Alina Adams has worked for ABC Daytime, Procter & Gamble Productions, and the Daytime Emmy Awards. Her tie-in novels, Oakdale Confidential (As the World Turns) and Jonathan’s Story (Guiding Light) were New York Times bestsellers, while The Man From Oakdale won a Scribe Award from the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers. She wrote the officially sanctioned continuations of Another World with Another World Today, and Guiding Light with Mindy’s Twitter. She currently writes for SoapHub.com, which originally serialized her May 2025 historical fiction novel, Go On Pretending, which is set in the 1950s world of radio soaps as they transition to television, and what that means for the show’s African-American leading man. Read more at AlinaAdams.com.
When my family and I immigrated from the Soviet Union to the United States in 1977, I spoke no English or had any idea what it meant to be a “real American.”
Then I discovered soap operas. Soap operas were ideal for learning English. Everyone spoke slowly and with dramatic emphasis. After anything happened, everyone would discuss what had happened and repeat what had happened until, even if you barely understood the language, you had a pretty good idea what had happened.
Soap operas were also ideal for learning what it meant to be an American. Everyone lived in beautiful houses, wore beautiful clothes and nothing was impossible. If you wanted something or someone badly enough, all you had to do was work hard (I learned important words like “scheme,” “manipulate” and “blackmail”) and you would get it. America was the land where dreams came true!
I became obsessed with soap operas. I resolved to learn everything about soap operas. I learned that the genre was invented by a woman named Irna Phillips, and that the daytime dramas’ nickname came from her original shows’ sponsor, Procter & Gamble, makers of Ivory soap.
Cut to 20 years later: I was now working for Procter & Gamble, for no less than Phillips’ best-known programs, As the World Turns and Guiding Light. I produced the shows’ official websites, writing the supplementary material to the on-air content. If a character kept a diary on-screen, you could read it at the website. If a character started a magazine in the show, you could peruse it at the website. Want to snoop through your favorite characters’ emails? Website! And when As the World Turns’s Katie wrote Oakdale Confidential, a scandalous tell-all about her friends and neighbors featured on the show, I was the one who actually wrote the book, which appeared on real-life bookshelves (though Katie was the one listed as the primary author when it hit the New York Times bestseller list).
By the time I was working at Procter & Gamble, however, soaps had begun their downward slide. When I got my first job in 1994, on the E! Entertainment talk show Pure Soap (it was like Talk Soup, only … soapier), there were 10 soap operas on the air (down from a high of 19 in 1970), but they were averaging millions of viewers per broadcast.
Then, in 1995, the entire industry was hit by the tsunami known as the O.J. Simpson trial. Soaps were preempted for days, weeks, months, and viewers lost their daily viewing habit.
The cancellations began immediately. Loving was retooled into The City in November 1995, starring primetime siren Morgan Fairchild, then axed in 1997. Another World went off the air in 1999, after 35 years, with Guiding Light – at the time, the longest running American serial at 72 years old – going in 2009, and As the World Turns in 2010. All My Children last aired on ABC in 2011, and One Life to Live in 2012. I worked at the online reboot which attempted to bring the latter two back as streaming shows in 2013, but that effort barely lasted the summer.
There are currently four soaps still on the air: The Bold and the Beautiful and The Young and the Restless on CBS, General Hospital on ABC, and Days of our Lives streaming on Peacock.
General opinion regarding the genre’s decline in popularity includes reality television taking over, all primetime shows becoming serialized, women no longer staying home to watch regularly, on-demand viewing making “tune in tomorrow” optional and, of course, O.J. Simpson.
But I blame a different culprit. I blame men.
Of the four soap operas left, The Bold and the Beautiful’s executive producer and head writer is a man, Bradley Bell (son of the show’s late creator, William Bell). The Young and the Restless’ executive producer and head writer is a man, Josh Griffith. General Hospital’s executive producer is a man, Frank Valentini. General Hospital has been playing musical chairs with head writers since 2023, with always at least one man at the helm, even if the team also happens to include a woman, like the current duo of Chris Van Etten and Elizabeth Korte. Over on Days of our Lives, another nepo baby, Ken Corday (son of the show’s creators, Ted and Betty Corday) is the executive producer, while Ron Carlivati was head writer from 2017. He has recently been fired, and a team of women, Paula Cwickly and Jeanne Marie Ford, installed in his place. But because the show tapes so far ahead, we won’t begin seeing their material air until late April of this year.
So, there are four daytime dramas left. And every single one is written and produced by men.
That’s a problem.
Soap operas were created by women, for women. I’m not saying men can’t be soap fans. My husband watched All My Children from its first day to its last, and I know many passionate, devoted male soap fans. But soaps weren’t made for them. They were made for us.
Men may love soaps, but men can’t understand why women love soaps, or which stories speak to us and why. (I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the most successful primetime soaps, from Grey’s Anatomy to Bridgerton, are overseen by a woman, Shonda Rhimes.)
On Monday, February 24, 2025, a new daytime soap opera, Beyond the Gates, will premiere on CBS. It’s the first new soap since 1999. It’s the first new soap for CBS since 1987. It’s Procter & Gamble’s return to the soap business, and it’s the first time the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) has invested in a soap.
Press for Beyond the Gates has been focused on it being the first daytime show to launch with a primarily African-American cast. (Generations in 1989 was almost evenly split between Black and white characters. It barely lasted two years.)
Personally, I’m intrigued by another, less publicized aspect. Beyond the Gates was created by a woman, Michele Val Jean. She will be the show’s head writer, showrunner and executive producer and her producers include Sheila Ducksworth (Soul Food) and Julie Carruthers (All My Children), among others.
Pundits have declared the daytime soap opera dead. Viewership has been dropping steadily for 30 years. Yet, Procter & Gamble, the company that first championed the genre, seems to believe it’s poised for a comeback. African-Americans have long made up a disproportionately large segment of the soap opera audience. CBS is presumably gambling on them to make Beyond the Gates a hit. (If the influx of Black characters onto the front burners of the other shows is anything to go by, Beyond the Gates’ competitors are already afraid of losing their viewers to the new kid in town.)
Yet no one is talking about what it might mean to have a show headed by women going head to head with the foursome led by men. Might Beyond the Gates prove revolutionary not only in its diverse cast and crew, but in its under-the-radar returning of soap operas to the women who not only embraced and popularized the genre, but invented it, as well?
Last week, the Paley Museum in New York City held a special event, Making Soap Opera History with CBS’s Beyond the Gates. I covered the red carpet arrivals and decided to pose precisely that question to the show’s executive producer, Sheila Ducksworth. She, too, noted the historical aspect of it, and rattled off the names of all the other female executive producers, four out of seven total.
A screening of the first Beyond the Gates episode made me optimistic that having a majority of women behind the scenes would forefront stories that resonate with female viewers; ones that understand female friendships, as well as the relationships between mothers and daughters, sisters, and, yes, frenemies, are often just as – if not more – important than romantic ones. In just the pilot, we saw a mother, Anita (Tamara Tunie), interacting with her two daughters, Nicole (Daphnee Duplaix) and Dani (Karla Mosley) and offering life advice based on her own long-lasting marriage to Vernon (Clifton Davis), as well as her past as a successful singer and civil rights activist; Dani being a bit too much of a stage mama to her influencer daughter, Chelsea (RhonniRose Mantilla); then Dani hauling off and slapping Hayley (Marquita Goings), the woman who stole Dani’s ex-husband … and just happens to be the ex-best friend of Dani’s other daughter, Naomi (Arielle Prepetite).
That, as Tunie said, “is messy.” But it’s exactly the kind of messy that women viewers – both those who’ve loved soaps for decades and those dipping their toes into the genre for the first time – can appreciate.
Featured image, showing Alina Adams and her daughter Aries at the Paley Center premiere event for Beyond the Gates, courtesy Alina Adams.
