Soap opera pace: interspersing glacial and warp speed

There's a small handful of soap operas I occasionally tune in to, and this past week they have all had various Christmas decorations in the background and allusions to Christmas. And I'm pretty sure they also exhibited that Christmas theme around this same time last year. But in between, the pace has been so glacial that I have a hard time believing that taken at face value the plots of these soap operas have really progressed a full year. Some soap operas, like Days of Our Lives, give me the impression that the plot of each 45-minute episode (not counting commercials) advances the story a lot less than 45 minutes. "What is it you were going to tell me?" asks one character in one scene. Zoom in on the worried person being asked that question. Cut to another scene, which probably also ends with an unanswered question. Then we cut back to the first scene. "Oh, I was just going to remind you about this thing, but it's not important anymore." Can you honestly believe those two characters spent two minutes just staring at each other?