How the Daytime Soap Opera Took Over Prestige Television – The Atlantic

Daytime soaps, unfairly maligned for too long, might seem in danger of extinction. But prime-time prestige television has absorbed their DNA.
Around the turn of the millennium, viewers of the daytime soap opera General Hospital may have noticed a shift in their favorite afternoon medical drama. The show, which had aired on ABC since 1963, had once been preoccupied with the titular hospital in the fictional city of Port Charles. Storylines in the ’90s were dedicated to socially relevant topics like a teenage couple navigating the HIV/AIDS crisis, a doctor dealing with her own breast-cancer diagnosis, and an adoptee tracking down her birth mother in adulthood. But in the early aughts, the soap’s gentle, humanistic notes gave way to machismo energy as it fixated on the dimpled mob don Sonny Corinthos (Maurice Benard) and those in his violence-ridden orbit. This about-face prompted the television critic Ed Martin to dub the show “Sopranos in the daytime.” Here was the ultimate indictment: One of daytime television’s crown jewels had become the Great Value knockoff of a prime-time masterwork.
Too often, General Hospital and its fellow daytime soaps—shows historically consumed and cherished by women and Black audiences—tend to get a bum rap from critics, who malign them as unworthy of respect. These days, slandering the soap opera is almost a form of punching down, considering how much the genre has fallen on hard times: Daytime soaps have been circling the drain for years, thanks to sagging ratings and slashed budgets. As if by miracle this spring, General Hospital celebrated its 60th anniversary, making it the longest-running scripted show on American television still in production, while CBS’s The Young and the Restless marked its 50th anniversary. Those two, along with CBS’s The Bold and the Beautiful, are the sole daytime soaps that remain on traditional American airwaves. (Last year, NBC jettisoned Days of Our Lives from its daytime network lineup, where it had been since 1965, and ferried it over to the streamer Peacock.) That’s a stark decline from the genre’s heyday in the early 1980s, when more than a dozen daytime soaps aired across ABC, NBC, and CBS; eight daytime soaps were on American television at the start of 2009, just before the wholesale purge of the genre began that year.
The watershed anniversaries of General Hospital and The Young and the Restless might provide an occasion to rue what’s become of the art form, but the strands of daytime soaps’ DNA are thriving elsewhere. They have a direct and obvious descendant in soaps that air at night, a category of television that has flourished since the 1960s with Peyton Place and the subsequent popularity of Dallas and Dynasty in the following decades. And nearly 20 years after Martin’s dig at General Hospital, the inverse of his observation holds true: Prime-time prestige darlings of this current television era—the kind you’d find airing on Sunday nights on premium television networks like HBO or Showtime—often borrow from and refine the style of daytime soaps. Once you identify the tropes that have buttressed daytime soap operas, you’ll spot them everywhere.
Let’s establish the hallmarks of daytime-soap storytelling. Even the most ardent devotees of the genre would admit that daytime soaps contain hairpin plot turns that defy logic. Major arcs on Days of Our Lives have dealt with satanic possessions; a storyline on General Hospital a few years ago involved a human’s memory being stored on a flash drive. Characters return from the dead after their corpses go cold. Plastic surgery gets wheeled out as an explanation for a role being recast and a startling lack of resemblance between two actors who inhabit the same character. Secret long-lost twins abound.
But at their finest, daytime soaps provide far more than pulpy pleasures. These shows, with their expansive canvases, have long explored thorny family dynamics across generations in a way few other genres have had breathing room for. They also use the grammar of exaggeration to moving effect. The ostentatious acting associated with daytime soaps—All My Children’s Susan Lucci and other grande dames of the small screen emoting with gale-force intensity—harkens back to classic Hollywood, where every Bette Davis or Joan Crawford knew how to wring emotional truth from extravagance. Soapy has long been a pejorative in the American vernacular, a byword for a piece of art that traffics in sappy schlock. But deploying that term can be more than a lazy way to sully an object’s artistic merit.
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The soapy spirit of absurdity courses through Showtime’s breakout hit Yellowjackets, a show that, as is customary of so many daytime soaps, centers the lives of women. Two timelines run parallel to each other; the first, in 1996, chronicles how the members of a New Jersey girls’ high-school soccer team fend for themselves after a plane crash strands them in the Canadian wilderness, while the second examines the aftershocks of their teenage trauma in the present day. Despite its pretense of seriousness, Yellowjackets doesn’t take long to freefall into preposterousness. Some viewers might still wonder how the girl whose face got mauled to pieces managed to heal within a few episodes, how another survivor could smash and destroy the aircraft’s ironclad black box (a device, mind you, that is engineered to withstand a literal plane crash), how the abandoned cabin where the team seeks shelter miraculously had enough pillows and blankets for each of the crash’s dozen-plus survivors.
But Yellowjackets, like any propulsive daytime soap, asks its audience to overlook any inconsistencies and instead submit to its base delights. The show is populated by characters who occupy a moral gray zone and engage in deliciously theatrical subterfuge, and Yellowjackets works best when it slyly unpeels the duality of these women. The frizzy-haired and bespectacled outcast Misty (played by Christina Ricci as an adult) might be the soapiest character of all. Her emotions shift on a dime: She is perky in one moment, sociopathically diabolical the next. Bullied as a teenager by the popular girls, she is still a loner longing for acceptance a quarter century later, but Yellowjackets resists making her too easy an object of sympathy. For example, she injects a cigarette with poison and hands it to a woman she’s kidnapped. Her actions seem stripped straight from the playbook of a soap-opera villain like Days of Our Lives’ Kristen DiMera, a vixen whose demonic machinations are direct consequences of the untended wounds from her past.
Ridiculousness is in high supply in American prime time’s most popular scripted television show, Paramount’s Yellowstone, a show often tagged with the soap-opera label as a snide way of impugning its worth. Characters do outrageous things, like walking out of a just-bombed building and asking a passerby for a cigarette, that might make viewers raise eyebrows. But like any solid soap, part of Yellowstone’s bargain with the viewer is the demand that they suspend their disbelief. Yellowstone concerns John Dutton (Kevin Costner), the aging patriarch of the land-owning Dutton family in Montana, and the struggle over his legacy among his children. The tussle between Dutton and his spawn on that show resembles the bitter feuds among the Quartermaine family of General Hospital, a fractured clan of strong personalities who constantly find themselves at loggerheads. Some of Dutton’s children remain fiercely loyal to him; others, like Jamie (Wes Bentley), never quite feel adequate enough to gain Daddy’s approval. On Yellowstone, as in General Hospital, the siblings trade barbs and spew such venom at one another that one wonders how they could possibly ever have lived under the same roof. The show also provides splashy anvil-drop reveals—like, say, that Jamie isn’t John’s biological kid—whose consequences reverberate over seasons.
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Denigrators have reductively dismissed Yellowstone as the downmarket, red-state cousin of HBO’s Succession, perhaps the most glimmering emblem of this current prestige era in television. The marital squabbles between Shiv (Sarah Snook) and her husband, Tom (Matthew Macfadyen), will ring familiar to anyone who’s endured the verbal sparring between General Hospital’s aforementioned Sonny and his on-again, off-again wife, Carly (played by four actresses throughout the span of the show), who cherish and despise each other in equal measure. For a time in the early aughts, Sonny and Carly’s shouting matches seemed to dominate each episode, just as the clashes between Shiv and Tom became crucial to Succession’s plots.
And longtime viewers of The Young and the Restless will recognize the melodramatic sweep of Succession’s basic conceit, with siblings warring over the future of a media conglomerate spearheaded by their father, Logan Roy (Brian Cox). Succession’s Waystar Royco has a daytime analogue in The Young and the Restless’s Jabot Cosmetics, a beauty brand begun by the family patriarch, John Abbott, and fought over by his children after his death. The tension between the Abbott siblings sometimes comes to a thrilling head: One scene from 2018 involves Jack (Peter Bergman) admonishing his sister, Ashley (Eileen Davidson), for besmirching the family’s legacy, and throwing their late father’s favorite chair through a glass wall before Ashley’s horrified eyes. The gesture is objectively hilarious—the kind of sequence that, shorn of context, might confirm prejudices against the genre of daytime soaps. But it’s not hard to imagine how such a scene might play on Succession, with its handsome HBO production values. Even brawls between the siblings—like the volcanic scene in the finale where Kendall (Jeremy Strong) lunges at Roman (Kieran Culkin) in a conference room—have a whiff of these high-octane daytime-soap sibling fights.
As Shiv, Snook gives a masterclass performance that’s reminiscent of daytime’s most indelible doyennes, refusing to blunt her character’s rough edges. Take the scene where, after Logan collapses on a plane, Tom holds a phone up to his ear and asks Shiv to say what may be her last words to him. The uncertainty over whether her father can actually hear her causes Shiv to cycle through a galaxy of feelings—disbelief, regret, heartbreak—within the span of minutes. Her choked reaction recalls a scene from the glory days of General Hospital in 1998, where the conniving, damaged Carly (then played by Sarah Joy Brown) tearfully monologues before the body of her deceased adoptive mother, with whom she had an acrimonious relationship. Snook, like Brown before her, doesn’t shy away from excess here: Her downpour of emotion feels torrential. Actorly indulgence of this nature, the kind one might find on a daytime soap, is precisely what lends this sequence in Succession its lasting power.
Succession seems to be aware of what it owes to daytime soap operas. There’s a scene in the show’s final season where the gruff Logan tells his kids he’s sad they didn’t come to his birthday party. “It’s like a fucking telenovela,” Kendall sneers in response, likening his father’s rare display of vulnerability to the kind of outsized expression common on a Latin American daytime soap. This throwaway quip feels like a subtle nod to the genre that has left its imprint on a show like Succession. Even as the daytime soap careens toward extinction, a time may soon arrive when calling a creative work “soapy” is no longer an insult but a compliment, a way of paying tribute to an undersung art form whose influence might just outlive it.

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