1970s in American television
The soap boom spawned a nighttime soap parody, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. The parody made a quick star out of Louise Lasser, who played the eponymous heroine. A rising soap opera toward the decade's end was Ryan's Hope. It capitalized on the everyman success of the movie Rocky. Despite Ryan's Hope debuting earlier, the show's success came a while after the movie's release. The serial was about an Irish-American family running a pub in New York City. It earned critical acclaim from television critics for its realistic portrayal of an "ethnic" middle-class family in a contemporary setting. The show's matriarch, played by Helen Gallagher, won two Daytime Emmys by decade's end. Also during the decade, General Hospital, a soap that spent most of the decade with bad ratings, saw a rise in popularity around late 1978 due to its more youthful focus. It would not yet become a ratings giant until the 1980s.