Soap Opera Spotlight: 50 Years Of Beloved Daytime Families!

The family unit is not only vital to society, but it is also vital to soap operas. When the CBS primetime special 50 Years Of Soaps aired, it featured a segment on soap families, representing many of the top core families of daytime!

The two actors who introduced the segment were well selected: Erika Slezak, matriarch Victoria Lord Buchanan on One Life to Live, and Robert Kelker-Kelly, who, at the time, was playing Bo Brady on Days of Our Lives!

The pair introduced clips of famous families including the Hughes brood from As the World Turns, the Hortons from DAYS, the Bauers from Guiding Light, Victor Newman (Eric Braeden) and his mother Cora Miller (Dorothy McGuire) from The Young and the Restless, the Martins from All My Children, and the fore-mentioned Buchanans from OLTL.

The segment concludes with Tom and Alice Horton (Macdonald Carey and Helen Wagner) from DAYS singing Always at their anniversary.

Some of the show’s clips were in black and white as they were chosen from the 1960s and more recent clips feature full glorious color. The genre evolved over the decades, but the family unit continues to play an important role in the daytime drama storytelling format.