Remembering "Ryan's Hope"

The daily weekday soap opera used to be a staple of daytime network television. All My Children, Guiding Light, One Life to Live and so many others entertained housewives, the unemployed and layabouts during the early afternoon hours for decades.

But then, about ten-to-fifteen years ago, they started to vanish. Some of these soaps, like Guiding Light, had started on radio in the 1930s and ran for the better part of 70 to 80 years! -- and then were unceremoniously cancelled. Today there are only about three or four left, as streaming and the Internet and production costs doomed them.

Most soap operas are generally set in some mid-sized fictional city in the midwest somewhere, usually with a name that starts with "Port." They exist in a  mystical Everytown USA where everyone is beautiful, sex craved, greedy, venal,  dishonest, and unusually prone to car accidents. 

One outlier to these kinds of soap operas was Ryan's Hope, which ran from 1975 to 1989 and was set in Washington Heights in Upper Manhattan.

Unlike most soaps, it was set in a real neighborhood in NYC with blue collar characters. Ryan's was a bar across the street from the fictional Riverside Hospital (i.e. Columbia Presbyterian) and the show explored the lives of its denizens. It still has the usual soap opera tropes of scandalous affairs and pregnancies and deaths but it was rooted in NYC and real community. 

One of the original stars of Ryan's Hope was Kate Mulgrew who went on to greatness as the Captain on Star Trek: Voyager and later as the hilarious Russian prisoner on Orange is the New Black. Guest stars included a young Kelsey Grammer, Dominic Chianese (20 years before The Sopranos) and Christian Slater. 

While it had a relatively short life compared to other daytime soaps, Ryan's Hope was an unusual slice of NYC life beamed each afternoon into homes across America -- and there's quite like it that exists today.