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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. This is a big week in soap opera history.

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This week, The Young and the Restless celebrated its 50th anniversary on the air. Tomorrow marks the 60th anniversary of audiences being invited to the town of Port Charles, the setting of General Hospital. They are two of only three daytime dramas, along with The Bold and the Beautiful that are still broadcast on television. Days of Our Lives migrated to streaming in 2022. Serial dramas began on the radio. Check out this bit of the Guiding Light from 1940. Two forbidden lovers fighting their attraction to each other over dinner.

Rose: This is all very stupid, Charles.

Charles: What is, Rose?

Rose: Our having dinner together.

Charles: Stupid?

Rose: Yes. What's the matter with me? What's the matter with you? Why did you ask me to have dinner with you? Why did I accept your invitation? Those are questions that've gone through my mind the past few minutes.

Charles: You can't answer them satisfactorily?

Rose: Frankly, I can't.

Charles: Are you being honest, Rose?

Rose: I've always prided myself on being honest. I don't think that I know how to be dishonest, really.

Charles: Well, you must have answers to those questions. Rose, after our last meeting, I made up my mind that I wouldn't- that I couldn't phone you again.

Rose: You didn't.

Charles: No. I must admit however that I kept on hoping that you'd phone me, that you'd tell me that you'd accepted my offer.

Rose: I see.

Charles: Then this new [unintelligible 00:02:18], having Metham Street as we did quite by chance. Well, here we are.

Alison Stewart: Guiding Light would go on to produce 15,700 episodes between radio and TV. Generations of stay-at-home parents and also, latchkey kids were glued to stories of evil twins, fortunes lost, swapped babies, various tumors, and of course love. Nearly 30 million people tuned in to watch the problematic wedding of Luke and Laura on General Hospital. The careers of A-list film actors like Michael B. Jordan, Julianne Moore, and Brad Pitt, they got their start on the soaps.

As we heard in our last segment, the latest show from Pulitzer Prize winner, Michael R. Jackson, takes on the genre. We thought we'd bring in an expert.

Joining us to discuss the legacy of daytime drama is Elana Levine, professor of Media, cinema, and Digital Studies in the English department of the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. She's the author of Her Stories, Daytime Soap Operas, and US Television History. Welcome, professor.

Professor Elana Levine: Thank you. It's great to be here.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, let's get you in on this conversation. Were you a daytime drama watcher? What did you watch? Who did you watch your soaps with? Or maybe you're an actor who was on a daytime drama, or maybe you worked on one? Share something you like people to know about soap operas. 212-433-9692. 212-433-9692. 212-433-WNYC, or you can hit us up on social media. Twitter or Instagram is @AllOfItWNYC. May I call you Elana?

Elana: Yes, please.

Alison Stewart: Elana, your book begins with the radio-to-TV transition of serial dramas. The earliest soaps were on the radio. What was the original purpose of a serial drama?

Elana: These programs started on radio, as you said, in the 1930s. They were really all about selling domestic products to homemakers. They were owned and produced by soap companies, which is where the soap opera name comes from. They were owned by companies like Proctor and Gamble, Colgate, Palmolive. Those companies would have their ad agencies produce a radio show where they would include commercial breaks and have ads for their products during it. The whole point was to offer something entertaining to housewives that would also deliver those commercial messages.

Alison Stewart: Things like soap. Let's actually listen to an ad from an early Guiding Light. This is actually how the episode started.

Speaker 4: The Guiding Light. [music] Brought to you by the makers of P&G soap, the white naphtha soap. [music] Maybe only last night you were sitting at the supper table having a good time, but all of a sudden you remembered that when supper was over, it was up to you to do that big pile of dishes. It took the fun out of things, didn't it?

Now, if you mind dishwashing that much, I'll just bet you're using a lazy soap, the kind of soap that just lies down and lets you do all the work. When you want to clean up a pile of dishes in a hurry, want to get grease and caked-on food off plates and pots and pans, you don't want a namby-pamby soap. What you need is a go-getting business-like soap, the kind millions of women just like you are using every day. A Husky White-0

Alison Stewart: It goes on. [laughter] A namby-pamby soap. What is considered the first daytime drama to transition to television?

Elana: Well, there's a little bit of controversy about this, but probably the most prominent example is Guiding Light, which you mentioned earlier. Guiding Light was a big success on radio. It's creator, Irna Phillips, convinced the ad agency and the sponsor to switch to television. It actually aired both on radio and TV for about four years, and then switched entirely to television from there. Not everyone thought it was a great idea because the form worked really well in radio. It's easy to do the dishes and listen to the radio, and at the time people thought you really had to pay attention to television.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting. If people look up the cover of your book, they'll learn and they'll learn from your book that a lot of women, a lot of the creators behind these daytime dramas, they were in fact, women.

Elana: Yes. It's one of the spaces in the world of media that women had an important role from the very beginning. We don't see that that often in other spaces, but I mentioned Irna Phillips, who created a lot of programs first for radio and then television as a writer. The cover of my book features Agnes Nixon, who was a protege of Irna Phillips, who would go on to create All My Children and One Life to Live, and a number of other soaps after that. It's a place where women have long, basically throughout the history of the form, had a really important behind-the-scenes role.

Alison Stewart: Let's take a few calls. Katrina is calling in from Brooklyn. Katrina is someone who has worked on a soap. Hi Katrina.

Katrina: Hi. How are you?

Alison Stewart: Doing great. Tell us about your experience.

Katrina: Well, I worked in the soap world from the early '90s through the early '00s. I mostly worked on One Life to Live. I was there in the wardrobe department. I saw things like the man who was the, I think he's the executive director of General Hospital now, Frank Valentini. I watched his career as he came in as a stage manager and ended up as our executive producer at One Life to Live.

Just working on the soaps was so much fun. The actors were so amazing because they would do what they referred to as pump and dump. They would just learn tons and tons of dialogue and stage directions, and go upstairs and shoot it. At that time, we had 14-hour days.

Alison Stewart: Wow.

Katrina: Then the next day they'd come back and do it all over again. Just the whole process of creating that world of them. I worked on One Life to Live, As the World Turns, and Guiding Light. It's an era that I fondly remember . I'm kind of sad that it's all over. It was just really amazing. I also got to watch a lot of stars come through. I can't mention them all now, but-

Alison Stewart: Sure.

Katrina: -just that whole process was such a great training ground for everyone involved.

Alison Stewart: Thank you so much for calling in. We actually have a super caller. I want to bring into the conversation someone who got her start on Young and the Restless, went on to be on One Life to Live, General Hospital, Days of Our Lives, and the Guiding Light for 17 years. Liz Keifer is joining us on the phone. Hi, Liz.

Liz: Hi. Hi, Alison. So happy to be here.

Alison Stewart: All right. How did you get your start in daytime drama?

Liz: Oh, wow. I was young. I was a teenager, but I was already living in Los Angeles, so I didn't have to drive across the country like most people in a car with nothing. It was right there. I just auditioned. I auditioned, I went in. I had done commercials prior to it, so I had already been in the union, and they took me in for a storyline that was at the time, it was to fill in when Melody Thomas went off on maternity leave. I had about a year [inaudible 00:10:04]. I played a teenager and I knew nothing, and I learned everything.

Alison Stewart: What is challenging for an actor who works on a soap?

Liz: Oh, the scripts are challenging, the new script every day, but you do develop a muscle that you do dump it. I watch shows now that I don't even remember ever doing. It's repeating the same storyline sometimes, but having to do it creatively. A lot of exposition in between when actions actually take place. Something big will happen to your character, and then you'll spend a week talking about it, and the [inaudible 00:10:57] making all of that interesting, the scripts that are a lot of dialogues as filler.

Alison Stewart: What was the most daytime drama-ey thing a character viewers had to do or was involved in?

Liz: Probably having twins by two different fathers and lying about it, covering it up, which was based on, I think, a real headline in the news at the time. That was wonderful. Guiding Light was just my most favorite show that I landed on. I obviously stayed there for 17 years and I had the terrible-- It was so beautiful. It was filled with family. I got to work with Jerry verDorn, who's the best co-star ever. That was comedy and drama, and it was everything. It served my family, served my soul. I stayed there.

Alison Stewart: Liz Keifer played Blake Marla on Guiding Light for 17 years. Liz, thanks for calling in.

Liz: Oh, you're more than welcome. I'm big fan. Soaps are so important. Here's one tidbit real quick. I was a fan of guys for 10 years before I went on to play Blake. I actually watched my character be born on the show and then years later as an adult. That's trippy.

Alison Stewart: Liz, thanks so much. Let's check back in with Elana Levine. She's a professor of Media at Cinema and Digital Studies at the University of Wisconsin, and the author of Her Stories: Daytime Soap Operas and US Television History.

We'll get to more calls from listeners in a minute, but you wrote this great, in your introduction to your book, Elana. "Central to the history of American Television in its workings as a commercial, cultural, and aesthetic force rethinking American Television history through the history of soap opera, shifts our perspective so that this gendered form is not an afterthought, but rather a central player in the history we thought we knew." How is the history of the soap opera central to the evolution of television?

Elana: Oh, wow. Such a great question. I absolutely believe that it is, and it's really in all the ways that you say in that quote. It was so important to the economic history of American broadcast tetwork television in particular, in that the soaps, particularly between the later '60s and the '90s, made a lot of money for the broadcast networks. They brought in a lot of money because they were relatively inexpensive to produce. The revenues that they brought in for advertising were just gravy.

There's a lot of really persuasive evidence that in the height of soap opera in the '70s and '80s in particular, they were really supporting the network business model. There's that fundamental way.

Also in just a storytelling way, because they were some of the first dramatic productions on television, and they had that long history in radio before it. They really helped creative folks figure out how to tell stories in this medium and how to tell continuing stories, which as we know today are the center of so much of television, even in the streaming world, especially in the streaming world.

You have this form that has been ignored for a lot of its history because of its daytime scheduling, association with women, all of those things, and yet it's done so much to support and lead the TV business.

One more quick way I'll mention is just in terms of their treatment of various kinds of issues and social questions, which soaps have often been at the forefront of throughout their history as well.

Alison Stewart: For example, I know one example you've given is how soaps treated abortion.

Elana: Yes. Abortion is an issue that soaps dealt with sometimes before other forms of television, and definitely differently than other forms of television. There were abortion stories on soaps is in the '60s. The best-known example is Erica Kane on All My Children having an abortion. Actually, it was in 1971, so before the passage of Roe v. Wade, when abortion law differed in different states around the country, actually like in the situation we're in today.

The story of Erica's abortion is just a fascinating piece of television history and really American history because it really told the story from her perspective and really tried to understand her struggle in trying to decide, is this something she wants to do? Why does she want to do it? Then how can she do this given that it's not so accessible for women at the time?

Really, the whole, not the whole cast of characters, but multiple characters once they find out what she did, because she does it in a sneaky way, really spend a lot of time just discussing it, talking about it, debating it, talking about why somebody would do this, this, why this choice was necessary for her. There's just nowhere else that we see that in our media culture, that real almost deliberation around what at the time, and of course still today, was a very contentious and debatable issue.

Alison Stewart: Let's hear a call from Jean calling in from Brooklyn. Hi, Jean. Thanks for holding. You're on the air now.

Jean: Hi. Well, I was explaining to your screener that I'm a geologist. In the '70s, I worked on oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. I did not watch soap operas. My mother watched them. I just associated that with all things female and ick.

I landed on a particular rig. I would fly out on a helicopter, and the drilling superintendent of this particular rig grabbed me and asked me, made me watch his soap while he had to do something else.

He was addicted to Ryan's Hope. I sat there and I made notes on the names of the characters and what they were doing and things. Even more than that, the rig workers on the platform itself, the drillers and the [unintelligible 00:17:29] all the people, all the guys on the rig, they work 12-hour shifts. One particular group of workers would get off their shift at, I don't know, say noon, and race downstairs and watch their soap. I don't remember which soap that was. It wasn't Ryan's Hope. It was a different one. The company, the oil company changed their hours for some reason from 12:00 to 12:00 to 11:00 to 11:00 or something. There was a riot. They refused to work.

Alison Stewart: [chuckles] Jean, thank you for sharing that story. That's a wild story. Let's talk to Hank, who's calling in from Fort Lee. Hi, Hank. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Hank: Hey, Alison. I, of course, grew up with a grandmother who watched soaps, had a girlfriend in high school who raced home to watch soaps, General Hospital in particular. Then when I had young kids, young boys in particular, we visited firehouses all over the tri-state area for years. Very often, we would get invited up into the lounge or back into the lounge where they would have taps and emblem collections and the barker loungers, strata lounger chairs.

On many occasions, soap operas were playing on the TV in those firehouse lounges. I figured no firefighter was going to be calling into this segment. I'm calling in to represent all the firefighters. I'm not a firefighter, but there are so many who watch. Sorry about this.

Alison Stewart: Thank you for calling in, Hank. This is interesting when you think about it, Elana, thank you, who the audience is and who the audience who we perceive it is, it's been interesting to hear these past two calls.

Elana: Absolutely. I love those calls because they're such great illustrations of the fact that the audience for soaps is way broader, way wider, way deeper than we tend to think, and really than the industry has ever thought of it as being. It existed to sell products to women in the home originally, and it's historically been really hard for the TV world to get away from that idea. It just is where this form fits for them.

Many people watch soaps and there's so many stories like this. I hear this from people all of the time, and they're not all who you think. They're professional women, they're men, they're kids, they're people in all kind of walks of life. There's something so compelling and desirable for many of us to just have this program that we can turn to day after day, week after week, year after year, and characters that we follow over a lifetime.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Lynn from Nyack. Lynn, thank you for calling in.

Lynn: Oh, yes. Thank you so much for taking my call. I no longer watch soap operas but at one point, I was watching, All My Children. I had a terrible loss of my sister died quite young. It was just a terrible loss. I could hardly talk about it. Nothing was helping me. No grief books, nobody. There was a storyline on All My Children where the character, Dixie, had lost her brother. I still get choked up about this.

She was going to his apartment and just speaking to him every day. That storyline just helped me get through my grief in a way that nothing else did. Years later, I actually happened to meet the actress who played Dixie and told her that story, and she was very moved by it. It really did touch. There were just human things about those shows that really could touch people.

Alison Stewart: Lynn, thank you so much for calling in. Elana, I was going to ask you, were soaps beyond selling things. They provided comfort. They provided company for people. What is that relationship between the audience and the show, an audience which is asked to believe some pretty incredible and wild things?

Elana: Absolutely. There's really nothing like it, the relationship between soap viewers and these programs and all the people associated with the programs. There's this deep bond really, because the daily presence of the soaps in people's lives, the fact that people watch them on this continuing basis, again, often over multiple different developments in their own lives, there's just no other form of storytelling that you can develop that kind of connection between a narrative world and characters and the people who consume it. That's just so meaningful for so many of us.

Soaps ask a lot of their audience sometimes because they do have pretty outrageous storylines or like anything, they wax and wane in terms of how compelling the story is. Viewers sort of know that and they just go with it. It's like you accept things about your friends and family that are sometimes things you're happy about and sometimes not because you love them, and they're just a fundamental part of your life. The relationship that so many folks have or have had to soaps is a lot like that. It's really this deep connection.

Then there's those emotional moments like we were just hearing about where the characters really do experience things that we can relate to. That's really what it's about. It's about the emotions and it's about what the characters feel and how they react to things. No matter how outrageous the actual plot is, what audiences care about is how the characters feel about those things.

Alison Stewart: Let's slide in one more call. Tony, I've got about a minute for you. Go for it.

Tony: Hello.

Alison Stewart: Yes, you're on the air.

Tony: Hi, my name is Tony [unintelligible 00:23:34]. I was on Another World for two years. It was my first paying acting job. I found out I got it when I was at the unemployment office since I was working as an off-Broadway and as a secretary.

What was very interesting about it for me was that even though I wasn't Italian, because I had dark hair and dark eyes, I was cast as the only ethnic working-class character on the whole show, which is amazing, who worked as a secretary.

I would get messages from the main office telling me they wanted me to have my hair a certain way, and I needed to have manicured nails and have a certain look, Procter & Gamble soap opera look.

Alison Stewart: Quickly, I want to follow up what Tony has to say. Elana, when did soaps actually start to become less homogenous? We've got about a minute.

Elana: That really started to happen in the '60s and it happened slowly with, fits and starts. In the '6Os you started to get a bit more diversity. Initially, it's ethnic diversity like Tony is talking about. Then you start to get more racial diversity, and you get more economic diversity in a wider range of characters. That waxes and wanes over time. Some things like gay and lesbian characters, transgender characters takes a lot longer. There's brief attempts at it throughout the history of soaps, but it really takes until the 2000s for those to become a regular feature of soap worlds.

Alison Stewart: The name of the book is, Her Story, Daytime Soap Operas, and US Television History. My guest has been Elana Levine, professor of Media, Cinema, and Digital Studies at University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Thank you so much for joining us and taking our listeners' calls.

Elana: My pleasure. This was great.

 

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