Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Entertainment/2017 December 5

= December 5 =

actresses and/or starlets on the three
I was wondering how many actresses and/or starlets performed in soap operas on the Big Three television networks? Anyone know?2604:2000:7113:9D00:E489:B375:36EB:1AC5 (talk) 05:25, 5 December 2017 (UTC)
 * Hundreds of them, perhaps thousands, especially if you go back to the radio days. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 07:15, 5 December 2017 (UTC)
 * Well, actually I was referring to the 1990s up to the present time.2604:2000:7113:9D00:E489:B375:36EB:1AC5 (talk) 09:19, 5 December 2017 (UTC)
 * Probably still several hundred, given that it's 28 years' worth. You might try IMDB. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 10:49, 5 December 2017 (UTC)


 * We should be able to do a Fermi calculation to get at least within an order of magnitude for the OP's purpose. Looking at Days of Our Lives, we can roughly see that the current cast consists of about 48 actors.  Assuming 1/2 are women, that's 24 women on a typical daytime soap opera.  If we presume about a 10-year run on the soap opera (it appears some have more, and some have less, but that seems a reasonable assumption, and we're just doing a quick estimation), that means means that we average 2.4 new women actresses per year, per soap.  List of U.S. daytime soap opera ratings seems to indicate about 10ish soaps per year, on average, which means that 24 new women appear in a soap opera in a given year.  Multiply that times the about 65ish years we've had TV soaps, and we have a very rough estimate of about 1500 actresses to have appeared in a soap opera.  Given the rough nature of this calculation, that 1500 number would have rather large error bars, but the range 1000-2000 seems a reasonable one.  If we include nighttime soaps, double that (say 2500-3500).  If one wanted a more specific number, one would have to go to IMDB, as suggested by Bugs, and manually count the casts of every known soap opera.  That's a LOT of time involvement, but you're free to do it.  -- Jayron 32 15:29, 5 December 2017 (UTC)
 * You're not counting guest cast. —Tamfang (talk) 23:55, 9 December 2017 (UTC)