Her Stories

de Elana Levine

"HER STORIES provides an in-depth history of the production and reception of the daytime soap opera in the U.S. It offers a detailed view of the genre's life span-from its move from radio to television in the middle of the 20th century to its supposed demise (but continued afterlife) in the beginning of the 21st century. Soap operas have traditionally been considered a women's genre and thus marginal to the formation of television industry. Elana Levine reclaims the foundational role of soap operas in US television history. Levine begins by tracing how soap opera transitioned from a radio to a TV genre from the 1940s through the 1960s, focusing on how the American TV industry used the genre to hone TV production and storytelling techniques, as well as to develop the medium's commercial viability. With viewers imagined as white middle-class housewives, soaps interrogated stories of family life and marriage, purporting to serve as therapy for women struggling to cope with their home lives. Levine shows how early soaps offered real recognition of the challenges and dissatisfactions of the heterosexual nuclear family ideal, but failed to connect that unhappiness to structural forces. Next, the book turns to the boom years of daytime soaps on US broadcast network television, from the 1960s through the 1980s. Early soaps had been funded by a single sponsor-owner-for example, Procter & Gamble-but the rising popularity of daytime soaps allowed for experimentation with other funding models: ABC's first soap, General Hospital, was funded by participation advertising, which left more editorial power in the hands of the network. This then altered the relationship between soap writers and broadcast networks, allowing for technological shifts, evolving visual and audial norms, new narrative strategies-including comedy and recapping-and greater representation and engagement with social issues. Finally, Levine examines the slow decline of soaps from the 1980s to today. Shifting notions of the imagined audience for soaps, as well as changing technologies for recording and watching TV, have led the industry to cast soap audiences in derogatory gendered, raced, and classed terms-old, low-income, and non-white, and therefore undesirable for advertisers. Levine argues that, desperate for viewers, soaps in the 2000s turned to exploitative treatment of social difference in a way that, for her, undermines the genre's history. HER STORIES is accessibly written and will appeal to scholars and students in TV and media studies, women's studies, American studies, and cultural studies"--