Executive producer Paul Monash rejected the “soap opera” label for Peyton Place, considering it instead a “television novel.” (His term is, in fact, the one applied in Latin America, telenovela, and Francophone Canada, teleroman.) Set in a small New England town, Peyton Place dealt with the secrets and scandals of two generations of the town’s inhabitants. An unmarried woman, Constance MacKenzie, and her daughter, Allison, were placed at the dramatic center of the story. Constance (played by 1950s film melodrama star Dorothy Malone) eventually married Allison’s father, Elliott Carson, when he was released from prison, though his rival Dr. Michael Rossi was never entirely out of the picture. Meanwhile, Allison (Mia Farrow) was caught up in a romantic triangle with wealthy Rodney Harrington (Ryan O’Neal) and Betty Anderson (Barbara Parkins), a girl from the wrong side of the tracks. Over the course of the series, Betty tricked Rodney, not telling him until after they were married that she had miscarried their child; Rodney fled and found love with Allison, but Allison disappeared; Betty was married briefly to lawyer Steven Cord but finally remarried Rodney. Other soap-operatic plotlines involved Rodney’s younger brother, Norman Harrington, and his marriage to Rita Jacks.

The production schedule was closest to that of day-time soap opera, with no summer hiatus, no repeats, unlike any prime-time American series before or since. Within the first year, the pace was increased to three episodes per week rather than two, going back to two episodes per week in the 1966–67 season as the craze for the show declined. Several of the show’s plot twists were necessitated by cast changes. Most notably, Allison MacKenzie’s disappearance occurred when Mia Farrow left the series in 1966 for her highly publicized marriage to Frank Sinatra. The program never fully recovered from Farrow’s departure, though news of the distant Allison kept the character alive. Some two years after Farrow left, a young woman appeared with a baby she claimed was Allison’s, a development that timed with the release of Farrow’s theatrical film, Rosemary’s Baby.

In 1968 Peyton Place underwent a transformation. Some storylines were developed to accommodate more cast changes (Dorothy Malone left the show), but many of the changes in the final season seem to have been in response to Goldenson’s call for more youthful, “relevant” programming. One of the youthful additions was the leader of a rock group. Most significant, however, an African-American family— Dr. Harry Miles (Percy Rodriguez), his wife, Alma (Ruby Dee), and their teenage son, Lew (Glynn Turman)—assumed a central position in the heretofore all-white Peyton Place. Cut back to one half-hour episode per week, the show also was scheduled a half hour earlier to appeal further to youthful audiences.

These drastic changes did nothing to revive ratings for the serial, which lasted through the spring of 1969. ABC brought it back for two years in the 1970s as a daytime serial, and in 1985 nine of the original cast members appeared in a made-for-TV movie, Peyton Place: The Next Generation.