101: Killing Off a Long-Term Character

For reasons that remain unclear to me, soaps these days are moving faster and faster. One would think that, given the number of hours a soap has to fill in a year compared to the 22 a primetime network show gets (or the 13 or less a cable series offers), daytime television would use its greatest asset – time – to tell stories at a pace that allows viewers access to characters’ emotions and thoughts as the plot moves inexorably forward. But now in the rush to get to the Next Thing, even characters being written out are rarely given proper time for exit scenes before they’re shown the door. This trend is especially offensive when veteran actors are given the axe, as often many years of being a crucial part of the ensemble with prominent storylines give way to a few hasty goodbyes and, perhaps, a quickie memorial.

This week, we said goodbye to John Abbott, who has presided over his family on The Young & The Restless since 1980 and has been played by Jerry Douglas since 1982. Douglas is certainly not the only soap veteran to lose his job in the last few years, but as usual Y&R bucked the trend of a one- or two-day exit and gave John—and Jerry—the lengthy and respectful sendoffs they deserved. John’s passing due to a massive stroke was written, produced, and acted with such craft that it got me thinking about another fairly recent soap death—General Hospital's Tony Jones, who had appeared on that show since 1984. Tony’s ignominious end (at the hands of what I believe we are all still calling the “monkey virus”) was easily one of the most half-assed efforts any soap has produced in recent memory, and contrasts so sharply with Y&R’s tribute to John that a comparison of the two will bear out the textbook rules on how to kill a long-term character.

Rule No. 1. Give the character a story before they die. John Abbott possessed a devotion to his family unmatched by the other wealthy soap patriarchs created around the same time. This may be in part due to the fact that he raised his children alone—the Abbotts were abandoned by their mother prior to their introduction. Though he maintained the toughness and arrogance of the soap father, clashing most frequently with his son Jack, John was also characterized by a nurturing instinct. In Martha Nochimson’s excellent book, No End to Her: Soap Opera and the Female Subject, she writes that John represented a unique hybrid of masculinity and femininity in his approach to his family. (Indeed, daughter Ashley said to him on his deathbed, “You were my father and my mother.”)

Unfortunately, John was equally devoted to his wives, generally with disastrous results. Recently, his union with Gloria Fisher led him to murder Gloria’s abusive ex-husband, Tom, sending John to prison. Though we saw him only sporadically in recent months, John’s unprecedented act of violence brought him to the forefront of story, and so when people weren’t talking to him, they were talking about him.

Tony, on the other hand, had rarely been seen in the two years prior to his sudden departure. The actor, Brad Maule, had been taken off contract and most, if not all, of the characters surrounding Tony were either gone or barely used. Despite the fact that Tony starred in what is arguably the second most famous scene in General Hospital’s history (just short of Luke and Laura saying “I do”)—laying his head on little Maxie’s chest to hear his dead daughter’s transplanted heart beating inside her—more recent writers and producers seemed unable to come up with a story for him, and he languished. When the sweeps-month event of the (heaven help me) “monkey virus” hit General Hospital, doctor Tony suddenly reappeared to help during the crisis, evidently so that his death would add a cheap veneer of significance to the absurd proceedings. Upon his return Tony was given exactly one scene with his recast son prior to his death—a coming out scene, no less—and no scenes at all with his ex-wife and longest term love interest on the show, Bobbie Spencer, until the obligatory deathbed sequence.

Rule No. 2. Take a few days and let it sink in. There’s no reason to race through a character’s demise, particularly one with a lengthy tenure. If you can spend an entire episode with characters on a plane between, say, Springfield and San Cristobel, you can afford to spend more time saying goodbye to and mourning a major character. At the very least, the structure for a fatality would be spread over a week: Friday, the inciting incident occurs; Monday, the character is rushed to the hospital and family is informed; Tuesday, the vigil, farewells and the death itself; Wednesday, other stories are highlighted; Thursday, the funeral is planned; and Friday, the funeral is held.

For John, Y&R added in another protracted beat, as the family argued whether or not to take John off life support. This conflict—which feeds into Rule No. 4—also gave time to gather ancillary cast members like Tracy and Billy to return to Genoa City and have nominal screen time with their comatose father. All in all, it took a full two weeks to kill John, a time simply unheard these days, but absolutely appropriate to his status on the show and his importance to the characters left behind.

The death of Tony Jones, on the other hand, was divided into six acts. You heard me right: they did it in a day. After a few hints the day before (mainly consisting of Tony sweating as he treated patients), Tony succumbed in act one, family and friends were told in act two, they rushed to his side in act three, goodbyes were said in act four, Tony died in act five, and Bobbie was left alone with the corpse in act six. It was like a death written for Archie Comics. Tony’s memorial wasn’t until nearly three weeks later—once sweeps were over, naturally.

Rule No. 3. Surround the character with loved ones. In an exit interview, Jerry Douglas expressed gratitude that his show cared enough about him that they paid for fifteen actors to be in the room when John passed away. Imagine! Fifteen actors is more than half Y&R’s cast. Practically everyone who mattered to John was present to send him off, including characters who returned to the show just for that purpose, and each had an individual moment to say goodbye to him. The result was an incredible feeling of weight and tragedy surrounding this event. When everyone else cares, the audience cares.

Telling a story like this properly naturally costs money—you’d be hard pressed to find a show that pays to feature fifteen actors on any regular day, let alone one that will bring back former characters who wouldn’t logically miss the funeral. (Y&R loses a point, though, for Mamie’s absence.) General Hospital couldn’t really be bothered with Tony, and so the only people who showed up were Tony’s ex, Bobbie; his son Lucas; his niece Maxie; former friends Alan and Monica; and, most curiously, his brother-in-law Luke, with whom he’d only shared a few nominal scenes over the years, but who apparently took it the hardest. At Tony’s memorial, several other Port Charles denizens turned up, apparently to fill the pews, because Tony’s brother Frisco and sister-in-law Felicia couldn’t make it.

Rule No. 4. Use the death as a springboard for story. One of the basic rules of soap opera storytelling—and one that GH’s current writers are really, really bad at—is that every event leads to something else. Stories spin off in other directions. A character’s absence should ripple across the town and transform existing situations and relationships. The argument over whether to take John off life support has added a new, vicious strain to the revived conflict between his son Jack and widow Gloria, as well as their two families. Jack wants Gloria out of the Abbotts’ lives, while Gloria seeks to define her role, as well as those of her sons, in the evolving family dynamic and in the Abbott empire. Now that John is no longer present to mediate the dispute, the audience can anticipate a bitter war that will add a dramatic new dynamic to future stories.

No such luck with Tony Jones: He had been reduced to such an ancillary presence that his death was literally meaningless for the world of General Hospital. While his loss might have been a defining moment for Bobbie as she began to seek out another chance with Noah, or for Lucas as he came out, or for selfish Maxie as she could have realized she was wasting the gift Tony and her cousin gave her, even these meager possibilities were ignored. Which brings us to the ancillary rule 4(a):

Rule No. 4(a). Let the death inject life into another character. Stories must not just be redefined by a death, but so must characters. Jack’s egotism now fuels what he perceives to be a dynastic responsibility to replace his father, and it is apparent that even as his grief is laid naked, he is growing colder. His cruel decision to tell the Fishers the wrong time for John’s funeral so that they could not attend is likely the tip of the iceberg as Jack draws into himself and exacts tighter control over his family. Always a complex character, Jack’s brushes with darkness now appear to be overpowering him.

Conversely, GH’s unwillingness to give any story to Bobbie resulted in a focus shift to her brother Luke, who though barely acquainted with Tony—or really anyone, for that matter, he is so insular—felt moved enough to give the eulogy. The following day, Luke returned to being unaffected, as it was time for the Next Thing.

Rule No. 5. Don’t forget the little touches. In the end, though, it’s the little things that elevate a character’s death to a classy production. Soaps shouldn’t skimp on the flashbacks—both Y&R and GH had them aplenty, though Y&R’s were tied directly to surviving characters. Mentions of absent family members are welcome, as there’s nothing more frustrating than when someone’s child somehow doesn’t return to town for a parent’s funeral. But it’s getting to the heart of the dying character that makes the day. Though GH didn’t earn their ending, it was absolutely essential that in his last moments Tony see his dead daughter B.J., and thus despite the slapdash scenes preceding it, Tony’s death brought him full circle by evoking the part of his character we all loved most about him. And though the scenes between John and his children were incredibly moving, it was Katherine’s last words to him, evoking their bygone childhood together, that got me: “See you at the lake.” It was at once a fond goodbye and an admission that Katherine herself is closer to the end than she was the beginning.

It would have been nice, especially for this long-time GH viewer, if Tony Jones had gotten the John Abbott treatment. Y&R’s storytelling remains matchless, though any show can follow these rules and create a moving event that celebrates the departed, energizes the characters left behind, and drives story for years. The irony is that General Hospital did it ten years earlier, when Tony’s daughter B.J. died.

Who the Hell is Alexis Davis?

On any list of the best actresses in soap opera history, Nancy Lee Grahn would certainly place near the top. Too unconventional to play the damsel in perpetual distress, and too intelligent to play the sweeps-week victim, Grahn confounds expectations of feminine soap acting with her complex and confident performances. She has never acted with a man who is her equal. I’ll repeat that for the righteously indignant: She has never acted with a man who is her equal.

Yes, I love Lane Davies too, especially in his turn as Mason Capwell, Grahn’s sparring partner when she played the incomparable Julia Wainwright on Santa Barbara. And Rick Hearst, current paramour to her Alexis Davis on General Hospital, is competent and interesting. (And then there was Maurice. That’s a separate post someday.)

As Julia, Grahn played a fiercely independent feminist and attorney who refused to succumb to male authority and sought happiness in her own (Wainw)right. She constantly questioned her own happiness, especially when that feeling was linked to Mason, because of her deep distrust of his gender. Their comically tortured romance was, I believe, what made that show special and unique, and yet it was Grahn’s Julia alone who stood out and subverted the genre’s traditions by dominating the perspective of every scene. (The contrast on SB between Grahn’s Julia and Marcy Walker’s Eden was startling, and indicative of the show’s schizophrenic writing. Julia seemed to come out of a 1920’s play or a 70’s Jane Fonda movie; Eden was a straight-up Days of Our Lives heroine who needed a “Save Me” tee-shirt.)

Santa Barbara left us in 1993, and three years later Grahn returned to daytime as Alexis Davis on General Hospital. Alexis is (shocker!) an attorney, and as soon as she appeared she started raising hell – with her cousin, the brooding patriarch of an evil family, Stefan Cassadine, and with Stefan’s arch-nemesis, then-lion-haired Luke Spencer.

From the start, it was clear that GH’s writers intended Alexis to be a Julia clone. Despite her ties to the show’s gothic underpinnings, Alexis was thrust into a relationship with Masonesque Ned Ashton, another millionaire playboy with serious women issues. This pairing evolved into Alexis’s loveless marriage to Jasper Jacks (or, as the character and the writers so ridiculously insist, Jax) while Jax’s too-skinny love married Ned in a Bob-Carol-Ted-Alice pastiche.

Eventually, Alexis fell victim to the incomprehensible revisionism forced on the Cassadine family tree, and she was revealed to be Stefan’s sister, not his cousin, for reasons that had an effect on absolutely no one. (If it had turned out they weren’t related, that might have explained that weird vibe we always got when Lex visited Stef in that crypt of a mansion, and then we would have had a soap opera story.) In a similar vein, history was altered so that Stefan’s revelation that he was Nikolas Cassadine’s parent (with Laura Spencer), not his uncle as previously believed, was undone, and he returned to being an uncle who was written into irrelevance. Apparently, it is a recurring theme that Cassadines have no idea who created them and, in turn, whom they created.

Alexis’s involvement in this Cassadine soup did her no good, and she spent her time representing characters played by less interesting actors in three-week trials until her big hookup with mobster Sonny Corinthos (which produced a daughter) and then Sonny’s brother Ric (which produced another daughter). Even Lane Davies turned up again in an ill-conceived role and was quickly bumped off. In the midst of all this, it was revealed, even more improbably, that Alexis had a secret daughter portrayed, or rather represented in a physical space, by Playboy playmate and Dancing With the Stars winner Kelly Monaco. It would be difficult to find two actresses less alike in a common story, unless perhaps Judi Dench and Paris Hilton were to make a comedy about hashish-smoking nuns. Saddling a fiercely independent woman with this doe-eyed weeper seems to be one of GH's most criminal acts.

It’s likely that any soap opera character’s history, when quantified and calcified in this manner, would represent this many shifts in tone and detail, given that producers and writers change over time and have different visions for the characters. But it has seemed evident that, in the ten (ten! astonishing!) years that Grahn has been on GH, she has been forced to extremes in order to cobble some sort of consistent individual out of Alexis Davis. Is she Julia Wainwright-lite? Is she the voice of reason in a nefarious, incestuous family? Is she a woman who loves a mobster or the woman who wants him put in jail? Is she a woman who keeps secrets like a daughter born years ago, or a woman who is wounded when those she loves keep secrets from her? The writers don’t seem to know (or, perhaps, care), and yet Nancy Lee Grahn, day in and day out, keeps us interested. With her wry smile, flashing eyes, and strident stance, she makes us wonder.

I don’t know any more about Alexis Davis than I did when I first saw her ten years ago. But it will be easy to keep watching her, and maybe one day I’ll know what makes her tick.

Removing the Center: Institutional Memory & Guiding Light (2)

Last year, Guiding Light made a decision even riskier than tossing Maureen Bauer through a windshield. Either in the face of budget cuts or seeking to capitalize on the press Days of Our Lives got for killing off—and then bringing back—about a dozen characters in a few short months, the choice was made to murder Phillip Spaulding, who for several years prior had been the show’s leading male character. As played by Grant Aleksander, Phillip ranks easily among the most interesting, complex characters ever created on a soap opera. He was a noble Marler by birth and a ruthless Spaulding by rearing, and thus combined, in a kind of psychological morass, the twin impulses of both. Phillip, like House, was an asshole you couldn’t help but feel affection, even a kind of pity, for.

Aleksander infused all of Phillip’s stories, be they brilliant or misguided, with an inner dialectic born of this tortured dichotomy: All his relationships had a push-pull dynamic, as if Phillip could never decide whether he needed someone to love him or if he needed no one. Though Phillip had fascinating love-hate relationships with the women in his life, his best scenes were always with his two male influences – his father, the ruthless Alan Spaulding, who always encouraged him to retreat and shore up his defenses, and his best friend, Rick Bauer (Ed’s son), who wanted him to lighten up and do the right thing.

Phillip’s tortured nature had gotten the better of him in 2004, and he suffered depression and eventually a full-fledged breakdown. These scenes—including one where Phillip lay on the floor and refused to get up because he couldn’t see the point—were often difficult to watch and yet represented some of the best in the character’s history.

The new producing and writing team hired after this storyline decided that Phillip’s breakdown could either make him a better man or a worse one. They chose the latter, and Phillip’s return from the hospital saw his character descend, almost ridiculously, into a clichéd soap villain. Like some Bond nemesis, he built a model of Springfield and started moving around buildings like chess pieces. Uncharacteristically, he betrayed his own daughter. Once everyone in town started saying things like, “I could KILL Phillip Spaulding!!!”, the writing was on the wall.

For a while after Phillip’s death, the show really was infused with a new energy, as the writers had intended. Characters who had been friends became mistrustful of each other, and even good old Rick Bauer was a suspect. But as it became clear that Phillip was never intended to be dead after all, GL was dealt a blow when Grant Aleksander refused to return. Despite the fact that they built a story around a character who remained their most important even after his death, they had fallen once again into the trap of creating a hole in the show’s center and being left unable to fill the gap. The characters that once surrounded Phillip now seem unmoored and directionless, wandering aimlessly without anyone to connect them.

What is it about Guiding Light that makes its writers carve out its central characters, again and again? In Maureen’s case, was it an inability to see how important she was to the other characters, boring or not? Or in Phillip’s, was it mistaking his isolationism with out-and-out villainy? The institutional memory at Guiding Light seems to be its fear of itself and its desire to be like others. Losing Maureen made GL less “old-fashioned” and more like trendy and youth-centered General Hospital, which has lacked maternal figures throughout its nearly 45-year history. And killing off Phillip injected Days of Our Lives’ boldness into the show as well as, sadly, its soullessness. Guiding Light could use its heart and soul – Maureen and Phillip – right about now.

Removing the Center: Institutional Memory & Guiding Light (1)

My first detailed post and already it’s a two-parter. It’s hard to believe I’m married to an editor.

Institutional memory in the traditional sense can be a good thing. A company or organization has methods, strategies, ways of doing business that its employees remember and share with new employees so that the business remains successful and its identity remains intact. The flip side is when an organization becomes too unwieldy, bigger than the sum of its parts, and as it lumbers along institutional memory can result in making the same mistakes over and over again.

Television shows that have been running as long as soap operas can have institutional memory, too. Obviously, success breeds watered-down repetition: How many freaking times will General Hospital attempt to recapture the shock and thrill of Lily Corinthos’s sudden death in a car explosion lo those many years ago? But failure can repeat itself on a soap too. The best example of institutional memory bringing out the worst strains of a soap’s identity is Guiding Light.

Guiding Light, the longest running dramatic show in broadcast history (having started on the radio in 1937 and moved to television in 1952), has naturally experienced its share of creative peaks and valleys. Its primary strength has been its cast: In the last 25 years, GL has boasted some of the best actors on daytime playing complex, rich characters who have, with relatively few exceptions, maintained their essential integrity. (I think I will explore the exceptions in a future post, with special attention paid to the many insufferable faces of Beth Raines, who despite being played by the same actress since 1989, has essentially been a different character each year.)

If its characters have been at the heart of the show’s many successes, Guiding Light's removal of them is its principal repeated failure. Every week, soap operas write out characters to accommodate exiting actors, economic constraints and storylines. Like its counterparts, Guiding Light has throughout its run pruned away at its cast, sometimes at main characters, for all of these reasons. But what makes GL stand out is its recurring mistake of striking at the very core of its cast to drive story. The show, seeking to distinguish itself from the pack with a big “death” event, actually does damage to what made it distinguishable in the first place.

The death of Maureen Bauer in 1993 became one of the show’s most infamous mistakes. The Bauer family was introduced on the radio in the late 1940’s and have been a generational mainstay to present day: sometimes robust, more often dwindling, but always remaining at the emotional center of the show. Like Days of Our Lives’ Alice Horton or All My Children's Mona Kane, Maureen’s mother-in-law, Bert Bauer, had the go-to kitchen for advice to the younger set. When Charita Bauer, who played Bert, died in 1984, the torch was eventually passed to Maureen, who along with Ed became the town’s moral compass.

Legend has it that a focus group audience found Maureen’s moral superiority and homespun advice too boring, and so the decision was made to kill her off. Ed was inexplicably tossed into an affair with Lillian Raines, and Maureen was killed in a car accident after a night of angry recriminations. Her absence immediately punched a hole in the show’s essential identity; GL no longer had any character to assume the role of mother-counselor. The show’s other 40-plus women – Vanessa Chamberlain, Holly Norris, and soon a reborn Reva Shayne—were leading ladies too busy with their own problems to worry about anyone else’s. The crucial, central function that Maureen fulfilled – embodying Guiding Light’s special sense of continuity and community – gave way to more rote, life-and-death soap opera stories. The light had faded.

Next: History repeats itself 12 years later.

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For many years now, I’ve gone online in search of intelligent people writing about soap operas. For the most part, what I discovered on this sad journey was that the websites and forums out there confine themselves to crowing about unsubstantiated casting rumors; bitching about head writers and in some cases mocking their physical appearance; waxing nostalgic over their shows’ past greatness (1979 to 1994 seems to be the period most fans of any show want back); or expressing unhealthy, orgasmic devotion to a particular couple and threatening to boycott viewing if that couple is not front and center every day.

Whither the intelligent criticism? The easy answer is that no one intelligent is watching soap operas (or, indeed, making them), but I don’t believe that. I’m a populist, and despite what Nielsen insists are plummeting ratings I believe that there are plenty of people out there watching soaps, some fervently and some casually. Any poll on the street would tell you that almost everyone can name at least one soap opera (General Hospital and Days of Our Lives are the most recognizable) and at least two-thirds can name at least one soap star (you know who!). Soap viewers are not just lonely women with too many cats, gay men in college, elderly shut-ins, or any of the other stereotypical groups we are told are the last devotees of a dying entertainment form.

Likewise, soap operas themselves are not the turgid, badly acted and produced cheese-fests that American popular culture (and NBC) insists they are. Like any television art, soaps are capable of great things. They’re also capable of astonishing inanity, and sometimes they deserve their bum rap. But over the years a lot of effort and thought has been put into the daily creation of these shows, and I think just as much thought should be put into their criticism and dissection.

I’m tired of the inferiority complex that’s taken hold of daytime television. If it’s acceptable to talk about CSI or its kin in critical terms, it should be the same for As the World Turns. That’s what I want to do here.

And I suppose there will probably be some bitching.

But here are my promises:

I will not write about rumors, imminent dismissals, or supposed upcoming storylines. I’m going to talk about what has actually been on the air.

I will try to discuss all the soaps currently on the air, though I could not possibly keep up with them all every day. And I will try, really hard, to sit through an entire episode of Passions.

I will frequently travel back in time. There will be Knots Landing posts, and Santa Barbara posts, and maybe mention of Bobby Ewing in the shower. Sometimes we have to look back at where we’ve been to know where we’re going.

I will never refer to couples by their stupid combined names used online and, now, sadly, the soap press. When I write about, say, Lucky and Liz, I will call them Lucky and Liz.

Similarly, I will refer to actors and actresses by their full names, not their initials, as I know how to type.

I will try always to be entertaining and maintain a sense of humor in my posts. We’re all too serious and defensive about everything these days. It’s okay to have fun talking about this stuff. I will reserve my moral indignation for reacting to actual news.

Now: It’s 4 p.m. Soaps are over on the East Coast. Let’s start talking.