Serial (radio and television) usually ran from Monday through Friday at exactly the same time every day. A show called The Smith Family which ran only one night a week on WENR in Chicago during the early 1930s was credited as the "great-granddaddy of the soap operas" by radio historian Francis Chase, Jr. One of the other shows that helped pioneer the daytime soap opera/serial was "The Guiding Light", which debuted on NBC radio in 1937, and then switched to CBS Television in 1952. "The Guiding Light" final episode aired on September 18, 2009, having a total of 15,762 episodes air on CBS. Some
Soap opera weekday daytime slots, usually five days a week. Most of the listeners would be housewives.Thus, the shows were aimed at and consumed by a predominantly female audience. The first nationally broadcast radio soap opera was "Clara, Lu, and Em", which aired on the NBC Blue Network at 10:30 p.m. Eastern Time on January 27, 1931. One of the defining features that makes a television program a soap opera, according to Albert Moran, is that form of television that works with a continuous open narrative. While Spanish language telenovelas are sometimes called "soap operas," telenovelas have conflicts that get resolved and