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Her Stories Daytime Soap Opera and US
Television History
Elana Levine
Console-ing Passions: Television
and Cultural Power Series Durham (North Carolina):
Duke University Press, 2020 Paperback. ix+386 p. ISBN
978-1478008019. $29.95/£24.99
Reviewed by Charlotte Brunsdon University of Warwick
The significance of soap
opera While ‘soap opera’ remains a pejorative
term, carrying connotations of a tawdry banality, the worlds of the
detergent-sponsored daytime serials which were such a feature of US broadcast
economies have not survived into the twenty-first century. Elana Levine reminds
her readers, at the end of this compelling history of the rise and fall of US
daytime serials, that in 2020, four daytime soaps continue to air daily on
broadcast networks and that there is a growing industry of independent web
soaps creating a soapy space in digital television. However, 1984, the year of
the daytime serials’ peak audiences, is a long time ago, and both television
and its audiences have changed substantially. It is now difficult to imagine the
strength of a business model in which viewers are enticed – as housewives – to
take a little time out of their daytime chores to watch segmented drama in
which stories of romantic, family and community life are interspersed with
advertising which offers to solve the problems of germs, dirt and dust in the
home. Despite Levine’s insistence that soaps may yet have a life to live, it is
the sense of an ending which makes it possible to tell this story now, and to
tell it in a way which demonstrates the centrality of daytime serial drama to
twentieth-century US broadcasting. This book has been well reviewed, and
it was partly this that made me curious to read it, even though I stopped
researching soap opera some years ago. For the last sentence needs no
qualification – it has not been ‘well reviewed for a book about soap opera’, it
has been well reviewed, and recognised, as a significant contribution to the
history, and historiography, of U.S. television. The reception of most soap
opera studies has been tainted with the attitudes to the genre and its
audiences which have comprised one part of the field of study, and Levine
herself has contributed, in an earlier work, to mapping the contours of the
illegitimacy of television as an object of study. This history of US daytime
serials will become the definitive account of the genre, but its argument and
achievement reach beyond the genre, proposing that ‘its variations over time
can help us to understand how media participate in shaping our engagements with
one another across private and public spheres’, as well as narrating the story
of US television itself [298]. Although the book, with a nod to the challenges
of 1970s feminist history, is called Her Stories, its subtitle makes its broader claim apparent: ‘Daytime soap opera and
US television history’. The book tracks the daytime serial
from its late radio days (1940s) through the transfer to television in the
1950s, to the network phase (1970s-80s), to the long decline of post-network. Her
exploration of the transition from radio to television is particularly
significant for understandings of the development of codified practices of
storytelling in the new medium. Although the pioneering audience research of
the 1940s by figures such as Paul Lazarsfeld and Herta Herzog was conducted on
radio listeners, there was a gap in attention to the genre until the late 1970s
/ early 1980s, when the work of Tania Modleski, Ellen Seiter and Robert C.
Allen transformed the field. Levine’s approach is founded in this later moment,
but she grounds it in archivally-based account of the transition from radio
which illuminates the development of serialised visual story-telling and the
changing balance of voice and image as television producers experiment and
stabilise the codes of the medium. Levine does three main things with
this book, each of which entails an interaction with accepted histories of
television as well as with the historiography of the medium. She provides a thoroughly documented
account of the historical interplay of commercial and aesthetic impulses in the
production and development of daytime serial drama, demonstrating the
centrality of daytime serial production to the evolution of televisionstorytelling and the economies of the television networks. She historicises Newcomb and Hirsch’s notion of television as a cultural forum, and shows the way in
which daytime serials host the different kinds of debates and addresses to
femininity in the genre in the period of network dominance. And finally, she
draws on the pioneering feminist research on soaps and attitudes towards them,
to outline a history of the genre through its assumptions about its audiences
and its articulation of plausible and desirable gendered, raced and familial
identities and narratives. The critical difference from the earlier scholarship
which demanded that soaps be taken seriously, women’s fictions as they were, is
that Levine feels no need to polemicise. Instead of an argument about ‘women’s
genres’ within the canon in general, Levine can write a specific, historical
account of the development of daytime serials in the US in the network era, into
which she weaves an account of the changing position of women, and the shifts
in the representational repertoires of the drama. This enables her to use her
research to demonstrate the ways in which, for example, the portrayal (or even
possibility) of mixed-race couples, or the decision to have an abortion, are
inflected differently at different moments in the representational world of the
soaps. Levine’s method combines extensive and
multi-modal archival research with textual analysis. In the archive work, she
shows that the strength of the NBC archive has skewed the history of daytime
serial because NBC, with its social uplift mission was slow to engage with the
serials. In Britain, the dominance of the BBC’s archives has produced similar
distortions, as is also the case for other countries with histories of strong
public service broadcasting. For the analysis of how the serials represented
the social world they depicted, she explicitly and usefully addresses the
difficulties for the textual scholar of these unending narrative television dramas,
drawing on surviving episodes held in a range of official and unofficial sites,
and her own memories as a long-term soap viewer. While ‘complex narratives’
have, in the twenty-first century, been much touted as the invention of US
quality television, Levine shows how long and complex the history of soap opera
is. This is a feminist history in its most
achieved sense, in that the book demonstrates that attention to the history of
daytime serials transforms broader histories, and makes previous orthodoxies
simply untenable. I always knew that there was sleight of hand in David Simon’s
invocation of Dickens – and elision of television history - as a progenitor of The
Wire, but Levine shows how indebted all television drama is to the formal innovation
conducted by the soaps. Particularly fascinating is her account of the ways in
which the transfer to television demanded that serial producers must entice
their audience to look at the tv screen. However, Levine also intervenes in a
series of other debates. Her history demonstrates the ineffectiveness of much US
television regulation, while also, following the work of Eileen Meehan, revealing
how very limited the so-called science of audience measurement is. The failure
of the accepted ratings systems to count time-shifted video viewing in the
1980s is particularly significant for a genre which depends on a committed
audience. The determining significance of audience image is also addressed. Soaps
have never been prestigious, but Levine shows that the late twentieth-century characterisation
of the soap audience as poor, elderly, and often not white, was a key
legitimation for the cancellation of soaps in the period when young white
mobile women – think Friends - became
a key demographic for the tv networks fighting off the challenges of cable and
streaming. Reading this book, from outside the
USA, about half way through, I began to recall feelings I used to get when, in
the 1980s, US tv scholars talked about General Hospital or All My Children. I could tell that they were passionately invested
in what they were discussing – and Levine shows how significant the expansion
of the daytime audience, to include college students, was in the 1980s – but I
did not really have any reference points. Who were Luke and Laura? Most
television was national (with strong regional inflections), and the people who
got to see it were the people who lived in that country. While US television
was widely exported, it was the cowboys, the detectives and the medics, rather
than the soap operas, which travelled. When trying to think about why British
soap opera was so sneered at, I had never seen US daytime serials and did not
know what they were like. I met Ellen Seiter at a 1980 SCMS conference in New
York City through a shared interest in how to think about soap opera and
attitudes to soap opera audiences. It took us quite a while to figure out how
very different the television we were talking about was, as we had never
watched each other’s non-exported national television. Only with Dallas and Dynasty did family-based, but now prime-time, serial drama travel,
and that spawned a significant international scholarly literature. Levine shows
well the historical specificity of network television’s role as a cultural
forum in the US in the 1960s-1980s. The cultural forum period of television, as
we can now identify it, was also nationally specific, with countries with
strong state involvement in broadcasting developing rather different fora with
different representational repertoires – and much less advertising. For
example, in France, a series such as Les saintes chéries (1965-1970), which could be seen to have an
address to women, was broadcast to a family audience in the evening, while it
is not until the privatisation of TF1 in 1986 and the creation of the
commercial channel La Cinq that commercial television becomes available. It
is to Levine’s credit that she makes her case through sustained textual and
archival analysis and research, and it is precisely for this specificity that
television scholars must strive. However, for the non-US reader who is not a
scholar of US television, some of the detail may blur. This is a necessary
consequence of properly situated research into a medium which was dominantly
national in its period of ascendancy – otherwise work is all theory, or just
about widely exported, usually US-originated programmes. Levine’s central
arguments are significant for any scholar of television, particularly given the
global dominance of US television. Her explication of her method and research
design in the early chapters is clear and useful and could serve as a model –
even for readers who still have no idea who Luke and Laura were.
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