Becoming Bovino

A Chicago woman, Irna Phillips, birthed the daytime serial — and a Chicago woman, Michele Val Jean, is ushering in new interest in the genre. Val Jean has written for several shows, including Generations, Santa Barbara, General Hospital and The Bold and the Beautiful. Now, she's the creative force driving Beyond the Gates, the newest American soap, which debuted on CBS in February. The drama features a core Black family, the Duprees, who live outside Washington, D.C. It's full of delicious soapy drama, with slaps, villains, cliffhangers and fabulous clothes. Val Jean talks about her career, from writing the infamous catfight scene on Generations and revisiting the Luke and Laura rape on General Hospital to the joy she feels watching the reception of Beyond the Gates.

Go behind the scenes at Days of Our Lives in Burbank, California. Hear from actors, set designers and wardrobe as we pull back the curtain on how soaps manage to come on five days a week, every week — no reruns. Plus, we take you back to 1994, when Marlena was possessed by the devil!

Without soaps, we wouldn't have melodramas or reality shows. Without soaps, we wouldn't have many of the TV tropes and shows we love to stream and binge-watch. Cliffhangers, serials, vixens — in television storytelling, all come from soaps. Network television would not exist if not for the financial success of soap operas, according to Elana Levine, author of Her Stories: Daytime Soap Opera and US Television History. During the 1970s, Levine said soaps brought in 75% of the networks' revenue. “Soaps were a legitimate kind of pop culture sensation. As a result, the networks are able to charge more for those ad slots,” she said. “It's a way to reach young people in particular for a time. [Networks] were willing to pay more, because what they were paying was still a whole lot less than what primetime TV cost them, in terms of advertising time.” Ad sales on soaps bore the load of a broadcaster's overall business model, even as production costs inevitably increased. Production costs for a soap opera, Levine said, were “still never at the level of what it cost to make a primetime show.” The decline of soaps can't be attributed to a singular event. Over time, viewers' habits changed and how we consume television evolved, from the VCR to streaming. Soaps are not dead, though, and there are good reasons why they have endured.

Before the mainstreaming of Ellen and the hit show Will and Grace, soaps did their best to bring tenderness to LGBTQ+ storylines. That's the nature of the form: It gives room for anyone and everyone to be complex, fleshed out, loved and hated all at once. From supporting roles to legacy characters to complex depictions in their full humanity, from respectability politics to sometimes making missteps, soaps have found ways to evolve their depictions of queer life. Ryan Phillippe played a gay teen in the 1990s on One Life to Live. Eden Riegel played Bianca, Erica Kane's gay daughter in the 2000s on All My Children. Today, progress looks like a villain, according to Days of Our Lives actor Greg Rikaart. “I came on as the 'gay villain,' if you will, and to me, that felt like the ultimate equality, in that I didn't have to just say the right thing and follow the rules in order to be palatable to the audience,” he said. “And when I would get blowback from some people … I would just argue all those things: That that is further pushing the envelope open by saying, 'Yeah, we can be multifaceted. We don't all have to be good guys.' ” You can listen to this podcast episode by following “Making: Stories Without End” wherever you get your podcasts. Episodes drop every Tuesday for six weeks starting April 8.