No Soap
If you’re a fan of “The Bold and the Beautiful”, “Days of Our Lives”, “General Hospital” or “The Young and the Restless”, you’ve probably wondered why your favorite daytime drama is called a soap opera. What does it have to do with the opera, or with soap? Well, soap operas share the melodrama and the family stories with the opera – a lot of classic operas are actually very similar to soap operas.
The soap part dates back to the 1930s, before TV, when daytime serial dramas were broadcast on the radio. Their audience was made up of housewives and naturally, their biggest advertisers were laundry soap manufacturers. Later on, soap operas moved from radio to TV and the name stuck.