I was ABC all the way. We could watch General Hospital after school and it had the best ridiculous over the top sci fi/espionage/conspiracy plots. Summertime meant All My Children. I only watched One Life to Live sporadically, but enough to be able to follow the story when my dorm mate got hooked on it in college and wanted to talk to someone about Vicki's journey. I was a regular on rec.arts.tv.soaps my second try at graduate school with all the posting conventions that allowed for filtration. I remember my mom watching The Doctors when I was tiny, though.

Oh my gosh, One Life to Live had so many out there storylines. Time travel to 1880s Buchanan City! The Lost City of Eterna! I mean, it was no Days/Marlena possessed by demons, but they were good for an out there storyline. I miss that era of soaps. It wasn't just OLTL and Days. The soaps used to go all the way out there! Remember the whole Ice Princess storyline on GH? I mean, my word, ABC had a whole soap about vampires living in Port Charles (and it was fucking great!) They don't make soaps like that anymore.

I mostly watched CBS soaps but occasionally ABC. It took forever for me to watch Days of Our Lives. I have no idea how I picked the soaps I watched but Guiding Light - Beth! Phillip! Lujack! Etc

Also Young and the Restless, Capital, Bold and the Beautiful. I guess 2 of those are still on. And then I got into General Hospital.

And for awhile I knew this girl at church who confused me because she always had her Bible and was talking about being Godly but she was hooked on Loving and would recreate the stories with her Barbies.

Search for Tomorrow I'm pretty sure I watched that for a bit.

Yeah, I was a Guiding Light girl in a General Hospital world, because my grandmother was a CBS watcher, and it was her TV.

I got into Y&R in HS and college because they had a ton of pretty black people on the show at a time when black people in lead roles on ABC soaps had gotten very rare over. Drucilla and Neil and Olivia and Lily were my everything for a while there. That was really the only CBS soap that I ever watched.

Tiny piece of Y&R trivia, the kid who played, I believe it was "Little Nate" is now in his mid-twenties, recently graduated college, and works here. (In the accounting dept. Remarkably nice guy. Used his acting money to pay for college).

Remember the whole Ice Princess storyline on GH? I mean, my word, ABC had a whole soap about vampires living in Port Charles (and it was fucking great!) They don't make soaps like that anymore.

So true. But I often wonder if telenovelas and Korean dramas are like this now?

I used to watch a lot of novelas and they were crazy dramatic but not in a supernatural way, or at least not the ones that I watched. Not witches and demons and time travel and stuff like that. Just your typical over the top soap stuff. Kind of like 80s night time soaps but on steroids! I'm not sure about Korean soaps.

Days had a supernatural storyline, with Marlena being possessed.

Yeah, I think that one is the medal winner, it got enough press that even people who never watched soaps were aware of it.