In the 1930s companies such as Procter & Gamble sought sponsorship of daily radio programming targeted to homemakers, who controlled the purse strings for cleaning and other household product purchases. Daytime serial dramas soon answered this call, focusing melodramatically on women, multi-generational families, and romantic intrigue in live, fifteen-minute shows. Although derogatory at first, the term soap opera became the genre's customary designation. After making the transition to television, soap operas were eventually adapted for prime-time and worldwide audiences, making their mark as a highly influential genre. In the early twenty-first century, however, the original form of the soap opera waned in popularity.

The first soap opera, Painted Dreams, was developed in 1931 for WGN radio in Chicago by Irna Phillips, who would go on to become the most prolific creator of soap operas for both radio and television. The program aired without specific product association until content changes were made to accommodate Montgomery Ward & Co., the show's first sponsor. Phillips employed the same enticements to secure advertisers for her other serials, and the genre's characteristic sponsor ties were established.

Phillips's Today's Children (1932), sponsored first by General Foods and later by Pillsbury, evolved into the first network soap opera when NBC began airing it nationwide in 1933. Understanding that women often performed their domestic chores while listening to radio and were, consequently, all the more inclined to buy and use merchandise that was casually promoted within a program, Procter & Gamble (P&G) made advertising on soap operas central in its marketing campaigns and promoted its products on programs such as Ma Perkins (1933), The O'Neills (1935), The Guiding Light (1937), and Kitty Keene (1937).

Once television became a feature of the domestic landscape after World War II, soap operas gradually faded from radio and took up residence on the small screen. The Guiding Light (1952), a Phillips creation, ran simultaneously on both media for several years (its name changed to just Guiding Light in 1975). While radio soaps shifted to tape before transitioning, television soaps were, until the late 1950s, presented live. The decade saw myriad TV soaps begin and end abruptly, but several in addition to The Guiding Light—including Search for Tomorrow (1951), created by Agnes Nixon and Roy Winsor; Love of Life (1951), created by Winsor; and As the World Turns (1956), created by Phillips—exhibited staying power. As a by-product of the shift to television, an extra measure of redundancy and backstory exposition was added to the soap opera formula in order to accommodate viewers' tendency to step away from the screen in attending to their household tasks. When added to the genre's open, serial form, this element further ingrained feminine domesticity into the very fabric of the soap opera.

The ability of soap operas to target the preferred audience of women, ages eighteen to forty-nine, was unmatched. Younger viewers became hooked on the shows by watching them with their mothers after school, during the summer, and on holidays, and advertisers counted on them to become loyal viewers into adulthood. With...