Soap operas went from 30 minutes to 60 in 1975, when the genre’s audience was largest, and most ravenous. According to a Time-magazine article titled “Sex and Suffering in the Afternoon,” everyone was watching them: from the critic Renata Adler, who, after falling ill with laryngitis, fell for the series Another World; to the Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, who tuned in to Days of Our Lives each afternoon; to a quarter of Princeton’s student body, who took to their dorms at midday to watch The Young and the Restless. There was “a separate nation of more than 20 million Americans who weekly follow, or rather participate in, the soaps.”
Today only four soap operas remain on the air, their viewership steadily declining. But the spirit of the soap lives on—on TikTok. Clocking in at three minutes or less and available morning, noon, and night, TikTok’s miniature melodramas have some advantages over the traditional soap.
