Elana Levine, Author at Public Seminar

When the Networks Prescribed a Dose of Reality for Ailing Soap Operas

How AIDS and Social Issues Reinvigorated Soaps in the 1990’s

March 9, 2020 • by Elana Levine

In this excerpt, Levine looks at how “the soaps”, challenged by flagging ratings in the 1990s, embraced the social issues of their day. --- Reality versus Fantasy As soap ratings initiated their slow decline by the later 1980s, the programs began to explore new developments in storytelling, shifting the boundaries of soap opera ...

When the Networks Prescribed a Dose of Reality for Ailing Soap Operas

The conversations All My Children promoted put feminism on television’s map

January 6, 2020 • by Elana Levine

This scene, broadcast fifty years ago this week, marked the debut episode of the American daytime television soap opera, All My Children. More than forty-three years later, on the program’s final broadcast, the same character, the glamorous Erica Kane, repeated her observation, “Pine Valley . . . is still not the corner of ...