The typical soap opera starts slow introducing you to character dynamics in the first few episodes. Maybe a small cliffhanger to end each episode. When thinking of soap operas, I don’t imagine beginning with a funeral and ending the first episode with a bastard child making herself known to her father’s family. Going from a 3 to a 10 in the span of 14 minutes certainly got my interest as I honestly wasn’t expecting the big guns to drop so soon. But that’s what the audio drama soap opera does and continues to do. It’s “Evergreen*” and it’s exactly that in more ways than one.

*This is not the QCODE fiction podcast of the same name.

Timing of a Soap Opera

When you end the first episode with a twist you’d find in a season finale, it’s hard to go anywhere but down. However, the writers — Roberto Guevara, Marisol Medina and Amaris Pueyes Méndez — keep the tension high and the interest level stable for 12 episodes each one less than 30 minutes long. The range is between 10 and 15 minutes per episode, but a decent portion of the runtime is for a “previously on…” segment and the end credits. While a recap can kill the flow of a story for bingers, listening to the episodes as they released I appreciated as after the midway point, episode releases no longer stuck to their original schedule.

From episode two on, there are three sublplots. One involving revenge, the other forbidden love and finally murder. The three horseman of any daytime soap opera. Two of them get roughly equal screen time. One of them has a twist that I honestly didn’t see coming in the final episode. On a re-listen, the foreshadowing becomes apparent, but

An Audio Drama Soap Opera with Recaps

Guevara however walks the metaphorical waveform of his audio drama soap opera to near perfection. If this podcast was the game “Guitar Hero,” he’d have gotten a near perfect score on a song on medium difficulty. Easy enough to pull off, but can be hard depending on the song. One of the two choices he made where I thought he did the podcast a disservice was the narrator. He should’ve trusted the audience more.

I get why he did it. Specific details and remembering who’s who and their motivations made the story muddied down in detail. There were times where it was also helpful. But having a narrator say something that is about to happen or is currently happening is kind of redundant. Mostly this comes from having the narrator come in after a recap and explain what it said before starting the episode proper. The recaps, edited by Guevara, capture the feeling of an actual TV show’s “previously on” segment. Even on a re-listen, I enjoyed them as they were just the right length and contained the right information needed to understand the episode of which it was attached.

Plenty of Soap for the Dirt in this Audio Drama

It wouldn’t be a soap opera without some dirty laundry to show, and there is plenty of that in the form of the characters of Petra and Rocky — two women hellbent on ruining two different lives. Stop me if you heard this before. A college-age girl falls in love with an authority figure, but that person is married. The question becomes will the older person sacrifice their current life for a quick moment of satisfaction. If that doesn’t sound like the start of an adult film I don’t know what does. Now it could’ve gone down the typical pornographic way, but this audio drama soap opera does something a bit different. That’s something you’ll have to experience on your own.

Coming full circle, this audio drama soap opera is evergreen in the sense that you can understand it anytime. In TV production, evergreen means nothing dates the segment being shown to the viewer. Mostly this an issue in news broadcasts. For “Evergreen,” the podcast from The Next Great American Soap manages to be timeless and interesting, if a little predictable.

9.5-/10 Stars

New Content Over on Substack

I recently started doing a monthly listening recap series on Substack. Here’s the first installment for October 2024 consumed fiction podcasts in that month. They will release the first Monday of the month and information will come from the month prior.