As Levine herself writes, “For soap opera, the past always matters, bearing upon the present and shaping the future.” And who better than soap opera’s biggest fans to safeguard the past, relish in the present, and place - angry - calls regarding the future? In Her Stories, as in her other work, Levine does not shy away from the high stakes of her history, forging an argument that proponents of prestige television are rarely compelled (or able) to make: that soap operas are the history of television, and television is the history of America, so, by extension, soap operas index the conflicts and character of American culture from mid-century to the present day. Her Stories resonates with Levine’s previous work on television’s contemporary claims to art-form status ( Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status, co-authored with Michael Newman, 2011) and its historical relationship to identity politics and sexual mores ( Wallowing in Sex: The New Sexual Culture of 1970s American Television, 2007), as well as popular culture’s fraught relationship to the female viewer-consumer ( Cupcakes, Pinterest, and Lady Porn: Feminized Popular Culture in the Early Twenty-First Century, ed.). Happily, Levine is both a scholar and a fan, which comes out in the joy and color of this, her latest monograph. Television History (Duke UP, 2020) and spoke candidly of writing a book not only for fellow historians of culture and media but for fans as well, knowing the latter camp would include her harshest, most detail-oriented, critics. In May 2020, author Elana Levine did a Zoom discussion about her book, Her Stories: Daytime Soap Opera and U.S. In the most intimate ways, though, the television soap opera has always belonged to its fans, a community of viewers with a memory so encyclopedic that they do not need a tattered binder to recall past decades’ twists and turns. Should it encode progressive or retrograde ideologies for its viewers? Should it follow the minutiae of the small-town housewife or pursue more melodramatic, even supernatural, avenues? And to speak for the network executive, is the soap opera a cash cow or a financial albatross? Some of them were, frankly, angry, and why should I let them chew me out? I was, at best, a temporary keeper of the show’s past, and I had no clout when it came to determining its future.īut as the daytime soap continually battles for self-definition and survival, the question remains as vital as ever: to whom does the television soap belong? Even in its heyday, the American soap opera struggled to delineate itself aesthetically, narratively, and culturally. All I knew was that I preferred Binder Duty to the prospect of answering phones in the main office and talking to the fans calling in to issue their opinions on the latest plot twist. #Soap opera network channel archive#My pride in maintaining this archive presaged my future as a television researcher, but I couldn’t have known that at the time. The purpose of The Binder was to keep track of which characters were related or had been married, so that future writers would only romantically pair up cousins on purpose and never by accident. One of my favorite responsibilities was managing the massive black binder that contained decades’ worth of script loglines and summaries. The villains were often the friendliest, though one season’s villain was the next season’s hero: such is the television soap. The writing and production office was only a few floors below the soundstage, so actors popped down on their breaks, in costume and out of character, looking for coffee or small talk. The workings of the office were not nearly as lurid and dramatic as the scripts I was reading if anything, the day-to-day more accurately resembled a workplace sitcom. It was, at the time, America’s longest-running daytime soap opera, based out of Proctor & Gamble Productions in Manhattan. THE SUMMER I WAS 20 years old, I interned in the writing office of Guiding Light (CBS, 1952-2009).
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