A crucial element that defines the soap opera is the open-ended nature of the narrative, with stories spanning several episodes. One of the defining features that makes a television program a soap opera, according to Albert Moran, is “that form of television that works with a continuous open narrative. Each episode ends with a promise that the storyline is to be continued in another episode.”
In 2012, Robert. Lloyd of the Los Angeles Times wrote of daily dramas, “Although melodramatically eventful, soap operas such as this also have a luxury of space that makes them seem more naturalistic, indeed, the economics of the form demand long scenes and conversations that a 22-episodes-per-season weekly series might dispense with half a dozen lines of dialogue may be drawn out, as here, for pages. You spend more time with the minor characters as the apparent villains grow less and less villainous. Soap opera storylines run concurrently, intersect and lead into further developments An individual episode of a soap opera will generally switch between several different concurrent ".Narrative threads that may at times interconnect and affect one another or may run entirely independent of each other. Evening soap operas and serials that run for only a part of the year tend to bring things to a dramatic end-of-season cliffhanger.
Q. What does the author mean ‘by the open -ended nature of soap operas?
“According to Albert Moran, is “that form of television that works with a continuous open narrative. Each episode ends with a promise that the storyline is to be continued in another episode.”