How do the writers of Soaps handle the workload?

[Yong Fang]

That is the question. Since, I think the surviving Soaps are one hour shows, five days a week, basically 52 weeks a year, how do they manage? Seems to me that the sheer workload and time would make these soaps just not profitable and expensive for the return, which is why a lot of them got cancelled, or where am I wrong?

Basically an hour Soap Opera (like Days of Our Lives, Young and Restless etc.) is 40 minutes in length. 40(x)5=200 minutes or 3 hours and 20 minutes each week, or around 10,000 minutes (probably deducting time for Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years. Watching a year's worth of a daytime drama in one sitting would take a week, 7, 24 hour days.

A sitcom on the other hand is about 20 minutes (more like 18 minutes but I'll round up) for about 22 episodes for a year, which is about 440 minutes. Watching a year's worth of a network sitcom in one sitting would take about 7 HOURS.

So, how does Soap Opera writing work, since they have to come up with basically twenty times the scripts than a Sitcom? Soaps do not have the budgets that successful sitcoms do, the Soaps have to have more writers than Sitcoms, or they would run themselves ragged. But some of these shows have been on for decades. Just seems much more labor intensive for the writers point of view.

I do know from watching a soap in college (I am male) that not all the characters are on everyday, and there are a lot of characters, and most of the actors are unknowns but mostly young and eager, and probably like most professions to begin is a lot of work.

Where is my math wrong, or how can these writers come up with all this dialogue without going nuts and jumping out the window?