The end of the soap opera era

An era is passing, and other than a few newspaper stories that quote sad baby boomers, it’s hard to find a lot of public mourning. In our culture, soaps are guilty pleasures, at best: sentimental kitsch with endlessly circular love stories, bad production values, and none of the she-said-what hipness of Wendy Williams.

So it’s rare to find an unabashed soap lover like Sam Ford, the director of digital strategy at Peppercorn Strategic Communications and editor of the upcoming book “The Survival of Soap Opera’’ — who argues that we’re on the verge of losing something big.

“As The World Turns’’ happens to be Ford’s soap, the one his mother and grandmother watched when he was a kid, the one that figured heavily into his studies at MIT, where he wrote a master’s thesis on soaps in modern culture. He was struck by the similarities between soaps and pro wrestling: the sprawling casts, the complex storylines with long-term payoffs, the intensity of viewers’ love.

When he taught a class on soaps to MIT undergraduates in 2008, Ford made “As The World Turns’’ required viewing. And a funny thing happened: Students who had scoffed at soaps started watching with a group, and they got hooked.

Soap opera fandom, Ford argues, has as much to do with connecting with other viewers as it does about caring if Jack and Carly’s latest attempt at marriage is going to stick. So it was in Ford’s life: Long after his mother left the house, she and Ford’s grandmother talked often. One of their excuses? They had to discuss what happened on “As The World Turns.’’

If soaps had been marketed like sports franchises, Ford says — as a kind of cross-generational glue — they might have had a better shot at survival. Then again, few people consider the Red Sox a guilty pleasure. And there’s no similar shame around the comic book, another mid-century relic that has enjoyed a resurgence; now it’s a graphic novel, thank you, and seems to seed a new movie every month.

Soaps have been just as influential — hello, “Desperate Housewives’’ — so why aren’t they nearly as valued? Is it because they deal so baldly with emotion? Because they speak primarily to women? Because they’re really that much cheesier than anything else?

Sure, hunt down old clips of Julianne Moore and Steven Weber on “As The World Turns’’ in the ’80s, and you wonder how they ever managed acting careers. But as Ford points out, there’s a special skill to soap writing and acting: The sheer volume of material that needs to be produced, the number of scenes shot in single takes, the emphasis on close-ups, where every muscle twitch has meaning.

And long before Oprah became the queen of public catharsis, soaps were on the forefront of discussion about controversial social issues. “As The World Turns’’ tackled living wills in the 1980s and AIDS in the 1990s. It was the first soap to air storylines about divorce, marital rape, and more recently, a love affair between two men.

It’s true that soaps started dying when women joined the workforce in droves — and that talk shows and reality shows have siphoned off more potential viewers. But soaps also died, Ford argues, because they started to chase the holy grail of the 18 to 34 demographic, downplaying the older characters and long-term stories that kept people engaged for generations. “As The World Turns’’ didn’t even try to capitalize on a flurry of gay male viewers who tuned in to dish about gay couple Luke and Noah.

The best way to snare a new soap fan, Ford contends, isn’t by airing earthquakes, crime waves, and other recent soap opera publicity stunts. It’s by getting viewers to talk to each other — and grandmothers to pass along their love. At least there’s still the Red Sox for that, too.

Joanna Weiss can be reached at weiss@globe.com.