2 hours ago, alwaysAMC said:

Haha, I never watched B&B, but AMC sure had a lot of it too Your others, like paternity tests and IVF, are good examples too - same for me!

Now as I think about it more abstract....I learned some stuff about human relationships. I learned that till death do us part usually means a year or two... In many cases 😂

Edited yesterday at 03:18 PM1 day by Maxim

After the last several posts I just remembered I learned about the viability of freezing sperm from the Y&R story with Victor, Diane, Nikki and Ashley. I had heard of the process before, but not the actual details about how long until implantation, etc. that story was so gross!

11 hours ago, BoldRestless said:

I first learned about concepts like shareholders and stocks and board meetings from watching Y&R as a kid (when they actually showed the business stuff onscreen!). It certainly isn't discussed regularly on television and I wouldn't have heard about it IRL

Me too, from the time Jack lost Jabot to Victor through them getting it back, I was so invested and also felt like I understood the concepts, even if they were dramatized for effect.

2 hours ago, janea4old said:

I started watching OLTL in 1969. I remember the original Viki/Niki split. The terminology "D.I.D." (dissociative identity disorder) did not exist back then.

They simply called it "split personality". When the book and movie "Sybil" came out in the mid-1970s, I already knew about splitting from Viki/Niki. I was surprised that Sybil had so many alternate personalities, because I had thought there could be only two (the real/main one like Viki, and the other one like Niki).

(This was long before OLTL changed it to show Viki having many alters)

UGH I wish I could see the OG Viki/Niki split. I hope one day a video surfaces.

On 12/2/2025 at 10:33 AM, Marco Dane said:

UGH I wish I could see the OG Viki/Niki split. I hope one day a video surfaces.

Me too! That and episodes about the original Carla Grey storyline!

I thought of another concept soaps taught me about. The WSB is where I learned there were more than just cops. Spies were real and we had them in real life. I don’t know how many of them moonlighted as singers like Frisco Jones though.

And even though I grew up with alcoholics in my family, seeing Katherine Chancellor battle alcohol, and other characters talk about addiction recovery like Maggie Horton on DAYS or Lee Baldwin on GH was my first introduction to that concept too, that it was an illness and people did seek treatment for it.

One bad thing I learned from soaps that wasn’t true was the ideas that all doctors did everything. Steve Hardy being the Chief of staff and also seeing all kinds of patients, etc. Monica was a cardiac surgeon but other doctors they just used as a catch all a lot of the time.

Edited 41 minutes ago41 min by titan1978