What happened to primetime soap operas?

April 20, 2009 1:49 PM

So, primetime television soap operas—e.g., Dallas, Dynasty, Knots Landing, Falcon Crest—what happened to these sorts of show?

Totally 1980s, right? Like, fer sure? I've never seen any of this stuff; it's off my radar except as pop cultural currency and point of reference. Do any of you know anything worth reading about this, rise and fall sort of stuff?

posted by cgc373 to Media & Arts (19 answers total)

The primetime soap operas still exist - think Melrose Place (totally 90s!) and the such. I also think that Desperate Housewives fall into that category.
posted by Sassyfras at 1:53 PM on April 20, 2009

From wikipedia:

The primetime serial

Primetime serials were just as popular as those in daytime. The first real prime time soap opera was ABC's Peyton Place (1964-1969), based in part on the original 1957 movie (which was itself taken from the 1956 novel). The popularity of Peyton Place prompted rival network CBS to spin off popular As the World Turns character Lisa Miller into her own evening soap opera entitled Our Private World (originally titled "The Woman Lisa" in its planning stages) in 1965. Our Private World ended in the fall and the character of Lisa returned to As The World Turns.

The structure of the Peyton Place with its episodic plots and long-running story arcs would set the mold for the prime time serials of the 1980s when the format reached its pinnacle.

The successful prime time serials of the 1980s included Dallas, Dynasty, Knots Landing, and Falcon Crest. These shows frequently dealt with wealthy families and their personal and big-business travails. Common characteristics were sumptuous sets and costumes, the presence of at least one glamorous bitch-figure in the cast of characters, and spectacular disaster cliffhanger situations. Unlike daytime serials which are shot on video in a studio using the multicamera setup, these evening series were shot on film using a single camera setup and featured much location-shot footage, often in picturesque locales. Dallas, its spin-off Knots Landing, and Falcon Crest all initially featured episodes with self-contained stories and specific guest stars who appeared in just that episode. Each story would be completely resolved by the end of the episode and there were no end-of-episode cliffhangers. After the first couple of seasons all three shows changed their story format to that of a pure soap opera with interwoven ongoing narratives that ran over several episodes. Dynasty featured this format throughout its run.

The soap opera's distinctive open plot structure and complex continuity also began to be increasingly incorporated into major American prime time television programs. The first significant drama series to do this was Hill Street Blues. This series, produced by Steven Bochco, featured many elements borrowed from soap operas such as an ensemble cast, multi-episode storylines and extensive character development over the course of the series. It and the later Cagney & Lacey overlaid the police series formula with ongoing narratives exploring the personal lives and interpersonal relationships of the regular characters.[10] The success of these series prompted other drama series and situation comedy shows such as St. Elsewhere to incorporate soap opera style stories and story structure to varying degrees. The legacy continues in more recent series such as The West Wing and Friends.

The prime time soap operas and drama series of the 1990s, such as Beverly Hills 90210, Melrose Place, and Dawson's Creek, focused more on younger characters. In the 2000s, ABC began to revitalize the primetime soap opera format by premiering shows such as Desperate Housewives, Grey's Anatomy, Brothers & Sisters, and Ugly Betty. These shows managed to appeal to wide audiences not only because of their high melodrama but also because of the humor injected into the scripts and plot lines.
posted by Sassyfras at 1:54 PM on April 20, 2009

There are lots of 'em. Brothers & Sisters, 90210 (the new version, obviously), LOST (to an extent), etc.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 1:56 PM on April 20, 2009

They got better: Sopranos, Deadwood, 24, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Gossip Girl, Lost, etc. These all fit the definition of Soap Opera (serial dramas with season-long arcs). The difference is they're not shit any more and as a result they're not crippled by the condescending term "Soaps", which were initially created to sell products. These shows (for the most part) are their own products and are selling subscriptions to paid services like HBO, or DVD box sets (and soap).
posted by You Should See the Other Guy at 1:56 PM on April 20, 2009 [3 favorites]

I think Dirty Sexy Money was trying to be that show. It didn't do so well.
posted by gaspode at 1:56 PM on April 20, 2009

What 'You Should' said. Other examples: The West Wing, The Wire.
posted by neuron at 2:17 PM on April 20, 2009

My completely uninformed hypothesis is that these shows appealed to those people who either faithfully watched daytime soaps or grew up around mothers who did. I remember as I child back in olden days (late 70s, early 80s), if you were stuck at home watching daytime tv, you could chose between three soap operas or Bob Ross on PBS. Now, from my own limited, statistically insignificant sample of friends and relatives, most of us either work outside the home or have many other options to watch on cable instead of soaps. Sure, there are plenty of popular serial dramas, but the basic set-up of rich people scheming, dying, coming back to life, and scheming again - to the exclusion of any other overarching plot conceit - isn't a familiar or beloved enough model to attract a wide audience on its own in prime time. "Desperate Housewives" comes the closest, but it's too campy and self-consciously soapy to be a legitimate heir to the great hairspray and shoulder-pad epics of the 80s.

Again, this is just my guess. Someone probably has written a much more erudite analysis of these shows elsewhere.
posted by bibliowench at 2:18 PM on April 20, 2009 [1 favorite]

Coronation Street and Eastenders broadcast in primetime I believe. For those of you who like your soap operas working-class and non-aspirational. And English.
posted by GuyZero at 2:31 PM on April 20, 2009

I've always just assumed that the reality-contestant shows were today's soap operas. (Hell's Kitchen, America's Next Top Model, I Love NY, School of Rock, etc)
posted by jpeacock at 2:34 PM on April 20, 2009 [1 favorite]

Hmmm.. I'm no expert, but I would say they haven't gone away so much as had the serial element assimilated by other genres which were more traditionally episodic. Instead of a few serial dramas and a few procedural crime shows, for example, we have more "crime dramas" which incorporate elements from both. The standard formula today is a short-term plot that gets resolved by the end of the episode, and a few scenes that advance a seperate long-term story arc.

And really, is Heroes not just "rich people scheming, dying, coming back to life, and scheming again", but with SUPER POWERS? All I see happening here is networks making more of an effort to appeal to different demographics or abuse CGI. Something like Dallas, I think, would have a much narrower audience today.
posted by cj_ at 2:38 PM on April 20, 2009

I would put crap shows like "The Hills" and "Laguna Beach" in this type of category.
posted by karizma at 2:48 PM on April 20, 2009

Sassyfras/Wikipedia has got it. They haven't gone away, they haven't morphed into genre shows, and they haven't risen above the label "soaps." That Wikipedia description of Dallas et al EXACTLY describes The OC, and you can't tell me that had a narrow audience.

Of course, Heroes is a soap opera with super powers and BSG was (at times) a soap opera set in space, but you can still find plenty of non-genre soaps as well.
posted by natabat at 3:14 PM on April 20, 2009

You can thank David Lynch and Twin Peaks. He pretty much singlehandedly (and thankfully) killed off that old tripe and replaced it with actual storytelling. Well okay, not everything is great, but you never would have had some of the awesomeness mentioned above; The Wire, The Sopranos, Deadwood, LOST, Mad Men, etc. My two pennies.
posted by elendil71 at 3:28 PM on April 20, 2009 [1 favorite]

The Brits are doing it quite well. BBCAmerica is currently running Mistresses, before that it was Footballer's Wives... before that it was...

They aren't my kind of shows, so I don't watch, but I see their adverts all the time.
posted by hippybear at 3:41 PM on April 20, 2009

I wonder if part of the allure of these shows was, as mentioned in the Wikipedia article, the presence of the "glamorous bitch-figure," and that these archetypes don't really exist in today's pop culture in the same way.

Jane Wyman, Lana Turner, Joan Collins, Linda Evans: who are today's analogues? I can't think of any who can wear their shoes. Heather Locklear on Melrose place? Sure, she was good, but she was no Jane Wyman. And she was no Joan Collins, with whom she played on Dynasty.

People enjoyed seeing these stong iconic women (and men--Larry Hagman!) on TV, often resurrecting their careers spectacularly after long fallow periods where Hollywood didn't know what to do with them. Those kinds of actresses and actors don't exist these days.

Also credit the rise of the ensemble cast of equals (males, females, races/ethnic backgrounds, and most within the 20-50 age range), which functions to attract the broadest possible audience--important to advertisers. Grey's Anatomy for example--named for the character Meredith Grey, but it's a full-on ensemble show featuring someone of every persuasion, and whose narrative does not revolve around the title character. Same thing for Desperate Housewives, etc.
posted by ViolaGrinder at 4:14 PM on April 20, 2009

I've never seen any of this stuff; it's off my radar except as pop cultural currency and point of reference.

Lucky you!!

As someone who indeed grew up around a mother, and father, and aunts and uncles and neighbours and an entire country who faithfully watched series like Dallas and Dynasty, the main thing I remember is how huge they were, it was impossible to avoid them, everyone had either watched at least once or heard about it anyway, you could have travelled to the furthest village in the remotest Greek island and everyone would know who J.R. Ewing was, and I bet in the local pub you'd have been able to find more than one person to sing the theme tune for you as well.

If that sounds like hyperbole, check this out:

Dallas was one of the most popular TV shows in history—and nowhere was it more talked about than in Nicolae Ceausescu’s communist Romania. How did the soap opera get past Romanian censors? With help from Dallas leading man, J.R. Ewing, of course. Because J.R. was portrayed as a despicable oil baron, Ceausescu’s government presumably decided the show must be anti-capitalist. Whatever the reasoning, Dallas became a runaway hit when it arrived in Romania in 1979. A series about wealthy, beautiful people (evil or not) was an inspiration to Romania’s poor and dejected masses. Eventually, the government decided such Western television was a bad influence, and Dallas was taken off the air in 1981. But by then, it was too late. The fantasies of Western life lived on in the imaginations of Romanians, and in 1989, Ceausescu was overthrown during a public uprising. Not incidentally, the actor who played J.R., Larry Hagman, visited Romania some years later and was treated as a hero. In an interview following the experience, Hagman said, “People from Bucharest came up to me in the street with tears in their eyes saying, ‘J.R. saved our country.’ ”

More on that here. I think they may be slightly overstating the case of the show's political influence, but you get the idea about the level of popularity.

And in numbers (apparently a record still unbeaten): In 57 countries, 350 million people watched to see who gunned down the most notorious soap villain of them all - Dallas oil baron JR Ewing.

Nothing in tv drama today that has achieved that kind of mass appeal. Desperate Housewives is big but not that big, nevermind the difference in style/content (what bibliowench said).

In terms of mass popularity and primetime viewing, that place has definitely been taken by stuff like Big Brother, X Factor, Pop/American/Canadian/Indonesian etc. Idol, Survivor, Wife Swap, etc. etc. 'Reality tv' is the Dallas of our era. For better, or worse.

Apart from this development, what happened is that there is more choice - tv drama and its audience have become a lot more diversified, there are more subscription channels and they are producing more and more independently, and because sometimes it's fine even if it doesn't get 20 million viewers (or 200, globally), and it doesn't have to appeal to every single average household on the planet, it can sometimes be more daring, it can be more interesting, it can even be clever, or at least more cinematic in style (Twin Peaks was probably one of the turning points, it was an unexpected success at least at the beginning).

So yeah, there's a lot of good stuff coming out because the offer is more diversified, and more diverse audiences are targeted, from bigger to smaller.

Soaps and big family sagas had started in the time where the main target for this kind of thing was housewives. By the end of the 80's they must have figured out maybe there were other big profitable target groups of viewers and consumers for primetime tv drama, like, oh, teenagers (hence Beverly Hills etc.) and that magic 18 to 34 demographic.

The targeting itself also developed enormously, it's become so much more studied and precise, so much money is spent on the research alone, nevermind the advertising. So - consumers changed, the tv market changed, targeting changed - and television changed accordingly.

(Reality tv for the masses is also cheaper to produce than tv drama for the masses, apparently.)
posted by bitteschoen at 7:31 PM on April 20, 2009

That Wikipedia description of Dallas et al EXACTLY describes The OC, and you can't tell me that had a narrow audience.

That description may fit in terms of the barebones, The OC is about rich people too, and there are elements of a family saga (even if like Beverly Hills 90210, it is more focused on and targeted at the kids rather than the parents); but their wealth is not at the level of disgustingly shameless wealth of an oil empire in Texas, and the main characters all pretty much face supposedly 'normal' problems, and the dad lawyer is all socially conscious, and mom goes into rehab, and all the backstabbing and cheating and greed is unambiguously punished, or there's some penance and redemption, etc. It's almost educational by comparison, really.

In short, there's some very unsutble level of moralising about wealth and life in general that was practically absent from Dallas & the like, as far as I remember -- and well, as far as it fit perfectly into the 80s zeitgeist! It was totally unapologetic. There is a world of difference with anything you see today.

It's like, think about when it used to be normal to smoke in a movie without the smoking character turning out later to be a murderer, or murdered, or a spy, or psychotic, or get cancer, etc. That's what it was like in Dallas, with money and greed. It was shamelessly celebrated.
posted by bitteschoen at 8:18 PM on April 20, 2009

If you're looking for a book to read, Everything Bad Is Good For You covers exactly why this sort of show has changed over the past 20 years.
posted by tapeguy at 9:45 PM on April 20, 2009

We have 200 channels and the internet now - we don't have to just watch the best thing out of 3 options, because if it's not good enough, there are literally dozens of other channels to check out, plus endless DVD's and downloads (a lot of people in the 80s didn't even have basic cable or a VCR, and even if they did, there still was a lot less available).

Today we don't need one TV show that appeals to mom, dad, grannie, grandpa, aunt and uncle; everyone can TiVo their own show for later, or catch it online or just know they'll rent the season at another time if it's good enough. That builds less hype for cliffhanger cultural storylines.

And even so, there are plenty of shows that are basically soaps - Mad Men and Heroes are the two I've seen that I'd say go more soapy than witty dialogue-y in their drama.
posted by mdn at 9:17 AM on April 21, 2009