A work · 1933 · Television
The soap opera
A form built almost entirely by women, for women, and treated as unserious for fifty years. Daily episodes, fixed slots, cliffhangers, characters written in indefinitely and never resolved.
The origin of the entire research tradition, and it started as a footnote about daytime television that nobody thought was important. The rhythm is the mechanism: a fixed slot and an unresolved story, repeated daily, is a relationship with a schedule. It is also the reason the phrase 'soap opera' is now an insult rather than a description.
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