It was grounded in a reality - about women’s actual lives - that the genre had otherwise disavowed. Unlike most soaps, which were claustrophobic, “Ryan’s Hope” let the world in. This and other aspects of the show felt revolutionary. Lacking the deracinated quality of the others, the show was set in a city - an actual one, New York - specifically in Washington Heights, amid a Catholic, working-class Irish American family whose matriarch, Maeve Ryan (played by the Tony Award-winning actress Helen Gallagher), loved Yeats and spoke with a brogue. It dealt with the generational tension between Old World cultural and religious values and the new freedoms embraced by the young the modernity did not appeal to her. One summer in the late ’70s, I discovered a new daytime series - ‘‘Ryan’s Hope” - but I couldn’t get her on board.

It became clear years later that my grandmother’s pristine English, delivered as if she had entered the world via the Main Line, was the result of her daily ritual. Home by 3, I could join my grandmother for “General Hospital” and, later, “The Edge of Night,” whose story lines bent toward crime and courtroom drama but nevertheless accommodated the absurdist narrative mandates of soap opera.Ī chilly and practical immigrant who spent her evenings writing poetry in her native Sicilian dialect, my grandmother was an unlikely candidate for addiction to the Amnesia Plot, but there we were, picking at butter cookies, enthralled every time another socialite with a split personality couldn’t remember the murder she committed when she was someone else with darker hair.Īt the time, nearly every soap on television was set in a fictional affluent suburb - to my mind, always in eastern Pennsylvania - dominated by some wealthy Protestant clan or another. Growing up in the 1970s and early 1980s, that great period of parental absenteeism, I spent most weekday afternoons on the floor of my grandmother’s bedroom in front of a small television that sat next to the door to her veranda, a sunlit space covered in wisteria that still could not compete with the pleasures of ABC’s daytime lineup.

Edge of night soap opera