Assignment #5 - Megan Ewing - The Daytime Soap Opera

Different forms of TV have different purposes. While some shows, like those aired on PBS, have an educational value, some have no value other than the advertisements run throughout the show. One of those supposed worthless shows is the daytime soap opera. This show has little value, almost no plot, and each episode can be watched separately from the others. This type of show was used mostly as a filler during the day for unemployed housewives that sat at home. This allowed for the delivery of ads without television studios spending a lot of money on writing or actors. While many would agree that such shows are worthless for anything other than delivering ads to the unemployed, some thoroughly enjoy the one-off episodes these shows provide. Other people would argue that while these shows individually have little worth, as a genre, soap operas show an important element of American culture during their prime. Daytime soap operas remind us of the culture of the early- to mid- 1900s when most women sat at home cleaning, desperate for something to entertain them, so this genre was born to fill the time slot and sell ads without too much money or effort put into it. Daytime soap operas, while of little entertainment or educational value, have a great cultural value to those who remember them. For more on the history of the daytime soap opera, here’s a video I watched a few months ago and found interesting:
https://youtu.be/h683ckfeNok