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.