Love in the Afternoon: The Supercouple of 1980s US Daytime Soap Opera

Abstract

In the 1980s, the afternoon soap operas of US broadcast television featured ‘supercouples’, romantic pairings that both kept with conventional gender roles and defied traditional expectations. These stories brought a broadened audience to daytime soap opera and made the genre especially profitable for the television networks. They also helped to address viewers' uncertainties about a world changed by the women's liberation movement, embracing the ‘liberation’ of young women free to embark on romantic adventures with the men they loved, but removing any sense of patriarchal injustice, offering instead a fantasy space apart from ongoing social problems of gender inequality.