When I was younger, I watched them (Dark Shadows was my first). When I was in my late teens and early 20s, I’d watch them when I went home for lunch, or they had a TV in the breakroom where we’d hover over All My Children.
Nowadays I couldn’t watch one if you paid me. They’re painful to look at for even a few minutes.
So…do you watch them and how old are you? Which ones do you follow?
I watch General Hospital. Habit, really. I’ve been watching it with my whole life (both my parents followed it). And now my best friend watches it every day, and she likes to talk about it, so I have incentive to keep tuning in. Even though, honestly, I hate it. It’s like chewing on tinfoil. There are basically three characters I really watch for these days, and I expect they’ll all be destroyed and murdered before too long (since GH seems to do that to all their interesting characters these days).
I’m 25.
When I was in college, for a year or 2 I watched ABC’s big 3 - All My Kids, OLTL, and GH. I used to go upstairs and watch them with the 2 girls who lived above us. We’d get high and eat snack foods.
Heck, one of the highlights of my law school career was convincing our admin law prof to let us bring a TV into the classroom, because we were sure that was the day Tad was going to kill Jenny. So the prof was lecturing away with the TV off to the side of his desk with the volume off. At one point he noticed many of the kids were paying attention to the TV. He asked, “Is he killing her?” And we responded, “No, it’s a cat food commercial.” Can you believe he turned the set off? I mean, come on! It was that “Chow, chow, chow” ad where the cats were dancing!
Due to some foot surgery I am no longer able to run, and I started working out in a gym over lunchtime. Occasionally they will have the ABC soaps on. For some reason it shocked me to see some of the same actors playing the same characters on the same show 25 years later. Tad, Jesse, Angie, Adam on AMK, and Beau and Dorian on OLTL.
No, I would not voluntarily watch them.
47 years old.
Moved from IMHO to CS.
I watched General Hospital my freshman year of college, because my roommate watched it. And as a result, I got into it enough to keep watching it sporadically the following summer. But the next year my (new) roommate and I did not have a tv, and it didn’t take much not watching to lose what interest I had had.
Age 63, and no.
I watched for a couple of years when the kids were very young. There wasn’t much else on daytime TV in the pre-cable years.
I kept up with General Hospital for awhile. (I loved Roy Thinnes). That’s the one with Luke and Laura, isn’t it? I remember being downtown shopping in Seattle the day they got married, and there were TV’s on everywhere – people brought TV’s to work so they wouldn’t miss it. It was quite the event. Must have been pre-VCR’s too.
I am a 35 year old professional male and I have tried to watch them a few times over the years as a pop-culture experiment. They are excruciating and I don’t understand why the format still exists at all. I have watched “The View” and, while I didn’t like it much, I could stretch my imagination and see why some captive females would. Talk shows like Oprah and Jerry Springer have some appeal.
I always assumed that it was housewives that watched the Soaps and I guess it has to be but I still give today’s housewives more credit than that. I don’t know anyone that admits to watching soaps but they have to be out there somewhere.
When I was a kid, I always guessed that they hardly ever turned on any lights inside because the budgets were too small to afford the electricity. Now, I am not so sure that isn’t true.
Yes, Luke and Laura were on General Hospital. They made a big deal about them “coming back” after 10 years away or something like that during my year of watching a soap.
Years ago I did with a girlfriend. Now I’m at work during the daytime soaps and wouldn’t have the attention span or interest anymore.
No. And not just soaps. I don’t watch anything with any degree of regularity. I have never seen an episode of Friends, and I couldn’t even tell you what night ANYTHING is on TV. The TV is usually commandeered by my wife or kids and on the occasion when I do get some time in front of it I like news, documentaries, or sports. (OK, sometimes stand up comedy and the like.)
Sorry, didn’t plan the hijack. I just seem to have too much to do to watch TV for hours on end. Soaps are definitely at the bottom of the list.
I’ve never watched the soaps and you couldn’t pay me to. (OK, I watched old Dark Shadows reruns for a while in library school–that was a hysterical show. I love bad movies too.) I’m a housewife, btw, and most of my friends are too, but I don’t think any of them watch soaps that I know of. Some of them like American Idol, though.
I do like Bollywood movies though, which are often really soap operas, only with saris and dance numbers and different standards, which makes them OK 'cause it’s studying a different culture. Even so, some of them have plots straight from Three’s Company and I’m not wild about those.
I used to watch The Young and the Restless, mainly because my mother did. I grew up, moved out, graduated college, married, had a couple of kids. I was recording the show during the day because I was working.
I realized I was wasting a lot of time on the weekends trying to watch the M-F episodes, so I just stopped watching it. I’ll catch pieces of it on Soap Network as I’m surfing by, but I have no desire to get caught up in it again.
I don’t watch daytime television at all. Whenever I’ve tried it’s all “get a job! Borrow money! Borrow money and go to school so you can get a job!”
I did watch soaps briefly in college, as the cool thing to do was hang out in the community day room watching soaps over the lunch hour.
My TV in never, ever on during the day unless I’ve been up all night playing a video game. That hasn’t happened in a long time. I can’t watch TV until right before bed.
I can sit in front of the internet off & on all day, so don’t think I’m all self-righteous or anything. 
I prolly have ADD. A TV show during the day is way too much attention and sitting still than I could handle.
Unfortunately my wife records General Hospital everyday and I sit in the same room reading the newspaper while she watches it so I know the characters and what’s going on.
It’s horrible. All the plots revolve around getting people stuck together in one place. The train derails and everyone is STUCK in the tunnel. There’s a bank robbery and everyone is STUCK hostage in the bank. Everyone’s at a party in a mansion on an island and are STUCK there because of a storm. Lame.
And some of the story lines draaaaaaaaaaag on and on and on. One couple broke up because she wanted to have a baby and he didn’t. Now she’s pregnant with his baby and wants to be involved. And they’ve had the same arguement about it everyday for over a month now.
Most of the time I wonder why most of the characters don’t wise up and say “Y’know, Port Charles sucks, and the people all suck, and everyone is so over dramtic about everything, I’m moving away.”
Ha! Add to that “Why are you sitting on your ass in the middle of the day watching tv? You could be suing someone for something. Call Mavis, Davis, and Spence!”
Begs the question: is it possible to construct a well-scripted and novel soap opera? Or does the mere use of the name “soap opera” automatically imprison a show within the genre conventions? Was Buffy a soap opera?
I grew up on All My Children, One Life To Live and General Hospital. I recall Luke and Laura’s wedding, the saga of Viki/Niki, the underground city Eterna, the ups and downs of the ever conniving Erika Kane…Ah those were fun days.
I haven’t watched any soaps (except for brief scenes) since about 1990ish.
Forgot to mention…I had a huge crush on Cord Roberts. Oh baby.
In high school I watched The Young and the Restless when we were theoretically in Anchor Club, and in college my roomate and I watched the Mexican soap operas although we spoke not a word of Spanish. (You don’t need it.) Not since. I’m 28.
This is why I record the episodes and FF through them. It’s one step away from just letting it go. In the pregnancy storyline, the mother has HIV. There is a lot of stuff to explore with this storyline! Instead, they focus on this one conversation over and over and over.
But you forgot one. Occasionally, somebody (or lots of people) die, and there’s a long, pointless, tedious investigation that nobody cares about until the big, stupid reveal.
The sad thing is, stuff used to happen on General Hospital.