A continuing series focusing on the personal relationships between several characters, usually following the form of the traditional daytime
Soap Opera or
Prime Time Soap. The difference is that the characters live in a world in which supernatural events and beings are commonplace, and as such the characters may often come into contact with vampires, ghosts, witches, etc. In some cases, the show's characters are themselves supernatural beings.
The original supernatural soap was ABC's daytime drama
Dark Shadows, although the form was perhaps perfected by
Joss Whedon's cult hit
Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spinoff
Angel.
Supernatural Soap Opera is a subgenre of
Urban Fantasy and
Supernatural Fiction. Compare
Fantastic Comedy.
Examples:
- Being Human
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer
- Carnivale
- Charmed
- Dark Shadows
- Dead Like Me
- H 2 O Just Add Water
- Kamen Rider Kiva
- Kindred: The Embraced, a short-lived soap based on the Vampire The Masquerade RPG.
- Kyle XY (more of Sci Fi, though).
- Le Portrait De Petite Cossette (Granted, it may be a 3 episode OVA, but...)
- Passions
- Point Pleasant
- Port Charles
- Roswell
- Round the Twist is this for kids, although the soap elements are either low key or pervasive depending on the season and episode.
- Scryer's Gulch
- Smallville
- Spirited
- Split
- Strange Paradise
- Supernatural
- True Blood
- Twin Peaks
- The Vampire Diaries
- Vampire Prosecutor
- Wonderfalls
- Surprisingly, there have been some Latin Soap Operas (known as Telenovelas) in this genre, like "La otra mitad del sol", "La mujer en el espejo", "Vampi" and "El voyagem", among others.
- La Otra Mitad Del Sol (The Other Half of the Sun) was about two murdered lovers meeting again years later after reincarnating.
- La Mujer En El Espejo (The Woman In The Mirror) is about a homely woman who uses a magical mirror to become beautiful- the problem being, normal mirrors still show her true appearance.
- Vampi, as the name clearly indicates, revolved around vampires, more precisely a model/singer turned vampire who goes to live in a small town as part of her attempts to free herself of her sire and his own attempts to claim her.
- El Clon is about a rich man who pays to have a clone "son" of himself made. However this Telenovela is better remembered for its extensive use of Arabic cultural trappings.
- Victorinos has a psychic predict that three men born on the same day, all named Victorino, would meet some day- and one of them would then die. The novela follows their individual lives (which range from decent to criminal) until the day they meet, with the audience left to guess which one would die.
- Aurora is about a woman who was put in Suspended Animation to save her life, and wakes up 20 years later, to find that the man she loves is now married, and her daughter is now a grown woman.
- Simplemente Rita was a rare animated version of a Telenovela, which operated on Cartoon Physics.
