Arvo Daytime Soap Operas

How did the 3:30 PM time slot affect the success of soap operas?

I can only speak to this as an Australian viewer, and from my recollection, there were only ever two US American soap operas airing around that timeframe — Passions, and The Bold & the Beautiful (fellow Aussies, please correct me if I’m wrong, though I’m speaking from the 2000s onwards).

Passions

Now, in Australia, Passions aired on Channel 7 at 3pm, so many of us would get home from school and see the bonkers storylines play out while winding down from our day. I was in high school when it first premiered on 29th January, 2001. I was 13 years old and had no idea how this soap would shape me!

But I distinctly remember being excited that I finally had a show I could grow up with, instead of always harking back to days gone by with all the other soaps that had been on air for years — and mostly, decades. So, to have this one was pretty cool… or so I thought. And it seems, to this day, Passions is still talked about, mainly because of its off‑the‑wall shenanigans and (literal, at times) out‑of‑this‑world plots, which still amaze me.

The funny (or ironic) thing I found about this soap is that when you strip the supernatural elements out of Passions — as if it were just your average, ordinary, run‑of‑the‑mill soap opera — it still works as a standalone story almost perfectly. One opulent family owning almost everything in town, while also almost controlling everyone in it, still made for great viewing. The hidden scandals. Long‑past affairs that still had their stings coiled around the residents of Harmony. The love triangles of almost all the residents. Even the smaller, professional goals were well done.

And the fact that it had four distinct families of differing social standings — with two of them being solid families of colour, and not in a token‑aspect way — the Hispanic Lopez‑Fitzgerald clan and the African‑American Russell clan, was great to see, and also a first in the daytime soap world (which surprised me when I learnt that later on in my writer life).

But come 2005, the soap — literally, just as it was getting good — was taken off the Aussie airwaves due to music copyright issues. As quoted in an article from The Age:

“We made every effort to keep the series on air, but the music clearance costs were untenable for the producers, as only Australia and a few smaller European territories carried the program,” a Seven spokeswoman said.

So just as we were about to meet the long‑returned children of characters we’d often heard about but never seen — Paloma Lopez‑Fitzgerald, Noah Bennett, Fox (then Fancy and Pretty Crane), as well as the five babies being born around that time — along with the assumed‑dead Katherine Crane and Martin Lopez‑Fitzgerald, the show was gone.

All us Aussie fans got were pages in the two soap magazines — TV Soap and Soap World — detailing what we’d missed out on and what was happening next overseas.

To this day, I wonder what would’ve become of that soap if it had stuck around (and remained on NBC, rather than its move to the satellite service, DirecTV — one of the firsts of its kind). But it’s not the first time I’ll mention something like that here.

And to this day, I still love and think of this ad (for their move across) whenever I hear this song.

And now to…

The Bold & the Beautiful

There’s not much I can say about this soap, as it’s been in this timeslot for so long that it’s a staple — the lead‑in to Channel 10’s hour‑long 5pm news bulletin. But when The Bold & the Beautiful was replaced, the news ratings suffered..

And it was the most ironic - even laughable - aspect of it all: the one time The Bold & the Beautiful shifted timeslots for Channel 10’s in‑built soap, the Australian soap Neighbours, the viewer backlash was so strong that the homegrown soap was moved aside and B&B was reinstated - and rightfully so.

As quoted on 5th October, 2023:

“We have listened to the demand from our loyal viewers to return The Bold & the Beautiful to its original time slot,” a 10 spokesperson said.

Neighbours was cancelled a year earlier, then resurrected on a digital channel, Amazon Freevee, with a two‑year contract. And the lengths I could go into about the absolute shambles the powers‑that‑be did to that soap would take up pages and pages of data! But for now, I’ll just say this: The Bold & the Beautiful definitely deserves its 4:30pm timeslot.

In fact, it’s because of this very timeslot that my mum got addicted to B&B (although she’d say otherwise), and how — and where — I started my film and TV journey.

These two soaps shaped the writer I first started off as (and that I kind of still am) when I began my writing journey back in 2003, when I wrote my first very own soap opera… then another, and another, until I had nine all up — what was I thinking? Haha.

Now I have 75 seasons on the first soap I created, and 71 seasons on the other (and I even added stories to the first soap for the January 2026 run today — so this question was fortuitous for me to discover, haha).

It’s because of this genre, and my absolute love of this crazy world It’s because of this genre, and my absolute love of this crazy world, that I remain in the Film & TV Industry, & still, would love to write/have my own Soap Opera one day.