ABC's The Story of Soaps shows how soap operas served as inspiration for everything from TV news to reality shows

Vulture

Executive producer Rebecca Gitlitz says of her approach to her new ABC special: "When I pitched this to ABC, I was looking for a topic that bit into our deeper consciousness and that I could take a deep look into. I was never a big soap opera fan, but as I was looking at reality TV as a subject, and as I got deeper and deeper into that process, I started to realize the extent to which reality TV is just carrying on what soaps started. And so I started looking at soaps, and I realized that in terms of storyteling, this is where a lot of everything started. Soaps are looked at pejoratively in this society, but there was so much richness there. We wanted to unearth it."