The Return of the Soap Opera Script Template

“Screenwriters today are being told directly to write with simpler arcs and less complex plots. The notes are explicit. Assume the audience is half watching. Assume they are looking at their phones.” - Christine Merser

I keep thinking about the old soap operas. The daily drip of story that unfolded across decades for the housewife at home. She would watch while ironing shirts or folding laundry or stirring a pot on the stove. She was present but not fully. Soft focus. Eyes up, eyes down. The story waited for her. It knew she would return. Our lives were simpler then. We waited for things. We waited for people. That patience is gone now. We do not wait for anything. Not man. Not woman. Not child.

My ex husband, who was as funny as he was unforgiving on a spreadsheet, was lying on his back after surgery with a television bolted too high up on a hospital wall years and years ago. He started watching a soap opera and became enthralled. Then he went back to work and left it behind.

Years later he had another surgery and ended up flat again, stuck with the same television and the same long hours to fill. He turned on the same show and a man walked into a room and said something that could have been said the day he left. The plot had moved so slowly and asked so little of the viewer’s ability to follow anything complex that he had not missed a thing. It was the same conversation. The same emotional beat. The same simplicity. He said it felt like he had never left, and we laughed because it was absurd.

That memory sits beside today’s multitasking culture. We already know the truth about attention. You can only do one thing at a time. Even artificial intelligence can only do one thing at a time. And here we are, insisting that we can live our best lives on fractions of our own focus. And here we are, insisting that we can live on fractions of our own focus.

Screenwriters today are being told directly to write with simpler arcs and less complex plots. The notes are explicit. Assume the audience is half watching. Assume they are looking at their phones. Assume they will miss key moments and need the emotional beats repeated so they can re enter without confusion. Characters say exactly what they feel. Stakes are spoken out loud. Exposition is echoed throughout the episode. It is not an artistic choice. It is survival in the age of the half here viewer.

Inside the television industry the directives are blunt. Keep it simple. Keep it clean. Do not build a story that requires memory or sustained attention. The platforms track the moment the viewer looks away. They reward anything that can be digested in pieces. They are not worrying about whether viewers are present. They are creating for a mind that has been trained not to stay. The industry is feeding the very dilemma it claims to observe. The less we focus, the less we are asked to focus, and the less we remember how.

Actors feel it too. Nuance evaporates when half the audience is texting. Small interior choices vanish in the glow of the second screen. Performances grow broader and more declarative because someone has to carry the emotional load the viewer used to share. It is hard to craft a layered scene when you can sense that half your audience is browsing handbags during the turning point.

I asked Celeste, my AI, what shows fit this new model. She said Bridgerton. I was surprised. It is such a popular series. I could never get into it. I found the dialogue boring. I find it hard to believe that Shonda Rhimes, who I think is a complex thinker and a genius at structure and emotional pacing, would ask her writers to simplify anything. But she and I do not brush each other’s hair and whisper secrets so someone else will have to ask her.

I recently completed the fourth season of The Morning Show. I watched the last two episodes three times. It is complex. Each time I watched it I learned something new. What now scares the shit out of me is that maybe I learned something new because I am not as able as I used to be to take in complex plot lines in their entirety, and I was beginning to miss things. Maybe that old adage she misses the plot is going to become reality.

Here is what I believe. This shift is not a quirky change in viewing habits. It is another example of what scrolling has done to the brain. This is the course we are on and science is beginning to showcase it. We are already designing entertainment, education, and information for the half here mind, and the result is terrifying. Scrolling repeats a point of view the algorithm thinks we want to hear. We hear it over and over again, and we end up believing we thought it through, but the truth is we never did. A mind fed repetition mistakes repetition for insight. A mind fed simplicity loses the muscle required to weigh information and form an original point of view. The very thing that makes us spectacular, the ability to think, begins to thin out.

And if that continues, our lives will lose the ability to communicate with the excited unveiling of ideas with each other, and we will lose our passion and our vision and our purpose.

That continues quietly. Inch by inch. One simplified script at a time. One repeated emotional beat. One softened arc. One divided attention span. Until artificial intelligence tells us a complex story and we no longer know how to follow it.

That is where the real danger lives. Not in the algorithms. In our slow willingness to shrink our own minds to fit them. - Christine Merser