Unlike episodic television programs, in which there is no narrative linkage between episodes and each episode tells a more or less self-contained story, the viewer's understanding of and pleasure in any given serial installment is predicated, to some degree, upon his or her knowledge of what has happened in previous episodes. A serial narrative is a story told through a series of individual, narratively linked installments.

The defining quality of the soap opera form is its seriality. and elsewhere, exceed this generic designation. In the United States, the term continues to be applied primarily to the approximately fifty hours each week of daytime serial television drama broadcast by ABC, NBC, and CBS, but the meanings of the term, both in the U.S. The 'soap' in soap opera alluded to their sponsorship by manufacturers of household cleaning products while 'opera' suggested an ironic incongruity between the domestic narrative concerns of the daytime serial and the most elevated of dramatic forms. The term 'soap opera' was coined by the American press in the 1930s to denote the extraordinarily popular genre of serialized domestic radio dramas, which, by 1940, represented some 90% of all commercially-sponsored daytime broadcast hours.

As this website says soap opera became a derogatory term - but that is now different with the soap opera style going big time. The soap opera moved to prime time TV in the US in the 1980s.

Reference: soap opera's started as daytime but moved to evening Sitcom vs soap opera English translation:.

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