Traditional Soaps May Be Waning, but Our Stories Are Sudsier Than Ever

Even though only four original soap operas remain on the air, our appetite for high drama has never been more insatiable.

May 13, 2026

In late April, a sizzle reel comprising classic soap opera clips of divas falling down a grand staircase tumbled around social media and right into the “Saturday Night Live” writers room, inspiring the sketch “Edge of Destiny.” The May 2 episode featured host Olivia Rodrigo wearing a flip feathered wig and a shoulder-padded jumpsuit, pushing one glammed-up cast member after another down the bouncing steps, each giving a more exaggerated performance than the last. The spoof of an old favorite soap trope, epitomized by the 1980s prime-time show “Dynasty,” may have struck some as random since network television phased out daytime serials well over a decade ago.

But in a broader sense, the parody felt timely.

While promoting his new film “Project Hail Mary” a few weeks ago on the podcast “Happy Sad Confused,” actor Ryan Gosling was singing the praises of the soap operas he watched as a child. A clip of that conversation went viral, which not only resonated with other Xennials who grew up watching those shows, but also introduced soaps to a new audience.

Younger generations are likely familiar with the genre’s over-the-top tenor, even if they never watched an actual soap opera. But the narrative convention inarguably has been absorbed into our culture — and whetted our appetites for even more high drama.

It may just be that soap operas, as Gosling knew them, weren’t meant to last forever, but instead evolve into something else, perhaps something bigger. Soaps were initially serial dramas that centered around the domestic lives of women, the earliest iterations of which were developed for the radio in the 1930s to sell detergent to housewives. The originator, Irna Phillips, adapted soap operas for daytime television in 1949. They peaked from the late 1970s into the ’80s when there were close to 20 daytime soaps running on the four major networks. At their pinnacle, soaps were joined by prime-time counterparts like “Dynasty,” “Knots Landing” and “Dallas,” which were created to accommodate the schedules of working women — and to appeal to their husbands, whom advertisers assumed would be watching with their spouses.

Today, only four of those original soaps are still on the air (and one is only available for streaming). The famous “General Hospital” episode featuring Luke Spencer and Laura Webber Baldwin’s wedding remains the most-watched in daytime history, with 30 million viewers in 1981, while “The Young and the Restless” currently boasts the largest audience in 2026, with 3.1 million viewers.

Still, said Rebecca Budig, who stars in the daytime soap “The Bold and the Beautiful,” “I actually don’t think that the genre’s dying. I think we’re having a little bit of a resurgence.”

Now, instead of obsessing over super-couples like Luke and Laura, newer generations are fully invested in the brewing romance between Amanda Batula and West Wilson from the Bravo reality show “Summer House,” especially after Wilson wouldn’t commit to Batula’s bestie, Ciara Miller. And millions of viewers are tuning in to “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” the “docusoap” — a paradoxical term that exists as a programming category, speaking volumes about this moment — that homes in on a community of Mormon women who bonded on TikTok and whose toxic relationships, divorces and throw-down fights have become tabloid fodder.

Days of Our (Real) Lives

We are seeing real-life stories about real-life people being mined for a new kind of soap opera: “Strangers,” the best-selling memoir by Belle Burden that examines her husband’s abrupt decision to make a clean break from his family during the pandemic shutdown, is being adapted for film. Ryan Murphy has created a genre out of turning recent history into stylized sagas, as he did with “Love Story,” the quintessential American soap which depicted a very real, tragic relationship between two very real people — Carolyn Bessette and John F. Kennedy Jr., the latter of whom hailed from a family who has suffered more than their share of tragedy. Viewers were so swept up in the series that they began mimicking the couple’s style and visiting their old stamping grounds in TriBeCa.

“I’ve always felt like every show that is hugely popular is a soap opera,” said Budig, who also co-hosts a podcast called “Soapy” about the soap world. “At the end of the day, we can have all these big stories,” she said, “but it’s really about what’s happening between two people and whatever that relationship is. And that’s where I think there’s drama.”

Budig could just as easily be talking about “Heated Rivalry,” the smash hit about two hockey players who fall in love, or “Hunting Wives,” the over-the-top Netflix series about a New England woman who relocates to East Texas and becomes mesmerized by a gun-toting Christian socialite clique. And then there’s Murphy at his Murphy-est with “All’s Fair,” in which the producer built a starring vehicle for Kim Kardashian about an all-woman law firm.

And reality dating shows like “Love Island” (returning to Peacock on June 2) and all of the “Real Housewives” franchises, according to Greg Rikaart, a star of “Days of Our Lives” and Budig’s co-host on “Soapy,” are as sudsy as any traditional daytime drama.

“I don’t know any group of friends that have as much conflict,” Rikaart said. “Beyond that, it’s aspirational. If you are someone who aspires to have Birkin bags and a beautiful home and fancy cars.”

That is not a coincidence. Bravo’s ubiquitous factotum and talk show host, Andy Cohen, has discussed his inspiration for the “Real Housewives” franchises, citing “All My Children” and “Knots Landing.”

Now, thanks, in part, to those “real” housewives and to families like the Kardashians, who made the public believe you could become famous simply by having money and filming every aspect of your life, the line between soap and reality has blurred. Regular people are now starring in the story of their lives, using social media or related platforms as their proverbial stage on which to perform.

Melodrama Queens

At this point, there is no “reality” without histrionics: Docuseries about real estate listings or those working on luxury superyachts are rife with interpersonal drama. It’s what people want, including the actress Sarah Michelle Gellar, whose career took off after her adolescent star turn as Kendall Hart on “All My Children.” Recently, she complained on Page Six Radio (much to Andy Cohen’s horror) that this past season of “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” was “boring” and “slow.” If it’s more battles that she craves, she need only tune in to the endless updates about the “beef” between the podcaster Alex Cooper and the influencer Alix Earle.

In the same way characters on soap operas never really die, neither does the convention of soaps themselves, especially as a larger cultural phenomenon. The daytime drama as a genre may have contracted, but in 2025, CBS introduced “Beyond the Gates,” the first new soap since 1999. And the gestalt of soaps — serial storytelling involving a fixed social ecosystem of intergenerational characters, heightened stakes, incredible plot twists, the longing of star-crossed lovers, conniving nemeses, thwarted heroes and power struggles — has bled into other types of programming, whether that’s procedural dramas like “The Lincoln Lawyer,” period pieces like “Bridgerton” or prestige drama writ large.

Michael R. Jackson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright whose Off Broadway musical “White Girl in Danger” was a send-up of soap operas, recognizes parallels between the performative behavior driving civilians and politicians alike and the daytime dramas he grew up watching (and worked into his script).

“I think of soap operas as melodramas,” said Jackson. “They prioritize plot over character, which is to say that the character will conform to whatever the plot. People — they’re villain or victim.” The reality stars and content creators who have catapulted to fame often hew to those archetypes, and they’re rewarded for it.

Too Real?

Watching current events unfold can feel a lot like following a daytime drama, Jackson said, and sometimes those delivering the news become players themselves. “People who deliver the news are also the popular characters,” Jackson said, referring to a love triangle between Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the journalists Olivia Nuzzi and Ryan Lizza. “It’s like ‘Melrose Place’ meets ‘Days of Our Lives’ meets ‘Scandal.’ It’s all soap within a soap within a soap.”

Soap operas have always been a great escapist outlet, so it’s little wonder this hyper-reality has people seeking out these shows as a fantasy-based distraction. The result has been a proliferation of serial dramas like “Yellowstone” (and its many spinoffs, including the latest, “The Madison”) and “The Morning Show.”

Jackson has avoided most of these newer sudsers but admits he has found comfort in “The Gilded Age,” a historical drama about the wealthiest New Yorkers in the late 1800s, because, he says, it “feels the closest to watching an old-school soap opera, even though you can still feel the presentism.” The actress Donna Mills, who played the idolized alpha villain in “Knots Landing,” said she found Netflix’s small-town romantic dramas “Virgin River” and “Sullivan’s Crossing” a salve amid the barrage of news alerts she received throughout the day.

She was also made aware of an uptick of interest in “Knots Landing,” which ran for 14 seasons, from 1979 to 1993. It became available on the streaming platform Plex toward the end of 2024, and it was popular enough that it was acquired a few months later by Amazon, where it’s currently available for purchase.

Its success prompted Mills and her former co-stars Michele Lee and Joan Van Ark to start the podcast “We’re Knot Done Yet,” on which they reminisce about working together and interview former castmates like Alec Baldwin and Brian Austin Green, as well as their Hollywood contemporaries like comedian Sandra Bernhard and “Dallas” star Linda Grey. More recently, the entirety of the extant daytime soap “The Bold and the Beautiful” and its defunct competition “All My Children” became available for streaming in Canada. “What people say about ‘Knots Landing’ and watching it again and again is that it feels like home,” Mills said. “It feels like they know these people, and so they’re interested in their lives.”

And why not indulge in these old-fashioned soaps? By comparison, they seem like a less provocative form of diversion than some of their more recent iterations. “Maybe when things are a little more copacetic, we can lean into more challenging, scarier stories,” Rikaart said. “And when things are challenging in the world, maybe the escape is less severe.” For now, no need to burst the bubble.

The post Traditional Soaps May Be Waning, but Our Stories Are Sudsier Than Ever appeared first on New York Times.