Soap opera: Encyclopedia II - Soap opera - Soap opera characteristics

Soap opera - Soap opera characteristics

Soap opera - Plots and storylines

Most soaps follow the lives of a group of characters who live or work in a particular place. The storylines follow the day-to-day lives of these characters. In many soap operas, in particular US daytime serials, the characters are generally more handsome, beautiful, seductive, and wealthy than the typical person watching the show. This is true to a lesser extent in Australian and UK soap operas which largely focus on more everyday characters and situations. Many Australian and UK soap operas explore social realist storylines such as marriage breakdown or financial problems, and sometimes include significant amounts of comedy. However in general even the most realistic soap operas take everyday, ordinary lives and exaggerate them to a degree where they are still plausible, yet are more dramatic.

Romances, secret relationships, catfighting, extra-marital affairs, and genuine love has been the basis for many US soap opera storylines. The most popular soap opera characters, and the most compelling and popular storylines, have usually involved a romance between two characters, of the sort often presented in paperback romance novels. Soap opera storylines sometimes weave intricate, convoluted, sometimes confusing tales of characters who have affairs, meet mysterious strangers and fall in love, are swept off their feet by dashing (yet treacherous) lovers, sneak behind their lovers' backs, and engage in other forms of adultery that keep their audiences returning to find out who is sleeping with whom, who has betrayed whom, who is having a baby, or who is related to each other.

Remarkable (sometimes unbelievable) coincidences are sometimes used to enhance the drama. If a young woman in a soap secretly has a single sexual encounter with a boyfriend in high school, this forbidden affair will come back to haunt her at the very moment it would cause the most harm — such as on the day of her wedding. Previously-unknown (and sometimes evil) twins may emerge, and unexpected calamities disrupt weddings with unusual frequency. Much like comic books—another popular form of linear storytelling—a character's death is not guaranteed to be permanent without an on-camera corpse, and sometimes not even then. The death of Dr. Taylor Forrester on The Bold and the Beautiful seemed permanent as she had flatlined on-camera and even had a funeral. But when actress Hunter Tylo returned to the show in 2005, the "flatlining" was explained away with the revelation that Taylor had actually gone into a coma.

More recently, the American soap opera "Passions" currently involves some supernatural or science fiction elements in their ongoing storylines. This can include, for instance, an alien character or a vampire character (most infamously seen on Port Charles). Often, these characters are isolated in only one of the ongoing story threads, which can seemingly allow a fan to ignore them if they do not like that element, a form of krypto-revisionism.

Soap opera - Soap music

In addition, the musical soundtrack used for a soap opera uses a style that instantly identifies it as belonging to soap operas. Soaps aired during the golden age of radio usually used organs to produce most of their music (because they were cheaper than full-blown orchestras). The organists from the radio serials moved over to television, and were heard on some serials as late as the 1970s.

Like the storylines themselves, soap opera soundtracks were overblown and melodramatic. An instantly recognizable characteristic of a soap (one that has been spoofed and imitated many times) consists of a scene where a lovely woman tells her husband or boyfriend that she no longer loves him, for she has been seeing someone else...and at that moment, a single, blaring organ chord resonates on the soundtrack, emphasizing this dramatic moment. Organ music has been abandoned on the serials for thirty years now and pre-recorded music has largely taken its place. For most of the 1970s and continuing through the latter part of the 1990s, full orchestras performed the underscore. Today, however, soap music performances have, in a sense, come full circle from keyboard to keyboard as it is almost entirely done by synthesizers, thereby avoiding the high cost of using orchestras.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Soap opera characteristics", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki