Part Two: Soaps — The Original Binge
Other than sports, I can’t remember the last time I watched a television show in real time.
Streaming has trained me well. I watch when I want, which is usually sometime between 10:00 p.m. and 2:00 a.m. I am, without apology, a binge-watcher. If a story has its hooks in me, I don’t want to stop — even if it’s 3:34 a.m. and I need to leave for work at 6:30. Closure matters more than sleep.
Recently, I finished two seasons of the Quantum Leap reboot. I liked it. Season two ended in a way that could have worked as either a series finale or a setup for another season. The network chose to end it. Honestly, I thought it landed better than the original, which famously ended as if there would surely be more story to tell.
Streaming services have built an entire ecosystem around people like me — people who want to live inside a story for a while, not just visit it once a week.
Here’s the thing: soaps did this first.
Long before “binge-watching” was a term, soaps understood how to keep viewers coming back. Every episode ended with just enough tension to make you want one more. Not full closure — partial closure. Enough resolution to breathe, but never enough to walk away.
Soaps weren’t designed for marathons in one sitting. They were designed for attachment. Five days a week. Fifty weeks a year. Year after year.
That’s not a flaw. That’s a feature.
Think about it. At the end of most soap episodes, very little was actually resolved. The story moved inches, not miles. But those inches mattered because they stacked up over time. Networks needed viewers to return the next day, and the next day, and the next.
In other words, soaps trained an audience to tolerate — even enjoy — delayed gratification.
That’s the same muscle binge-watchers use today.
This is the part where I pretend this might land in front of the right people.
ABC–Disney executives, if you’re reading this — and I assume you are, because clearly all major corporate decisions begin with a personal blog — you already own One Life to Live. That means you own one of the deepest serialized story libraries ever created for television. Thousands of episodes. Forty-five years of characters, relationships, and long-form storytelling. And right now, most of it is inaccessible.
I understand the objections. Restoration costs money. Music rights are complicated. Contracts are messy. But streaming platforms already spend enormous resources trying to create exactly what OLTL already did naturally: viewer loyalty, emotional investment, and long-term attachment. This story was built to keep people coming back — not for weeks, but for decades.
Putting OLTL on Disney+ wouldn’t just serve longtime fans. It would introduce a new generation to a kind of storytelling they already enjoy, just delivered differently. Binge culture didn’t eliminate patience — it rewarded it. Soaps trained viewers to live with stories, not rush through them.
And if any former OLTL actors happen to read this — or share it — that wouldn’t surprise me either. You didn’t just play characters; you helped carry a story that still matters to a lot of people. There’s value here. Financial value. Cultural value. And an opportunity to test whether long-form, character-driven storytelling still belongs — not at 1:00 p.m. on network television, but exactly where modern audiences already are.
Soaps didn’t disappear because audiences stopped liking stories. They disappeared because the economics changed.
They were expensive to produce. Time-consuming. And daytime television could make more money with cheaper programming. At the same time, the traditional soap demographic — households where one spouse was home during the day — began to shrink.
Instead of asking how to introduce soaps to younger viewers where they already were, networks largely walked away from the format altogether.
That was a mistake.
Especially for a generation raised on streaming, playlists, and serialized content.
If soaps lived on a streaming platform — where viewers could go back, catch up, binge old arcs, and still follow the story forward in the present — the model works again.
The appetite for long stories didn’t disappear.
We just changed how we watch.
And that raises a bigger question, which I’ll get to next:
What if the problem wasn’t the story — but where we tried to tell it?
I KNOW MIKE WILLIAMS 