Soap opera rapid aging syndrome

Soap opera rapid aging syndrome (SORAS) is the practice of accelerating the age of a television character (usually a child or teenager) in conflict with the timeline of a series and/or the real-world progression of time. This allows for, for instance, storylines around a pregnancy and birth to be relatively quickly followed by storylines around the travails of that child as a teenager or young adult. This is usually accomplished by recasting the actor playing the part, although in some cases the character is not shown onscreen, only mentioned, until after they have been "rapidly aged".

The process originated (and is most commonly used) in daytime soap operas, though it is also sometimes used in prime time shows. On sitcoms, a newborn infant character is sometimes aged quickly into a preschooler, for greater comic potential, as was done with the character Chrissy Seaver on Growing Pains in 1990.

The term was coined by Soap Opera Weekly founding editor-in-chief Mimi Torchin in the early days of the magazine, which began publishing in 1989. It is now widely used in the soap opera media, and is sometimes used as a verb as well ("the character was SORASed"). Torchin has jokingly called it "my one greatest contribution to the world of soap operas."