...’ influence has expanded, with serial narratives becoming commonplace on most primetime TV programs. This book investigates the causes of their dwindling popularity, describes their impact on TV and new media culture, and gleans lessons from their complex history for twenty-first-century media industries...

...This chapter examines how the gendered narrative elements of soaps have been absorbed into, handled cautiously in, or cast out of primetime genres such as science fiction “space operas” and reworked in light of the challenges daytime dramas currently face. It explores how soaps have adapted...

...This chapter focuses on the soap opera genre’s increasing incorporation of over-the-top and campy elements alongside the development of many classic storytelling traits in primetime. It argues that the decline of quality in soap opera narratives has been driven in part by the industry’s self...

...This chapter presents Mittell’s views on whether soap operas have influenced primetime television. Mittell says that contemporary primetime narrative complexity has little in common with or influence from soap operas, except through their common connections to 1970s and 1980s primetime serials...