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It happens all the time. You are flipping through the channels on the television, and you come across a movie. You do not really have the time to sit for two hours and watch a movie, but you decide to watch for a few minutes just to see if it will be any good. The next thing you know, the movie is half over. Sometimes a soap opera can suck a person in just as easily.

When I was a kid, whenever I did not have school, I watched The Price is Right at ten every morning, and I watched The Family Feud at twelve on the same channel. The Young and The Restless just happened to be on in between these two programs, and sometimes I would catch a few minutes of the beginning or the end of the show, and then eventually I got so interested in it that I began watching it every day, and I guess I have been sucked in ever sense.

Soap operas suck people in because the storylines are spaced out and well-timed. Generally a storyline builds slowly, and this makes it very suspenseful, and then all of a sudden something very climactic happens that changes the entire story. A murder occurs, or a murderer is discovered. Two characters kiss for the first time, or someone finds out she is pregnant. A girl is kidnapped, or a man suddenly recovers from a terminal illness.

Even the order, in which the events occur, in a single episode, is an effective way of sucking people in. For example, we do not sit and watch two people have a conversation for an entire episode or even for twenty minutes at a time. We see two people talk for about five minutes, and then the show skips to another scene with different characters. We watch them for three or four minutes, and then it cuts to another group of people, and eventually we get to the continuation of the first scene. This is an effective way of sucking people in, because even if you do not like certain characters on the show, you will sit and watch their scene while you wait for the scene featuring your favorite characters.

It is easy to become interested in soaps because they feature so many different kinds of characters. It is not just about one family or one group of friends. It is about an entire community of people, and in this community you will find both friends and foes, and it becomes very interesting to follow the relationships that these people have with one another. It also sucks you in because it is always changing. People get married, get divorced, move away, commit a crime, go into a coma, die and come back from the dead. Who would

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