15? 30? 45? 60? 90? Which is the best and worst runtime for soaps?

[mikelyons]

Soaps are the one of the few mediums which have shifted and morphed in their time-slots throughout their history.

Which runtime do you think serves soaps best...and worst? 

 

Best: 30 minutes. Tight, succinct episodes told in three to five acts, depending on the writer. Soaps seemed to thrive in the half-hour format as pioneered by ATWT. 

Worst: 60 minutes. Way too much fat. Bloated casts. Shows burned through storyline with such gusto they ate themselves.  I think the only soap which did the hour well was Y&R because they seemed to treat it as two half-hour episodes. You had to watch because you never knew who might pop-up at the half-way mark! 

 

Honorable mention: 12.5 minutes. BBC Radio 4's The Archers packs a huge wallop with character development, tight stories, and large casts into a 12.5 minute soap. AND the episodes are engaging!

[John]

30 mins less time for fluff

[KMan101]

30 minutes. I mean, to be fair, soaps are like 36 minutes now so ... lol

 

What's B&B's runtime without commercials? 19 minutes?

[mikelyons]

7.5 minutes if you cut out flashbacks and expository dialogue. 

[KMan101]

 

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 I'm 

 

Sooooo true!

[DRW50]

Best. 30. I'm also very fond of 15 as that means truly tight focus. 

 

Worst. 90. Unless you enjoy seeing Beverlee McKinsey vamp over a phone for 3 minutes, which, admittedly, is not a bad way to spend your time.

[Sindacco]

I think DAYS and GH's current runtime of 36 minutes is pretty good.

 

But B&B's 18 minutes is easier when catching up and binge watching.

[All My Shadows]

The half-hour, for sure. The full slate of soaps ran at 30 minutes each from 1968 to 1975, and the genre just shot up in popularity during this time. You could finally tell more than one story in-depth and develop characters beyond one central family/group, but the focus remained squarely on that central group, making it harder to completely move away from the core.

 

The hour experiment made sense as soaps kept gaining popularity, but once they started to expand, their respective cores were diluted with too many other characters, too many storylines going on (introducing the concept of a frontburner and a backburner), etc. Even the soaps that remained at the half-hour tried to mimic this by flooding their canvases with more characters and stories.

 

I wish just one of the hour shows had attempted to cut back down to the half-hour in the 90s just so that we could see what the result would have been. It could have saved daytime.

90-minute...well, I haven't watched a bunch of those episodes of AW, but come on. It has disaster written all over it. If a show was going to try it, I'm glad it was one of the few that truly capitalized on the hour format, but had that caught on? Ew, I don't even want to think about it.

[Chris B]

Half hour is the best historically and even if you look at soaps thriving overseas, it works. Same goes for when Prospect Park rebooted AMC and OLTL. Those shows are new so obviously they weren't perfect, but I thought the format worked better for them even though we knew them in the hour format for so long. I think B&B gives half hour soaps a bad name because they have such a singular focus in the writing.

[titan1978]

I think it depends on the show.

 

If I was launching now, I would pick a half hour just for the tighter cast and storytelling.

 

Labine’s GH run was her first hour show, and she often had longer scenes so it still felt full even if there were not as many scenes as a regular hour show.  Great shows if you have strong dialog writers!
 

I can’t imagine something like the Curlee era of GL with a shorter runtime- they had a huge cast but they all mattered at that point.

 

But I also wish OLTL and AMC had tried to do half hours instead of cancelling them both.

 

 

[Aback]

I think you should do a 20 minute show a day and then offer a 44 minute 'package' every weekend, for people to watch as a weekly primetime show.

[soapfan770]

Best? 30 minutes always works unless you’re Thudley Bell these days of course. 
 

Actually I’ve always wondered even since GL was trying that “Inside the Light” stories on Wednesdays if 60 min soaps really even need to be on all 5 days a week. 
 

90 minutes of course is wayyyy too long, not even sure why Rauch, Lemny, and NBC thought that was even a good idea at all.

[AbcNbc247]

30 minutes for sure. 

 

But actually, IMO a 90 minute soap would work really well today. They don't even have to have 65-70 minutes of story. They could spend 40-50 minutes on the show itself and in the remaining time have 2-3 different actors each day answering tweets or podcasting or whatever.

[Khan]

Actually, I think it would depend on the medium.  If it were a soap made expressly for television, then I would say 30-minute episodes work best, as writers tend to pad out 60-minute episodes with superfluous scenes and dialogue.  But, if it were a soap being made expressly for online streaming, then I think 15-minute episodes would work better, due to the fact that viewers are being encouraged more and more to download and watch series "on the go" on handheld devices.

[Chris B]

 

Quibi specializes in short form things so it shocks me they don't have a 15 minute soap. Especially someone like Ken Corday.