Will The Coronavirus Kill The Daytime Soap Opera?

Much of the drama around soap operas these days is going on behind the scenes.  

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‘s The Young and the Restless and The Bold and the Beautiful, the two most popular daytime dramas, have started airing reruns after running out of new episodes because TV production stopped because of the COVID-19 Pandemic.

 ABC’s General Hospital, TV’s longest-running scripted drama, began airing “classic” episodes on Fridays earlier this month. NBC’s Days of Our Lives has got more of a cushion than its rivals since it shoots eight months in advance.

Like other genres of television programs, soap operas saw a bump in viewership when most of the U.S. went into quarantine the last month. According to TVLine.com, during the week ended March 23, The Bold and the Beautiful and General Hospital saw their best ratings in two years. Days of Our Lives attracted its biggest audience in more than a year while The Young and the Restless hit an 11-month high.

Robert Thompson, director of Syracuse University’s Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture and a Trustee Professor of Television and Popular Culture, however, argues the networks risk alienating soap fans by showing reruns.

“I don’t think there is a situation where people who used to watch `Soap Opera A,’ which is now in reruns, are going to watch `Soap Opera B’, which they have never seen before,” he said. “Soap operas are not one- night stands. They are a long-developing relationship.”

Ratings from the week of April 20 to April 24 show The Young and the Restless and The Bold and the Beautiful gained both total viewers and female viewers aged 18 to 49.  compared to the previous week. General Hospital and Days of Our Lives both lost viewers during that same time. Compared with a year ago, only Days of Our Lives gained total viewers. All four shows saw their audience in target female demographic slip.

According to Thompson, there are many reasons why soaps have struggled to keep up with the times.

As more women began working out of the home, they got out of the habit of watching the daytime dramas that began targeting them when soaps started on the radio during the 1930s. Furthermore, the serialized story tyle where plotlines continued over multiple episodes that made the shows unique was adopted by Prime Time shows during the 1970s and 1980s

 General Hospital appealed to younger viewers, breathing new life into the genre for a while. About 40 million people saw the show’s 1981 wedding between fan favorites Luke Spencer and Laura Webber. Unfortunately, soaps haven’t enjoyed that level of popularity since then.

 O.J. Simpson’s sensational trial in 1994 and 1995 regularly preempted soaps. Venerable daytime dramas Guiding Light and As The World Turns went off the air in the 2002s after a multi-decade run. Thomspon is pessimistic about the shows’ future.

“The writing has been on the wall for the daytime soap opera for a long time,” Thompson said in an interview. “A lot of people weren’t alive when it was at its peak.”