Without America’s soap operas, we would never have gotten “Mad Men”

Quoted: And yet, it’s likely longform television dramas like The Wire wouldn’t exist if soap operas hadn’t paved the way. “Daytime soap operas were the first instances of serialized narratives in television,” Elana Levine, associate professor of media studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison told Quartz. “It was in daytime that TV writers, producers, and directors figured out how to create moving-image stories that had no set ending, that had characters that changed over time and had histories and memories.”