Our World Still Turns

By Dan Hagen

Of all the genres of popular fiction, soap opera seems truest to our experience.

We act in multiple intertwined dramas that feature birth, betrayal, joy, sorrow, seduction, love, illness, intimacy, enmity, imprisonment, riches, reversals, redemption, death, despair, deceit, determination, depression, decency and — given courage and compassion — even deliverance from defeat, if we’re lucky.

The serial "As The World Turns" aired on CBS from April 2, 1956, to Sept. 17, 2010.

We differ from the characters in the fictional melodramas only in the quality of our reactions to events. Their emotions are always at a high pitch, kept lurid to lure in the mass audience. We experience, enjoy and suffer all the same things they do, but more quietly, maybe with better dignity.

Some of us leave the stage, others appear, but the drama goes on and on.

The daytime dramas are largely dead on American television, vanished like the housewives to whom they pitched products for 80 years. But why mourn them? We only need to pay attention, and look around.