The Survival of Soap Opera

How the daytime drama format reaches or loses its audience in the Internet ageContributions by Ernest Alba Kay Alden Robert C. Allen Nancy Baym Sara A. Bibel Denise D. Bielby Denise Brothers Tom Casiello Mary Cassata Giada Da Ros Abigail De Kosnik Patrick Erwin Sam Ford Racquel Gonzales Erick Yates Green C. Lee Harrington Barbara Irwin Deborah L. Jaramillo Elana Levine Lynn Liccardo J. A. Metzler Jason Mittell Patrick Mulcahey Jaime J. Nasser Horace Newcomb Roger Newcomb Radha O'Meara Julie Porter QueenEve William J. Reynolds Tristan Rogers Melissa C. Scardaville Christine Scodari Louise Spence Bernard M. Timberg Emma F. Webb Carol Traynor Williams and Mary Jeanne WilsonThe soap opera one of U.S. television's longest-running and most influential formats is on the brink of disappearing. Declining ratings have been attributed to an increasing number of women working outside the home and to an intensifying competition for viewers' attention from cable and the Internet. Yet soaps' influence has expanded with serial narratives becoming commonplace on most prime-time TV programs. The Survival of Soap Opera investigates the causes of their dwindling popularity describes their impact on TV and new media culture and gleans lessons from their complex history for twenty-first-century media industries.The book contains reflections from established soap scholars such as Robert C. Allen Louise Spence Nancy Baym and Horace Newcomb along with essays and interviews by emerging scholars fans and website moderators and by soap opera producers writers and actors from ABC's General Hospital CBS's The Young and the Restless and The Bold and the Beautiful and other shows. This diverse group of voices seeks to intervene in the discussion about the fate of soap operas at a critical juncture and speaks to longtime soap viewers television studies scholars and media professionals alike.Sam Ford Bowling Green Kentucky is a research affiliate with Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Convergence Culture Consortium and Director of Digital Strategy for Peppercom Strategic Communications. Abigail De Kosnik San Francisco California is an assistant professor at the University of California Berkeley in the Berkeley Center for New Media and the Department of Theater Dance and Performance Studies. C. Lee Harrington Oxford Ohio is professor of sociology and a Women's Studies Program Affiliate at Miami University. She has been conducting research on the daytime industry and soap fans since the late 1980s and is author of many published academic works on soaps including Soap Fans (with Denise D. Bielby).