I'm Natalie Moore. I fell in love with soap operas when I was just five years old, and I still

watch them. Their television's longest scripted series and have zero reruns. Now let me tell you,

soap operas aren't just some silly art form. They are significant. In this season of making,

Stories Without End from WB EZ Chicago.

Join me as I share how the genre began, their social impact, and why these stories endure.

Listen, wherever you get your podcast.

From WB.EZ Chicago, this is Nerdette. I'm Greta Johnson. We did it. We made it to another weekend.

Coming up, we'll take a look at all the novels coming out that are about the pandemic.

You know, do we want to sort of immerse ourselves in this reality that many of us would like to not be part of right now?

But if you ignore it, is that, you know, sort of jarringly out of touch.

Plus, what the U.S. women's soccer lawsuit settlement means for equal pay more broadly.

You know, and it's about making sure that women in the workforce are participating and are not just leaving the workforce as we've seen so much over the past two years

and have the opportunity to be paid equally. But first, let's take a look at the week that was with us today. We have Doreen St. Felix, a TV

critic for the New Yorker. Doreen, hello. Hi, Greta. We also have Shirley Lee, who covers

culture for the Atlantic. Shirley, welcome back. Hello. Thank you for having me back.

So I want to start with scams because you both rate and think a lot about TV especially.

And one thing that I've noticed, especially recently, is like all of these fictionalized shows about scammers.

I'm thinking about inventing Anna, which came out on Netflix a couple weeks ago.

Next week, there's the Hulu show about Elizabeth Holmes coming out. It's called The Dropout. There's also one about WeWork coming out next month on Apple TV. I get that a lot of this is probably just a matter of timing, right? Like if you're going to do like the scripted version of the article that came out several years ago, that takes a lot of time in terms of, you know,

script writing and casting and production and all that good stuff. But it still seems kind of uncanny to me that they're all coming out at the same time. What do you think, Doreen? Does that

strike you too? That's an interesting question. I mean, I think the scammer has long been the fixation of American culture. And of course, it's always, it's really tempting to see a kind of serendipity because the fans that they attract are often people who are involved with like, you know, the digital media space. So it can feel like, you know, we're experiencing a surplus of

them. So I don't know if there's like a real structure that we can point to besides the general

...