ARCHIVAL MEDIA

The melodramatic novels of Charles Dickens were the first significant publications in the serial format. Like the television dramas that followed, they included advertising to subsidize their production.

Stage melodramas were extremely popular with the masses, if not with critics. Many were theatrical interpretations of "Blood and Thunder" melodramatic stories.

Print periodicals known as "story papers" were widespread at the turn of the 20th century.

Serialized "nickel weeklies," like story papers, were published on a regular basis, in a format similar to today's comic books.

Radio programming started as a simple mix of talk and music.

Before long, radio adopted dramatic storytelling as a way to keep audiences hooked... and listening to ads.

Although the daytime radio schedule was packed with dozens of 15-minute soap operas for women, nighttime programs included dramas of every genre for a wide-ranging audience.

Comic strips, which had originally been mere doodles in the margins or single visual gags, adopted a serial dramatic format with adaptations like Tarzan and original adventure strips such as Captain Easy.

Adventure and science fiction comic strips rapidly became a hit due to titles like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon.

With continuing stories and cliffhangers, action/adventure strips revolutionized the "funnies" pages.

As the original fans of comic strips grew up, their children also became fans of the medium and their ongoing stories.

Gasoline Alley adopted a soap opera-like, family-oriented format that continues today, 108 years after it launched. Its continuing storyline has expanded to include the fourth generation of its central family.

Not content to merely focus on story, Gasoline Alley and many of the strips of the period were also wildly visually inventive.

Magazines followed the trend of seriality, and many popular magazines were chock full of serialized novels and stories, including Jack London's Call of the Wild.

In the 1910s, serials were the dominant form of film entertainment, and widely credited with making movie attendance a weekly habit.

Many of the biggest stars of the silent film era starred in serials.

As feature films and "talkies" took over, the serial became relegated to younger audiences.

The fans of sound era serials were primarily children and action-film adult fans, fed a steady diet of Westerns, ne'er-do-well villains, and cliffhangers.

The goal of serial film studios was to pack the house with young and teen audiences kept hooked by increasingly exciting thrills.

The popularity of action films spawned a backlash against movies that "over-excited" children.

As the television age dawned, the radio soap opera shifted to the small screen, often written by ad agencies specifically to place ads for a sponsor's product.

Irna Phillips, considered the founding mother of television soap opera, wrote These Are My Children, which ran as an experiment for one month in 1949. Three years later, in 1952, she took her show The Guiding Light from radio to TV.

In September of 1951, the first two successful soap operas launched: Search for Tomorrow and Love of Life, both created by former radio soap opera writer Roy Winsor.

Love of Life was directed for its entire 28-year run by Larry Auerbach, the father of Tune In Tomorrow series creator & director Scott Auerbach. Larry Auerbach went on to direct many other soaps including All My Children and One Life to Live.

Local televised wrestling was a hit in the late 1940s and early 1950s, long before the rise of WWE and AEW. Gorgeous George introduced the preening, glittering, robe-wearing archetype that later became a staple of pro wrestling. Decades later, as fans tired of repetitive local staged matches, WWE's Vince McMahon introduced longer, more complex, ongoing storylines into the ‘athletic melodrama’ of wrestling.

Soap opera veteran Mary-Ellis Bunim and news & documentary producer Jon Murray teamed up to pitch The Real World to MTV, creating an entirely new television drama genre: “reality TV.”

Before 1980 virtually no primetime dramas had long-arc continuing storylines. Episodic anthologies ruled the nighttime schedule, and only daytime soap operas had continuing stories. By the 2010s, nearly every primetime, cable and streaming drama had adopted the serial format.