So i just read that General Hospital has over 60 seasons and the longest airing show ever is Guiding Light at 72 seasons.
So like are each season consistent with the last? Do they reference something that happened 10seasons ago? Do they use the same actor/actress for all seasons? Is soap operas just a dramatized version of real life?
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It’s more than just how many seasons, it’s the fact that they air every day. Soap operas are insane to me, it has to basically become your life. That dude who plays Victor on whichever soap that is, that’s just who he is, he’s Victor.
The longest isn’t guiding light it’s coronation street, I think it started about 70 years ago
All My Children had some crazy storylines. I started watching in middle school because I spent the summer with my cousins and they got me into it. I remember the main story was one of the characters, David was a cardiologist and he was madly in love with Dixie, but she was married to a guy named Tad (who had the nickname Tad the Cad). If I remember correctly, David was working on a drug that boosted libido called Libidozone and in an effort to get Dixie away from Tad, he planned to spike Tads drink with the drug in the hopes he would cheat on his wife with another woman. He accidentally ended up spiking the punchbowl and the party erupted into a giant orgy. Tad got caught in a compromising situation with someone else and Dixie ran into David’s arms.
I’ve not heard of General Hospital but the UK’s ‘Coronation Street’ about life in the north of England is the world’s longest running soap. It started in the 60s and it still going on. Characters come back every now and then and the audience get to see character grow up in real time and occasionally it has such a cultural impact that story lines get referenced in Parliament. It’s successful as it reflects the issues that impact the audience at the time and show how different scenarios play out.
The Archers is a BBC radio soap. Going since 1951. over 20,000 episodes. Longest running drama ever. Does not do seasons, as radio production is less resource intensive. Just keeps going…
That ‘longest airing’ is surely just a US statistic. Wikipedia tells me that Guiding Light ran for 57 years from 1952 to 2009, but Coronation Street in the U.K. started in 1960 and is still going strong, so is looking at 64 years right now.
Just a warning. If you’re watching an episode featuring a ‘large’ lady and she bursts into song, it’s probably too late to invest any of your time in it.
Everyone else has covered it, but I wanted to throw in – you mention things happening 10 seasons ago, but it’s worth pointing out that time gets really *funky* on these shows.
Firstly, the show proceeds more or less in real time, so the first episode of 2020 takes place in early 2020. But, episodes tend to cover very short periods of time, a whole week of episodes could take place over a single day. This tends to lead to a “year” on the show feeling oddly short. If you read a description of one year of storylines on a soap opera, it’ll probably take place over about two months of time.
The other big driver is [SORAS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap_opera_rapid_aging_syndrome) – Soap opera rapid aging syndrome. Children of characters will regularly be aged up at the first opportunity, going away to boarding school one year and coming back as a 20 year old. This leads to scenarios where a character might give birth when they’re 30 and have a 20 year old son when they’re 40. If things get really out of whack, a character’s child might end up dating one of their friends.
Or my favourite quote from the SORAS page Wikipedia page, “The repeated use of SORAS on Days of Our Lives led to characters Tom Horton and his great-great-grandson Scotty Banning both working as doctors in the same hospital at the same time.”
The UK’s **Coronation Street** holds the official Guinness World Record for being the longest running/oldest television soap opera in history. Coronation Street first premiered in 1960 and has since aired over 10,000 episodes.
My best attempt at an ELI5 Answer:
A little over 100 years ago, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote *The Great Gatsby*. This became wildly popular as time went on after the author’s death. Folks analyzed how it presented the story of all of these people and started making TV shows set in recent times (really 40yrs ahead of the novel) . And they kept the story “living” with characters coming in and leaving just as people come and go in our real lives.
Some people love this because there’s a human need to consume *gossip*. That’s why tabloids and the paparazzi exist. Soap operas are just a fictional version of gossip creation.
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