When “Edge” premiered on CBS in April 1956, a lot of TV soap operas were carryovers from radio or new variations on tried-and-true radio soaps. I clicked on it to discover it was my own pop culture blog in a post from 2013 that I’d completely forgotten about.) (By the way, I was chagrinned during the research process for this piece to find an online site with an intriguing photo of a couple of my favorite characters. But before its swan song – and it ended on a cliffhanger involving a killer, of course – “Edge,” as its fans call it, ran for nearly 30 years on two different networks. It’s not hard to guess why: The show has been off the air since 1984. The remaining soaps don’t have nearly the audience they had decades ago, mostly because the supposed target audience – housewives who bought the household products featured in each show’s commercials – is largely non-existent: Women are no longer the cliché stay-at-home moms they once might have been (but never really were), and it’s safe to say that women and men who stay home now are working or otherwise too busy to park themselves in front of a TV all day to catch the latest incremental installment of their “stories.”īut among soap operas, “The Edge of Night” – simply “Edge of Night” in its final few years – might be particularly east to forget. Soap operas are probably considered a dying art form today. While most soaps dabbled in murder and sensational courtroom trials, “The Edge of Night” was more of a dabbler in traditional soap tropes but specialized in noirish tales of murder and madness. Two soaps quickly became favorites of mine: “Dark Shadows,” the Dan Curtis-produced supernatural soap that ran on ABC from 1966 to 1971 and introduced vampire Barnabas Collins to the world, and “The Edge of Night,” a long-running soap that did what few other soaps ever did. She was partial to the shows on NBC, like “Days of Our Lives” and “Another World.” When I was a kid in the 1960s and 1970s, on days I was out of school and during summer vacation, I’d sometimes be around the house and I’d check out some of the soap operas – daytime dramas, as they were also known – my mom watched.

The edge of night soap opera