One reason that soaps’ long-arc storylines, with their drawn-out plot reveals and unceasing reverberations, can affect soap viewers deeply is that “soap time” approximates “real time.” Unlike the compressed temporalities of a two-hour film or a one-hour weekly series that runs for only a few years, soap opera events unfold in a timeline that mirrors viewers’ lived time quite closely. A soap opera airs five days per week for fifty weeks of each year, usually for many decades, and so viewers have the sense that they live their lives alongside, or in tandem with, soap characters. Even though the events in soap characters’ lives are usually far more dramatic than those taking place in viewers’ lives, the parallel between soap time and real time gives soap operas a certain ongoing realism that other forms of drama rarely match. Viki uncovered her memories of her father’s abuse, not twenty minutes or two hours after she began to manifest symptoms of DID (as would occur on a primetime television program or in a movie), but twenty-seven years later. The time that it took Viki to realize what had happened to her in her childhood is, according to Sigmund Freud, a normal amount of time for any adult to “remember, repeat, and work through” early trauma and heal psychologically.2 Among TV genres, soaps alone have the ability to show an individual undergoing an intense psychological transformation over decades, which is often the time that people require to recover from the damage inflicted upon them during their youth. Although soaps have often been criticized for their outlandish, unbelievable plots, in this respect, they are highly realistic fictions, resembling many women’s actual experiences of psychological hurt and healing. The open-endedness, persistence, unevenness, and unpredictability of Viki’s struggle against her inner demons, and the fact that it took her nearly thirty years to realize the most crucial truth of her own childhood, are what Nochimson values as realistic: a kind of realism that can be achieved in “soap time” far better than in any other narrative genre’s timeframe.
The similitude of “soap time” to real time can lead viewers to feel close, even literally familiar, with soap characters. For example, media theorist Robyn Warhol writes of having moved thirty times in forty-six years and marveled at the fact that “in all those places, only one set of persons has been constantly present, continually and reliably ‘there’ no matter where: the characters who populate Oakdale, Illinois, the fictive setting of As the World Turns.”3 Similarly, Nancy Baym states that soap viewers can feel as if they have formed a strong bond with soap characters—a bond she calls “a parasocial relationship—a kind of family.”4 Neither Baym or Warhol claim that soap viewers are deluded that fictional people are, in fact, members of their family; although some studies of soap opera fans have speculated that fans confuse reality and fantasy, and although this stereotype of regular soap viewers remains popular today, numerous scholars have observed that the reality/fantasy conflation is experienced by only a small percentage of fans, and that the vast majority of viewers clearly understand the boundary between fictional lives and real lives.5 Rather, Baym and Warhol point to an affective impact that soap operas can have on audiences that no other narrative genre can have by virtue of soaps’ duration and the constancy of their casts of characters who come to feel like parts of viewers’ families.
The sheer quantity of episodes that soaps produce every year, and the number of years that soaps air, allow soaps to tell “lifelong stories” about “lifelong characters,” with deep seeds, long reveals, and continual reverberations of key plot arcs. These soap-specific narrative techniques can generate, in long-term viewers, an intensity of emotional response to plot twists that people usually feel only when they witness family members or close friends experiencing significant or sudden life changes. The unique temporality of soap storytelling, and its impact on audiences, was well understood by one of daytime drama’s pioneers, Agnes Nixon, who created All My Children, One Life to Live, and several other soap operas. Nixon writes:
The serial form imitates life in that, for its characters, the curtain rises with birth and does not ring down until death.… The ingredients are the same [as those] required for any good dramatic fare but with one basic difference: that the continuing form allows a fuller development of characterization while permitting the audience to become more and more involved with the story and its people.6
Some soap stories span fictional people’s—and real people’s—entire lives, and therein lies their effectiveness. If and when soap operas finally disappear from the American television landscape, the force and power of lifelong storytelling will die with them.7
FURTHER READING
Baym, Nancy K. Tune In, Log On: Soaps, Fandom, and Online Community. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2000.
Ford, Sam, Abigail De Kosnik, and C. Lee Harrington, eds. The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011.
Harrington, C. Lee, and Denise D. Bielby. Soap Fans: Pursuing Pleasure and Making Meaning in Everyday Life. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995.
Levine, Elana. Her Stories: Daytime Soap Opera and US Television History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020.
Warhol, Robyn R. Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003.
NOTES
1 1. Martha Nochimson, “Amnesia ‘R’ Us: The Retold Melodrama, Soap Opera, and the Representation of Reality,” Film Quarterly 50, no. 3 (Spring 1997): 32.
2 2. Sigmund Freud, “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 12, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1959), 145–56.
3 3. Robyn R. Warhol, Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003), 103.
4 4. Nancy Baym, “Perspective: Scholar Nancy Baym on Soaps after the O. J. Simpson Trial,” in The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era, ed. Sam Ford, Abigail De Kosnik, and C. Lee Harrington (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011), 105.
5 5. Austin S. Babrow, “An Expectancy-Value Analysis of the Student Soap Opera Audience,” Communication Research 16, no. 2 (April 1989): 155–78; Nancy Baym, Tune In, Log On: Soaps, Fandom, and Online Community (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2000), 36–37; Dannielle Blumenthal, Women and Soap Opera: A Cultural Feminist Perspective (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1997), 99–102; C. Lee Harrington and Denise D. Bielby, Soap Fans: Pursuing Pleasure and Making Meaning in Everyday Life (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), 101–8.
6 6. Agnes Nixon, “Coming of Age in Sudsville,” Television Quarterly 9 (1970): 63.
7 7. In 2013, One Life to Live and All My Children were revived as web series available on Hulu and iTunes via The Online Network. Thus, as this book goes to press, the story of Viki Lord continues.
8
The Sopranos
Episodic Storytelling
SEAN O’SULLIVAN
Abstract: The Sopranos is one of television’s most acclaimed series, ushering in the rise of the twenty-first-century primetime serial and helping to elevate the medium’s cultural status. But Sean O’Sullivan problematizes our understanding of the show’s seriality, highlighting episodes that function more as short stories than as chapters in a novel, and thus illuminating how the program’s story structures and themes explore and challenge the norms of television narrative.
When Jennifer Egan discusses her inspirations for A Visit from the Goon Squad, the winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, she often cites The Sopranos. Egan’s book has nothing to do with mobsters or federal agents. Rather, it is a loosely connected series of thirteen chapters, tracing over several decades