Opera Australia

A soap opera (also called a daytime drama or soap) is a genre of a long-running radio or television serial, frequently characterized by melodrama, ensemble casts, and sentimentality. The term soap opera originated from radio dramas' original sponsorship by soap manufacturers. The term was preceded by horse opera, a derogatory term for low-budget Westerns. Some authorities exclude short-running serial dramas from their definition.

BBC Radio's The Archers, first broadcast in 1950, is the world's longest-running soap opera. The longest-running television soap opera is Coronation Street, which was first broadcast on ITV in 1960.

According to Albert Moran, one of the defining features that make a television program a soap opera is "that form of television that works with a continuous open narrative. Each episode ends with a promise that the storyline is to be continued in another episode". In 2012, Los Angeles Times columnist Robert Lloyd wrote of daily dramas: Although melodramatically eventful, soap operas such as this also have a luxury of space that makes them seem more naturalistic; indeed, the economics of the form demand long scenes, and conversations that a 22-episodes-per-season weekly series might dispense with in half a dozen lines of dialogue may be drawn out, as here, for pages. You spend more time even with the minor characters; the apparent villains grow less apparently villainous.

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