The Top 10 Soap Operas You Can Stream Right Now
Like sand through the hourglass, these are the daytime soaps to watch while you work from home.
Willfully overdramatic and scripted on a never-ending loop, soap operas may vary from fictional town to town, but a legit soap never changes its stripes: There will always be torrid affairs, bonkers storylines, enviable super-couples, and of course five-finger slaps heard round the networks.
Another signature of the frothy genre? TONS of familiar faces. Over the decades, soaps have served as career launching pads for some of Hollywood’s most boldfaced names—looking at Laurence Fishburne, Leonardo DiCaprio, Robin Wright, and Kelly Ripa here. Below, we’re listing the top 10 afternoon delights that are either still on the air or streaming online now. So go ahead and get reacquainted with the characters your babysitter introduced you to, like Erica Kane, Malcolm Winters, and Marlena Evans, or fall in love with entirely new ones, like Days’ trailblazing Will and Sonny. Dr. Drake Ramoray would want you to.
The Bold and the Beautiful
One of the longest-running soaps still on the airwaves, this Los Angeles-set saga began in 1987 and continues to churn out episodes of Forrester family fashion drama on the regular. Starring an enduring lineup including original cast members John McCook (Eric Forrester) and Katherine Kelly Lang (Brooke Logan), B&B relishes in starry cameos—Usher, Gina Rodriguez, and Betty White are all favorites—with some even scoring recurring roles, as Denise Richards has played Vegas mom Shauna Fulton since April 2019.
The Bold and the Beautiful airs weekdays, at 1:30 p.m. eastern, on CBS.
General Hospital
Paging the longest-running soap opera in production: GH has been on the air since 1963 and is credited with being the first to usher in what has become an essential feature vital to a soap opera’s ability to break into the pop culture zeitgeist—the super-couple. A daytime hotspot where the love lives of Port Charles residents clash with medical and mob drama teeming on the East Coast, the show mixes business with pleasure and hot doctors who don’t always wear scrubs. No wonder fans have been on house arrest since its genesis.
General Hospital airs weekdays, at 2 p.m. eastern, on ABC.
Days of Our Lives
For going on 55 years, Days of Our Lives has been flipping that hourglass and sharing the stories and romantic affairs of the Horton family and their friends and foes, with enduring actors Deidre Hall and Drake Hogestyn (Marlena Evans and John Black) as cast members for a massive chunk of the series’ five-decade extent. Set in the fictional town of Salem, its genre-hopping narratives have explored drama with paternity twists, horror, and even science-fiction with a time-jumping plot.
Days of Our Lives airs weekdays, at 1 p.m. eastern, on NBC.
The Young and the Restless
The beauty of a soap opera is you don’t have to be an early adopter to comprehend the series’ plot lines—jump in on any old Tuesday, and a couple episodes later, you’re mostly up to speed. With the young, restless characters of Genoa City, Wisconsin, who have plotted, scammed, and cavorted for decades, it doesn’t take long to learn that the two families at the center of the drama—the Newmans and the Abbotts—have a longstanding feud as rivals in the cosmetics industry. Although, when tragedy strikes, which it did in when actor Kristoff St. John, who played Neil Winters, died in real life, truces can actually happen.
The Young and the Restless airs weekdays, at 12:30 p.m., on CBS.
Dark Shadows
A Gothic soap that would get Tim Burton’s visionary treatment on the big screen 50 years later, Dark Shadows was a cult hit with teenagers in the late 1960s. About the mysterious Collins family who has an aversion to sunlight, it gave monsters and vampires an hour in the afternoon to appeal to the masses as a little bit more human. Navigating the eternal soapy storylines of parenting, revenge, and, of course, romance, the show’s not only one of the best soap operas of all time, it’s the reason the aughts were under the spell of undead fare like Buffy, True Blood, and The Vampire Diaries.
Passions
A berserk cult-favorite that mixed supernatural flourishes with the tell-tale signatures of a soap opera, Passions was not your average daytime TV. Set in the fictional town of Harmony, it starred Lindsay Korman-Hartley (ex to one Justin Hartley of This Is Us fame), Molly Stanton (Two and a Half Men), and Jesse Metcalfe (Desperate Housewives), as hopeless romantics but also hapless targets of Tabitha Lenox (Juliet Mills), the town witch, and her doll-turned-real boy sidekick, Timmy (Jimmy Ryan Evans). We know. But just go with it. It’s so over-the-top, it was the reason “our friends” would pretend to be sick so they could stay home from school and tune in.
Guiding Light
Hayden Panettiere (Nashville), Matt Bomer (The Sinner), Brittany Snow (Pitch Perfect), and so many others found stardom following their big breaks on this daytime series. Set in a fictional Midwestern town with middle-class and wealthy families vying for the heart of the show, Guiding Light is the brightest bulb in the soap box: Though the stalwart soap that began as a radio serial in 1937 isn’t on television anymore, it’s still the record holder for longest-running soap opera of all time, clocking in nearly 16,000 episodes during its—wait for it—72-year run. That’s a lotta light.
One Life to Live
Like its counterparts, One Life to Live too had its fair share of wealth, conflict, and star power, with actors including Phylicia Rashad, Laurence Fishburne (that’s him on the left as a kid in the ’70s), and Ryan Phillippe reading lines on the reg. Phillippe actually starred as gay teenager Billy Douglas, a groundbreaking role at the time. The original series, which ran from 1968 to 2013, was jolted into its second life with a web-based reboot starring the acting debut of Kourtney Kardashian.
Santa Barbara
Big hair, blonde highlights, bomb bikinis: It’s Santa Barbara, y’all. Before she was spinning a yarn in the Oval Office on Netflix’s House of Cards, Robin Wright was starring in the sunny soap about greed and murder as filthy-rich scion Kelly Capwell Perkins. As soaps do, the plotlines that rocked the series vary from shocking weddings to natural disasters, though all through lines lead back to the wealthy Capwells and the murder of their son, Channing. Another huge star we need to mention that passed through the SB set? Leonardo DiCaprio.
All My Children
The house that Susan Lucci—or as her die-hard fans know her, Erica Kane—built was also lived in by several stars you know and love today: Buffy the Vampire alum Sarah Michelle Gellar and Good Morning America host Cameron Mathison got their starts on the beloved soap. Not to mention, it’s where everyone’s favorite PDA pushers Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos found love as soap sweethearts Hayley Vaughan and Mateo Santos Jr. The series itself takes an Elizabeth Taylor approach to storytelling: one woman, her men, and everyone else. That woman here is, of course, Erika Kane. And though the original show can be found in pieces through the interwebs, it was revivied in 2013 and preserved on iTunes.
DeAnna Janes is a freelance writer and editor for a number of sites, including Harper’s BAZAAR, Tasting Table, Fast Company and Brit + Co, and is a passionate supporter of animal causes, copy savant, movie dork and reckless connoisseur of all holidays. A native Texan living in NYC since 2005, Janes has a degree in journalism from Texas A&M and got her start in media at US Weekly before moving on to O Magazine, and eventually becoming the entertainment editor of the once-loved, now-shuttered DailyCandy. She’s based on the Upper West Side.
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