Behind the Screen is an American late-night weekly serial which aired on CBS from October 9, 1981 to January 8, 1982. It was created by David Jacobs for CBS, which wanted to experiment with late night programming as a counterpoint to ABC and NBC's more successful efforts at that time of night. Drawing upon his experience with the prime-time serials, Behind the Screen was a dramatization of the goings-on at a fictional TV soap opera called Generations. This was not the first attempt to explore the concept of a "soap within a soap" as radio soaps had used the idea as far as back as the 1940s, and Ryan's Hope had used the idea for a story in the early 1980s.