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.