November 4, 2005

Soap Operas as a Tonic for Loneliness, Alienation, and Monotony

By PETER MONAGHAN

Louise Spence, associate professor of media studies at Sacred Heart University

Soaps can freshen the mind, claims Ms. Spence. In Watching Daytime Soap Operas: The Power of Pleasure (Wesleyan University Press), she analyzes hundreds of hours of her observations of online chat rooms and interviews with soap-opera fans. She discovered that the viewers — most of them women — watch the programs as an escape, a means of resistance, or an expression of identity. Many