men
who might be watching with women in the evening hours.
5
“Lifetime Movies” have
since become synonymous with the over-the-top melodrama usually associated with
the soaps, but by using the melodramatic elements in made for television movies
instead of “soap operas,” the new network stayed away from negative stigma and the
implied stay-at-home mom audience associated with soaps. Differing itself from
traditional broadcast daytime programming, Lifetime presented itself as the network
128
designed for ‘working women,’ which implied higher income professional women
who work outside the home and therefore had more disposable cash to purchase
higher-end products.
6
Byars and Meehan discuss how Lifetime’s marketing
positioned the channel as “feminine but never feminist.”
7
They conclude that
Lifetime presented a vision of women that were independent and worked outside the
home, “but ultimately rely on heterosexual relationships to round out their lives.”
8

Lifetime’s female audience was portrayed as “having it all,” but the channel was
careful to balance the idea of a working woman with a need for heterosexual coupling
and children.
While Lifetime dominated the cable marketplace for the female audience for
the first ten-plus years of cable, the idea that one cable network could address all the
needs of female viewers creates a very limited perception of these viewers. In her
discussion of the rise of women’s cable networks, Amanda Lotz cites that “Television
for Women” was enough of a distinction for Lifetime’s early years, but this type of
campaign suggested “a generalized construction of women as a coherent and
monolithic group.”
9
As the cable landscape expanded, other networks attempted to
address different segments of the female audience by trying to create a different
vision of the female viewer, one not offered by the homogenized image created by
Lifetime. The number of cable networks for women saw a marked increase at the end
of the 1990s/early 2000s. This so-called “she TV” included Romance Classics in
1997, which then became WE: Women’s Entertainment in 2000, Lifetime Movie
129
Network in 1998, Oxygen in 2000 and SOAPnet in 2000. Trade publications
speculated as to the cause of the rapid expansion:
Kate McEnroe (then AMC’s network president) made noise about the need
for more women’s networks when Romance Classics was first announced
back in 1992, when advertising geared toward women was still pretty much
limited to hygiene and housekeeping. Only in the past couple of years have
the big bucks advertisers, like automakers and financial institutions, come to
recognize that women buy cars and manage money.
10

Shockingly, the consumer power of women was still a mystery to the much of the
television industry when the broadcast daytime daypart had successfully depended on
female consumers for the previous fifty years. Women were still seen as a
specialized and limited niche audience to advertisers and the television industry well
into the 1990s.
11
While the growth of women’s networks recognized women’s
increased role as consumers, these new networks’ most challenging obstacle was in
defining the women to whom they were marketing. Market duplication was a major
concern for all these new women’s networks. Younger cable networks couldn’t hope
to compete with the bigger and more established Lifetime if they didn’t offer
something different from what was already available. Lifetime had become the
industry standard for cable ‘television for women,’ and these upstart networks had to
define themselves, and their potential female viewers, against that standard.
While all fighting for the same most desirable segment of the female audience,
those with the highest incomes, these new women’s networks had to create an image
of their female viewer that was somehow different from that of Lifetime’s viewers.
Lotz explains how psychographics, characteristics of lifestyle, life stage and attitude,
are used in audience segmentation and how women’s cable networks differentiated
130
themselves by using psychographics to form their individual constructions of
“women” and “women’s needs” as they developed their brand identities.
12
Lifetime
tried to provide “inspiration, information and empowerment” for all women, but their
attempt at inclusiveness also constructed women as a singular group. Examining the
way these networks constructed different brand identities reveals that each network
has a different version of what they considered “women.”
When Romance Classics became WE: Women’s Entertainment in 2000, network
president Kate McEnroe was quoted as saying:
Through extensive research, we found that women are seeking simplicity,
inspiration and a time-out viewing experience to help them disconnect from
the stress in their everyday lives. WE: WOMEN'S ENTERTAINMENT
provides this through its original series, topical specials and the most
comprehensive library of women's interest films.
13

McEnroe continually uses words such as “inspiration, relaxation and relief” to
describe women’s desires in order to define this new network, but also to define the
network’s vision of its female audience.
14
Along with “women’s interest” films,
which usually featured a strong romantic plot or sub-plot, the channel premiered with
programs such as Winning Women, which celebrated female extreme athletes, and
Cool Women, which profiled ordinary women doing extraordinary things.
15
WE’s
version of the female viewer was a woman who was overwhelmed and under such
great amounts of stress that she was either seeking total escape from her real life or
something that would inspire her enough to continue with whatever struggles she was
facing. When the channel was still Romance Classics, executives considered
renaming it “Oasis” because they had “underestimated the stress women were going
131
through” and they wanted the channel to serve as an oasis from that stress.
16
WE
differentiated itself from Lifetime by trying to provide women with an escape from
the pressures of ‘having it all,’ the image of women that Lifetime seemed to celebrate.
In the same vein as Romance Classics, WE continued to program from a large library
of romantic and escapist ‘women’s interest’ films.
17
Much of the channel’s original
programming also emphasized heterosexual coupling, with shows such as Bridezilla
and How We Met, and thus lent itself to target a traditional construction of
femininity.
18
The network stayed away from any issue-oriented content,
differentiating it from Lifetime, using the slogan “Live, Love, Laugh.” Lotz dubs it
the ‘unthinking woman’s network,” filled the escapist fare and traditional
constructions of femininity.
19

Also premiering in 2000, Oxygen launched as a “thinking women’s network”
with emphasis on non-narrative programming and web integration with its content.
20

In order to distinguish itself, network executives claimed that they wanted to offer
programming that didn’t tell women what they “needed” to do or be and didn’t create
the “fearful place” supposedly created by Lifetime’s programming.
21
Oxygen came on
the scene branding itself as optimistic, informative and funny. Early programming
included talk shows, documentaries about women and programming that focused on
the web experience (Oprah Goes Online) targeting women. Lotz laments that
although this unusual model attracted feminist media critics it failed to attract
viewers, so the network had to reorient its programming with more traditional off-net
comedies and female-centered dramas.
22
Lotz describes Oxygen as the FOX of the
132
women’s cable nets with more of an ‘edge’ to its programming, even when it shifted
from its early progressive/informative identity to a channel that just offered more
‘edgy’ women’s off-net fair.
23

While Lotz praises the diversity of programming that these new women’s nets
offered, they still attempted to fit women into specific psychographic categories.
Lifetime, WE, Oxygen and the many women’s networks that followed all sought to
define themselves by defining the specific woman that would watch their
programming. When thinking of what would be defined as women’s programming,
soap operas might be at the top of that list. If soaps’ target audience is women and
soaps are thought of as women’s programming, SOAPnet might logically be defined
as a women’s network. In looking at the beginning years of SOAPnet, however, the
channel’s attempt to not brand itself as a women’s network may be what defined it
against its women’s net competitors.

Was SOAPnet a women’s net?

As a likely candidate to be a ‘women’s network,’ SOAPnet faced an
interesting dilemma in how to define its viewing niche. With the re-airing of ABC’s
daytime soaps as its original signature programming block, SOAPnet’s vision of its
female audience could have looked much like broadcast’s vision of its daytime
viewers: women who did not work outside the home but who had purchasing power
over domestic and child related products. If SOAPnet chose to use traditional
133
imagery associated with the soap opera viewer in marketing the new channel, that
image would also bring with it all the negative connotations that have been associated
with soap viewers for decades. Alternately, SOAPnet could have chosen to try to
redefine the ‘modern’ woman as some slightly different variation from the images
that other cable women’s networks were creating. The channel faced the challenge
of marketing the same programming to two groups of women; drawing working
women back to soaps in the evenings and existing daytime viewers to SOAPnet when
they missed the program during the day on the broadcast networks. The channel’s
programming strategy of time shifting daytime soaps to the prime time hours for
viewers who could not watch during the day implied that most of their prime time
viewers were working women and lapsed soap viewers who had stopped watching at
least partially due to scheduling. If SOAPnet decided to create an image of its
audience as the new ‘working woman,’ as Lifetime did, it ran the risk of disparaging
the broadcast daytime soap viewers who already watched their programming. This
would have been counterproductive if the channel hoped to attract viewers who had
either once been a broadcast daytime soap viewer or were introduced to soaps by
mothers and relatives, who had also been broadcast daytime soap viewers. The
channel was not changing the traditional content of the daytime soaps, so it couldn’t
really promote its programming as something new and different for the ‘modern’
woman. Either way, the channel’s hands were tied. If SOAPnet wanted to distance
itself from stereotypes of the daytime audience by marketing toward a different kind
of ‘working woman,’ it risked offending the current daytime broadcast audience that
134
still watched or were lapsed daytime soap opera viewers. If it marketed toward the
image of the traditional soap viewers, it had to take on the negative stigma that went
with that audience, one that might be off-putting to potential new viewers or cable
advertisers.
In contrast to other women’s networks, SOAPnet cleverly positioned itself solely
toward soap opera viewers rather than the much larger demographic of ‘women,’ in
order to avoid the pitfalls of trying to define the entire female viewing population.
While WE and Oxygen were trying to tap into the illusive ‘what women want,’
SOAPnet targeted its audience as first and foremost soap opera fans. While the
overwhelming majority of SOAPnet viewers were women, part of the channel’s early
success can be attributed to its decision not to try to define women or tell female
viewers something new about their own identity. Instead of inspiring or instructing
women, the channel provided a genre that historical evidence had proven women
enjoyed watching:
…While it shares target audiences with WE and Oxygen, SOAPnet has
succeeded in channeling a sensibility that resonates while its competitors are
struggling. It looks like women don’t want to be psycho-babbled to death,
patronized with talk about their “emotional intelligence.” SOAPnet devotees
say they feel less like they’re buying into an ethos than trashy, authentic
escapism and entertainment.
24

By not attributing the need for escapism as a product of the modern woman’s
lifestyle, SOAPnet was able to promote its escapist fare without having to comment
on the state of women’s lives. The network’s branding and marketing strategies were
lauded for not trying to make the channel into something more than a straightforward
soap opera channel; “SOAPnet celebrates what it is: a fun place that diverts our
135
minds from bills and the snow on our driveway…”
25
SOAPnet had the advantage of
promoting itself as a channel for all soap viewers, focusing its branding on its
programming rather than competing with the other ‘women’s networks’ who focused
on defining the psychographic make up of their audience.
SOAPnet posted early wins over its female-targeted cable competitors with its
genre focus strategy, but still had to constantly fight the negative stigma that
surrounds soaps.
At the turn of the millennium, network executives like Oxygen’s Geraldine
Laybourne and the WE channel’s Kate McEnroe were cheerleading the arrival
of a new kind of ‘enlightened,” you-go-girl women’s television…. In the all-
important under-50 demographic, both these girl-power, neo feminist
networks are now being beaten by a retrograde channel: SOAPnet.
26

While the columnist here is certainly celebrating the success of SOAPnet over the
other women’s networks, she ironically uses the word ‘retrograde’ to describe the
channel. Rather than seeing the forward momentum the channel was experiencing in
the ratings, it seems that SOAPnet could not always escape the negative associations
that label the genre as old fashion or regressive. It also supports the idea that soap
operas, or a soap opera channel in this case, are somehow antithetical to feminist
ideals. In fact, the article from which the quote is taken emphasizes how many
younger professional women are watching the channel, but can’t seem to completely
divorce itself from the notion that there is something inherently ‘retrograde’ about
watching soaps.

136
Branding SOAPnet in the World of Narrowcasting

Branding, even more than programming, is seen as the essential way to build
young cable networks’ identities and SOAPnet was able to use their ironic marketing
and genre identity as a way to repackage what was considered an “old-fashioned”
genre. With increasing competition in the cable marketplace, there is always pressure
to create a network that creates a new location known for particular content or a
‘boutique’ niche. Instead of building the new network around a signature series or
demographic, SOAPnet was built around a genre with a well-established and highly
loyal audience. Then ABC Cable Networks’ president, Anne Sweeney is quoted as
saying, “It’s the last genre to go to cable” and that she liked to call SOAPnet a “genre,
not a gender network,” even though the audience was at least 75% women.
27
By
characterizing the channel this way, Sweeney is not necessarily disassociating the
channel from its female audience, but by stressing genre rather than gender she
differentiates it from other women’s networks, attempts to open up the audience, and,
more specifically, does not exclude any possible male viewers. Soaps are already so
heavily gendered female that the network didn’t need to brand itself as feminine to
attract the desired female audience.
In their article “I Want My Niche TV,” Gary R. Edgerton and Kyle Nicholas
discuss the important link between genre and the successful rise of early cable
networks. Traditionally, television genres were used as formulas for minimizing risk
in order to assure a returning audience by providing a familiar model with just enough
137
innovation to differentiate one program from another. Edgerton and Nicholas argue
that many cable networks’ success was due to their use of genre as the key element of
brand identity as opposed to the broadcast networks’ more traditional use of genre:
Cable, in particular, has enjoyed success in competing for audiences with the
six broadcast networks precisely because it utilizes genre as a tactic to
differentiate itself, rather than as a means of minimizing risk by assuring
product standardization.
28

Many cable networks built their brand identity around a particular genre, and in turn,
a particular niche audience in a way that broadcast networks could not if they were
still trying to capture the widest possible audience. Edgerton and Nicholas use The
History Channel and HGTV as examples of cable networks built around particular
genres, the historic documentary and lifestyle-focused ‘how to’ programming, which
were highly successful in their use of genre as an image or branding tool:
Since the 1980s, genres have actually grown far more useful to the TV
industry as marketing devices than as production strategies. They have
become starting points from which to imagine whole new television services
more so than innovative series...
29

SOAPnet might be the ultimate example of this phenomenon. There was no need to
mold programming to fit into the network’s image of a particular genre, since the
soap opera is one of the oldest and most well established of all television genres.
SOAPnet president Deborah Blackwell commented on the advantage of the channel’s
pre-existing brand identity: “SOAPnet doesn’t have to build a brand ‘from scratch,’
…Shows like All My Children are already a brand.”
30
SOAPnet viewers were already
emotionally engaged with the programs SOAPnet began rebroadcasting and this level
138
of attachment could be easily transferred to an engagement with the SOAPnet
network brand.
The soap opera already had significant genre identity that easily became the
channel’s brand identity and, more importantly, the genre, and thus the network,
already had well-established fans. While soap fans tend to follow a particular
program with the utmost fervor at any given time, they are generally devoted fans of
the genre and have watched several different soaps over their viewing lifetime. By
branding itself as a channel for and about soap operas, SOAPnet capitalized on a
relatively untouched cable audience. The loyal soap opera audience was also a very
desirable one in cable’s fight against ‘channel surfing’ as the number of cable
networks expanded. According to Nielsen measurements of Length of Time (LOT)
of viewership in 2003,
“the audience with the longest staying power in prime time television today
belongs to a cable channel: Disney’s SOAPnet. Perhaps the network has a
built-in advantage: Soap opera fans have a reputation for being the most loyal
devotees of any genre on the small screen. Soaps make the point for
appointment TV.”
31

The concept of “appointment TV” is usually reserved for can’t miss episodes of
prime time network series or live sporting events. In SOAPnet’s case, the channel
was proving that the daytime soap would not only draw a prime-time audience, but
also deliver an audience that stayed-put once they tuned in. Soap opera viewers,
usually misjudged as an unsophisticated audience, turned out to be a cable success
story.
139
While the soap audience was still served by the broadcast networks with their
daytime soap lineup, declining ratings had slowly eroded the publicity surrounding
and the overall visibility of the daytime soap opera genre. In the cable marketplace,
however, this somewhat neglected audience was very receptive to the strategic
marketing of a brand built around their favorite genre. With the negative
connotations and low cultural status surrounding the soap genre and soap opera fans
in particular, SOAPnet re-affirmed the fans’ self-worth as viewers on a personal level
while affirming their value as marketable commodities to national advertisers.

Time Shifting—Addressing the modern viewers’ lifestyle

While SOAPnet’s initial brand identity avoided the pitfalls of trying to define the
‘modern woman,’ their audience target was still the same 18 to 49 year old women
that the other women’s cable networks were hoping to attract. SOAPnet’s branding
strategies may not have specifically addressed contemporary constructions of female
identity, but the channel still needed to capture women who were lapsed soap viewers
and working women who were no longer available to watch during the daytime
daypart. The creation of the network was in fact an attempt to address the changes in
women’s daily lives and to modernize the delivery, rather than the content, of soap
operas. SOAPnet president Deborah Blackwell characterized the women the network
was trying to capture;
“SOAPnet was started because of our belief that, as women’s lifestyles
changed, it was too hard for working women and even stay-at-home moms,
who are very busy these days and can’t necessarily organize their lives around
140
being home at a certain time every day [to watch soaps]. So the theory in
starting SOAPnet was, let’s give people who are busy during the day a chance
to watch their soaps.”
32

Blackwell recognizes both the huge growth in women working outside the home,
given that the broadcast scheduling strategies for soaps had not changed since the
1950s, and the fact that stay-at-home moms were also in fact doing work, so much so
that scheduled daytime TV viewing was not a viable option. The idea of time shifting
daytime programming to prime-time hours acknowledged the changes in lifestyle of
the contemporary stay at-home mother, whose daytime hours were really not her own
to control, as much as it did women who were now working outside the home. While
the VCR allowed women to time-shift soaps on their own in the 1980s and 1990s, the
SOAPnet format gave soap viewers a very simple and easy way to exercise a choice
in their prime-time viewing that was previously unavailable to them. SOAPnet
removed the obstacle of having to set a VCR, and promoted the idea that working
women, both outside of and within the home, still wanted to watch soaps if they were
easily accessed in prime time or on the weekends.
Attempting to address the changing lifestyles of soap viewers, SOAPnet
designed its initial prime-time lineup as same-day replays of the current ABC
Daytime soaps, targeting women who worked during the day, but still wanted to
follow the daily sagas of a daytime soap.
33
This idea of ‘time shifting’ the afternoon
soap targeted women working outside the home, allowing them to watch the
programs without the hassle of recording them on their VCR and promoted the idea
that a soap opera could appeal to a larger audience than women who supposedly
141
didn’t have anything better to do with their afternoons.
34
This addressed the idea that
while working women might not be home during the day, female professionals might
actually still want to watch a daytime soap. The negative image of a soap viewer
included the idea that women who went to work in the 1970s and 80s would no
longer be interested in the sagas of a daytime drama after they started working outside
the home. It was as if women had only been interested is soaps because they were
stuck in the domestic environment during the daytime hours. SOAPnet’s time-
shifting strategy depended on the idea that working women were still interested in
watching soaps for their content and that their appeal to women went beyond the fact
that soaps happened to be aired during the daytime when women had historically
been home.
“To some, it’s surprising that the sudsy shows are selling to the professional
women of New York, bucking conventional wisdom about the soap-watcher
as a bored, stay-at-home wife eating bonbons in her house dress and curlers,
awash in feminine mystique.”
35

This quote from the New York Observer claims that young professional women
equally enjoy the escapist fare that soaps offer them after work and that these daytime
soaps being aired in prime time provided just as viable an option as any other prime
time cable programming.
While the early decades of television were dominated by the three broadcast
networks which each aired multiple daytime soaps, the broadcast network oligopoly
did not insure the success of the daytime soap opera. Daytime television could have
just as easily been filled up with game and talk shows if female viewers did not
respond favorably to the soap genre. While the bored, stay-at-home housewife
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stereotype was rarely ever true, female viewers still had choices, albeit limited, when
it came to switching programs or switching off their televisions. Soaps were popular
with the daytime viewing based on audience preference, as no one was forcing
women to watch.
In addition to the idea that SOAPnet allowed working women to watch
daytime soaps at night, the time shifting strategy also addressed the fact that working
women still expressed many of the same needs or desires in their entertainment as
stay-at-home moms. The need for this ‘escape,’ or any sort of dedicated personal
time, was just as present in working women as it was for stay-at-home moms. In an
interview about the channel, Anne Sweeney, then president of ABC Cable Networks,
discussed working women’s desire to have dedicated time in the evenings for their
own television viewing;
Putting the soaps in prime time did a couple of things. First of all, suddenly
watching soaps became guilt-free: ‘I’m home from work. The kids are fed.
This is my time’…
36

Sweeney’s statement makes multiple points. She acknowledges that women working
outside the home are still most likely the primary caregiver to their children after
returning home from work and in order to promote soaps as “guilt-free,” she assures
us that female viewers will complete all their domestic duties before watching an
entertainment program solely targeted at women. Such reassurance is apparently still
as necessary as it was when programmers feared that the daytime soaps would prove
too much of a distraction for housewives in the 1950s. In her study of soap opera
viewing, Louise Spence recounts that many of the soap viewers she interviewed felt
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the need to apologize for or somehow justify the time they spent watching soaps.
37

Women taking time for their own pleasure is often associated with feelings of guilt,
especially when tied to such a lowbrow form as the television soap opera. This fear
that women taking time for themselves somehow threatens their commitment to their
families is seen in terms similar to Radway’s study of romance novel readers who felt
the need to find “escape from the heavy responsibilities and duties of the roles of wife
and mother, which they admit they do out of emotional need and necessity.”
38
This
desire for ‘escape’ or “me time” seems as applicable in working women as earlier
theories associated with the domestic housewife, likely due to the fact that working
women are still asked to meet the same emotional and physical needs of their
husbands, children or households that are asked of stay-at-home moms.
39
SOAPnet
recognized that working women might thus have the same need for soaps as a means
of an hour of concentrated “escape” time as women who were able to watch soaps
during the daytime.
Two particular on-air SOAPnet network identifications from the mid-2000
attempt to portray this guilt-free “me time” in which watching SOAPnet at the end of
the day is portrayed as a reward of personal time for both women working outside the
home and stay at home moms. In the first of these brief ten-second spots, there is a
quick montage of images of a ‘working woman’ as her day progresses and then
watching SOAPnet after a hard days work. The spot begins with a running
showerhead, a woman blotting her lipstick, a key starting a car, a woman writing on a
white board titled “Market Strategy,” a stack of papers being place on a woman’s
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desk, a woman hanging up her office phone while saying “got to go,” a woman
slamming her hands down on a conference table as three others sit while saying
“come on,” a stamp coming down on a stack of papers, the side of a car pulling in a
driveway, keys unlocking a door, a close up of a woman watching television while
lying on her stomach on a bed, a zoom in on a TV that appears to be airing a soap
opera, and finally a wide shot of the woman on her bed while a man sits propped up
next to her working on a laptop computer. As we see the woman watching the
television from her bed, it is accompanied by the voice over “bedtime stories:
SOAPnet, the new way to watch soaps.” The story of the promo tells that of a young
professional woman who works hard all day and then uses a soap opera as a ‘bedtime
story’ at the end of the day. Though she appears to be successful at her white-collar
job, the promo places emphasis on the frustrations and monotony of her day, building
a need for escapism and thus the “bedtime stories” of soap operas at the end of the
day. It is significant that she is portrayed as both upper middle class and has a
boyfriend/husband. The promo works against the negative image of soap viewers as
lonely, underachieving women who don’t have successful careers or relationships.
The companion SOAPnet network ID spot is similar in form with a different
kind of woman’s busy day. This one begins with pieces of toast springing from a
toaster, a toddler eating cereal in a high chair, a woman’s hand ripping a list off the
front of a cluttered refrigerator door, an SUV pulling out of a suburban house’s
driveway, the bottom of a woman’s feet as she stretches towards them in a yoga-like
position, a woman’s hand taking cash out of an ATM, a close up on the bottom
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wheels of a shopping cart while an orange falls down beside the wheel, a shot of a
woman helping a young boy with his homework at a kitchen table (this is the first
time we have seen a woman’s actual face in the promo), the same woman sitting on a
couch watching television, the reverse shot of a soap opera playing on the television
she’s watching, and finally a wide shot of the woman on the couch with a man in the
background standing at a sink in the kitchen. The shot of the woman on her couch
with the kitchen in the background is accompanied by a voice over announcing,
“After a long day: SOAPnet, the new way to watch soaps.” As a contrast to the
white-collar professional in the companion promo, this one attempts to portray a
contemporary look at the day of a stay-at-home mom. Instead of stereotypical images
of stay-at-home moms lounging around all day while they wait for their husbands and
children to return home, the promo places the woman in a variety of locations and
activities. While she still performs traditional tasks such as childcare and grocery
shopping, the promo includes images of a mom also taking care of herself (yoga) and
having some sort of control over her own finances (ATM). The final image even
portrays her male partner/husband possibly performing some sort of domestic task at
the kitchen sink. Her final act of watching a soap opera on SOAPnet appears as a
reward for a busy day of multi-tasking through the demands of being a mother and
running a household rather than as an escape from an unfulfilling and boredom
inducing day once associated with stay-at-home moms.

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Time Shifting as Repurposing for the post-network era

SOAPnet’s time-shifting strategy can also be seen as part of larger changes
within the television industry during the early 2000s, the beginning of what is
sometimes called the “post-network era.”
40
The large media conglomerates which
owned the broadcast networks began buying or creating their own cable networks to
create new viewing outlets for their own programming.
41
In his discussion of
increasingly segmented television advertising, Joseph Turow recounts how the media
conglomerates created cable networks based on their own recycled properties that
could efficiently target the smaller segments of the audience that advertisers
demanded:
What makes MTV, ESPN, Nickelodeon, A&E and other such “program
services” distinctive is not the uniqueness of the programs but the special
character created by their formats: the flow of their programs, packaged to
attract the right audience at a price that will draw advertisers.
42

SOAPnet fit perfectly into this model. It was certainly not the uniqueness of the
programming which prompted the channel, which was already airing daily on the
broadcast networks, but the combination of being able to cheaply repurpose these
properties and assuring advertisers an audience of women 18 to 49. This idea of
‘repurposing’ network assets on cable channels served to extract maximum profits
from programs and to offset rising production costs for the networks.
43

Repurposing broadcast network’s media products was also a response by
media conglomerates to the rise of digital media and the industrial instabilities that
came with it. With fears that digital media would overtake television, the industry
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responded by remarketing their archives as content that could be repurposed across
various platforms. John Caldwell discusses how the media conglomerates that owned
the broadcast networks actually turned the rise of digital technologies to their favor
by using this idea of “repurposing as a means to counteract a limited first-run shelf
life and to exploit legacy archival holdings in the post-network era.”
44
Caldwell calls
this phenomenon “ancillary textuality,” an attempt to bridge the world of television to
emerging digital technologies by repurposing or migrating content to these new
outlets:
With the flurry of dot-com activity attached to studios and networks in the late
1990s, the syndication lesson was further underscored: an endless “ancillary
afterlife” was now a possibility for all shows; if not in off-prime time, then in
digital form; if not on or with the parent corporation, then with a subsidiary
corporation.
45

The expanding landscape of digital outlets, including multichannel digital cable,
made syndication rights as important as initial broadcast runs for television producers.
For daytime soaps, a strategy to offset the declining ratings for the daytime broadcast
was the idea that the single network broadcast no longer had to be the singular
revenue generator and that soaps could expand their profitability if they could be
repurposed on a cable outlet like SOAPnet. Soaps had never been rerun or
repurposed beyond their first run broadcast before, but they offered another source of
already produced content that media conglomerates could use to fulfill the need
created by the expanding cable and digital worlds.

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Respecting the Soap Audience

As a way of competing with other women’s networks’ marketing strategies,
SOAPnet marketed itself directly at female soap viewers, and the channel offered
soap viewers something new that they had never had before: respect. The fact that
the female 18-49 demographic has always been a very desirable segment of the
audience for television advertisers is somewhat incongruous with the negative
cultural image of female soap fans. While advertisers certainly wanted women to
continue to watch soaps and then purchase their products, it has become less and less
popular to identify oneself as a soap opera fan despite their long popularity. As
women left the home for the outside workplace, the stigma of watching soaps became
more apparent to women who stayed home. Women experienced increasing pressure
to fit into one of the competing versions of what a woman’s ‘correct’ cultural identity
should be. Second wave feminism amplified the media and political spheres’ debates
over the virtues of the ‘have-it-all’ working woman verses the stay-at-home mom
model. If women were staying home in the role of fulltime mother and homemaker,
they certainly felt the pressure to distance themselves from the stereotypical image of
the 1950s housewife, whose job was apparently so unchallenging that she had plenty
of time to spend hours watching her “stories” every afternoon. Being a soap opera
fan, whether working outside the home or not, became something many viewers
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would rather deny than deal with the ridicule that came along with the perceived
identity of soap viewers:
Viewers find the genre intensely pleasurable but are uncomfortable knowing
that it is belittled by others. Some viewers downplay their own viewing
habits; others report they have “tried to stop watching” but could not; still
others know people who watch daytime television but “pretend not to.”
46

While the advertisers and soap producers have always courted the female audience,
self-identifying as a soap opera fan is altogether different from just watching a
daytime soap. The category of “fan” generally has negative connotations and female
media fans take particular hits, being characterized as lonely, single or divorced,
overweight and generally all things socially undesirable.
47
When a female viewer
identified as soap opera fan, the stigma is automatically increased because of soaps’
low-cultural status. One of the revolutionary things that SOAPnet did as a channel
was to recognize, validate and even celebrate soap opera fandom. While women
watching during the daytime broadcast had been trying to hide the fact that they
watched daytime soaps, suddenly there was a channel designed exclusively for soap
fans. Regardless of the marketing strategies, the channel’s existence recognized soap
viewers as valuable consumers: valuable enough to design an entire network around.
There were already cable channels for golf fans, weather enthusiasts, and video
gamers, but SOAPnet finally capitalized on this pre-existing fan base that had been
ignored by cable. SOAPnet was able to take away some of the negative stigma
associated with soaps by creating a virtual space for soap viewers’ fandom, in much
the same vein as other narrowcasting channels like ESPN or HGTV. Soap fans were
starved for the kind of recognition SOAPnet provided, and the channel could cash in
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on fan loyalty and longevity of viewership. SOAPnet’s senior vice president/general
manager, Deborah Blackwell, commented on how unusually grateful soap fans were
for the creation of SOAPnet:
“There’s an experience I don’t think many cable executives have, that we
have all the time—having fans come up to us and say, “thank you so much for
giving us SOAPnet.” It’s just amazing to get that kind of response.”
48

Part of this gratitude was no doubt due to the maligned status soap fans felt in the
expanding cable universe and within television culture in general. The fact that
women went out of their way to express their thanks speaks to the effectiveness of the
channel in creating a visible public space for soap fandom where there was usually
only personal, and often hidden, space for their fandom before. Vice President of
SOAPnet marketing in 2005, Sherri York argued, “We don’t ever think that we’re
poking fun at soaps. I think what we try to convey is the real fun behind them.”
49

The channel not only created a place for this fandom, but also did so in a way that
didn’t belittle women for their love of the genre.
While the concept for the channel was based around time-shifting the soaps to
women working outside the home during the day and stay-at-home moms with busy
schedules, SOAPnet also tried to change the image of soap viewers. Along with soap-
centered programming, SOAPnet began by readdressing loyal soap fans with a
modern sensibility while capitalizing on this relatively untouched commodity of soap
opera reruns. The channel’s early marketing campaigns addressed women as a more
sophisticated audience with a sense of humor about the genre, rather than the outdated
image of the lonely domestic daytime viewer. Soap fans, whether traditional daytime
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viewers or nighttime SOAPnet viewers, were now all included in this image of a new,
more sophisticated audience. The channel’s publicity (industry trade Television Week
celebrated SOAPnet’s five year anniversary with a special edition) emphasized the
youth and higher income levels of their audience:
One stereotype SOAPnet refuses to play into, however, is the perception of
soap viewers as idle homebodies who lack sophistication. “Our audience is
younger and has higher income levels that what you would ever perhaps
imagine a soap viewer to be. We don’t dumb anything down,”
50

While this gives the impression that the SOAPnet audience is vastly different from
the daytime audience, any soap viewer could imagine herself as being spoken to by
SOAPnet’s marketing. Women still watching at home during the daytime could
include themselves in this new, more valued image of the soap viewer. In 2002, the
channel introduced the tagline “The new way to watch soaps,” indicating that viewers
would watch soap operas “not just at a new time, but with a sassier sensibility. The
target: working women with a sophisticated style and sense of humor.”
51
This
statement doesn’t imply that women who stay at home don’t have a sophisticated
style or sense of humor, so women who usually watched soaps during the daytime
hours could also feel that the SOAPnet marketing addressed them just as much as it
did women working outside the home during the day. This ‘new way to watch soaps’
implied a different viewer position for all soap viewers rather than just a new time
slot.
Even the channel’s logo was changed to try to entice younger audiences who
may have stopped watching soaps because of scheduling. Channel president Deborah
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Blackwell commented on how the channel’s new look was designed around younger
viewers:
We wanted to be more contemporary in our look, … especially after research
determined that SOAPnet’s viewers were much younger than the typical
daytime crowd. The new design showcases sophisticated graphics and colors
in an effort to attract a more upscale crowd of working women—and men—
who use SOAPnet to time-shift the dramas they may have started watching in
their teens.
52

Retaining younger soap viewers is always a principal goal for soap producers in order
to build the lifelong viewers who make up the core of the soap viewing audience.
The channel needed a look that was respectful of the most passionate soap fans but
could draw occasional and lapsed viewers back to the genre. The channel’s original
logo featured a capital ‘S’ and ‘N’ over the word ‘SOAPnet,’ which was written in a
feminized cursive font. The negative space between the S and N was in the shape of
a large heart:

The allusion to romance with the heart as the part of the identifying logo evoked a
very traditional interpretation of soaps, and therefore of women turning to them for
romance and escape. As the channel evolved, they attempted to straddle the line
between appealing to the current daytime viewers yet seeming fresh and
contemporary enough to bring back lapsed viewers. SOAPnet’s ‘a new way to watch
soaps’ campaign included changing their logo as an attempt to promote more of the
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action/adventure elements of the genre, rather than the romance and more feminized
aspects that the original look of the channel leaned toward:
Consumer research told her (Blackwell) soap opera fans seek more than just
romance from their daily serials, she added. They also expect to find
suspense, scheming, treachery, intrigue and well, lust from the genre…. The
new look succeeds the soft pastels and hearts of the previous SOAPnet logo,
which has been replaced by a cleaner look that emphasizes “Soap.”
53

This move away from an emphasis on romance reflected the channel’s attempt to
address their audience as women who are the not stereotype of the lonely housewife
watching soaps in place of having any romance in their real life.
The cultural stigma attached to soap fans would be a continuous obstacle for
the channel’s attempts to brand itself as younger and more modern. In the following
exchange with TV Week, the trade publication attempts to ensnare Blackwell with the
thinly veiled implication that soap viewers are women without interesting lives of
their own:
TV Week: “The nature of soaps is often romantic fantasy. Do they attract a
certain kind of fan who’s into vicarious living?”

Blackwell: “We says it’s an aspirational experience, because I think we can
vicariously experience all the emotional highs and lows of the characters in
our shows…when you think about the emotional driver for soap viewing, it’s
that you can have a 40-year relationship with a character on a soap. That kind
of longevity is unique to the genre. That’s very special.”
54

154
Blackwell skillfully deflects the interviewer’s clear negative description of soap
viewers as women who want “fantasy” and are “the kind of fan” who needs to live
vicariously through television. She shifts the emphasis away from ideas of romantic
fantasy and toward the uniqueness of the genre and how it offers a type of viewer
loyalty that is attractive to advertisers.
While the marketing of the channel did not change the content of the daytime
soap operas it time shifted every day, the recognition of the soap fan as a modern and
valuable viewer was something new to the television landscape. Soap fans had been
such a maligned community before the advent of SOAPnet; viewers embraced the
chance to be seen as a valuable commodity and as women who could enjoy soaps
without being depicted as crazy fans who cannot tell the difference between the
fictional world of soaps and the real world.

Programming

One of the ways in which SOAPnet cultivated this sense of respect for soap fans
was by creating original programming focused around the world of soap operas as a
viable part of the entertainment industry. Soap opera actors, or anything soap related
for that matter, are rarely seen making the rounds on the daytime talk show or
entertainment news program circuits, which rely heavily on promotional
stories/interviews with prime-time television and film actors. In place of these
publicity outlets, SOAPnet created Soap Talk, an original talk show based around the
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world of soaps, hosted by former soap stars Lisa Rinna and Ty Treadway. The
program allowed fans to watch interviews with actors, writers, musicians, etc. from
soaps and expand their fandom with more ‘behind the scenes’ knowledge. Though
there are still several national print-based soap opera magazines and now the ever-
expanding worlds of soap blogs and soap gossip sites, SoapTalk was one of the few
television shows devoted to the promotion of soaps. SoapTalk (2002-2006) was
unique in that it gave soap world guests the kind of platform they were unlikely to
find anywhere else. Surprisingly, it seems as if working professionals in soaps were
as worried as soap fans when it came to the world of soaps being taken seriously.
Executive producer, Kari Sagin felt that SoapTalk offered a safe-haven for those
working in soaps: “I think stars know they can come to our show and know that we
will treat them with respect and not make fun of the genre. We honor the soaps
here.”
55

SOAPnet’s original programming also included One Day With…, a behind the
scenes look at a day in the life of a soap opera star and hosted by well known soap
actor Wally Kurth, Soapography, which featured biographical portraits of soap stars,
and I Wanna Be a Soap Star, a competition-based reality series featuring actors vying
for a part on a soap opera. The reality/game show featured Cameron Mathison, a
prominent actor on All My Children, as the host and had a rotating panel of judges
which included other successful soap actors, soap writers, agents, and casting
directors. I Wanna Be a Soap Star complimented the channel’s goal of respecting the
soap audience by delving into the intricacies and specifics of soap opera acting, thus
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treating it as a real and legitimate part of the field of acting. Soap acting may never
be recognized for its subtleties, but I Wanna Be a Soap Star at least recognized that
acting for a soap has its own technique and style.
Another way that SOAPnet was able to repurpose the programming and capitalize
on the extremes of the genre was to group these extremes together in the form of
frequent programming stunts or marathons. SOAPnet tried to appeal to its longtime
soap viewers by creating themed episode marathons. The channel delighted in using
the genre’s melodramatic excesses with holiday theme specials such as a Labor Day
“Whose Your Daddy?” marathon (2003), highlighting classic paternity plots, and a
Halloween “Back from the Dead” marathon (2002), featuring characters’ return from
presumed death. While this could be seen simply as a marketing gimmick used on
holidays and such, it also was a way for the channel to reuse soaps' vast catalogues
for inexpensive readymade content for the channel. By repackaging these soap opera
reruns into marathons they immediately became something different from what they
were when originally aired on broadcast television. Kompare’s concept of distinctive
repetition discusses the idea that new cable networks had to do more that just rerun
old programming, but that “the familiar must be made unique and remarkable” in
order to attract viewers.
56
These marathons offered viewers a new experience even if
they had previously seen the individual episodes when they aired on a broadcast
network.
Repurposing old content not only made good business sense, but it also tapped
into fans' nostalgia for soap history. Nowhere else would they be able to see these
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episodes again, unless they had personally captured them on their personal home
recording technology or sought out through other fans’ collections. While these
programming stunts did not allow viewers to revisit whole storylines or large time
spans, as fan archives often do, they were a quick glimpse at a soap’s past which
could remind fans of why they loved a particular story, character or particular soap in
the first place. These programming stunts also often used the apexes of soap story
lines (weddings, births, deaths) as the centerpiece of a marathon. This use of these
moments mirrors the 'greatest hits' type of collecting used in public archives, but it
also did much to reinforce the viewers’ love for soaps. Reminding viewers of the
great moments they spent years waiting for is a highly effective way to reengage
viewers with the genre, especially if they had become the lapsed or occasional
viewers that SOAPnet was targeting. Whereas the compilation tapes discussed in the
previous chapter are created by and usually sold or traded to fans who actively seek
them out online, these programming stunts targeted the lapsed soap fan who might
rediscover their love for soaps by watching SOAPnet.
One of the channel’s first programming stunts was June 2002’s “Unforgettable
Weddings.” Each Sunday in June, the network aired four hours of weddings from
each of the four then-currently airing ABC daytime soaps. A one-hour, clip-based
special aired before and after each marriage marathon.
57
While happy soap weddings
are the big payoff for fans who follow a particular couple through years of trials and
tribulations, the channel’s programming didn’t always try to highlight typical soap
opera celebrations, which can often reinforce traditional gender roles and promote
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heterosexual coupling and family. SOAPnet pitched their lineup of prime-time
classics Dynasty, Dallas, and Knot’s Landing, Beverly Hill s 90210, and Melrose
Place as “Dysfunctional Family Night,” -a campy marketing ploy linking these high
profile soaps from the 1980s and 90s. For a marathon of ill-fated weddings called
“Wedding Interruptus,” (2004) SOAPnet gave away T-shirts that said, “I don’t” and
“Cold Feet” slippers.
58
While these marketing campaigns grouped conventional soap
opera tropes such as weddings and the emphasis on family into programming
marathons, the channel’s marketing also put the emphasis on the failure or potential
failure of these rituals which are tied so closely to cultural images of feminine desire,
the fairy-tale wedding and the happy nuclear family. While embracing some of the
fantasy portrayal of love and marriage as portrayed in soaps, SOAPnet was
simultaneously marketing to current fans that were well aware of the realities of
marriage and family.
SOAPnet also produced another series of marathons titled “They Started on
Soaps” featuring past soap stars who had gone on to become prime-time TV or film
stars. The marathon consisted of individual episodes featuring the stars being
celebrated. In 2004, They Started on Soaps 3, aired an episode of All My Children
originally from 2000 featuring film and TV star Josh Duhamel. While the episode
was meant to highlight Duhamel, it also featured other past AMC stars, Kelly Ripa
and Mark Consuelos. The repurposing of the episode was enhanced with
“soapnotes,” a series of short textual messages that appeared in the lower thirds of the
screen throughout the program. Much in the same vein as VH1’s Pop-Up Video
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series, these soapnotes consisted of short explanations of what was happening on
screen, references to both past and future storylines that would effect the on-screen
characters, and supplying non-diegetic information about the actors and actresses.
Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos played the popular on-screen couple of Hayley
Vaughn and Mateo Santos, and Ripa went on to co-host the morning show Live with
Regis and Kelly and star in an ABC sitcom Hope and Faith. During the scenes
featuring Ripa and Consuelos, the on-screen soapnotes featured tidbits such as:
• Haley is the host of her own TV talk show, “WAVE”
• Turkey Day: Hayley Vaughan arrived in Pine Valley on Thanksgiving
Day in 1990.
• Mother Trouble: Hayley’s mom Arlene was an alcoholic
• Love on the Set: Kelly Ripa met Mark Consuelos when he auditioned
to play her love interest.
• Mark and Kelly secretly eloped to Las Vegas.
• Watch Kelly on “Hope & Faith” every Friday @ 9/8c on ABC.
• California Here We Come: In 2002, Hayley and Mateo moved to CA
when Hayley’s show “WAVE” went into syndication.

The soapnotes not only serve to repackage previously aired content, but point out the
intertextuality involved in watching soaps. The notes merge both past and present on
screen, explaining the character of Haley’s arrival and departure from the program,
and the world of the actors outside the soap, which soap viewers often follow closely.
The notes even manage to work in a quick synergistic promo for Ripa’s sitcom, Hope
and Faith, which was then currently airing on ABC. Like Pop-Up Video, the
soapnotes helped tie these older episodes into current ‘digital’ aesthetics and respond
to online fan practices that combine fan knowledge of the narrative world and the real
world business of soaps together.
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SOAPnet’s synergy with ABC through the Disney Corporation also allowed it to
cross-promote ABC primetime dramas which feature actors who once appeared on
soaps with the “they started on soaps” ad campaign. That campaign was especially
fruitful with the success of ABC’s Desperate Housewives, a comedic take on soap
opera itself, in which several of its stars started on daytime and primetime soaps. The
channel also runs occasional marathons of ABC’s prime time dramas that share many
of the soap opera’s narrative structures including Ugly Betty, Private Practice and the
short-lived, but critically acclaimed, Dirty Sexy Money.
59
These one-time crossover
marathons from ABC are good example of how media conglomerates reused content
across their spectrum of holdings and exposes the fact that much of the serialized
prime time programming has for more in common with soap operas than non-soap
viewers may realize.
Using both original programming and programming stunts, SOAPnet offered
soap opera fans something they had never experienced before, a twenty-four hour a
day soap opera immersion. Creating ancillary programming around the actual soap
operas allowed the channel to become more than just a repository for daily reruns of
current network soaps. By acknowledging that soap fans are savvy enough to
recognize the absurdity of some soap opera tropes, like characters coming back from
the dead, and embracing the sheer fun that can be had in following soaps, the channel
showed its investment in fans. Creating original programming also acknowledged
that fans followed soap actors and the soap industry much in the same way general
entertainment fans do, and that they clearly knew the difference between the soap
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world and the real world. SOAPnet was the first place to single out soap opera
fandom as a valuable commodity in the television industry.

Distinctive Repetition

Kompare’s Rerun Nation introduces the notion of ‘distinctive repetition’ as a
branding process used by boutique cable television networks in the end of the 20
th

century. Kompare discusses how, in the case of Nick at Nite and TVLand, cable
stations become more than just rerun venues but rather construct themselves as
shrines of TV heritage where programs are combined with stylized marketing and
intertextual associations focusing on the very ‘TV-ness’ of the channel itself.
60
Nick
at Nite and TV Land both used reruns to shape their identities as cable networks.
SOAPnet thus uses this idea of ‘distinctive repetition’ to celebrate the soap opera
genre’s own television heritage. The channel’s tongue in cheek marketing promos,
their strategy of linking together cancelled and current soaps in its lineups and
making connections between current celebrities and their previous soap roles
connects the rerunning of soaps to the larger world of current television and
celebrities. The channel is able to create a new viewing context, not just watching a
combinations of reruns, but by using this idea of distinctive repetition to create a
space where the viewer is immersed in a virtual celebration of the soap opera genre.
Soaps, news programming, sports and game shows are unlike most television
genres because they are impractical for repetition. Kompare argues that a television
162
program’s capacity for repetition is an “essential element in the viability of the
producer, studio, distributor, network and even the fan.”
61
With the rapidly expanding
availability of delivery systems, be it cable, satellite, or internet/broadband
applications, any program must build in the possibility for repetition in order to make
itself a profitable venture for all involved. The repetition–unfriendly nature of soaps
is a detriment to soaps continuing viability in the current media industry. SOAPnet’s
attempt to create ‘distinctive repetition’ for soaps was not only a way to reap profits
from the network archives, but to boost the potential of a genre in economic peril.
Providing soap operas in a rerun format is also significant to the experience of the
soap opera viewer and soap fan community. Allowing more soap fans to re-
experience these series can keep their fandom of soaps, past and present, alive and
thriving, much like other ‘cult’ fan communities who re-examine and rewatch their
fan text at great length.

Watching Soaps in Rerun: Changing the emotional connections

While SOAPnet recognized a change in the viewer, marketing to a modern
and self-aware audience, and created a new viewing context with its ‘distinctive
repetition’ of soaps, watching a soap in rerun is an altogether different experience
than watching it in its first-run. Watching reruns—soap reruns in this case—
constructs a different mode of viewership than ordinary television watching. John
Weispfenning’s work on the cultural functions of reruns cites surveys in which
respondents report their motivations behind watching reruns, which include,
163
“wanting to remember parts they had missed before or forgotten, wanting to look for
different things, and…wanting to be reminded of the ending.”
62
These descriptions
may fit many of the reasons fans might want to watch their favorite soaps again. In
‘wanting to remember parts missed or forgotten,’ soap fans can attempt to fill in gaps
of their own knowledge of soap histories by watching reruns. Knowledge of complex
narrative histories of specific soaps functions as a marker of cultural capital within
fan communities, such as in the case of the fan historian. Newer fans can revisit past
storylines of a current character in order to gain greater understanding of motivations
behind current plots and character actions, thus finding increased pleasure in both
viewings. Older fans, who viewed the reruns in their original broadcast, are reminded
of particular scenes and stories they previously enjoyed. In ‘wanting to look for
different things’ in reruns, fans’ attentions may have shifted in their current
viewership to an emphasis on different characters or even different soaps. Watching
soaps as reruns allows fans the opportunity to revisit storylines that they may not have
paid much attention to during their original run, as determined by their current
viewing habits and preferences.
Finally, ‘watching reruns to be reminded of the ending’ presents an interesting
issue when it comes to watching soap opera reruns. While the availability of reruns
will not likely alter the daily viewing of new episodes by current fans, being able to
revisit one’s own particular favorite moment allows the fan access to past emotional
ties that were closed off when storylines ended in the first run broadcast. As covered
in Modleski’s early work on soaps, lack of closure is an important structural
164
component of the soap opera form and serial narratives in general.
63
The narrative
conflicts of the soap opera world never ‘end’ in any permanent way. All romances
are subject to upheaval, families are continually broken and reunited, and death is a
conditional state of being. Yet storylines and characters do come to at least
conditional endings, mostly in ceremonial rituals like weddings, births, deaths, etc.
These rituals often function as the emotional apex of a storyline and serve as a payoff
for fans’ patience through months and years of constant delay. In this way, fans can
watch soap reruns to be reminded of one of these particular storylines and of the
rituals in which they invested so much time during the original run. The experience
of revisiting these particularly emotional events can stand in for years of faithful
viewing.

Nostalgia on SOAPnet

While creating nostalgia using reruns from past television eras was a successful
programming strategy for other boutique cable channels, no one had ever tried airing
soaps in reruns, even though the content on soaps is constantly referring to the
narrative’s history and calling on viewers’ knowledge of the program’s past.
SOAPnet’s themed programming marathons were a clever way to reuse previously
produced content at little cost for the network, and they also maximized the sense of
nostalgia for long time soap viewers. The programming marathons allowed for the
rare rerunning of previously aired episodes of network soaps that were still in
165
production. The re-airing of cancelled soaps also provided a previous unavailable
access to something from a viewer’s past connection to soaps. Senior vice president
of program planning, scheduling and acquisitions for SOAPnet, Sandy Wax,
discussed how these reruns were a kind of celebration of soap history and therefore
capitalized on nostalgia for that history:
These walks down Memory Lane have proven successful for the network, in both
providing value to advertisers and appealing to viewer’s sense of nostalgia. “Except
for the occasional flashback, the broadcast networks don’t have much of a chance to
celebrate a show’s history…”
64

Using viewers’ lack of access to past soap opera episodes to its advantage; SOAPnet
drew on viewers’ nostalgia for the past to lure them to the channel. Disney chief
executive Michael Eisner commented that he wanted to build the channel based on a
sense of nostalgia in order to recapture lapsed soap viewers.
65
Besides positioning
itself as a genre-specific rather than a gendered channel, SOAPnet’s use of nostalgia
in its marketing served to further distance itself from its major cable competition, the
so-called “women’s networks.”
SOAPnet could use this sense of nostalgia to its advantage whenever it reran
historical programming. Such was the case when SOAPnet celebrated the twenty-
fifth anniversary of the historic wedding of Luke and Laura on General Hospital in
2006. Luke and Laura’s wedding in 1981 is arguably the best known moment in all of
U.S. daytime soap opera history, and the possibility for creating nostalgia around its
anniversary was immense. General Hospital marked the anniversary of the wedding
within the narrative of the program by bringing back the character of Laura, and the
actress Genie Francis, and having the characters of Luke and Laura reunite and wed
166
again on what would be the anniversary of their first wedding. While the reunion of
these two historic characters was very successful for ABC Daytime and General
Hospital on the broadcast side, SOAPnet extended the event by creating a
programming marathon, “Luke & Laura 25: Something Old, Something New,” as
well as an original special Luke & Laura: The Love Story Revealed. The
programming stunt aired classic General Hospital episodes featuring the couple and
hosted by the three actors that portrayed their children on General Hospital at the
time.
66
The “Luke & Laura 25: Something Old, Something New” stunt aired four
episodes, including the 1980 episode in which the couple hides out overnight in a
department store and lives out a romantic fantasy date, the 1980 episode in which the
couple consummates their relationship, and the two 1981 episodes featuring their
elaborate wedding. The programming choices closely reflect the type of “greatest
hits” collecting done by television archives. The one-hour special, Luke & Laura:
The Love Story Revealed, featured interviews with Tony Geary and Genie Francis as
they watched and reflected on some classic Luke and Laura moments from General
Hospital. The special reviewed the narrative of the couple’s love story, included
interviews with other cast members as well as Francis and Geary, interviews with the
soap press and on set footage of Francis’ return to General Hospital in 2006. The
second half of the special featured Francis and Geary sitting on a couch in front of a
television as they discuss the clips from the couple’s history as well behind the scenes
moments from their 2006 wedding. The entire special and marathon were awash with
moments of fond remembrance and celebration of this apex of soap opera history.
167
The channel created this frenzy of nostalgia in hopes of drawing in lapsed viewers
who had once been one of the thirty million viewers who watched the original 1981
wedding. While it may have enriched the experience of current SOAPnet and
General Hospital viewers, the nostalgia was also a simple marketing tactic used to get
lapsed viewers to remember their former love of soaps and hopefully entice them to
start watching soaps again on SOAPnet.
In using nostalgia, SOAPnet’s programming stunts and marketing seek to engage
its viewers with their past relationships with soaps. The concept of nostalgia implies
a longing for the past, which is irretrievable, and the memory of a past that is
somewhat unreliable.
67
While the channel did not create new representations of the
past, as a nostalgia film that is set in the past would, it drew on viewers’ memories of
past soap operas to create that sense of nostalgia and a unique audience perspective
when watching vintage soaps. This strategy also raises the question ‘does a channel
that relies heavily on a sense of nostalgia imply that its viewer yearns for the original
era of the programming or that that programming is actually still enjoyable outside of
its original context?’
Susan Murray discusses a similar phenomenon in her work on the cable success
of Nick at Nite and TVLand by the way they created a “unique spectator positioning
for their distinctive collections of reruns.”
68
Nick at Nite, TVLand and SOAPnet all
had to build a brand to support their recycled programming that seemed new and
different enough to attract audiences. The two retro/nostalgia-based channels, Nick at
Nite and TVLand, serve as an interesting comparison to SOAPnet’s attempts to use
168
nostalgia to brand the network. Lynn Spigel discusses the way in which Nick at Nite
successfully used packaging and viewer positioning, rather than the programs
themselves, to create appeal around vintage programming:
The popularity of Nick at Nite’s reruns probably has less to do with the
universal appeal of television art - its ability to last through generations – than
with the network’s strategies of recontextualization. Nickelodeon created a
new reception context for old reruns by repackaging them...
69

According to Spigel, it is not the programs themselves that stand the test of time, but
the creation of a new reception context for vintage programs that makes them viable
again. As discussed earlier, SOAPnet tried to appeal to a contemporary female
audience with ironic and nostalgic marketing partially because the channel did not
change any of the soap opera content itself, with its emphasis on love and romance.
While the content of the current and classic soaps on the channel continued to follow
the traditional genre tropes within their narratives, SOAPnet’s use of nostalgia
endeavored to create a new viewer position where soap fans could embrace their love
of the form, with all its over-the-top and exaggerated features, as well as their past
personal connection with particular soap moments.
In considering the use of nostalgia, we also need to remain conscious of the
industrial factors that contributed to its resurgence throughout the television
landscape. In his article “Nostalgia and Style in Retro America,” Paul Grainge argues
“modes of media nostalgia are not the necessary reflection of mood (longing) or
cultural condition (amnesia), but the result of specific technological transformations
and strategies of niche marketing.”
70
Grainge contends that the production of
nostalgia as a marketing style is a specific economic strategy of the broadcast
169
industry rather than part of a larger postmodernism narrative, which produced a
cultural style of nostalgia. In the case of SOAPnet’s use of nostalgia in its marketing
and programming, these technological transformations were the rapid expansion of
the cable universe and therefore the narrowcasting model used by so many cable
networks. Grainge examines the production of nostalgia in the cable and broadcast
industries as specific strategies that cannot be collapsed as symptomatic of a nostalgia
that is part of a larger postmodernism narrative. He argues that this resurgence of
nostalgia in television needs to be explained by the changes in industry and
technology of television rather than just by changing cultural perspectives and argues
that the use of nostalgia in the media is more about niche marketing and targeting
specific demographics than cultural longing.
71
Nostalgia on SOAPnet can easily be
seen as a result of these industrial changes, but the strong emotional connection that
viewers have with the genre makes the use of nostalgia equally likely to cull forth
some of emotional longing for a connection to one’s own past viewing self. The
nostalgia for SOAPnet viewers may not be for the time and place of the narratives
aired on the channel, but rather the time or place in the viewer’s life when they first
watched these narratives. Soap viewers often have strong associations between a
particular soap or storyline and the person, often a prominent female presence in their
life, who introduced them to the practice of watching soaps.

170
Watching soaps out of context

The idea of the historical specificity of particular soaps or soap opera
narratives involves both the text’s historical context, the viewing context of its
original broadcast, and fan attachment to specific moments in a soap’s narrative
history. As with all reruns, broadcasting of soaps in rerun replaces the original
viewing contexts in which they were first aired, and therefore may produce a different
experience from the experiences of the original viewers. While this process of
rewatching or rereading particular television texts multiple times is common to most
fan cultures, it is a phenomenon not often examined with soap fans due to the lack of
reruns available.
Henry Jenkins addresses this issue by turning to Barthes’ mention of the rereading
process in S/Z. He quotes Barthes:
Rereading draws the text out of its internal chronology (‘this happens before or
after that’) and recaptures a mythic time (without before or after).” The insistent
demands of the hermeneutic code, the desire to resolve narrative mysteries, loses
its grip on the reader once the story’s resolution becomes fully known. Interest
shifts elsewhere, onto character relations, onto thematic meanings, onto the social
knowledge assumed by the narrator: “rereading is no longer consumption but
play.
72

Through Barthes, Jenkins contends that the rereading process allows viewers
to focus on different aspects of narrative rather than concentrate on the narrative
outcome as dictated by a first viewing. In much the same way that Weispfenning
addresses general audience attraction to the rerun, Jenkins stresses the different
attraction rereading holds for avid fan communities in order to increase their
knowledge and pleasure of the text. Fan communities such as those discussed by
171
Jenkins do not often rely on the broadcasting of reruns for their rereading experience.
Fans have their own videotape collections and archives of their favorite series or
episodes. These fan collections are also a major form in which viewers rewatch soap
operas. While both the cable rerun and the videotaped collection draw the soap opera
text out of its “internal chronology” of the original broadcast, rewatching a soap opera
raises several new issues surrounding fans revisiting soap narratives.
While Jenkins stresses the increased knowledge and pleasure when fans
rewatch a series, we also must be aware of the possible negative consequences of
stripping a program from its original context. Examining the way in which Nick at
Nite repurposed comedies of the 1950s and 60s, Susan Murray observes that the
channel was able to “recontextualize them in a manner that strips them of their
original historical and cultural meanings.”
73
Murray discusses how stripping the
context from these programs can lead to oversimplification and depoliticizing of
crucial cultural moments, and this manner of presenting programming is in line with
SOAPnet’s early marketing strategies but runs somewhat counterintuitive to the
emotional engagement demanded by the soap opera genre. Like TV Land, many of
SOAPnet’s marketing campaigns suggested that “ironic and escapist viewing are the
preferred reading strategies.”
74
If the ironic tone of SOAPnet marketing addresses its
audience as smarter, more self-aware viewers, do they necessarily want to create an
ironic reader position? While the outrageous storylines of soaps always rely heavily
on the audiences’ suspension of disbelief, without an emotional connection to the
characters or story, whether it be the a first viewing or re-watching long after the
172
original viewing, is there still hope of sustained engagement with a soap? There is a
fine line between creating an ironic positioning for the viewer and creating an ironic
detachment, where as the viewer might not allow herself to engage emotionally with
the characters or story.
SOAPnet’s use of irony in their marketing followed in the wake of their
parent company ABC’s own rebranding effort the late 1990s to change the network’s
image into a new, hipper version of itself. The network’s “yellow campaign” used
ironic tag lines mocking classic negative stigmas attached to television viewing in
general (“programs for couch potatoes,” “This is not your father’s TV”) without
actually changing the content of their programming to reflect this kind of ironic
critique of television. Caldwell asserts that the success of the campaign had little to
do with actual network content: “…even if it did not have comparably hip programs
ABC could still front itself as postmodern by making irony and pastiche a part of
every institutional and promotional self-reference.”
75
SOAPnet’s attempts at ironic
marketing function in much the same vein. The content of the channel’s
programming was as traditional as ever with their rebroadcasts of daytime soaps, but
repackaged for an audience that was aware of the genre’s negative stigma but who
still embraced it with a sense of ironic distance.
In watching soap reruns as reruns, in the case where the viewer has previously
seen the episode in its original or another context, we must account for how this new
situation may revise previous theories of how female viewers watched the genre.
Perhaps rather than having to focus on the needs and desires of others, referring here
173
to Modleski’s theories about female soap viewers constant state of interruption due to
the demands on their time from home and family, watching soaps in rerun form may
allow the female viewer to focus more attention on the self than she did in that past
moment of the original viewing.
76
Jenny Nelson’s article, “The Dislocation of Time:
A Phenomenology of Television Reruns,” asserts that this experience of watching
reruns, “contributes to the ‘I’ recognizing its own responsibility in creating such an
interest. The person turns a critical eye on the past-seeing self.”
77
The soap opera
viewer may be able to engage in a nostalgic or critical look at the self through
rewatching soaps that held significance for them at some particular point in time.
Nelson claims our fascination with the rerun lies in its connection to our personal
history: “Where was I then? What was I like then? How was I situated and
informed? These are the once-lived experiences that return to us through our own
narration of a rerun.”
78
Access to these once lived experiences of day-to-day life
may provide new insights into the significance of fan attachment to particular
narratives and therefore the singularity of specific soaps rather than their study as a
more totalizing genre.
The rerunning of soap operas offers a completely changed viewing context for
new and old audiences. Moreover, it provides a newfound source of profits for
producers and an alternative avenue for scholars to examine how soap fans interact
with particular soap histories and how soap narratives live on in fan cultures. While
soap operas may have passed their peak in ratings and broadcast significance, and
even in academic television studies, the study of the serial narrative in rerun will be
174
an increasingly important area of study due to the resurgence of serialized narratives
on both network and cable TV. The prominence of serialized dramas in primetime
and the serialized nature in many popular reality programs may have dramatic effects
on the nature of reruns on television.

SOAPnet’s Cancellation

In May 2010, Disney/ABC television announced the cancellation of SOAPnet
to make way for a new pre-school themed cable channel, Disney Jr. It was not a
shock to many viewers since the network had failed to acquire any new programs for
their lineup and the few original productions the channel had put forth in the most
recent years had been short-lived and decidedly off-brand. Such programs included
Holidate and Bank of Mom and Dad, a switching cities dating reality show and a
financial advice show for adult children still dependant on their parents. While these
programs were essentially still targeted toward ‘women,” they had very little to do
with the soap opera genre or the serial melodramas that the network was first branded
around. The biggest indication that SOAPnet might be on shaky ground was the
increasing popularity of the DVR, making the networks original value proposition of
providing easy time shifting of the daytime soaps less and less important to the
typical consumer. There was also a significant rise in serialized dramas on primetime
which targeted the same female viewers that SOAPnet was hoping to capture in the
evenings. This was not a fault in logic of time shifting, but the network didn’t
175
anticipate the immense popularity and the rapid household penetration of the DVR
and other new viewing platform technologies.
With new technologies like Tivo starting to take root, the novelty of time
shifting via a cable network appeals to fewer people. It’s never been easier
for viewers to watch soaps on their own timetable. Primetime is getting
increasingly competitive for nets that target femme viewers, thanks to the
boom in reality fare, much of which appeals to the same set of viewers as
sudsers.
79

Rather than expanding their soap lineup or adding more soap themed series, SOAPnet
attempted to broaden their base by adding their own reality series, targeting younger
women with Southern Belles: Louisville and reruns of younger skewing primetime
series, such as One Tree Hill and Gilmore Girls. Without the original need for the
time shifted daily soaps and with the growing competition for female viewers,
SOAPnet’s lack of concentration of the soap genre left it in the mix of others more
generic ‘women’s networks.’ By attempting to expand their audience to the more
generalized audience category of ‘women,’ the network lost what made it unique and
invariably alienated many of those soap fans it had tried so hard to court during its
initial incarnation. While As The World Turns and Guiding Light were never aired on
SOAPnet, their cancellations signaled a dwindling pool of options for future
programming and for the future of soaps on any network. The cancellations of All My
Children and One Life to Live shortly after SOAPnet announced its own cancellation
also meant that the network would soon have less fresh soap programming without
new episodes of these two daily soaps. Without developing any new original soap
programming, either focusing on soaps such as Soap Talk or new scripted
programming like GH: Night Shift, the network became less and less about soaps.
176
The cancellation of SOAPnet reflected both the ABC/Disney cable networks lack of
interest in courting soap fans and soap fans’ unwillingness to watch non-soap
programming on a channel that was supposedly devoted to soaps. While ABC/Disney
may not have found a way to revitalize or reimagine a successful SOAPnet after the
widespread adoption of the DVR, the channel’s early success and ultimate failure are
a useful tool in examining how highly serialized content functions in reruns. If one
subscribes to Kompare’s theory that repetition is an essential element of any
television program’s success, then SOAPnet’s fate may be a precursor to upcoming
challenges in the television landscape.
80
With current original programming, both
network and cable, both scripted and non-scripted, becoming more and more
serialized in nature, SOAPnet may be a model of what’s to come when trying to rerun
those programs.

177

Chapter Three Endnotes

1
Lynn Spigel, “From The Dark Ages to the Golden Age: Women’s Memories and
Television Reruns,” In Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar
Suburbs, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), p. 374.

2
Reynolds, Mike “SOAPnet adds Young & Restless.” Multichannel News 27.12
March 20, 2006: p38.

3
Marc, David. “What Was Broadcasting?” Television: The Critical View. Ed
Horace Newcomb. 6
th
Edition. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

4
This broadcasting strategy adheres to the false assumption that the majority of
women, as a demographic category, worked within their own homes fulfilling the role
of mother and housewife. Closer to reality was that the broadcast strategy only
targeted middle class women with the financial status that did not require they earn
outside income and had enough disposable income to own a television set during the
these early years of broadcasting.

5
Byars, Jackie and Eileen R. Meehan. “Once in a Lifetime: Constructing “The
Working Woman” through Cable Narrowcasting.” Television: The Critical View. Ed
Horace Newcomb. 6
th
Edition. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). p. 162-
163.

6
Byars and Meehan, 2000.

7
Byars and Meehan, 2000. p. 155.

8
Byars and Meehan, 2000. p. 164.

9
Lotz, Amanda. Redesigning Women: Television after the Network Era. (Urbana,
IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006). p. 38.

10
McAdams, Deborah D. “Too Big To Ignore; networks for women.” Broadcasting
& Cable Nov 27, 2000. v130 i49. p. 98.

11
Meehan, Eileen R. and Jackie Byars. “Telefeminism: How Lifetime Got Its
Groove, 1984-1997.” The Television Studies Reader. Ed Robert Allen and Annette
Hill. (London: Routledge, 2004). p. 92.

12
Lotz, p. 52.

178

13
“Who are WE? Rainbow's Romance Classics Renamed WE: WOMEN'S
ENTERTAINMENT; Network Announces MSO...” Business Wire Nov. 29, 2000.

14
“Who are WE? Rainbow's Romance Classics Renamed WE: WOMEN'S
ENTERTAINMENT; Network Announces MSO...” Business Wire Nov. 29, 2000.

15
“Who are WE? Rainbow's Romance Classics Renamed WE: WOMEN'S
ENTERTAINMENT; Network Announces MSO...” Business Wire Nov. 29, 2000.

16
McAdams, p. 98. The channel later decided against the name “Oasis,” due to a
copyright issue.

17
“Who are WE? Rainbow's Romance Classics Renamed WE: WOMEN'S
ENTERTAINMENT; Network Announces MSO...” Business Wire Nov. 29, 2000.

18
Lotz, p. 60-61.

19
Lotz, p. 61.

20
Lotz, p. 43-44.

21
Lotz, p. 56-57.

22
Lotz, p. 44.

23
Lotz, p. 59.

24
Schneider-Mayerson, Anna. “SOAPnet Cleans Up; Few Gasp For Oxygen.” The
New York Observer. October 3, 2004.

25
Ebenkamp, Becky. “Jacinda Cannon: employing cheeky campaigns, this soap
marketer knows how to dish out a little camp with her vamps.” Brandweek. April
12, 2004, p. 27.

26
Schneider-Mayerson.

27
McAdams, p. 98.

28
Edgerton, Gary R. and Kyle Nicholas. “”I Want My Niche TV: genre as a
networking strategy in the digital era.” Thinking outside the Box: A Contemporary
Television Genre Reader. (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2005). p.
248-249.

179

29
Edgerton, p. 249-250. The concept of original programming in order to remain
competitive will become an issue for SOAPnet, which I cover in my discussion of
their changing marketing strategies.

30
Dempsey, John. “Blurbbsters Bubble over cabler SOAPnet.” Variety. August 12,
2002. p. 16.

31
McClellan, Steve. “Networks like when viewers watch a LOT: ‘length of tune’ is a
stat broadcast nets push to ad buyers.” Broadcasting & Cable. July 21, 2003. v133,
i29. p. 26.

32
“Stories Made Exec a Big Fan.” Television Week. May 9, 2005. p. S3.

33
The first prime-time schedule for SOAPnet reaired the daily broadcast of ABC’s
daytime lineup: Port Charles, All My Children, One Life To Live, and General
Hospital.

34
The introduction of the channel predated the introduction and wide spread usage of
Digital Video Recorder technology.

35
Schneider-Mayerson.

36
Whitney, Daisy. “A Passion for Sudsy Story Lines.” Television Week. May 9,
2005. p. S9.

37
Spence. p. 54.

38
Radway, Janice. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarch, and Popular
Literature. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). p. 92.

39
See Arlie Hochschild and Anne Machung’s The Second Shift for an early in depth
discussion on the amount of household and childrearing duties working women
perform when compared to working men. (New York: Penguin, 2003).

40
Caldwell, John. “Convergence Television: Aggregating Form and Repurposing
Content in the Culture of Conglomeration.” Television After TV. Ed. Lynn Spigel
and Jan Olsson. (Raleigh Durham: Duke University press, 2004). p.43.

41
McClellan, Steve and Joe Schlosser. “Once and again.” Broadcasting & Cable.
New York: Jul 30, 2001. vol. 131, Iss.32. p. 18-20.

42
Turow, Joseph. Breaking Up America: Advertisers and The New Media World.
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). p. 5.
180

43
The conglomerates would quickly face lawsuits from producers and other
financially invested parties who claimed that cable syndication deals were purposely
undervalued in order to rerun properties on their own cable networks. See Kompare,
Derek. Rerun nation: How Repeats Invented American Television. (New York:
Routledge, 2005.) p. 189.

44
Caldwell, p. 65.

45
Caldwell, p. 47.

46
Harrington, C. Lee and Denise D. Bielby. Soap Fans: Pursuing Pleasure and
Making Meaning in Everyday Life. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995).
p. 90-91.

47
Jenkins, Henry. “Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritten: Fan Writing as Textual
Poaching.” Television: The Critical View. Ed Horace Newcomb. 6
th
Edition. (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2000). p. 471.

48
Stories Made Exec a Big Fan.” Television Week. May 9, 2005. p. S4.

49
Quoting Sherri York from Helmes Amy, “Having Fun With Image” Television
Week. p. S10.

50
Helms, Amy. “Having Fun With Image.” Television Week. May 9, 2005. p. S10.

51
Ebenkamp, p. 27.

52
Hogan, Monica. “SOAPnet to clean up its on-air look.” Multichannel News. May
13, 2002. v23, i19. p. 64.

53
Hogan, p. 64.

54
“Stories Made Exec a Big Fan.” Television Week. May 9, 2005. p. S4.

55
Carter, Alan. Honoring the Genre With “Talk.” Television Week. May 9, 2005. p.
S11.

56
Kompare, p. 171.

57
Forkan, Jim. “SOAPnet marches first promo down aisle.” Multichannel News.
April 8, 2002, v23, i14. p. 30.

181

58
Helms, p. S11.

59
ABC’s Ugly Betty was based on the internationally successful telenovela Yo Soy
Betty, La Fea.

60
Kompare, p. 171-172.

61
Kompare, p. 169.

62
Furno-Lamude and Anderson quoted in John Weispfenning “Cultural Functions of
Reruns: Time Memory, and Television.” Journal of Communication, v53 March
2003: 167.

63
Modleski, Tania. Loving With a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies For
Women. (New York: Routledge, 1982).

64
Helmes, Amy. “SOAPnet’s Stunts Spice Up the Slate.” Television Week. May 9,
2005. p. S9.

65
Schneider-Mayerson.

66
Greg Vaughan portrayed their son Lucky, Julie Marie Berman portrayed their
daughter Lulu, and Tyler Christopher portrayed Laura’s son Nikolas. Ironically,
neither Vaughan nor Berman had portrayed their characters when Genie Francis was
on General Hospital before she returned for her limited run during the 25
th

anniversary wedding storyline.

67
Cook, Pam. Screening the Past: Memory and Nostalgia In Cinema. (London:
Routledge, 2005). p. 6.

68
Murray, Susan. ““TV Satisfaction Guaranteed!” Nick at Nite and TV Land’s
“Adult” Attractions.” In Nickelodeon Nation: The History, Politics and Economics of
America’s only TV Channel For Kids. Ed. Heather Hendershot. (New York: NYU
Press, 2004) p. 69.

69
Spigel. p. 360.

70
Grainge, Paul. “Nostalgia and Style in Retro America: Moods, Modes, and Media
Recycling.” Journal of American & Comparative Cultures. Spring 2000; 23,1. p.
29.

71
Grainge. p. 31-32.

182

72
Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture.
(New York: Routledge, 1992). p. 67.

73
Murray, p. 73.

74
Murray, p. 70.

75
Caldwell, p. 54.

76
Modleski, p. 98-103.

77
Jenny Nelson, “The Dislocation of Time: A Phenomenology of Television Reruns,”
Quarterly Review of Film and Video V.12 (3), 1990: 89.

78
Nelson, p. 90.

79
Oie, Lily. “SOAPnet in a lather over ratings drop.” Variety. April 14, 2003. v
390, i9, p14.

80
Kompare, p. 169.
183
Conclusion:
The Soap Opera is Dead! Long Live the Soap Opera!
1

The fate of the daytime soap opera is certainly in peril, but to declare it dead may
be a bit premature. I’ll refer back to the story of General Hospital’s near cancellation in
1978 that all soap fans, myself included, tend to cling to when the threat of cancellation
looms overhead. As the story goes, in 1978 General Hospital’s Nielsen ratings were
perilously low, and the ABC network was considering canceling the show. The network
brought in producer Gloria Monty and writer Douglas Marland and told them they had
three months to turn the show around before it would be axed. Monty’s action/adventure
storylines and her discovery of super-couple in the making Luke and Laura did, in fact,
save the program from cancellation and pushed General Hospital to the top of the
daytime ratings. Saving it from cancellation, Monty’s work elevated General Hospital to
a pop culture icon when Luke and Laura’s wedding became the most watched program in
daytime television history with 30 million viewers. As of mid-January 2012, only four
daytime soap operas will remain on the broadcast airwaves (General Hospital being one
of them). There is no way to know if there is another Gloria Monty waiting in the wings
with enough vision and bravado to turn fate of the remaining soaps around. While it
certainly feels like a dark time for soaps, with the cancellation of many of the major
network soaps and the demise of SOAPnet, there still may be hope for the future. So we
are left to wonder, will the next decade see the end of the daytime soap opera as we know
it, will the tropes of the genre be subsumed into elements of other genres or will the soap
opera be able to sustain itself in some other format in our current transmedia landscape?
Even with the cancellation of four 40+-year-old soap operas in the last four years, the
184
current media landscape has provided ground for fan resistance to soaps’ decline and
experimentation, although not always successful, in hopes of finding ways to save the
soap opera. While the bulk of my dissertation has focused on what is being done or what
can be done with the history of soaps, it is also this deep historical legacy that has made
the future of soaps so important to so many people. The archiving of soaps in official
archives is an essential part of maintaining the legacy of women working in television,
but the opportunities that those women created for other women as writers and producers
on soaps may disappear if the soaps disappear altogether. Obviously, the fans have a
deep emotional investment in continuing the stories which they pride themselves on
knowing the backstory for, but many in the television industry also recognize that there
could be a way to leverage the power of a 40+ year-old brand with the kind of name
recognition and emotional loyalty that can’t easily be replicated in today’s highly
segmented television marketplace.
The very long and complex narrative history of the soap opera marks it as unique
in the television world. As I researched how the narrative histories of soaps have been
maintained in different but interrelated ways by archives, by fans, and by the media
industry, there may be a future for the soap opera within its past. Jenkins and Green
discuss Wired magazine’s Chris Anderson’s idea that profit can be found in the “long
tail” of storehouse titles, where small niche audiences will generate greater revenue than
mass audiences of the limited number of television channels (both broadcast and cable).
2

Despite some irreversible loss of early soap operas, the soap opera definitely has the kind
of ‘long tail’ history that would provide the huge volume of back content that Anderson
refers to. Sam Ford has theorized that the digitization of a soap’s back catalog and
185
allowing viewers to access it online or on-demand for a nominal fee could monetize soap
history for their producers and give soaps a chance to grow an even stronger internet
audience base.
3
(A similar enterprise proved successful in professional wrestling.) While
such a venture has yet to pick up much traction with soap operas, transmedia alternatives
for soap operas are getting closer to reality, especially in light of the recent fan activism
surrounding the cancellation of two of ABC’s soaps.

Response to All My Children and One Life To Live’s cancellation

When ABC announced the cancellation of Agnes Nixon’s All My Children and
One Life To Live in April 2011, there was an expected outcry from thousands of soap
fans and loyal viewers. As I discussed Chapter One, viewers raced to their online soap
communities and social media to rally against ABC’s decision and immediately started
campaigning against the cancellations. While soap fans still carry the stigma of lonely
housewives, these fans were tech savvy enough to start online Facebook petitions
directed at major corporations that advertise during the programs, a coupon campaign
sent to ABC affiliates declaring their intent to turn off their local ABC station when the
soaps went off the air, and staging protests at the network’s yearly upfront presentation to
their advertisers in New York and at several large ABC affiliates around the country.
ABC affiliates were experiencing an especially vulnerable moment because of other
upcoming daytime lineup changes with the exits of major fixtures of syndicated daytime
programming, The Oprah Winfrey Show and Live with Regis and Kelly. Both Oprah and
Regis Philbin announced their retirement from daytime television earlier in the 2011.
Blogger Ed Martin included this major schedule upheaval, as well as ABC’s lack
186
innovation in finding alternative venues for the soaps, when he expressed his outrage at
the soaps’ cancellations:
…the apparent failure of a major global entertainment content company to
explore innovative alternatives to those cancellations, the decision to terminate
two established franchises at the same time that ABC’s affiliates and audience
must also process the departures of daytime icons Oprah Winfrey and Regis
Philbin…
4

Online fans thought they made a big splash when The Hoover Vacuum Company
posted a message on Facebook saying it was pulling its advertising from ABC in protest
of the soaps’ cancellation. While it galvanized fans with the thought that they could
affect Disney/ABC with potential backlash from sponsors, it appears as if the company
might have just been capitalizing on fan support without really putting their money where
their mouth was. Hoover didn’t have that much advertising money invested in ABC
Daytime, and many thought that this was more of an attempt to capitalize on the fans
outrage than a real effort to save the soaps. An article in Advertising Age argues that
pulling one’s advertising from a program is more likely to hurt it than keep it on the air
any longer:
If Hoover really cared about the fate of Erica Kane and whoever else populates
these long-running shows, it would put a call into ABC and say, “hey, we were
really upset to hear about your decision to cancel these vaulted programs. They
attract an audience we care about. What say we try to sponsor a week of them?
Or how about you keep them on the air a few weeks longer and we’ll kick in extra
advertising support?
5

Whether or not Hoover’s decision to pull its advertising dollars from ABC was in fact in
support of soap fans or just a cheap way to garner a little extra good will while pulling
out of what might have been declining revenues during daytime television, some in the
finance and advertising world did notice. Not that Hoover’s decision was much of a
shake up, but Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson of The Financial Times had this to say:
187
Advertisers would do better to forget such stunts and start thinking about whether
they can help create a more viable economic model for the soap opera in the
digital media era. […] The intellectual property such brands have built up over
decades still has value, and some of the 2.5ml-plus viewers each show on ABC’s
death row pulls in every day would follow them to a new home.
6

As discussed in Chapter three, the ‘brand’ of soaps like All My Children were already
well known and followed by loyal audiences. Building a recognizable brand identity
around television networks and programs is highly desirable, but somehow these soap
operas’ brands were not enough to outweigh the cost of producing them for shrinking
broadcast television audiences.
Both fans and forward-thinking critics were stumped by the lack of value placed
by the network on such a devoted and vocal fan base. Even though the financial burden
of producing a daily soap was well known, as were the declining ratings for all daytime
network programming, a large committed fan base was supposedly the gold standard
when it came to other television properties. Coverage of fandom extraordinaire Comic-
Con is now front-cover material on such mainstream entertainment magazines as
Entertainment Weekly and TV Guide, but somehow soap fandom still manages to be
devalued by the media and industry. Critic Jim Romanovic wondered why daytime’s
‘failing’ ratings are considered as failures when looked at in comparison to primetime
programs favored by young viewers; “The Young and the Restless and The Bold and the
Beautiful both do better than most primetime shows on the CW.”
7
Granted, Romanovic
doesn’t discuss the financials of either sets of programs, but he is correct in terms of the
sheer number of eyeballs watching the different series. Other critics were similarly
confused at the industry’s lack of imagination when it came to finding some way to make
188
these long running serials financially viable when they still produced such devoted
audiences:
For now, just let me say that if you’re truly unable to successfully leverage more
than four decades of history with a show, along with one of the most dedicated
and passionate fan bases in TV, then the failure lies with you – not the daytime
genre, not with the series and not with the audience.
8

Most soap fan campaigns are less well known than many recent campaigns for prime
time shows in danger of cancellation, although their efforts have been just as active and
organized, but they still suffer the stenotype of being deluded housewives who can’t tell
fantasy from reality and are therefore rendered invisible by most mainstream media
outlets.

Fan activism to save soaps: the case of Another World

As opposed to primetime fan campaigns, these daytime campaigns are tied to the
genre as well as the program, but the industry response to these activists has not been as
accommodating as with their primetime counterparts. Harrington and Bielby cite the
catch-22 that soap fans find themselves in when they try to defy the popular image of a
soap fan by actively participating in soap campaigns (whether it be against cancellation
or some other change). Not taking action reinforces the popular myth that soap fans are
passive, but acting then invites criticism ranging from being a fanatic to the inability to
distinguish the line between reality and fiction.
9
Many assume that soap fan campaigns
are made up of those imaginary and stereotypical women who spend their days writing to
fictional soap characters to warn them of some dastardly fate that awaits her.
Fan campaigns to save a television program have frequently been driven by
189
fighting cancellation for prime time series, such as Roswell, Arrested Development, or
Family Guy.
10
Henry Jenkins’ work has championed fan activism, but even his references
don’t mention the activism that daytime soap fans have long practiced:
When we hear that fans are rallying support behind a favorite television series, we
might imagine the letter writing campaign in the late 1960s which kept Star Trek
on the air; we might imagine fans of Jericho sending crates of peanuts to network
executives; we might even picture fans of Chuck organizing a large scale
"buycot," getting people to purchase foot long sandwiches at Subways to show
their enthusiasm for the series
11

Whether by virtue of their devalued status as soap, and therefore female, fans or the lack
of success they have achieved in preventing cancellation, soap fan campaigns are not
mentioned alongside their prime time contemporaries. Soap viewers might not have
garnered as much mainstream publicity or even academic interest until the recent
cancellation of the ABC soaps, but soap fans have a strong history of fan campaigns.
Although they are portrayed as delusional women writing letters to the characters instead
of writers, soap fans have often written to the networks, producers and sponsors in order
to protest or praise particular storylines or to sway the future of programs. Melissa
Scardaville discusses her own participation in the Save Another World campaign in 1998
when the program was in jeopardy of cancellation. After joining, Scardaville learned she
was somewhat late to the party, and that there had been an organized group of Another
World fans actively campaigning since 1993:
The first of four distinct yet overlapping campaigns begin in 1993 when the
Seattle affiliate pulled AW (Another World). This sparked a regional campaign to
get it back on the air, and after that goal was realized, the group grew into a
national organization, one that lobbied for a quality show and put pressure on
NBC and P&G (Procter & Gamble, producers of the soap) when the soap’s
contract was up for renewal. By 1998, the campaign had morphed into the
version that existed through the actual end of the show. Post-cancellation, the
190
group continued to evolve, first focusing on bringing AW back to the air and then
lobbying for particular actors to find work on other soaps.
12

Save Another World campaigners organized on the web, but they used non-virtual actions
such as petitions, P&G product boycotts, phone calls to NBC and more to try to get the
companies to take them seriously and not paint the group as only a “small number of
disgruntled Internet fans.”
13
These Another World activists faced the same dismissal as
today’s soap fan campaigners who are already maligned because of their devalued status
as soap fans and, even though devoted viewers would seemingly be valuable to networks,
many long-time viewers may have aged out of daytime television’s most valuable
demographic, women age 18 to 49. Another World supporters felt the importance of the
a soaps’ history to a fan was part of the appeal of the campaign; “the campaign became a
means of validate their cumulative history as fans and a way to reinvest meaning into
something that had been devalued.” While advertisers and producers may dismiss older
viewers as ‘too old’ to be desirable consumers, without the historical knowledge of these
‘older’ or long-time viewers there would be no one to mentor in new and younger
audiences.
14
While the Another World campaign was not successful in preventing the
program’s cancellation, many of the participants felt they achieved some measure of
success when reruns of the program were re-aired on SOAPnet.
This organized and multiplatform campaign to save Another World pre-dates the
many current technologies that allow for multiple delivery platforms for video content.
The legacy of activism within the soap fan communities along with the extreme volume
of content that a soap opera produces would seem to be something perfectly suited for
those looking for fanbases that exemplify new theories of convergence culture. Henry
Jenkins defines convergence as,
191

the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between
multiple media industries, and the migration of media audiences who will go
almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they want.
15

If soaps could transfer from one major media platform to another, radio to television, can
they do it again and move from television to the internet? Television critic Jim
Romanovich postulated that a move to a different platform was based largely on whether
or not television programmers were willing to risk the capital it would take to move soaps
online:

The networks, I hope, realize…these devoted viewers who will follow their shows
wherever they go…I know that the six soaps can survive on the Internet or as a
hybrid television Internet vehicle if network programmers can see them as
valuable commodities. But I really can’t say as to whether they do. Although the
broadcast soapers may come to an end in 10 years, who’s to say a cable/Internet
run isn’t in the cards? It doesn’t have to be the end.
16

As I discussed in Chapter 2, soap fans are active enough to create their own video
libraries of historical soap footage because that footage is unavailable to them except in
largely inaccessible television archives or through off-air copies generated by themselves
or other fans. If soap fans were willing to go to such lengths to see historical footage of a
show they currently watch, they would certainly fall under Jenkins definition of
migratory media audiences who would move across formats for new episodes. Whether
or not these female soap fans are seen as financially valuable enough for a media
conglomerate to invest in moving soaps to the Internet is one of the key question yet to be
decided.

192
Can the Soaps Make the Move to the Internet?

In July of 2011, three months after All My Children and One Life to Live were
cancelled by ABC Daytime, the small production company Prospect Park, founded by
Jeff Kwatinetz, founder of the successful talent management company, The Firm, and
Rich Frank, former president of Walt Disney Studios, announced that they would be
licensing the two soaps from ABC for production and distribution on the internet.
Prospect Park indicated that they wanted to start their own online network, somewhat
unoriginally named The Online Network, with original episodes of the two soaps airing
five days a week. While the terms of the deal were not revealed, it appeared that the
production company would pay a licensing fee to ABC to use these established properties
in order to build recognition for their new online network and had the option to market
their production of the soaps to cable networks as well. The media speculated that
Prospect Park hoped to land a deal with a basic cable network that would air the soaps on
a delay, a few days or a week after they aired online, thus bringing in more revenue and
viewers who would not have otherwise followed the soaps online (they assumed that
older viewers would reject online viewing).
17
Although Prospect Park had only
successfully produced two hour-long cable dramas and had no experience making soaps,
fans saw them as a possible savior for their beloved programs.
Prospect Parks’ plans were vague, but fans embraced the idea of watching online
as long as they could continue to follow the programs they had invested years in. Things
looked promising when Prospect Park signed many of the lead actors from One Life to
Live, including 40-year veteran actress Erica Slezak, agreed to continue, the head writer
from One Life agreed to continue writing the show, and the executive producer of One
193
Life was hired as both executive producer of the online version and as vice president of
serialized dramas for Prospect Park. For soap fans, Prospect Park was the hero of the
storyline. Then it all fell apart. In late November, just after One Life to Live had
wrapped production for their final ABC episodes, Prospect Park announced that they
would be suspending their endeavor to produce the two soaps for their Internet network.
While there were some indications that they were unable to finalize deals with the
respective unions involved, the unions emphatically denied the claims
18
. Apparently
finding financial backers was ultimately the biggest hurdle. Kwatinetz is quoted as
saying,
“A lot of the investor pool that we go to are people with Hollywood
backgrounds,” he says. “And while we feel that it’s obvious that convergence is
here, we’ve met with an unusual amount of skepticism. So now we’re going out
to Silicon Valley, and they seem to get it.”
19

The research used in Prospect Park’s pitch to investors also indicated that 52% of soap
viewers watched online video “sometimes” or “frequently” during the daytime hours.
20

Apparently Hollywood investors were still reluctant to back the idea of moving a daytime
soap online because of unstable ad revenues for streaming video, even while they
scramble to build online engagement around their upcoming releases and fight for
visibility at fan-centric events like Comic-Con. Even as the media conglomerates spend
more and more time courting the rising culture of fandom, they apparently didn’t see the
value in investing in these soap operas, no matter how much soap fandom looks like the
prototype for current and emerging television fandoms.

194

Who Will Get the Last Laugh?

In a darkly ironic moment of corporate synergy, Disney, the parent company of ABC,
chose to use soap opera cancellation as fodder for their younger viewers on the Disney
Channel. In November 2011, an episode titled “Teddy on Ice” of Disney Channel’s
Good Luck Charlie featured a storyline where the two brothers, PJ and Gabe, accidentally
break their neighbor, Mrs. Dabney’s, satellite dish. The neighbor insists on coming over
to the boys’ house to watch her daytime soap opera, The Tears of Tomorrow. The two
sons get hooked on the show along with Mrs. Dabney, but then disaster strikes when they
learn that The Tears of Tomorrow has been cancelled because “our (the teenage
brothers’) generation doesn’t respond to it.” Mrs. Dabney doesn’t know how she can go
on without it and swears she will never be able to replace her beloved show, but when she
sees its replacement, The Edge of Yesterday, she is easily and instantly duped. It seems
that even if the daytime soap opera is not long for broadcast television, the stereotypes of
unintelligent and easily manipulated soap opera fans will live on. Disney/ABC, while
reducing their production of soaps, was apparently still in the business of teaching the
next generation about the foolishness of female soap fans. The program makes light of
the real devastation of long-time viewers caused by the cancellation of decades’ old soap
operas. At least the fictional Tears of Tomorrow was replaced by another soap; the
current fans of the American daytime soap opera may not be so lucky.
With the current prominence of serialized television programs and the celebration of
active media fandom by the popular press, it appears that the legacy of soap operas
touches much of our current television landscape. But as evident in the previous
195
narrative, the soaps and their viewers are still the subject of mainstream media’s ridicule
(even by their own parent company in this case). There seems to be an inability to admit
how influential the narrative structure of soaps has been across all of television
programming. The television industry, television archives, and television studies itself is
still reluctant to give soap operas their due in the contemporary television arena. Soap
opera fans still seem to be the only ones focused on maintaining the soap opera’s legacy.
As a scholar and fan myself, I have argued for the continued importance of soaps to
archivists and historians even as they may be in decline on daytime television. As an
artifact in television archives, the soaps hold a singularly important place in the early
work of women in the television industry and an important genre in early feminist
television scholarship. As the subject of an intense and loyal fandom, soaps and soap
fans are a prototype of the current media fandom that we see today. Rather than see this
fandom as just a precursor to today’s television fan communities, we need to understand
why this female fan community is still refused the proper recognition for their powerful
social networks, narrative historians, genre archivists and fan activism that they deserve.
Understanding the fate of the soap opera and the preservation of its history might hold the
most value to the television industry itself. Without learning how to maximize the
history and fan loyalty to serialized television, producers may face the same fate as soaps
when it comes time to syndicate current serialized programming into reruns. Soap fans
seem to be the only ones that recognize what might be lost if there is indeed no chance to
‘tune in tomorrow.’

196

Conclusion Endnotes

1
This title is taken from Rebecca Traister’s article of the same name. “The Soap Opera
is Dead! Long Live the Soap Opera!” The New York Times Magazine. September 25,
2011.

2
Green, Joshua and Henry Jenkins. “The Moral Economy of Web 2.0.” Media
Industries: History, Theory, and Method. Ed, Jennifer Hold and Alisa Perren.
(Chichester, West Sussex, United Kingdom: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.), 218-219.

3
Ford, Sam. “WWE 24/7 On Demand.” August 29, 2006.
http://www.convergenceculture.org/weblog/2006/08/wwe_247_on_demand.html

4
Martin, Ed. “Daytime Disaster! Did ABC Have to Kill All My Children and One Life
to Live?” www.huffingtonpost.com. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ed-martin/abc-
daytime-soaps_b_851989.html. April 21, 2011.

5
Steinberg, Brian. “Hoover’s Soap Opera Support Sounds Like a Wash.” Advertising
Age. April 19, 2011 http://adage.com/article/tuning-in/hoover-s-soap-opera-support-
sounds-a-wash/227079/

6
Edgecliffe-Johnson, Andrew. “Advertisers Must Plan for Soap Opera’s Second Act.”
The Financial Times. April 20, 2011. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a7181ce0-6b6e-11e0-
a53e-00144feab49a.html#axzz1bjHvfDg6

7
Wilson, Stacey. “Emmys: Why Daytime TV Still Matters (Q&A). The Hollywood
Reporter. June 15, 2011. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/emmys-why-
daytime-tv-still-202140

8
Giles, Jeff. “The Popdose Interview: One Life to Live Head Writer Ron Carlivati.”
April 19, 2011. http://popdose.com/the-popdose-interview-one-life-to-live-head-writer-
ron-carlivati/

9
Harrington, C. Lee and Denise D. Bielby. Soap Fans: Pursuing Pleasure and Making
Meaning in Everyday Life. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995. 90-96.

10
Scardaville, Melissa C. “Accidental Activists: Fan Activism in the Soap Opera
Community.” The American Behavioral Scientist. (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications,
March 2005) Vol 48, Iss. 7.

11
Jenkins, Henry. “When Fans Become Advertisers: Millville Becomes Legendary.”
http://henryjenkins.org/2010/05/when_fans_become_advertisers_s.html
May 3, 2010.

197

12
Scardaville.

13
Scardaville.

14
Scardaville.

15
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. (New
York: New York University Press, 2006), 2.

16
Romanovich, Jim. “Barefoot in Prospect Park: Daytime Soaps Dot Com.” Baseline
Intelligence: Research Wrap Blog. September 20, 2011.
http://www.baselineintel.com/research-
wrap?detail/C8/barefoot_in_prospect_park_daytime_soaps_dot_com

17
See Romanovich, “Barefoot in Prospect Park” for theories on how Prospect Park
expected to finance their production of the soaps online.

18
Giddens, Jamey. “AFTRA: "For The Past Month Prospect Park Has Not Responded to
Our Repeated Inquiries.” November 23, 2011.
http://daytimeconfidential.zap2it.com/2011/11/23/aftra-prospect-park-hasnt-responded-
in-a-month

19
Kafka, Peter. “Can “One Life to Live” Get New Life on the Web? Here’s the Pitch:”
November 3, 2011. http://allthingsd.com/20111103/can-one-life-to-live-get-new-life-on-
the-web-heres-the-pitch/?refcat=news

20
Kafka, http://allthingsd.com/20111103/can-one-life-to-live-get-new-life-on-the-web-
heres-the-pitch/?refcat=news
See embedded research slides.

198
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Asset Metadata

Creator Wilson, Mary Jeanne (author)

Core Title More lives to live?: archiving and repurposing the daytime soap opera

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinema-Television (Cinema Critical Studies)

Publication Date 08/13/2012

Defense Date 06/18/2012

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag archiving,fan studies,feminism,OAI-PMH Harvest,soap operas,television

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor McPherson, Tara (committee chair), Gambrell, Alice (committee member), Seiter, Ellen (committee member)

Creator Email maryjeannewilson@gmail.com,mjwilson1@hotmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-90096

Unique identifier UC11289198

Identifier usctheses-c3-90096 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-WilsonMary-1153.pdf

Dmrecord 90096

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Wilson, Mary Jeanne

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA