Suspenseful serialized plots, not jokes, made early radio gripping

Evidence

It seems that what gripped so much attention, what kept millions coming back, were the show’s elaborate and suspenseful plot lines. The New Yorker again: “For Amos ‘n’ Andy…have finally mastered the trick of creating suspense. With half a dozen plots running through their sketches, they hold the dramatic tension in a way to arouse the admiration of Professor Baker.” In particular, much of the show turned on the romance between the earnest Amos and Ruby Taylor, whom he’d met in Chicago. Later, the focus was on the engagement of know-it-all Andy and the bossy divorcée Madam Queen. Nowadays we might say that Amos ‘n’ Andy resembled a soap opera—but as we shall see, it was really soap operas that copied Amos ‘n’ Andy. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 319

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s attention-industry history: identifies the mechanism (serialized suspense) that held attention, later copied by soap operas.