Guilty Pleasures or Surprising Treasures

A lot of people consider soaps a guilty pleasure, but for many who watch they are surprising treasures. Below I discuss of how someone can start viewing for one thing and find some deeper meaning.

Sometimes it seems like soaps are just an erasable thing: the kind of programming that is easily watched and forgotten. While I doubt a lot of soap viewers feel that way, it seems like the shows at times do. Stories written and never mentioned again with characters handled the same. This is something that bothers many, but no one seems to care.

With soaps, the guilty pleasure aspect is a big deal to many. Some of us watch them seriously or at least parts of them, while others just view them as trash. I think that causes many arguments within fan groups the different expectations. Some people just watch to be entertained, while others want to be entertained and informed. Some serious soaps have "silly" stories or ones that I couldn't take seriously. See anything having to do with a primate being obsessed with a human character, which happened on both Ryan's Hope and Another World. Those two shows typically could be taken seriously, but not during those plots.

The surprising treasures comes about when someone watches for the guilty pleasure aspect and finds something else. Soaps aren't all trite or ridiculous all the time. Some of them are more serious than one expects if they aren't focusing on various tropes like SORAS or dual identities. Soaps are about "feels" and at their best they make one express emotion.