Soap opera

:Soap Opera redirects here. For the album by The Kinks, see Soap Opera.

Soap opera characteristics

Plots and storylines

Most soaps follow the lives of a group of characters who live or work in a particular place. The storylines follow the day-to-day lives of these characters, who seem similar to ordinary people on the street — except that soap opera characters are usually more handsome, beautiful, seductive, and rich than the typical person watching the TV show. Soap operas take everyday, ordinary lives and exaggerate them to a degree where they are still plausible, yet are more dramatic.

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Romances, secret relationships, extra-marital affairs, and genuine love has been the basis for the vast majority of soap operas. The most memorable soap opera characters, and the most compelling and popular storylines, have usually involved a romance between two characters, of the sort often presented in paperback romance novels. Soap opera storylines weave intricate, convoluted, sometimes confusing tales of characters who have affairs, meet mysterious strangers and fall in love, are swept off their feet by dashing (yet treacherous) lovers, sneak behind their lovers' backs, and engage in other forms of adultery that keep their audiences returning to find out who is sleeping with whom, who has betrayed whom, who is having a baby, who is related to each other, and so on.

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Remarkable (sometimes unbelievable) coincidences are used to enhance the drama in most soap operas. For example, if a young woman in a soap secretly has a single sexual encounter with her boyfriend back in high school, this forbidden affair will certainly come back to haunt her several years later...usually at the very moment that it would cause the most harm (such as on the day of her wedding). Previously-unknown (and often evil) twins regularly emerge, and unexpected calamities disrupt weddings with unusual frequency. Much like comic books—another popular form of linear storytelling—a character's death is not guaranteed to be permanent without an on-camera corpse, and sometimes not even then. A good example of a death that seemed to be permanent was Dr. Taylor Forrester on The Bold and the Beautiful, who had flatlined on-camera and even had a funeral. When actress Hunter Tylo returned to the show in 2005, the "flatlining" was explained away with the revelation that Taylor had actually gone into a coma.

Related Topics:
Evil - Twin - Wedding - Comic books - Storytelling - Death - Corpse - The Bold and the Beautiful - Flatline - Hunter Tylo - 2005

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"Soap music"

In addition, the musical soundtrack used for a soap opera uses a style that instantly identifies it as belonging to soap operas. Soaps aired during the golden age of radio usually used organs to produce most of their music (because they were cheaper than full-blown orchestras). The organists from the radio serials moved over to television, and were heard on some serials as late as the 1970s.

Related Topics:
Soundtrack - Organ - Orchestra - 1970s

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Like the storylines themselves, soap opera soundtracks were overblown and melodramatic. An instantly recognizable characteristic of a soap (one that has been spoofed and imitated many times) consists of a scene where a lovely woman tells her husband or boyfriend that she no longer loves him, for she has been seeing someone else...and at that moment, a single, blaring organ chord resonates on the soundtrack, emphasizing this dramatic moment. Organ music has been abandoned on the serials for thirty years now and pre-recorded music has largely taken its place. For most of the 1970s and continuing through the latter part of the 1990s, full orchestras performed the underscore. Today, however, soap music performances have, in a sense, come full circle from keyboard to keyboard as it is almost entirely done by synthesizers, thereby avoiding the high cost of using orchestras.

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