Time after tedious time, when critics suffer an aridity of fresh, inventive phrases with which to denigrate a film, play or book, they fall back on "soap opera"; it has become the classic cliché of derogation….

[The] syndrome persists that soap opera is a Never-Never Land where hack writers and inferior producers, directors and actors serve melodramatic pap to a lunatic fringe of female children who grow older but never grow up….

What is the appeal of the soap operas? What causes them to have millions upon millions of faithful viewers, or, if you will, "addicts"?

For a serial to be successful it must have a compelling story. That story, in turn, must concern interesting, believable characters. And the fact that it is a continuous story, allowing the development of these characters in episode after episode, permits the audience to become deeply involved with what is happening to them.

Our detractors say this becomes a vicarious experience bordering on sickness, but ask the lady who watches one and you'll find it is the very normal empathetic response that a good tale, well told, has held from time immemorial…. This is what the soap opera gives us. There is always tomorrow. A tomorrow fraught with problems, tragedies and traumas, to be sure, with hate mixed with love and sorrow with joy. But how does that differ from life itself? There are more of humanity's horrors to be found in any issue of the daily newspaper than abound in all of Sudsville.

Perhaps it is not mere coincidence that Charles Dickens, one of the greatest creators of immortal literary characters, started his career as a writer of serialized stories. He knew, and demonstrated with genius, that for a public to stay with a story they had to care about the characters in it….

Though no soap writer suffers the grandiose delusion of being a Charles Dickens, certainly we learned from him, perhaps by osmosis rather than scholarly scrutiny, that the development of characters in depth, the audience's ability to follow their lives, to love them and hate them, is an intrinsic part of the serial's appeal to its audience. Certainly it is by this very hold that the soap opera has been able to do stories which have performed a public service to the national community in a way which no other kind of television entertainment could achieve.

As an example, the axiom and the battle cry of the American Cancer Society is that this disease can be prevented if caught in time. Yet how many people turn off the Society's program or throw away its pamphlets unread because the name strikes terror into their hearts.

It was for this reason that several years ago "The Guiding Light" undertook a campaign to reach the "ostriches" among women viewers, with the message of the Pap Smear test for the prevention of uterine cancer. This story was preceded by painstaking research and detailed planning so that the message would be gotten across by integration into a gripping long-term story with many dramatic elements and no "preaching."…

The women who would never have watched or heeded a Cancer Society program with its obvious public service appeal, were, in effect, a captive audience for our message because Bert Bauer was to them like a sister or a very old and dear friend….

No fan of "As The World Turns" will ever forget when Ellen, an unwed mother, had her baby and gave it out for adoption. But quite aside from the compelling story, the sequence was researched with meticulous care and the writer worked at great length with the Children's Aid Society to present to the public—and to the thousands of young women who, statistics tell us, yearly find themselves in this situation and do not know where to turn—information on how one can seek help and thus insure that one's baby will find a loving home and parents….

The young are frequently exposed to articles, books and movies about LSD, some that are good and some that are bad. But no viewer, young or old, who has watched the travails of Lee Randolph on "Another World" can any longer doubt the potential horrors of this chemical mind-expander and the long range destruction it is capable of effecting, not only on the person who has taken it but on future generations….

[It] would be fatuously dishonest to pretend that daytime soap operas have, in the past, done as much toward providing jobs for Negro actors as they should. The serial must stand accused along with the rest of the industry, and the American business establishment in general, in this regard. Nor is a possible explanation—as one person sees it—in any sense a valid excuse. Apathy can at times be more insidious than prejudice because it is less tangible a foe….

All this is changing rapidly now, although belatedly. A sequence has been running on "Another World" which closely involved a Negro couple, the wife being a legal secretary and the husband a somewhat unsympathetic police detective….

And on ["One Life to Live"], two leading characters will be Negroes with deep, long-lasting story involvement, and as the various plots unfold, there will be other important roles for Negro talent….

And so that's how it is in Never-Never Land, folks….

We are doing a job we like, getting a satisfying response from the audience we are trying to entertain and even have the feeling, at times, of accomplishing something truly worthwhile along the way. So if the critics wish to cite us as a paradigm of puerility we really don't mind. But we do think that these erudite ladies and gentlemen of the press, before they next invoke our names for the purpose of scorn, should be warned that they may actually be paying their target a compliment.