Another soap opera, As the World Turns, has been cancelled. Soap operas are interesting as a narrative form, and a lot of good critical work has been done on them by feminist scholars. My favorite analysis is by Laura Stempel (written as Laura Stempel Mumford), Love and Ideology in the Afternoon. And there are many other essay collections, articles in journals, and full-length analyses. But, in recent years the soap opera as a specific format has been replaced by dramas with continuing narratives, like The Closer or Gray’s Anatomy. Spanish speakers have long had telenovelas, which unlike US soap operas have a set ending — though they may take many episodes to get there. US attempts at English language night-time series that were structured like the telenovelas weren’t successful. Perhaps attention spans just aren’t geared toward such narratives any more? And yet, long running novel series do seem to maintain loyal audiences….
Anyway, years and years ago, FD was interviewing for a job in Maine and was being taken through a library of Maine women writers’ papers. The guide said that As the World Turns (a very popular soap at the time — FD remembers a student enthusiastically explaining that ATWT was so good because “the Snyder family has more members than some other soaps, and they aren’t the only family on the show”) was based on a novel by Gladys Hasty Carroll, As the Earth Turns. I haven’t read the Hasty novel, but based on the reviews, I’m a little skeptical. There is a farm family, and some domestic drama, but other than that there weren’t many connections between the two, at least in the 1980s -1990s when I was aware of the plot lines. But the novel was very popular, was made into a play and a movie, and has attracted some scholarly attention.