You can tell something is a soap opera by just looking at a scene. What causes this?
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The nature of their rapid and cheap production forces them to have a very homogenous style.
The game of soap operas is to produce as much content as possible as what you are really doing is making the bare minimum that justifies the ad-breaks (hence being called soap operas, because their early radio-play form were dominated by soap commercials). So they are produced cheaply and quickly, meaning there isn’t time or budget to do much more than write the script then stick the actor in an existing set to deliver them.
Those sets need to be made ready for production very quickly so the lighting setups for them are just left in place. You rock up, hit the switch and the set is lit. That lighting is done so that the actors can stand anywhere inside them and still be well lit for the multiple cameras pointing at them. You want multiple cameras because doing multiple takes for different angles takes time and time is money.
So everyone is just homogenously lit in the scene and every scene is lit like every other scene.
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