Some of them were, frankly, angry, and why should I let them chew me out? I was, at best, a temporary keeper of the show’s past, and I had no clout when it came to determining its future.īut as the daytime soap continually battles for self-definition and survival, the question remains as vital as ever: to whom does the television soap belong? Even in its heyday, the American soap opera struggled to delineate itself aesthetically, narratively, and culturally.

All I knew was that I preferred Binder Duty to the prospect of answering phones in the main office and talking to the fans calling in to issue their opinions on the latest plot twist. My pride in maintaining this archive presaged my future as a television researcher, but I couldn’t have known that at the time.

The purpose of The Binder was to keep track of which characters were related or had been married, so that future writers would only romantically pair up cousins on purpose and never by accident. One of my favorite responsibilities was managing the massive black binder that contained decades’ worth of script loglines and summaries. The villains were often the friendliest, though one season’s villain was the next season’s hero: such is the television soap. The writing and production office was only a few floors below the soundstage, so actors popped down on their breaks, in costume and out of character, looking for coffee or small talk. The workings of the office were not nearly as lurid and dramatic as the scripts I was reading if anything, the day-to-day more accurately resembled a workplace sitcom. It was, at the time, America’s longest-running daytime soap opera, based out of Proctor & Gamble Productions in Manhattan.

THE SUMMER I WAS 20 years old, I interned in the writing office of Guiding Light (CBS, 1952-2009).

Scripts from passions soap opera