How the Daytime Soap Opera Took Over Prestige Television

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, and its fellow daytime soaps—shows historically consumed and cherished by —tend to get a bum rap from critics, who malign them as unworthy of respect. These days, slandering the drain for years, thanks to and . As if by miracle this spring, celebrated its 60th anniversary, making it , while CBS’s marked its 50th anniversary. Those two, along with CBS’s , are the sole daytime soaps that remain on traditional American airwaves. (Last year, NBC jettisoned 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 in the early 1980s, when more than a dozen daytime soaps aired across ABC, NBC, and CBS; daytime soaps were on American television at , just before the wholesale purge of the genre began that year.