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.