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"When Lee Randolph died, a suicide who had lingered on for weeks, I watched her face being covered by a sheet, and I was ridden by the event. But it was not at all like losing a character in fiction they become more "relevant" and, sometimes, realistic. Today it is common to see such queasy subjects as abortion, incest, drug addiction and venereal disease meshing with the old, familiar workings of unhappy families. This produces the kind of intense melodrama rarely seen in the evening. Currently, The Young and the Restless is helping a woman through a mastectomy with almost excessive realism. All My Children recently took six months to describe a child-abuse case; How to Survive a Marriage (now defunct) introduced a precedent-setting seduction scene that ended up with the participants in bed discussing impotence and frigidity.
Such raciness is enticing to viewers—and to advertisers.
The fresher, more daring soaps are pulling younger, more affluent viewers rather than the traditional audience of blue-collar housewives and the retired. There is also a trend to give the soaps more time for their vicissitudes. Last year NBC, in a push for supremacy in TV's richest market, daytime programming, expanded its two blockbuster soaps, Days of Our Lives and Another World, to an hour each, smashing the opposing game shows and half-hour soaps. Last month CBS followed NBC with an hour-long version of As the World Turns. More of the 14 soaps now on the air may soon go to an hour too. This shift in the length of the shows makes the ratings battle particularly fierce, with NBC and CBS juggling schedules to gain an edge.
The networks lose money on many of their prime-time shows; they need the daytime profits, which are now expected to show a healthy increase, to finance the more expensively produced evening programs. A show like Kojak costs $250,000 to produce but brings in revenues of only $200,000. To make one week of Days of Our Lives costs NBC $170,000; daily advertising revenues are $120,000.
One of the ironies of the soaps' success is that nobody who works during the day can see them. What has become a persistent threnody in American life is shaped by housebound women, students, hippies and the unemployed. This ghettoization of the soaps has kept them freer of the kind of systematic analysis frequently made of sources of popular culture like comic strips and rock music. But now, after more than 40 years of near invisibility, soaps are gaining academic attention. Colleges are offering courses on them. They are being claimed as heirs to the 18th century tradition of the picaresque romantic novel. Others think Daniel Defoe started it all with Moll Flanders. This week, the soaps receive what intellectuals might consider the ultimate accolade: a serious parody. Norman Lear's spoof, Mary Hartman! Mary Hartman! will start airing on 90 independent stations—often scheduled opposite the very shows it is spoofing.
Seen one, seen 'em all, say cynics. For all their huge popularity and moneymaking capacity, the soaps are something of a mystery hit. For the uninitiated, there is only one word that really describes them: weird. To watch a soap is to be drawn into an enclosed and not particularly welcoming world.