TRAILER: Stories Without End

Making

WBEZ Chicago

Society & Culture

4.6 • 3.7K Ratings

🗓️ 6 March 2025

⏱️ 2 minutes

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Summary

Soap operas are the foundation of American television storytelling. From early radio days in the 1930s to the invention of TV to streaming, soaps have endured by telling intergenerational family stories. Daytime dramas are an important part of American television history and popular culture. It’s been said that television is socially ahead of movies. Soap operas take that social consciousness a step further. Rape, abortion, AIDS, LGBTQ+ storylines – before primetime or even mainstream America was ready. But soaps have been written off as low-brow drivel for women. For decades, soaps routinely pushed serious social issues the general public didn’t even know about because they weren’t paying attention to them. Take this journey to learn the history of soaps, the innovative creators who pushed social impact and how the genre was the moneymaker for networks for decades. This is television's unique immersive storytelling.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Daytime soap operas are the longest running scripted shows on television.
0:06.0	No other genre has made it possible for an actress to be on your TV set since 1976.
0:12.0	Well, think about it. If it's five days a week for 5,000 shows, who could be doing that?
0:16.0	Dan Rather? No, don't think so. Newscasters, no. Episodic, no, they do one show a week.
0:22.4	There really isn't any sort of venue that allows you that many hours on screen.
0:27.2	From early radio days in the 1930s, through the invention of TV to streaming today,
0:33.5	soaps have endured by telling intergenerational family stories.
0:38.2	It's one of the great things about soap opera, right, is that they're this, you know, very
0:41.9	mainstream form, which function is really there to sell household products to women in the home.
0:48.8	And yet they have all these somewhat potentially subversive elements because they can't have
0:54.1	just nothing happened. Those subversive elements because they can't have just nothing happened.
0:55.5	Those subversive elements have been groundbreaking storylines that you non-soap fans notice,
1:01.4	divorce, abortion, queer representation.
1:06.1	I'm Natalie Moore and in this season of making, I'm bringing you stories without end. I love and still
1:13.6	watch soaps. On this podcast, you'll hear from scholars, actors, writers, from the past and now.
1:20.7	And also learn about Erna Phillips, the Chicago woman who made the genre possible.
1:38.3	The Queen of Soaps originated, wrote or supervised more than a dozen daytime serials for more than 40 years. It's time she gets her flowers.
1:40.3	Phillips created serialized storytelling on TV and familiar archetypes we love to hate like The Vixen.
1:47.0	She and her protégés didn't want, and they lived happily ever after stories.
1:52.0	We're really pushing the envelope with sexuality and getting into the intimacies of a marriage or an affair or, you know, even the mother-daughter, the inter-family
2:04.5	relationships.
2:05.6	You probably didn't know that because soaps are written off as low-brow women's television.
	...

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