Serial narratives in the new millennium: The decline and the future of daytime US soap operas

Abstract

Despite its cultural significance, soap opera as a television genre has been in decline in the United States since the early 2000s. While the nature of its audience has been changing, the media landscape also has been drastically shifting because of the wide expansion of new media technologies. In this article, I survey these reasons and examine the current state of the genre. To do so, I first briefly examine the history of the genre before I review the significant cultural and social forces that reshaped the US media landscape and eroded the popularity of the genre in certain segments of the audience.