And Then There Were Eight

I never cared for Passions.

Like the other fallen NBC soaps of the last 20 years, it was an interesting experiment. Santa Barbara mixed in arch comedy and deft dialogue with its staid romantic storylines and was for a time the best show on the air. SB’s replacement, Sunset Beach, was just starting to find its voice when it was cancelled. And Another World, though it had been on for a long time, attempted to recreate itself in its final year as a gothic/sci-fi pastiche.

When Passions premiered, its star was not any of the unknown cast but its creator, James Reilly, who was coming off one of the most (in)famous runs in soap opera history, on Days of Our Lives. The presumption was that he would repeat his over-the-top successes from that show, which included characters being buried alive and possessed by the devil, in a new kind of genre soap. Sure enough, we were presented with a 300-year-old witch and a talking doll, but as Passions progressed they unfortunately came to represent the show’s only breakout “couple” as well as its half-hearted attempt to weave in supernatural stories. Tabitha and Timmy seemed perpetually on the outside of the action, and this hesitancy to fully embrace what could make Passions unique from its soap brethren, namely a Dark Shadows-like bent toward the eerie, created a schizophrenic viewing experience. Watching Tabitha and Timmy plot over a boiling cauldron might have been fun, but sitting through inexperienced actors struggle through their characters’ dull-as-dishwater problems for the rest of the hour was grueling. Passions was a show that didn’t know what it wanted to be.

The other main problem with Passions was its clumsy groping for metatheatrical humor. Characters would occasionally break the fourth wall, talking or even sometimes singing to the audience, and the sophomoric dialogue poked fun at the familiar trappings of the soap opera genre. Through this self- (and other soap-) mocking, Passions attempted to distance itself from soap opera and come off as something new. It insultingly implied, not half as cleverly as primetime cousin Desperate Housewives, that we all know soaps are stupid and predictable, so let’s have fun while we’re doing it. Aside from the fact that self-parody is a fleeting television fad (see ya, O.C.; Housewives and Boston Legal, don’t get too comfortable), Passions’ writers were so bad at it they repelled viewers more than they amused. Remember, kids: comedy – especially meta-genre comedy – distances audiences from character, and that’s antithetical to a soap’s long-term survival, which depends entirely on continuity of, and the audience’s investment in, its characters.

So the demise of Passions after eight years isn’t surprising, as the show was, with very few exceptions, sloppily written, poorly acted, and without a core ethos. It wanted to be different, but it wasn’t different enough, and perhaps even the addition of talent in front of or behind the camera couldn’t have changed the show’s ambivalence toward its own identity.

What we’ve read already and what we’ll read about over the coming months in the soap and mainstream press is what the loss of Passions does for Days of Our Lives, which is likely to be cancelled by NBC in 2009, and for the soap opera genre as a whole. This thrust to the story is natural as no one was really passionate about Passions. But let’s take a moment to think of the show itself, remember it for what it was, and take away the lessons the remaining soaps could learn from it:

1.) Shows need identities, and attempts to deny, change, or shy away from those identities results only in a bland program that is indistinguishable from the others. Remember – more people watch just one soap opera than watch more than one. They’ve chosen yours for a reason.

2.) Making fun of yourself and your viewers is more self-destructive than it is funny.

3.) Nice bodies are good, but good actors are nice.

4.) Timmy was the most popular character because he was an underdog and a misfit, someone to root for. Ugly Betty is popular because she’s an underdog. Every lead teen character in every John Hughes movie was a misfit. People love to root for an unlikely hero, especially a young one. Yet no soap opera in recent memory has cast a shy, awkward character in its teen storylines, opting instead for beautiful, popular, perfect ones who are all interchangeable, year after year.* Cast against the grain once in a while, and people will watch.

5.) Introducing a monkey as a character is worse than the worst idea you’ve ever had.

Adios, Passions. For a couple of minutes there, you had some potential.

*Passions admirably did this at some point too, with a nerdy teen named Reese, but cast some muscular hunk, stuck a pair of glasses on him, and never gave him a contract. I don’t know what happened to him; he may have been killed by the monkey.

R.I.P. Darlene Conley, Iconoclast

The passing of The Bold & The Beautiful’s Darlene Conley, who played the boozy, blousy Sally Spectra, robs soap operas of one of their last great female iconoclasts. Since Cady McClain used the term to describe her partner Hunt Block in her Emmy acceptance speech, I’ve come to think of iconoclasm in soap acting as a rarified status: Iconoclasts are actors who eschew the trappings of the genre and act, portray, behave however they damn please to suit the character and the scene. An iconoclastic performance is not exactly a great one, and vice versa – Erika Slezak, Susan Lucci, and Jerry verDorn are all great actors who pretty much follow the formula for soap opera performance.

In the past few years, most of the iconoclasts remaining in soaps have been men: General Hospital offers a pair of weirdos who defy categorization, Tony Geary and Maurice Benard, and Justin Deas spices up Guiding Light with off-the-cuff line readings. There are also some iconoclasts who I don’t think are really that good: Kin Shriner’s style is so baroque as to make him seem almost unprepared, and no one else on earth can do whatever it is that Drake Hogestyn does.

Iconoclastic women on soaps, however, have been few and far between. I think that has something to do with the traditional origins of the female-focused genre, and probably some inherent sexism in acting itself. As the male role in soaps has evolved over the last forty years, they’ve been able to get away with more (just as, in movies, the juiciest parts still go to men), but somehow we still expect our soap women to behave in a certain way – steely, flighty, sexy, but not too off the wall.

In large part, the female iconoclasts play roles we’re not supposed to think of as heroic or even sexy. They’re often older, maybe they’ve gained a few pounds, and if they’re not single they’ve at least stopped having bedroom scenes. Conley's Sally could have gotten her hair done by One Life to Live’s exiting Ilene Kristen, who is fabulous as screwball Roxy. And As the World Turns’ Elizabeth Hubbard makes Lucinda Walsh fascinating as she seems to pluck each subsequent line of dialogue out of the air in front of her. But there are a couple of lead female titans in the group, principally Kim Zimmer, as Guiding Light’s Reva Shayne, and Darlene Conley’s sparring partner, Susan Flannery, as B&B’s Stephanie Forrester.

Reva, like Erica Kane, is an outsized personality, but unlike Susan Lucci’s more traditional and mannered portrayal of the diva, Zimmer lets herself hang out there. Reva doesn’t care if one day she happens to look fat, or ugly – she is who she is, and screw you for saying so. As Reva wears her heart on her sleeve, Zimmer is an open book. Her every emotion, however inappropriate, is there on her face for us to see. She laughs and cries at moments in scenes you know weren’t scripted, and sometimes we actually see Reva eat—another taboo broken. Reva is probably the most real, complete female character currently on daytime television, and that’s due to Zimmer’s fierce and fearless performance.

Which brings us to the women of The Bold & The Beautiful. For my money, Flannery and Conley are the representatives of the first half of that title, as they have more balls than any of the men. Flannery’s Stephanie is the female version of the classic soap patriarch. Like Asa Buchanan or Alan Spaulding, she holds the purse and the puppet strings, and imposes her will on those who would otherwise hurt her family. While Stephanie has always been powerful, Flannery has allowed her, over the years, to become less glamorous. Gone are the blond locks, and gone are the wigs that, for a time, replaced them; confident Steph has gone gray and doesn’t care who knows it. At a time when soap opera women are undergoing a myriad of procedures in order to stave off the effects of aging, Flannery has embraced her appearance, and as such, we see Stephanie as that much stronger and sure of herself.

And while I know that B&B fans love a good Steph/Brooke smackdown, for my money the real title matches were between Stephanie and Sally. Maybe it’s because, in relief to Stephanie’s simplicity, Darlene Conley made Sally overly sophisticated: She dolled up, put on too much makeup, and was unashamedly still a redhead at 70. She met Flannery’s steely gazes with a titanic bluster. We won’t soon forget that deep voice, rising in indignation, emphasizing the wrong words in a line just because she could. And like many of her fellow iconoclasts, Conley did not concern herself overmuch with Sally’s sexuality. Conley/Spectra knew that the days of romance were behind her, and enjoyed imparting her own learned wisdom so that the younger set could have their fun.

Conley was truly a member of a rare breed. They don’t make them – nor do they hire them – like her anymore, which is the real shame: In order to evolve, daytime could use a few more iconoclasts, pounding on the barrier of tradition in order to see what else could be discovered.

Demo-hungry soap executives would have called Conley old; I thought of her as something new.

What Luke and Laura Mean

With the recent month-long re-wedding stunt on General Hospital, it seems appropriate for me to weigh in more substantially (albeit belatedly) on the decades-long Luke and Laura phenomenon. In all the mainstream press surrounding the soap genre’s most famous couple, much is made of the original wedding’s impact on popular culture and of the public’s enduring captivation with their relationship (“enduring” being extremely relative in the years of dwindling soap viewership). Mention is frequently made of the improbability of the union, considering all the villains the couple has faced over the years, the frequent years-long absences of one or both of the actors, and Luke’s genuinely disturbing hairstyles. But, we are always told, no circumstances have been able to defeat completely the “greatest love of all.”

Which has been, for 25 years, an illusion.

The Luke and Laura relationship is one of the most subversive stories ever told by a soap opera. Given the number of cooks in the GH kitchen over the years, it’s likely many of the creators never realized this. Ostensibly, it’s a story of love overcoming all obstacles, of unlikely partners uniting and reuniting. But all that is a Trojan horse for the real theme that underlies their drama, day after day, year after year.

Love does not conquer all. It’s only a desperate, temporary refuge from tragedy.

No soap opera couple is a happy couple, I know. All of them, especially the long-lasting ones, go through affairs and breakups and court battles and and remarriages and presumed deaths. This is the nature of the daytime drama, and Luke and Laura have been no different. But two things make them distinctive from the pack: 1) the essential nature and consistency of the characters, which have been nurtured and protected by probably the best acting partners in soap history; and 2) the violence of GH’s universe, which has frequently invaded the couple’s happiness and forced them to deal with problems that often have mortal stakes. Unlike almost every other soap couple – who face adversity from exterior forces and sometimes lose – Luke and Laura are defeated time and again because the external circumstances fuel the internal conflict at the heart of their incongruous pairing.

From the beginning, Luke and Laura’s relationship was clouded with darkness. Mobbed-up clubowner Luke raped innocent Laura, who had been seeking adventure outside her suffocating marriage to golden boy-turned-lout Scotty Baldwin. Whereas only a couple of years earlier Guiding Light punished marital rapist Roger Thorpe by tossing him off a cliff, GH sought to redeem Luke, and the story was reworked so that Laura’s forbidden attraction to him only grew. Their romance was set against a backdrop of adventures with upper-case names: The Left-Handed Boy. The Ice Princess. They were lovers on the run, contending not only with disapproving parents and jealous exes but vengeful mob bosses, hitmen, crooked politicians, and eventually, yes, world-conquering megalomaniacs.

Through it all, hero Luke remained true to heroine Laura, and they wed. And then she disappeared. Without Francis, GH’s writers kept Luke in the superhero mold for a couple of years until Laura returned to usher him out stage right. Apart from an appearance here and there, they were out of town until the mid-1990’s, when the most extensive and realistic cycle of breakup and reconciliations began.

The cracks were apparent right away. Laura had grown into an earth mother in her absence; after years on the run, she longed to nest. Luke found himself drawn back toward the mob, placing his family in harm’s way yet again. Luke’s attraction to danger continuously reveals his unease with his marriage and family life, as he is only able to bond with Laura through mutual fear and hatred of a shared enemy. He exploits external problems for them both to face to mask the problems between them as well as insulate himself from his most tender feelings.

While Laura was subconsciously complicit in this impulse as the young girl Luke married, as she matured and became a parent she no longer found deferment of conflict safe or acceptable. The arrival of her secret son Nikolas, heir to their enemies the Cassadines, exposed the key flaw in their marriage. Luke needed a villain to feel connected with Laura; Laura wanted her bond with Luke to eschew this superficiality.

Now that the Cassadines were no longer their common enemy but family, Luke felt betrayed on two levels: Laura had kept a crucial secret from him for many years, but had also removed from their relationship the common adversary through which they could bond. He no longer had a fellow-hater, and thus drifted away from Laura (and toward his son, who shared his enmity).

While Luke had always attempted to deny the internal obstacles to their marriage, Laura’s insistence that her family be safe led her to rebuff the external forces threatening them. As the years wore on and the stories found their trajectories, it turned out that, generally, Luke had been right – the Cassadines, save Nikolas, remained the Spencers’ enemies, and sought time and again to hurt Laura, Luke, and their children. Laura’s eventual psychological retreat from reality – although brought to fore in a ridiculous plot – was nevertheless a natural evolution from her character’s own need for the ever-mounting life-threatening circumstances facing her family not to be real: For her to still be in her house, with her children, safe and normal. And with Luke as well – although, perhaps, stripped of the self-destructive impulses he had come to embrace.

Which brings our heroes to last November in a story that was a microcosm of their 25 years together. As Laura came out of her catatonia, Luke was relieved but also immediately guilty; he would lie to her about the length of her recovery, of course, but that was, in miniature, a manifestation of his guilt over having raped her, and even having ever met her and drawn her into his world. As they rekindled their romance (which had been dead when she slipped into the coma; they were divorced), this guilt tinged all their scenes together, hovering over them. The audience knew this reunion was not meant to last. Helena Cassadine even reappeared at the couple’s new wedding, which was a pretend-show, a fantasy – one that Laura believed and one that Luke desperately wished were true. He put off telling her the truth because he didn’t want the fantasy to end – he wanted it to go on forever—for his own selfish benefit more than hers, as he eventually confessed to her. But the fantasy always ends, because that’s the story of Luke and Laura.

I thought the reunion was brilliant because it was their story in miniature – passionate love clouded with guilt and denial of each individual’s essential nature. Fundamentally, Luke and Laura are opposites – he is an insular, reckless soul who needs Laura to feel complete and worthy and love; she is a fragile creature who longs to be stable but has chosen a partner who can only expose that fragility. But instead of really addressing these differences and coming to a real, difficult understanding about why they are together, they borrow the clothes from the mannequins and dance down the aisle of the department store.

Luke and Laura are the heroes in a story about a beautiful kind of denial. No matter what turns lie ahead, this tale does not end with a happily ever after. Even if it ostensibly did on-screen, we would know the truth – that wherever they are, Luke and Laura are constantly on the run, fleeing not only their enemies but the deep secret they harbor – that no matter how much they love each other, they will never let themselves be happy.

So why do we all believe in Luke and Laura, invest in them, want to be like them? What makes them so special if they will never last?

Maybe it’s because they try.

New Year's Resolutions '07

Now that 2006’s unusually violent Christmas soap opera season is over, it’s time to look ahead to 2007. This blog is called “4 p.m. Quarterback,” which essentially implies I could do it better, so let me arrogantly make the shows’ New Year’s resolutions for them as we all strive for an improved year for the soap opera.

All My Children: Use this horrible serial-killer arc to refocus the scattershot storytelling and define characters’ roles in Pine Valley. If you were nominating for the Emmys right now, who would you put in the lead category? Or in supporting? No idea? Exactly. Structure is the key to rebuilding AMC into a powerhouse. After that, creating stories of interest to people outside the island of Manhattan.

As the World Turns: ATWT has fallen into its recurring trap of being boring, with too many nice characters dealing with external problems. Stronger conflicts that make sense – unlike the Dusty/Paul thing, which years later still feels forced – would be the shot in the arm this show needs. And more Margo, Margo, Margo. Everybody in Oakdale should have to answer to her.

Bold & the Beautiful: Kyle Lowder will bring a big change to this show as the new Rick. But in order to grow, B&B has got to resolve to move its stories beyond the Ridge-Brooke-Taylor thing. It is time for two of these people to settle down into (grand)parenthood and for one of them to go away forever. The show has brought on so many interesting people exterior of the Forresters only to burn through them too quickly. It’s time to expand the gene pool permanently.

Days of Our Lives: The one to watch in ’07. New head writer Hogan Sheffer was nothing short of a miracle-worker at As the World Turns, primarily because he is a master of structure and tone, so I have high hopes for his run on Days. The cast bloodletting right now may be a little scary, but once this ship is stable it could really float. Let’s hope that Days builds its stories around its strongest actors—it has fewer than ATWT—and does what we know Hogan can do best: Tell big, juicy, entertaining stories just shy of over-the-top.

General Hospital: Stuart Damon is likely not going to be the only vet who gets cut this year, which is probably going to suck. But let’s put a positive spin on it: Leslie Charleson should get a story out of it if GH’s producers and writers are reading my blog (see 101: Killing a Long-Term Character). If they’re going to winnow their cast, GH’s resolution should be to use who they have left to the best of their ability, telling multigenerational stories with a broader perspective, instead of paying people to stand around in the background while seven of their cast members use all the screen time. Oh, and they should resolve to go an entire month without shooting someone. Let’s see if they can do it, kids!

Guiding Light: GL’s 70th year supposedly has a “pay it forward” theme which I doubt will last until March, but we’ll see. In concept, it sounds more in keeping with the show’s premise, and I’ve always maintained GL should have more of a real-world setting. But they’re not going to make it to 71 with their current collection of limp stories – GL should shake things up for real, dump half the cast, and replace them with a mixture of new people and characters we’ve missed. Phillip, Marah, and Shayne should be permanent fixtures, and if that means losing Jeffrey, Olivia, or even the rudderless Blake, then so be it.

One Life to Live: Too bad the biggest casting rumor so far for ’07 – that Hunt Block was on his way – turned out not to be. OLTL could use a villain (or villainess) more complex and dug in to the show’s fabric than Spencer Truman (that long-lost Buchanan thing was just bogus). The second thing they need is more sex – Rex and Adriana are working, but the cast is skewing old. There are too many grownups with too few of their children actually living in town. Let’s build up the main families a bit with more younger members and center the mature romance stories around Bo and Nora.

Passions: Here’s a show that has never lived up to its promise as the true heir to Dark Shadows. Passions will never really be engaging until they scale back on the sophomoric camp and embrace the spooky undertones to become an entertaining fright-fest. If prime-time’s recent successes have proven anything, it’s that a genre show doesn’t have to mock itself to be relevant.

Young & the Restless: Keep the train on the tracks by staying true to recent character developments, like Brad’s unearthed dark side and the newly isolated Jack. Wrap up the plot-driven stories – this reliquary thing is starting to play like latter-day Knots Landing pap, after Latham’s creative peak there—and focus on the deeper conflicts between these excellent characters. And Sharon in a bikini all summer would be just fine, thank you.

In general: Less violence, more romance. Fewer stunts, more humor. More friendship, and more conflict. More buildup, and more payoff. More balance and connection between veteran actors and newbies who can actually act.

And finally, more surprises. You don’t have to kill somebody off to get our attention. There are all kinds of potential plot twists and character developments hanging out there. Use one of those.

Best and Worst of 2006

When I created this blog, I intended the longer historical think pieces to be interspersed by shorter comments on current storylines, and hence, updated more frequently. The problem is that current stories are so mediocre that I have had little interest in commenting. (See previous post: Why Soaps Are Boring.)

That said, in the obligatory year-end sum-up list, I will not be naming a “best show” or “worst show” because they were all pretty terrible.

I’m in a dark mood.

Best Actress: Genie Francis (Laura, General Hospital). Most years I would put Kim Zimmer in this category automatically, and her portrayal of Guiding Light’s Reva was again the brightest spot on the floundering show this year. But Genie knocked my socks off in her four-week return as Laura. Why GH seems uninterested in keeping this dynamo is beyond me. Her poignant, heartbreaking performance brought back something the show has been missing for some time: class.

Worst Actress: Gosh, so many fresh faces on All My Children to choose from…but let’s get nasty and give the award to Kassie DePaiva (Blair, One Life to Live). It’s time to face facts, people: the poor girl can’t act. Her style, unlike her chest, hasn’t developed since she was in Evil Dead 2. She yells, she cries, she speaks every line forcefully in the same monotonous tone. There are much better actresses on OLTL to build the show around. Let’s put Blair in a year-long coma in ’07 and see what Nora’s been up to.

Best Actor: Peter Bergman (Jack, The Young & The Restless). Again, it’s always hard not to hand this to Tony Geary perennially, but Bergman did some standout work this year. Though Jack’s marriage to Phyllis had disintegrated, he was pretty much on an even keel earlier in the year, having come to terms with Victor, struck out on his own in business, and landed the hottest woman in town. But with the death of his father, Jack’s sense of purpose has completely unraveled, as a character previously defined only by his need to please dad must now seek to please himself. I’m not overly worried about the paucity of Abbotts next year: Jack’s going to be fascinating in isolation, and Bergman is best when he’s playing the desperate, calculating underdog.

Worst Actor: Steve Burton (Jason, General Hospital). Yes, I could plug in almost any actor from Days of Our Lives here, but that would be easy and I warned you at the beginning I was going to be mean. I have yet to understand GH’s obsession with the bland Burton. He is charmless, expressionless, and incredibly dull. Since we get all that from Sonny, why do we need Jason? Well, Burton looks better with his shirt off, as he finally proved this year after a long clothed spell, but as we’ve learned time and time again in the soap world, defined abs can’t save an undefined character. I’ll say this for him: He plays this Pinocchio pastiche woodenly.

Honorable Mentions: Greg Vaughan (Lucky, GH) at last had the opportunity to put his stamp on the character with his drug addiction storyline in an Emmy-worthy performance. Grayson McCouch (Dusty, ATWT) was great in the scenes surrounding Jennifer’s death. Victoria Rowell (Dru, Y&R) acted her heart out through her difficult year with Neil. And as usual Tuc Watkins (David, OLTL) stole the show.

Dishonorable Mentions: Eden Reigel (Bianca, AMC) is back, but she clearly hadn’t been away at acting school. Watching Days’ aging heroes Josh Taylor (Roman), Drake Hogestyn (John) and James Reynolds (Abe) trip over each other and their lines in search of Marlena was embarrassing. And Forbes March (Nash, OLTL) is better suited to a grade-school Christmas pageant.

Most Welcome Surprises: Paul Satterfield was actually pretty good as OLTL’s Spencer Truman before they changed him from asshole to villain. Paul Michael Valley (ex-Ryan, Another World) popping up on Guiding Light was a welcome treat. And B&B got Betty White! Betty freakin’ White!

Biggest Disappointments: I was thrilled when Jerry verDorn made the contract leap to OLTL, but he just hasn’t popped yet as Clint. The biggest reasons to spike the egg nog this Christmas, however, are ABC’s recent spate of firings: losing 30-year veterans Julia Barr (Brooke, AMC) and Stuart Damon (Alan, GH) is absolutely asinine. I’m starting my own soap opera where they can play husband and wife. With Ilene Kristen as their maid and Vincent Irizzary as the guy banging their daughter.

Least Watchable Show: Remember, all the shows were pretty bad this year, so we’re left with defining what I was or wasn’t capable of sitting through. The bottom of the barrel this year was All My Children, which stunk up the airwaves week after week with shrill acting, worse camerawork, and pointless stories about unrecognizable characters. Burying Ian Buchanan alive was clearly a metaphor for what’s happening to this once great show. We lost characters like David and Brooke for what – so we could watch three Babe look-alikes fight over three Ryan look-alikes while John James teeters through the hospital sets looking for his teeth? If I were Susan Lucci, I’d bitch-slap the producers for robbing her of vital, sexy leading man Irizzary in favor of the two fossils she’s torn between now. Walt Willey should be doing life insurance commercials. The show lured back Cady McClain only to waste her, while Michael Knight’s Tad is pretty much just a children’s birthday party magician nowadays. The writers have even managed to botch what had been one of the show’s only bright spots – the train-wreck marriage of J.R. and Babe – so now it’s just convoluted and obnoxious. As for all the characters who were babies last year now entering the dating scene – who can keep track? Whose children are these anyway?

Most Watchable Show: The Young & The Restless. Y&R is dangerously close to losing its crown now that, in the wake of Jack Smith’s and Kay Alden’s departures, head writer and executive producer Lynn Latham occasionally tries to fix what ain’t broken. (Losing John drives story, but Ashley? Hope to see you on Days in ’07, Eileen!) Yes, the show has become a little more plot-driven – stolen Jewish artifacts hidden from Nazis! Carmen Mesta murdered outside Neil’s club!—but it hasn’t lost focus on its characters. The Sharon/Jack romance has added a new wrinkle to the Phyllis/Nick relationship and, while only slightly icky, is true to these two wandering souls. Brad’s “outing” as Jewish was a daytime first and uncovered a new layer of this previously vanilla character – he’s been a cipher for years, and now we find out why. Dru and Neil continue to be absolutely electric, and the Baldwin/Fishers are predictably nuts. Though not every story has hit its mark, Y&R is still doing what soaps used to do: tell stories about a variety of characters in a variety of tones and have them all interlock. Ensure these characters are played by people who can act really well, or at least tolerably. And oh, yes: make sure they look good while doing it, with top-notch makeup, wardrobe, and scenery. Maybe that’s why Y&R is still pretty engaging: I know who everyone is, and it looks and feels the way no other daytime show does – like an honest-to-God soap opera.

See ya, 2006. Let’s hope 2007 sucks a little less.

Why Soaps Are Boring

There are a lot of ways to screw up a soap opera. Gutting the cast of legacy characters and replacing them with young people in their first professional acting jobs, for instance. Or failing to link new characters successfully to any existing core family. Telling stories too quickly, or telling them too slowly.

Writing for 20 or 30 characters at a time and telling long-form stories all year, day in and day out, is all about balance. Young and old, parents and children. Tragic and comedic. Heavy and light. Judging from what has aired over the last 50 years, balance is hard to achieve in soap writing. But there’s one kind of imbalance that not only throws the show out of whack, but actually makes it completely uninteresting to the dedicated and casual viewer alike. It has to do with conflict.

It seems so simple, really. Every person who ever got paid a cent for writing would tell you that every story must have conflict. Why, then, have there been a staggering number of instances where soap operas were drained almost entirely of conflict, for weeks, sometimes months at a time? Characters start having birthday parties, long-time enemies either bury the hatchet or don’t share scenes together at all, and everyone in town sits around wringing their hands over some issue or problem exterior of their own relationships to each other.

Then there’s the reverse. In the race to make every moment exciting, soaps can be jam-packed with conflict, each character shifting allegiances and motivations just to feed the beast of scenes filled with angry recriminations and overt threats.

Each is deadly. And each is unbelievably boring.

The absence of conflict most frequently happens on those shows that just have too many nice characters. Guiding Light and As the World Turns, for example, have each gone through some pretty dull happy spells. About five years ago, Ross and Buzz spent almost all their scenes together drinking coffee and complaining about getting older. The women were suddenly a cackling gaggle of multi-generational “girlfriends” who did everything together and incessantly declared they were BFF. Even Alan Spaulding had turned relatively soft. While external forces would drive story (San Cristobel politics, the mob), everyone in Springfield would band together and help each other out. Around the same time on As the World Turns, the writers couldn’t think of anything for their population of nice characters to do except marry Hal and Barbara again, until at last Craig Montgomery returned to town, polarizing everyone and turning the foibles of the good citizens of Oakdale against them.

Soaps with too many good guys usually end up falling into a vicious cycle to generate conflict: someone new comes to town (villain, long-lost child, an ex) and, for reasons that are occasionally clear, starts getting in everyone’s shit. Everyone in town agrees the newcomer is a heel. After a series of schemes, the newcomer is offed. Fingers are pointed and the town heroine is accused. The killer turns out to be someone no one in town really cared about anyway, all the characters are happy to see him/her carted off to jail, and everything gets back to normal and everyone gets along again. Time for a birthday party! Jack, see who’s at the door.

About ten years ago now, ABC, afraid of this kind of tepidity in its dramas, seemed to invent an opposite approach: Soap opera with no good guys at all. If everybody’s bad, then nobody gets along. And so was born the modern age of General Hospital.

It’s easy to understand the reasoning behind the decision. Why would people want to watch a couple of old hens drink coffee when they can watch two mob bosses trying to kill each other? One certainly sounds more interesting than the other, doesn’t it? The trap, though, is that good conflict has to be character-driven, and characters have been bleached out of GH. Like an old, creaky season of Dynasty, all those shifting alliances and multiple partners and who’s-the-daddy dramas have resulted in the exact same kind of stagnation GH’s writers and producers sought to avoid. We never really know where anyone stands because it’s never really certain from month to month who will be in love with whom, or who will be angry with whom, or who will be so angry with whom someone must die, and thus there’s no reason to care. The show’s unpredictability has, in a way, made it predictable.

I know: In terms of romance, I’ve seen the message boards and fan sites devoted to favorite GH couples, and it seems like there are legions of disappointed people out there. On GH, people hook up just to hook up. Jason and Liz fans waited, what, seven years for the two of them to make love, and it was only after we had been urged, for months, to invest in the couple of Jason and Sam. Sonny, having bedded everyone except his bodyguards, has become meaningless as a romantic lead. This month, we are supposed to open our hearts once again to Luke and Laura, and once Genie Francis is gone next month we will be asked to renew our interest in Luke and Skye, or possibly Luke and his wife, Tracy. The engine of plot has ground what were once shiny round apples of characters into flat fruit roll-ups.

Of course, it’s hard to create romance on a show where everyone hates everyone else. Most of the sex is angry sex or drunk sex or revenge sex. I encourage both readers of this blog to watch an entire episode of GH and determine if there is a scene that does not include someone yelling at someone else, or at least sternly reprimanding them. I’m serious—it happens even in the love scenes. No one is friends with anyone on GH, no one even remotely likes his or her parents, and all of them carry guns.

This is where the issue of balance comes in. There’s nothing inherently wrong with a continuing potboiler mob story. It’s just that GH presents no alternative. The show is completely devoid of a sense of humor. When Claire Labine was head writer, the heavy stories were disease-related, and you could always count on a light ‘C’ story for Lucy and Kevin, possibly featuring their pet duck. Nowadays not even Edward is funny. The audience needs some relief from all the invective.

There is a paradoxical element to this argument that cuts to the heart of why the show is boring. Everybody hates everybody, and yet nobody hates Sonny. Nobody good, anyway. The show is now a portrait of a completely amoral universe, and nobody, not Alan Quartermaine, or Mac Scorpio, or Jax, ever looks Sonny in the eye and says they abhor what he stands for and the violence he’s brought to their town and that they intend to take their community back. Nobody on General Hospital has any dreams. Nobody wants to make their world better. And nobody working behind the scenes wants to, either. And so we’re just supposed to watch a bunch of nasty people accuse each other of things until everybody’s dead.

And yeah: I think that’s boring. I’d almost rather watch the birthday party.

The 10 Most Underrated Actresses in Soaps

I did a lot of thinking about this one but it just seemed to me the playing field isn't as varied as it is for the men: soaps being a female-driven medium lend themselves to most of the actresses getting their due at some point. Women I considered for this list generally turned out to be long-time stalwarts who have been unjustly back-burned, like Leslie Charleson (Monica, General Hospital) and Judi Evans (you name it, she's played it) - more underused than underrated. So let's keep it simple.

1-10: Kelly Menighan Hensley (Emily, As the World Turns). For years, the female half of the Hensley acting duo has been consistently hitting it out of the park as one of the most interesting, desperate, misguided heroines on soaps. One Life to Live wishes Blair Cramer would be half as complex as Emily Stewart. After some initial years of standard manipulative bitchiness, Hensley and her character were given the chance to blossom under head writer Hogan Sheffer, who found ways to color Emily's relentless man-eating and friendless existence with a renewed family bond with her mother and sister. Once the writing led us to understand that Emily's ceaseless pursuit of the wrong (often married) men masked her underlying fear of abandonment, Hensley let loose. Thus, no matter the ridiculous plot twists (2006's kidnapping of Dusty was not a high point), Hensley makes Emily three-dimensional.

The real shame is that Hensley has no consistent male acting peer on World Turns, and thus generally cedes airtime to more classic soap heroines like Martha Byrne's Lily or Terri Colombino's Katie. Most memorable was her excellent pairing with the late Benjamin Hendrickson. Hal and Emily's romance, however improbable, was a high point thanks to the undeniable chemistry between the two actors. The recent sequences surrounding the news of Hal's death, ostensibly and justifiably an opportunity to kickstart stories for his son Will as well as his partner and ex-lover Margo (played by the superb Ellen Dolan) were, unsurprisingly to this viewer, dominated by Emily's reaction to Hal's death. The ignominious end to that relationship - and the questionable characterization in Emily's subsequent actions - were called into relief by Emily's realization that she had squandered her chances with Hal, the only really good man who had ever loved her, for pretty much no reason at all. As a viewer, I felt sad for Will and Margo and Barbara, but I wept for Emily. This girl has chops, and she deserves more stories that understand her character and play to her immense talent.

Crisis on Multiple Earths

An interruption of the two-part entry on actors to discuss the hot topic of the moment, today’s Guiding Light/Marvel Comics crossover.

Having read comics for a number of years growing up, I’ve often commented to people that they were similar to the soap genre. A creator responsible for either must steward characters who have existed for a long time and who fulfill certain roles within the storytelling universe they occupy. The only variant in soaps is the presence of actors, who can come and go (though their characters sometimes don’t), whereas comic book characters take part in story at the will of those writing and drawing it. Characters essentially contribute to the “brand name”: While I suppose it’s possible that All My Children would go on without Erica Kane, or that The Avengers would not regularly feature Captain America, both courses would probably be inadvisable.

The storytelling tricks of the trade also translate across soaps and comics – the cliffhanger, the “front-burner” storyline, the simmering subplots that pay off a few months later. These have been a staple of soaps since their inception, but it took Stan Lee, with the invention of the Fantastic Four’s dysfunctional family and then angst-ridden teen Spider-Man in 1961, to bring continuous, month-to-month dramatic storytelling to the comic book form. His innovations were perfected by Chris Claremont’s 15-year or so run on the X-Men, a period which remains the most soap operatic of all comic book storylines, complete with love triangles, illicit affairs, tortured couples with secrets, and even a mysterious doppelganger of a long-dead lover.

The most general similarity between soaps and comics, of course, is that each requires a suspension of disbelief toward the heightened storytelling—a willingness to accept the opera in the soap opera and the comic in the comic book. We have to believe that Barbara Ryan would be allowed to make a lengthy witness stand speech in her own defense just as we have to accept that Bruce Banner’s purple pants stay on even when he transforms into the Hulk.

Guiding Light’s decision to do an episode where Harley Cooper gets super-powers – and to allow their own characters to be featured in a Marvel comic book – is surprising only in that no one did it before, given these similarities. Why then does it seem so discomfiting? Is it Beth Ehlers dressed in thigh-high boots and a mask? Is it Buzz Cooper rendered two-dimensionally talking with Wolverine and looking twenty years younger?

The answer is that, despite the generic comparisons, superheroes really shouldn’t have any place in the world of Guiding Light. No matter the glorious fun of movies like Superman and Spider-Man, or the intriguing mysteries of the new series Heroes, those kinds of characters belong in a different type of story. (Or, at least, on Passions.) As ratings have waned disastrously, soaps in general have drifted toward a sameness, poaching what once made each show unique in the hopes that they will all find what will make them popular again. Guiding Light should be a show that reflects the experience of the American family – over the top, of course, to the extent that all soaps are over the top – but real. Putting Harley in tights seems to cheapen the statement her father made about her four years ago, on July 4, 2002, when he called her and her brother Frank – both police officers – genuine American heroes for being the kind of people who put their lives on the line to help others.

The Coopers have no business mucking in the comic book universe because they should represent, more than anyone else on the show, the real world. They do dishes, they save up all year to buy their kids Christmas presents, they argue and worry when one of them doesn’t come home. They don’t stop runaway cars or absorb electricity. Putting them in a plot like this creates a tiny hole in the show’s fabric of continuity. These “Inside the Light” mini-movies might be entertaining today, but then what world will our characters occupy tomorrow?

We all know this crossover is going to be a one-time experiment, unless the increased publicity results in a bump in ratings, which is unlikely. It’s just frustrating that this latest distraction is diverting the course of self-improvement GL must undertake in order to survive.

There’s nothing wrong with comic books, and the ones with the soapy stories are pretty fun.

There’s plenty wrong with soap operas, and comic books are not the place to turn for help. These are two worlds that shouldn't be merged together.