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.