As the South Turns
As The South Turns
by Ricky Fitzpatrick for The Creative South
There are certain sounds that defined growing up in the South: the slam of a screen door, the hum of cicadas, and the unmistakable theme music of a daytime soap opera drifting through the house sometime between 1:00 and 3:00 p.m.
If you listen real close, you can still hear it in your bones…those jangly opening notes that signaled somebody was about to get slapped, seduced, or resurrected.
Our grandmothers and mothers didn’t just watch soap operas. They trained under them.
If you ever wondered why Southern women have a sixth sense about who’s lying, who’s cheating, who’s not really “fine,” and who’s about to show up uninvited with an attitude, it’s because they spent decades studying the gospels of Erica Kane, Marlena Evans or Rachel & Mac the way theologians study scripture.
Soap operas were the original continuing education program for Southern women.
I remember afternoons at my grandmother’s house when the television became the moral compass of the community. Granny would sit in her recliner with a bowl of butterscotch candies and talk back to the characters like they were neighbors who had borrowed money and failed to return it.
“Erica, you know you’re too good for him,” she’d mutter, shaking her head like she had insider information from Pine Valley.
Or: “Oh, here comes Victor, bless his heart. That man’s been through more weddings than our family reunion.”
And Heaven help you if you spoke during a dramatic moment. That got you a look so sharp it could slice a ham.
But those soaps weren’t just entertainment. They were training. They were world-building. They were the first time many of us saw drama that rivaled the weekly events of our hometown.
Think about it: Daytime drama is essentially Southern life with slightly better lighting.
When a character in Days of Our Lives faked her own death and turned up three seasons later with amnesia, it wasn’t shocking to us. Around here, we call that “what happened to Earl’s second cousin in ’92.”
When Erica Kane got married for the eleven-teenth time, Southern women nodded in quiet recognition. Eleven marriages? Amateur numbers, sweetheart. Talk to Myrtle in the choir.
When Victor and Nikki on The Young & The Restless reconciled for the 47th time, my grandmother would sigh deeply and say, “Lord, I knew they’d work it out.”
As though she had intervened personally.
Soap operas provided something else too: permission for melodrama.
Southern women (God bless ’em) live in a state of refined emotional expression. That means they can say things like, “I may faint dead away,” or “I am simply undone,” or “Don’t you ever tell me that, I can see the truth in your shoulders,” and no one bats an eye.
Where do you think they learned that? Not from the Weather Channel, I’ll tell you that.
Even today, if you step into certain hair salons at 2 p.m., you will hear quiet discussions about past storylines like they were historical events…“Erica Kane didn’t just get married. She taught us to get married.”
And sometimes at family gatherings, you’ll hear names whispered like they’re long-lost relatives: “Luke and Laura… what a love story.”
Meanwhile the menfolk nod politely, unaware that these people never actually existed in physical form.
Here’s the truth: Soap operas shaped us. They shaped our parents. They taught us drama, timing, forgiveness, betrayal, redemption, and how to keep a secret until sweeps week.
They taught us that life is messy and sometimes hilarious, and always a little more dramatic than it needs to be.
Just like the South.
So if you wonder why we tell stories the way we do…full of twists, turns, feuds, reconciliations, porch therapy, and the occasional resurrection…remember this:
Before we learned to read and before we learned to drive, we learned from our mothers and grandmothers that every Southern life is basically a soap opera.
Some just have better cliffhangers.