Private Practice and shows like it

While I wasn't able to watch the whole episode, I did notice that the show Private Practice is a serial narrative in some respects but not in others. Narrative redundancy is certainly present, as most shows nowadays have a "Previously on..." flashback before each episode. Strategic positioning between enjoyment and suspense is present as well, since both the joys of watching a character's happiness and the punctuation of that character's happiness for dramatic purposes are necessary to keep viewers on the edge of their seats and tuning in each week. Unlike more traditional daytime soap operas, however, the community of characters is a little bit smaller and we definitely have a few protagonists. What had me thinking, besides seeing how Private Practice fit in as a serial narrative, was how shows like Private Practice aren't marketed as soap operas, but they essentially are. I am thinking of course about Grey's Anatomy as well, but also Lipstick Jungle, Gossip Girl, 90210, and so on: all of these shows feature many of the elements of serial narratives and soap operas, but aren't marketed that way. In fact, sometimes these shows are even more ludicrously dramatic than traditional soap operas like All My Children and One Life to Live are, but people don't call them soap operas. I was thinking it had something to do with the issues of daytime versus prime time TV - the big numbers get drawn it at night, not during the day, and the term "soap opera" has a stigma and a set of connotations attached to it that perhaps these shows don't want. And while the production values on Private Practice are much nicer and more sophisticated than on All My Children, but essentially, they're all soap operas.