Martin Schoeller

Daytime soap operas are dying, but they’re also being resurrected—at night. While daytime drama fans have been devastated by a series of high-profile cancellations, prime-time soaps, the ones that run once a week and deal with good-looking rich families exacting revenge on one another, are stronger than they’ve been in decades. On June 13, the U.S. and Canada will see a revival of the most popular prime-time soap of them all, Dallas. The ABC network, which recently cancelled the long-running One Life to Live and All My Children, is full of shows like the aptly named Revenge (in the Hamptons) and has announced a fall schedule that includes new shows Nashville (revenge in the music business) and 666 Park Avenue, described as the story of a posh building full of “wealth, sex, love, power, even revenge.”

People who grew up in the ’80s experienced an era when prime time was almost as soapy as daytime: thanks to Dallas, Dynasty and many spinoffs and imitators, most of the top dramas were soap operas. But the form lost steam when the public got tired of rich-people problems and storylines, like the season of Dallas that turned out to be a dream. Since then, except for shows aimed at teenagers (the revival of Beverly Hills 90210), plus the spoof soap Desperate Housewives, networks have avoided them and gone for shows where the characters try to help people instead of constantly plotting retribution.

Now the tide may be turning. With daytime soaps difficult to sustain for economic reasons—namely, not enough people watching during the day—prime-time storytelling has become a more sensible option. Christine Fix, editor-in-chief for Soaps.com, says viewers feel “nostalgic about prime-time TV in the 1980s and ’90s,” and that they “seem to be begging to see more of that now that we’ve lost so many daytime soap operas.” The continued popularity of telenovelas in Latin America, not to mention Coronation Street in the U.K., may have shown networks that people still watch this kind of programming in the evenings. Last year, La Reina Del Sur, a story of a young Mexican woman who fled to Spain where she becomes a major drug trafficker, was the most popular show in the history of the Spanish-language network Telemundo, and a U.S. studio has the rights to make an English-language adaptation.

Continue…