8. Days of Our Lives
Two years behind General Hospital, the soap Days of Our Lives first aired on NBC on November 8, 1965. At first, episodes were thirty-minutes long, but NBC quickly extended them to sixty minutes. To date, Days remains on the air, although it’s in a year-by-year contract at this point. What Days of Our Lives did well that other soaps have tried to emulate was how they captured a slice of American life. Somehow Days turned ordinary lives into captivating stories of drama. That formula worked, making the soap one of the longest-running scripted television shows in the world.