The soap opera began as a 15-minute radio broadcast designed by advertisers to help sell soap and cleaning products to housewives in 1930’s America. It started out humbly, but over time, the soap opera would make its move to daytime television, then to primetime and eventually diversify to conquer the teenage demographic as America’s leading preponderate of values and morals. While popular daytime soaps like The Guiding Light (the longest running, at a robust 68 years) and As the World Turns (49 years) continue to reach a predominately female target group, soap operas over the last thirty years have pushed to be more than just domestic dalliances for domestic mothers, and instead as full-out, hegemonic tools for the global family. Whether it be the big business messages of eighties soaps like Dallas or Dynasty, the Gen X angst of Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place, or the idyllic ode to youth geekery of Dawson’s Creek and The O.C., the soap opera has gone on to cover more than just domestic romance issues, and instead to ones pertinent to all ages and sexes. It is a genre that has faced many permutations over the years, but it has shaped culture as much as culture has shaped it, becoming one of the world’s most potent, moralizing machines. Most people today wouldn’t be caught dead saying they watch a soap, but regardless, the soaps have had some bearing on how we live our lives today.

For its first forty years, the daytime soap was the primary means by which capitalism could permeate the demographic of primary household spenders: Housewives. While men were off at work, women were at home with the kids, tending thehouse. The soap was thus devised to introduce to women cleaning products while, at the same time, offering entertainment. Before soap operas, cleaning products had a limited impact on domestic households, but today it seems one cannot live without anti-bacterial soap, Mr. Clean, and other, assorted hygienic products. The soaps created an entire industry to the women that would, so dedicatedly, tune in every weekday; and now, we as a culture have come to adopt this capitalist exploit of cleanliness to make cleaning and hygiene products such an essential industry in today’s market.

The soaps would help to keep the domestic market up and running while America was in the depths of World War II, expelling its capitalist message while women waited for their men to return. Not only this, but soap operas, with their elevated dramatic stories of love and death, helped satisfy needs of companionship and fears of wartime loss with their regular and reliable storylines. Not only did they instruct women what to buy, but also how to feel.

As women began to liberate themselves throughout the sixties, the power of the soap opera waned, as more and more women were heading off to work during the key daytime hours, and the soap opera was thus faced with its first major crisis. With waning female interest, the soap aimed for primetime hours (when women would be done with work and available for television), with the highly popular Peyton Place in 1967. Although initially successful, its primetime slot failed to attract male audiences, and after the novelty wore off, it couldn’t compete with typical nighttime broadcasting. Payton Place was laid to rest only five years after its initial run, but it opened the door to the possibilities of bringing the soaps to primetime.

Dallas, in the summer of 1978, was the show to finally capitalize on the groundwork laid by Peyton Place to become one of the eighties’ most lasting pop-culture artifacts and without a doubt the most famous soap opera in history. With its focus on the office exploits of the Ewings as they attempted to expand their oil empire, Dallas had succeeded in crossing over to youth and male demographics, adding the thrill of big money and big business into the mix of standard family drama. America, and thanks to clever export, the world, was tuning into Dallas on a weekly basis, allowing its exaggerated capitalism to enthrall the world over. Its glorification of the thrill of selfish monetary exploits helped to cultivate what is now known as the Greed Decade, and its exaggerated capitalist message has even been attributed to bringing down communism in many of the then-developing nations that aired the show. Before Gordon Gecko, the Greed symbol of America was J.R. Ewing, ready to backstab friend or family with a smile, just as long as it got him further in the game.

Dallas was one huge global guilty pleasure, as everyone enjoyed seeing cruel capitalism and harsh sexism prevail amidst a supposedly liberated America. The environment was constantly being exploited as the Ewings took their oil empire all over America and overseas, seemingly acting against the “We are the World” consciousness of the eighties. Women were always treated with contempt by their male companions, and were mere trophies for capitalist success. Whether males watched this to console themselves with the rising stature of women in society, or whether they watched for the competitive business edge of the show is uncertain, but cases could be made for both. What was clear was that Dallas gave legitimacy to things seemingly taboo and frowned upon at the time, a guilty pleasure that ended up pleasuring every aspiring yuppie from America to Turkey.

The soap opera had risen above the mere selling of cleaning products to be the prime purveyor of American values throughout the eighties. Dynasty, Falcon Crest and spin-off Knot’s Landing all followed on the “greed is good” architecture of Dallas, and throughout the eighties gave the world over their values. While the question in the sixties may have been “Who shot J.F.K.?” in the eighties it was “Who shot J.R.?”

After all the primetime eighties soaps had run their course throughout the decade, and after greed wasn’t exactly perceived as good, the primetime soaps of big business became tired to diverse adult audiences. Attempting to take the successful dynamics of Dallas and extend it to the under-tapped teenage demographic, Gen X finally found their calling card with Beverly Hills 90210 in 1990, and the successful spin-off, Melrose Place, a few years later. Suddenly school was the new It industry, and teenagers could now be sold products like women were soap in the thirties. Replacing soap, these new Gen X shows had bigger aspirations to sell teenagers culture, from music to clothing. Tied within the shows were musical montages, and later on actual musical acts, making 15-minute stars out of the likes of Color Me Badd, Jamie Walters, and Jeremy Jordan. The slick hair and potent sideburns of the one-two Perry/Priestly punch helped dictate to American youth how to groom themselves just like the show’s fashionable clothing excess showed them how to dress. Like Dallas helped dictate the yuppie drives of eighties culture, 90210 defined taste and style for the highly permeable youth market throughout the nineties.

Also like Dallas in the eighties, 90210 ended up closing shop as soon as the nineties came to a close, allowing most post-modern and cynical programming to expunge values to American youth for the new millennium. Thus paved the way for the massive success of Dawson’s Creek (and other WB tweeny soaps like Felicity and 7th Heaven), which helped make American Eagle one of the primary youth clothing lines and self-referential intellectual speak chic. It still dictated common soap opera themes of love (will Dawson and Joey ever get together?!) but subtly also milked the capitalist message of following your dreams and becoming good capitalists, whether that meant becoming a filmmaker (Dawson) or owning a restaurant (Pacey).

More than just making Paula Cole and Savage Garden household names thanks to featured musical play throughout the series, Dawson’s Creek also made strides in taking television’s primary teen soap stars and transforming them into even further-reaching movie stars. James Van Der Beek sung anything but the blues with the hit of Varsity Blues, while Joshua Jackson popped up in everything from The Skulls to Urban Legend. Katie Holmes has been the most successful, remembered now for her ties to Tom Cruise and her refusal of my letters and phone calls more than she is for playing little Joey on the Creek. With Dawson’s Creek, the soap opera became a testing ground for teenage talent, and while selling America prototypical values, it was also cultivating the stars that would help reach further audiences on the silver screen. That’s a long way from selling soap.

The Creek was eventually replaced by the even more cynical permutation, The O.C.. Learning well from its predecessors, The O.C. has combined all the successful sensationalism of 90210 and the idyllic locals and cynicism of Dawson’s Creek to become the ultimate soap opera machine for the 2000s. The show reeks of capitalism more than any other soap opera in history, with up-and-coming bands always playing at the various parties the teenagers attend, shows like MTV getting entire episodes dedicated to them, the cast members always modeling new clothing styles and even movie icons like George Lucas dropping by to pimp out Revenge of the Sith. The filmmaker dream of Dawson has been changed to one of comic books for Seth, the pursuit of a capitalist dream still remaining as strong as ever.

Although no doubt a textbook consumer culture machine, The O.C. succeeds best at bringing the soap opera to both the young and old. In its equal depiction of young and adult characters, the show is able to tap into all demographics with precision, providing intrigue for both teenyboppers and senior citizens alike. Although it doesn’t reach the audience that Dallas did in the eighties, its success is nonetheless a triumph, considering that the fall of the television reign of the big networks has made reaching massive audiences nearly impossible in today’s segmented market. The O.C. is where the popularity of the soap opera lies at present, and its targeting of total America, both young and old, marks its biggest evolution from the beginnings of The Guiding Light. The soap opera has been diversified to reach audiences with its messages, both capitalist and moralist in intent, telling everyone what to buy and what love, death, and drama means in today’s landscape.

In many ways, the soap opera has become to contemporary culture what the Greek tragedy was to Greece many years ago. The Greek tragedies were exaggerations of latent societal concerns, from the Freudian implications of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex to the hubris of wanting too much. Seeing characters deal with these elemental human concerns, and seeing the lessons taught by each elevated dramatic act served a cathartic function for Greek society. It allowed the viewer to experience repressed desires and actions, yet at the same time instructed them with morals by which to live. The stories were exaggerated, melodramatic even, but they nevertheless tapped into the mindset of their viewers.

Likewise, the soap opera has helped housewives and the public in general in dealing with taboos like adultery, murder, deception and deceit, all in the comfort of their living rooms. While letting the viewer live out sensationalist desires, they also help to dictate the morals and impulses that the viewers should hold. Whether it is greed in Dallas or teenage cool in 90210, these shows have helped comfort audiences and helped lead them along their paths to becoming fit members of society. They’ve helped tell society, whether they watch soaps or not, how to behave, and have become one of the most influential storytelling forms of modern America.

Whether one still holds the stigma that such soaps are too girly to even attempt to penetrate, I aim to do the hard work. During my immersion into primetime soap opera, I’ll review all the big soap titles currently making waves on digital, and help lay down the groundwork to help the uninitiated immerse themselves within the wonderful world of melodramatic serial. Through my reviews, I aim to show why the plains of Dallas kick as much ass as the hills of Beverly and why the Creek of Dawson runs as deep as the roots of Orange County. Soaps are a convoluted but undeniably addictive storytelling arena, and hopefully this primer will help interest those in the important and influential primetime soaps covered below.

Beverly Hills 90210, Dallas, Dawson’s Creek, Dynasty, Felicity, Freaks & Geeks, Melrose Place, My So-Called Life, One Tree Hill & The O.C.

(Editor’s note: Watch our REVIEWS section for each of Rhett’s updates)