Soap operas offer what few other TV shows really can: daily scripted drama and extremely long runs on television, with thousands of episodes over multiple decades. While some former soap opera staples like As the World Turns and Guiding Light ended well ahead of the 2024 TV schedule, others like General Hospital, Days of Our Lives, and the Young and the Restless are still going… and as dramatic as ever with some wild tropes to keep the plot going. Read on for the most ridiculous of these tropes and see if you think it’s time for any of them to be retired!
Rapid Aging Syndrome
Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome – a.k.a. SORAS – refers to young characters disappearing from a storyline, only to return later much older than they should be and played by a new actor. There’s no shortage of examples, but Luke Snyder from As the World Turns holds the distinction of getting SORAS treatment twice.
Back From The Dead
Deaths don't have to stick on soap operas. Admittedly, reveals are often that the person was never truly dead and only seemed to be due to crashes, explosions, and other incidents without leaving a body behind. Resurrections aren’t out of the question in this genre, though, and Days of Our Lives’ Stefano DiMera has proven many times over that all bets are off.
Amnesia
Amnesia is a classic trope in soap operas, with prime drama coming from when it wears off over time. When romance is involved, the trope can get all the more ridiculous. The source of the memory loss tends to be some kind of head injury that can be recovered from, with some exceptions, notably including Jason Quartermaine from General Hospital, whose previous life never came back to him.
Split Personality
Sometimes a soap will add a split personality or two to spice things up for a character. The split is usually due to a trauma that they’ve either been dealing with for years or resurfaces when they’re just not prepared to process it. On One Life to Live, daughter Jessica Buchanan and mother Victoria Lord both have had storylines with multiple personalities.
Switched At Birth
It’s good that soap opera tropes often don’t apply to real life, because otherwise there might be a real-life epidemic of baby swaps! The switch could be due to nefarious reasons or just mistakenly taking the wrong infant from the hospital. The discovery of a switch can lead to juicy storylines of what might have been. Days of Our Lives is a reliable source of baby swaps, including Nicole Walker trading which infant she’d adopt.
Brain Tumors
Brain tumors are a great soapy device to allow drastic personality changes in characters without actually having to stick with them in the long run if there's a cure. This isn’t exclusive to soaps, as Amelia on Grey’s Anatomy was given the diagnosis to explain seasons of odd behavior, but special credit goes to General Hospital for using a brain tumor to redeem former serial killer Roger Howarth.
Microchips
One more modern trope is pieces of technology messing with characters. It can be surprisingly sci-fi for the genre, and suspending disbelief can be rough. That doesn’t mean the storylines aren’t wonderfully juicy if you do suspend disbelief, such as when General Hospital attempted to swap the memories between twin brothers Jason Morgan and Andrew Cain, with a chip involved and disastrous results.
Evil Twins
There are all kinds of twin tropes, but evil twins are really the classic. This one isn’t also exclusively limited to biological twins within families, but it’s hard to think about the concept without giving a nod to the nefarious Adam Chandler and his good-hearted twin Stuart Chandler on All My Children, both played by David Canary for nearly three decades.
Long-Lost Relative Reveal
In a genre of twisted relationships, viewers should never rule out a long-lost relative. In the best cases, there is juicy drama with the new branches on the family trees. In more cringe-worthy scenarios, characters have gotten a little too close to each other before finding out about the family ties. One Life to Live's Todd Manning is a fun twist on the trope, as he was revealed to be a long-lost heir.
Fainting = Surprise Pregnancy
If a woman faints on a soap opera, then the odds are pretty good that she has a bun in the oven. More dramatic than morning sickness, this trope often involves a woman who definitely wasn’t planning on getting pregnant. Days of Our Lives is a good place to find swooning pregnant women, and the trope extends into primetime dramas that pack plenty of ridiculousness themselves.
Brainwashing
There are multiple methods of brainwashing in this genre, and it’s a great way to let the audience in on a character’s dastardly plans while keeping other characters in the dark. Lucky on General Hospital is an example after his parents’ nemesis used everything from kidnapping to black magic on him, but Stefano DiMera of Days of Our Lives shouldn’t be overlooked as a perpetrator.
Extreme Plastic Surgery
Some soap operas explain recastings by giving characters major plastic surgery. It's best not to look too hard at height or eye color differences and just go with the flow. One Life to Live memorably burned the character of Max Holden severely to explain a recasting, but then brought back the original actor without any explanation.
Surprise Children
With love triangles, complicated relationships, and twisted histories galore, is it any wonder that surprise kids are revealed in soaps? Sure, characters may not be children anymore when they're introduced, but the parentage is what matters. Guiding Light's Jonathan Randall has to be one of the most memorable surprise sons in the genre.
Repressed Memories
One doesn’t need a full case of amnesia for memory melodrama, and this can apply to bad guys as well as victims. Sometimes, a character tries to forget any dark deeds they did in their past, while others just want to erase memories of bad experiences. The Young and the Restless’ Adam memorably did a bad thing for an understandable reason, and then forgot.
Catfights
Catfights aren’t exclusive to soap operas, but it’s certainly not hard to find instances of women fighting other women for reasons that can range from trivial to game-changing. This trope can be found all over soaps, but some standouts come from a rare primetime show in the genre: the original Dynasty over nine seasons.
Soap Opera Disease
Ailments don't actually need to be pulled from real life to cause problems on soaps, with symptoms that can be as generic or as specific as needed for max melodrama. These are broader than brain tumors and can be used in a variety of ways, including the classic coma option. This is big enough to extend to primetime, infamously including the How I Met Your Mother finale.
It Was A Dream All Along
Why stick with a messy storyline when it can just be undone with a good old-fashioned dream sequence? Sometimes this can just be a scene or two, while primetime soap Dallas famously turned its entire ninth season into a dream to bring back Patrick Duffy as Bobby Ewing after killing him off in the previous season finale.
Scene-To-Scene Cliffhanger
Any TV viewer has undoubtedly seen a season-ending cliffhanger or two, but no genre does a cliffhanger quite like soap operas. Instead of just ending episodes on cliffhangers, transitions between scenes can be so dramatic that there's really no better way to describe them. No other soap cliffhanger may be as huge in pop culture as Dallas' "Who Shot JR?" but scene-to-scene cliffhangers are easier to find.
Who's The Father?
In a genre full of love triangles, secret identities, affairs, and amnesia, of course, there are often pregnancies with uncertain paternities! In fact, the question of "Who's the father?" is so prevalent in this genre that a major plot of House of the Dragon Season 1 had fans comparing the high-budget fantasy drama to daytime TV.
Wild Retcons
Soap operas aren't bound by the normal rules of continuity; if an event from the past gets in the way of a juicy new story, it can just be retroactively changed. This is easier to handwave on shows that air daily for decades on end, but a bit harder for weekly primetime soaps, such as Gossip Girl by its final season and the big reveal.
Weddings Gone Wrong
If characters are getting married in a high-profile soap wedding, it's a safe bet that something is going to go wrong, possibly involving any of the other 30+ tropes compiled here. The most famous has to be the wedding of Luke and Laura on General Hospital, which reached an audience of 30 million in 1981, with Elizabeth Taylor as a guest star and Laura's ex showing up to start a fistfight with Luke.
Fires
Sometimes characters, scenes, and full storylines quite literally go up in flames in this genre. Whether it's a fire on the smaller side to disfigure a character (by soap standards) to ramp up the tension or a full inferno, many different kinds of sparks are known to fly. Guiding Light's Fifth Street (and its diner) had some particularly bad luck back in the '90s.
Infinite Love Triangles
The course of true love never runs smoothly, and that's the case for just about any relationship on a soap opera, particularly ones that have run for decades. Love triangles are reliable sources of drama and of course result in strong reactions from fans. There's no shortage to choose from, but Young and the Restless' Victor/Nikki/Jack and The Bold and the Beautiful's Steffy/Liam/Hope are memorable for a reason.
Doppelgangers
Lookalikes don't have to be evil twins to deliver the drama; sometimes there are doppelgangers of characters who look exactly like others... mostly because the same actor is playing both. A particularly entertaining version is when one is a criminal and the innocent other is blamed for it, but one iconic case of doppelgangers comes from a show that few might qualify in this genre: Twin Peaks, which did have its soapy moments.
Secret Second Family
Sometimes it's not enough to have a secret affair or secret plan; sometimes there's a whole secret family. Instances aren't always as grand as two nuclear families just separated enough for one person to keep the secret, though, as proven by Del Henry's sibling connection to Dixie Cooney on All My Children.
Controversial Relationship Origins
Soap opera couples don't have to get off to fairy tale beginnings to eventually become iconic, and becoming iconic doesn't mean that the relationships don't eventually fall apart due to their troublesome starts. This can involve anything from violence to family objections, and few daytime TV super couples got off to a more controversial start than General Hospital's Luke and Laura.
Surprise Family Ties
Rarely is there a wilder bombshell on television than a strong relationship formed between two people who didn't know they were related. There are many instances, ranging from Days of Our Lives' Cassie more than once to As the World Turns' Holden and Lily, although their family tie turned out to be a false alarm. This trope is so well known that arguably Game of Thrones' biggest (and least shocking) reveal was deemed soapy by some viewers.
The Soap Wheel
The Soap Wheel is a trope well known to plenty of fans of the genre if not necessarily the name. It's a format of arcs within episodes to guarantee that the plot keeps going at a quick pace and cycling through various storylines. Plenty of other tropes fit into the Soap Wheel, and many shows fit, but perhaps none so reliably as Days of Our Lives.
Accidental Adultery
Adultery isn’t uncommon in soap operas, but accidental adultery is much more unique to the genre. Between secret family ties, evil twins, and characters who might not actually be dead, sometimes characters will make a love connection without knowing that they’re cheating. Sometimes, a person also only seems to be cheating, making that accidental adultery more of a misunderstanding. Other times, somebody is also being framed just for an extra layer of complication.
Local Crime Lords
What would daytime TV be without some bad guys? Some of the most iconic soaps of all time have some legendary crime lords, such as Stefano DiMera from Days of Our Lives and Sonny Corinthos from General Hospital. The crime lords are definitely big threats to the locals, although the details of their dastardly deeds are often vague. They’re on the wrong side of the law, and that’s all that viewers need to know to enjoy the drama!
Comas
Comas can be a serious business in primetime TV, but they can be quite convenient on soaps. Whether for the purpose of writing somebody out without committing to killing off the character or retconning their death as them merely being almost dead, comas are well known enough as a trope in soaps to be parodied on shows like The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and – famously – Friends with Joey as Dr. Drake Ramoray.
Kidnapping
With crime lords in the mix with personal vendettas against characters, is it any surprise that people tend to get kidnapped in this genre? The abductions often don’t end in a major tragedy, and some characters have been mixed up with them on more than one occasion of their long runs on the show. Just look at All My Children’s Erica Kane, who was involved on both ends of a kidnapping over her decades on the show.
