MarkH's Soap Musings

Fanfic/speculation: How I'd write the Delia-Cancer story on Y&R

2011-09-02T06:15:00.000-07:00

Readers who have been here before know that I've not liked the lack of emotion or the lack of "playing all the beats" on Y&R these days. Having a kid with cancer is another act of emotional manipulation on Y&R's part...but I'm actually okay with that! This is the stuff of classic soaps, and dying children can really milk the emotions and bring characters together--especially a child (like Delia) who is in the middle of the Chancellor/Abbott/Baldwin/Newman orbits.

In my view, the story would have BEATS. Now, maybe Y&R intends to do it this way, but I vaguely doubt it.

It is important to remember that (a) Billy and Victoria are estranged, basically because they lost two babies (one miscarriage and one illegal adoption). Thus, "babies" will have special emotional salience for them; (b) there is clearly unfinished Billy/Chloe chemistry, driven by Elizabeth Hendrickson and Billy Miller's "go for broke" emotional styles; (c) Y&R has a long history of "Christmas miracles", which could fit the timing of this story JUST FINE if Y&R slows it down a bit.

In my version:

(1) We'd milk the suspense of Delia's illness. What is wrong? Tests and worry. Finally, the cancer diagnosis that I feel sure is imminent. (I'm not spoiled, but I just know soap conventions).

(2) Billy, currently carousing in Hong Kong, comes home to be with his sick daughter. He is filled with self-loathing and regret.

(3) The first place to check is the parents. Sadly, Billy/Chloe are NOT compatible donors of bone marrow that could save their daughter. Note, bone marrow is not always the FIRST resort, so some time could be taken in giving Delia treatment that does not seem to be working. This can increase the drama and tension as the audience YEARNS to save the suffering child.

(4) The clock ticks, and Delia gets sicker and sicker. One consequence is that Billy starts to grow up (again), and Billy and Chloe set their hostilities aside. The chemistry between them is affectionate, as co-parents, but it is still threatening to Victoria, from whom Billy is estranged. Viki ACHES to comfort Billy, but she holds back, afraid of pain. Meanwhile, Billy puts up walls with Victoria, because he thinks (about himself) that he is a disaster. He wants to spare Victoria more hurt. The audience LONGS for the couple to just put down their walls and connect.

(5) Victoria is feeling ill, and learns that she is pregnant. Viewers will recall that JUST before Billy took off for Hong Kong, he and Victoria had unprotected couch sex.

(6) Victoria is torn. After having lost a total of FOUR babies, have this baby -- Billy's baby -- is the biggest joy she could ever know. But she is estranged from Billy, and his life is a mess right now, so she says nothing. Her plan is to tell Billy eventually, but for now, she's trying to save him another complication. She knows he'll worry that Victoria will also miscarry this child, so she doesn't want to saying anything until she is sure. Also, Viki is TERRIFIED that she's going to lose this baby...so she doesn't really want to make the pregancy public...since the baby could once more disappear.

(7) Of course, preganancies reveal themselves. Viki is in the shower, and the bathroom has Billy's special "trailer park" doorknob on it. Victoria is locked in the bathroom. She starts to spot. She is terrified. She can't get out, and doesn't have a phone. When Victoria doesn't show up for several meetings, Billy hears, and heroically rushes over to the house. He gets in past the trailer-park doorknob, and sees the naked Viki. The pregnancy is revealed!! Huge Friday cliffhanger!

(8) Of course, Victoria has to admit the pregnancy AND that she is spotting. Billy rushes her to the hospital, and all is okay with the child. It was normal spotting, and it was harmless.

(9) At this time, Dr. Nate Hastings returns to Genoa City. The transplant expert has been working on a new category of research--fetal stem cell transplants. Olivia asked him if there wasn't SOMETHING he could do for Delia, who is now hovering near death. By the way, it's near Thanksgiving.

(10) Chloe learns Victoria is pregnant, and she can't hide here jealousy and resentment. Chloe says to Billy "You don't even care that you're going to lose one baby--Victoria will just give you another."

(11) When Nate learns of Victoria's pregnancy, and that Billy is the father, he reports that he has been working on FETAL stem cell transplants to achieve miracle pediatric cancer cures.

(12) It is revealed that Viki's baby IS a match for Delia, but there is GREAT RISK extracting stem cells to baby Now Viki in crisis. Does she risk the baby she SO wants -- Billy's baby!!--to save Billy's OTHER daughter?

(11) Genoa City picks sides, Abbotts saying Viki must consent, Newmans against. Chloe takes Viki to court, but loses the case (this is a one-day emergency trial). All hope seems lost for Delia.

(12) Now, as December approaches, Viki realizes that her love for Billy is so great, she has no choice but to risk the life of her unborn child so that the other daughter Billy loves -- Delia -- has a final chance. It is risky for everyone, but Victoria realizes she has no choice.

(13) As Christmas arrives, we learn that (i) Victoria's baby survives the stem cell extraction; (ii) Delia survives and thrives following treatment.

(14) Billy is speechless with gratitude. His love for Victoria is overwhelmingly stronger than ever. Billy and Victoria reunite.

(15) But the story continues with many unanswered questions. Will Victoria's baby survive? And can the once-predatory Chloe hide the fact that this crisis has reawakened her obsessive desire for Billy...and her desire to put her family back together for Delia's sake? To be continued...

(I also think, in all of this, Cane should feel some paternal stirrings for Delia--since he was once her "father"--and while this doesn't lead to anything serious, I think Lily should feel vaguely discomfited that while she is pushing Cane away, he's starting to form other ties...)

The Rise of Los Angeles

2011-08-22T06:58:00.000-07:00

In a recent blog post, I lamented the state of The Young and the Restless, and I referred to The Bold and The Beautiful as my "also-ran" soap. I'm not alone. If you track the ratings, media attention (anything, really, but the international appeal), B&B never quite has seemed to measure up to Y&R.

At the same time, in the last few years, the dynamic has changed. B&B has won the "Best Show" Emmy (in a shrinking field) for the last three years. While I hold my nose at this (not because the show is bad, but because Brad Bell and his team have scripted VERY SPECIFIC "Emmy shows", usually involving Susan Flannery and Betty White), it's hard to miss the fact that the dynamic of B&B has changed.

For those of us who are William Bell acolytes, it is also hard to miss that most of his proteges (folks who brought Y&R to Number One status with him)--Kay Alden, Jack Smith, David Shaughnessy, Ed Scott--toil on B&B in one way or another. Many of B&B's most interesting cast members these days also are those who were jettisoned by Y&R (Sony) in recent cost-cutting regimes.

So, I'm still ambivalent about proclaiming B&B as my #1 soap. B&B still does infuriating things that are simply eye-rolling. Examples: Steffy declares the much-older Bill Spencer Jr as her soulmate--but when he dumps her (in a great, heartwrenching arc), she turns her attentions to his son THE VERY NEXT DAY. After decades together, on the SUSPICION that his wife Brooke might have had berry-fueled sex with his son Thomas, Ridge dumps her--has a wedding with ex-wife Taylor the same WEEK--and dumps Taylor at the altar and returns to Brooke THAT NIGHT once the truth is revealed.

So, why can I forgive B&B, which has made a habit of these sudden story jumps (and of hiring top-notch soap performers from other shows, but dropping them within one or two contract cycles )? I think it has to do with the fact that B&B embraces its identity as classic soap.

Take the example of the Steffy tale, mentioned above. In the current story, Steffy now lusts after Liam (Bill's son). Liam wants to be engaged to the virginal Hope. Steffy's lust for Liam makes sense--he's BILL'S son, and he's in love with a LOGAN (the family she blames for all her troubles). Liam also saved her life recently--a bonding experience. In this triangle, we have three core families (The Taylor-Forresters, the Logans, and the Spencers) all mixed up. Liam's lust makes sense...he's a horny young guy and he's been veeeeeerrrrry patient with Hope. Hope's sexual reticence makes sense--she seen how her mother's "Slut from the Valley" ways have often caused mayhem. Bill Spencer Jr. will be torn with jealousy if his son takes up with the woman (Steffy) he was recently about to leave his wife for. The downstream stuff will be even better. Fighting for their daughters will pit Brooke versus Taylor against each other again...but for once not over Ridge!

I've often complained about Hunter Tylo's Taylor...who was once the sanctified oncologist/psychiatrist...but who really WAS the voice of sense on B&B. In recent years (since her second return from the dead), Taylor's been off the rails -- alcoholic, vehicular manslaughter, sleeping with Brooke's son, sanctimonious...endless. Taylor is now a spastic, hypocritical, controlling and sanctimonious (I use that word again because it is DEFINITIONAL) controlling mother.

Now, positioning Taylor as the show's evil mother is BRILLIANT. Evil mothers used to be the stock in trade of the best soaps! (think Phoebe Tyler and Enid Nelson on All My Children; think Vanessa Prentiss on Young and Restless). With Susan Flannery being open about wanting to retire (and her character having Stage IV Lung Cancer), the show needs a new "bad momma". Hunter Tylo is now perfectly positioned for that (living through her children because her own life is bereft; using her children to fight old battles).

The beauty of B&B is that the throughline of characters is not forgotten. Rick has ALWAYS hated Ridge (as the man who chased his daddy--Eric--away). Thomas grew to hate Rick (after Rick slept with both of his sisters AND his mother AND took a certain primacy at Forrester Creations). It was enough that Thomas tried to scare/hurt Rick twice. Amber, the needy social climber BRILLIANTLY played by Adrienne Frantz (much missed, by me, on Y&R), took BOTH of their virginities. Word that Jacob Young is returning in the role of Rick makes me think that a Rick-Amber-Thomas triangle is automatically going to unfold...and how amazing will that be? The triangle makes sense, the actors are capable, and we can already predict every reasonable beat in the story.

In the end, that's the thing about B&B that makes it best. It embraces classy soap storytelling. (Friday's cliffhanger was a very public proposal from Liam to Hope--and she was clearly ambivalent about it), it follows core families and doesn't mostly kill them off. Actions from decades ago are remembered and fuel today's characters. The show almost never veers into crime-drama or science fiction...so that one knows one is going to get good domestic/romantic/business stories. Even now, the show is setting up a Bill Spencer/Nick Marone alliance to bring down the House of Forrester (again)...and the story will be leavened with decades of justifiable personal resentments. The alliance is also on shaky ground, because both Bill and Nick have strong emotional connections to Bill's wife (and Nick's ex-paramour) Katie Logan. However this story goes, it will force Forresters, Logans, and Spencers (all intertwined already) to pick sides. That's how you write a soap!

Genoa City Lost

2011-08-15T12:17:00.000-07:00

Readers of daytimeconfidential can discern the truth of Jamey Giddens' recent critique of Y&R. The state of the show is appalling...but it is also curious. All the elements -- from production to writing to acting -- are THERE...so why is the show so bad?

In short, the problem is the absence of heart...of emotion, nostalgia, or sincere feeling. Even remarkable actors who have bled on the stage for us in the past are clearly not connecting to the rushed, plotty show they're putting on.

My credentials: I have watched Y&R since 1973 (I was a wee 8 year old, but mom put it on). Y&R is so ingrained in the narrative of my life that I view it not from a "technical" perspective, but as someone who knows intuitively when the show is true to its nature. Or when -- as now -- it is not.

Right now, we have a canvas filled with original or veteran faces (Kay, Victor, Jack, Paul, Phyllis, Nick, Sharon, Ashley, Kevin) and characters we saw born on this show (Billy, Victoria, Chloe, Ronan)...but it all feels so flat. Characters are doing things they'd NEVER do (Kay annulling her son's marriage out of spite, Victor throwing a woman out of an ambulance and taking a son away from his father).

This happened once before. After a promising start, Lynn Latham's second year got seriously off the rails, as Nikki (Nikki!) ran for Senate and the entire town clustered around some rural village that was being turned into a resort (Clear Springs). Little made sense. Ratings began to decline precipitously during this period, and continued to do so well into Maria Bell's "rescue regime".

It is curious that Maria Bell's Y&R feels so off right now. We know she's capable of heart. Her nadir-story was "the death of Kay". Kay's funeral and eventual reunion were the ultimate of "heart", as a touching romance bloomed with Murphy, old friends and rivals reunited at Kay's funeral, and Marge got a touching "ghostly farewell" to the tune of Perry Como's "Papa Loves Mambo". Greatness!

But then the Silver Chipmunk happened. It is fair to say that, since then, Y&R has progressively devolved back into a crime riddled (Richard Hightower! Skye's multiple deaths! Patty's reign of terror! Corporate shenanigans!, Diane's murder! Baby stealing! Over-the-top Australian mobsters!) mess. Not only do these stories not elicit feeling or emotion...emotion is decisively left out. Examples:

Diane -- a character with a thirty year tie to Jack -- gets nary a tear (except, maybe, from the terrific Christian Leblanc's Michael). Adam is betrayed by Sharon, and embarks on a spree of revenge (thank heavens Michael Muhney -- and his eyes!! -- work against the malevolence of the tale). Three touching couples are made -- well -- not touching.

- Billy and Victoria: The story here would have been to see them stay together -- fight together -- against obstacles. Instead, they folded as soon as the first marital assault hit them. Where's the rooting value in that?
- Nick and Phyllis: Apparently they're sex buddies again. Okay. The actors still FIRE UP the room in every scene when they're together. So why is there no emotion or tenderness or motivation in their scenes?
- Lily and Daniel: (Controversial here--I know Cane/Lily have major fans). There's something beautifully touching in a pair that damaged their union through youthful mistakes rediscovering each other from a grown up perspective. Daniel feels he doesn't want to be a father (shadows of his own damaged childhood and paternity/maternity issues??)...but could Lily make him feel secure in his nurturing skills, so that he would be a good stepdad to her kids...and even dad to his own Lucy?

There WERE promising emotional stories.

The Lear-esque "Fall of the House of Newman" was especially good...and it really made the most out of Marcy Rylan/Eric Braeden's terrific chemistry. The family was fractured. This promised YEARS of rivalry and reconciliation. Instead...it is over. Forgotten. Done. Huh?

Phyllis -- inexplicably -- tried to pull baby Lucy from the secure loving parents who were raising her. (I guess I get it...it has to do with making up for her own previous shortcomings as a mom). Everyone picked sides. It was an agonizing story. Then...Phyllis got Lucy, was ostracized for week, then Nick and Michael seemed to mostly forgive her...and it's over. Forgotten. Done. Huh?

The Y&R canvas is OVER-STUFFED. The show seems to have little motivation to write for Tricia Cast/Doug Davidson, Kristoff St. John ... Yet the show also refuses to decisively clean house, and to commit to protracted story arcs we can invest in.

These days, I find little compelling material to draw me to the show. There are a few very capable actors (Muhney, Leblanc, Rylan, Thomas-Scott, E. Davidson) who are still finding emotion in every scene they do. There are a few others who rise to the occasion when they can connect with the material (Bergman, Braeden, Heinle, D. Davidson, Stafford). Still others seem utterly emotionally disconnected from this plotty show...even actors who have given us AMAZING performances in the past.

I still check in every day, but more and more reluctantly. My thoughts stray to cable (Breaking Bad, Torchwood, True Blood, Big C, Weeds). B&B (that's another blog post) --always my also-ran soap--has become my first soap of choice!. I guess I'm waiting for Genoa City to welcome me back to a big, nostalgic, sloppy, feel-good-or-feel-bad-BUT-FEEL-SOMETHING homecoming.

Why I'm dismayed by Y&R Diane Jenkings Murder Mystery (Killer "revealed")

2011-08-07T08:03:00.000-07:00

This adapted from a twitter-stream in which I ranted this morning. Surely I'm not the only one who feels this way. Ugh...

Structurally, I actually LIKE the murder mystery, and if I'm reading it right (see the section at bottom for my guess about the killer), it's one of the best-constructed for Y&R in yrs.

What I don't like about the murder mystery is the underlying emotional mistruths and plottiness it forces us to endure. To wit:

(1) We KNOW (subjectively) that none of the nine prime suspects is a killer......even Adam, we KNOW--because Muhney's eyes tell us he's not. (He did NOT kill Hightower).

(2) Too many crime stories (Hightower, Patty, mob, murder) have infected Y&R since the latter days of Lynn Latham. What about emotion, love and family drama in small Wisconsin town? That Y&R seems to be dead, eh? (Interesting that GH, AMC, DOOL all seem to be RETURNING to the formula of emotional family-based drama...and B&B is excelling in that category these days...with nary a murder in sight).

(3) Murder derails the show in a single umbrella story. So many interesting tales (Nikki's recovery, Villy, Daniel/Lily rediscovering each other, Tucker's son) are ignored.

(4) The story is ultimately pure plot, minimal character. There are a few actors on this show who can still evoke emotion with their faces and body language (Muhney, Leblanc, Ryland, Braeden [when he cares/is invested], and ... shockingly, Heinle). Strangely, Peter Bergman has been really emotionally disconnected from his scenes for a long while, and all that reads now mostly is coldness. But while this crew is front-and-center in the plot, most of them aren't finding the emotional truth of it at all. That relates to my next point.

(5) Y&R is totally ignoring the emotional HEART of this story. Diane has been on canvas since 1982 and some DID care for her. Only Michael Baldwin, briefly, got to play the emotion. I suspect that owes itself 80% to Leblanc's strengths as an actor--his constrained emotions and tear-brimmed eyes told the story of his outrage.

If I had my way, Y&R would do a two-year moratorium on death and crime, and see what else they could come up with.

Also, it bears noting that while many of us felt Maura West was an odd casting choice for Diane, and the character was scripted from jump (during West's watch) as a lost woman with no sense of her self-worth, no real identity, just money-grubbing man whore, she still thrived in it. West reinvented Diane as utterly broken, and she pulled it off. It is the writers' fault that Diane's successful past as a fashion maven, model, and architect were all fully ignored. (Empowered Diane couldn't have filled the show's obviously much-desired victim niche). Nevertheless, during her brief year on the show, West was a STAR. She captivated attention even in the most throwaway scenes.

My predictions about the killer are below, in white font. I'm pretty sure I'm right. Highlight the text with your cursor to reveal:

I think the killer is Patty. As such, it's actually a brilliant move because it makes sense based on THIRTY YEARS of history.

Rationale:

Motive: Patty's life derailed, basically, when she married philandering Jack Abbott. The NIGHT before his wedding to Patty, Jack slept with Diane...and the affair continued after the marriage (leading to Patty's miscarriage). The show cleverly reminded us of this rivalry in a one-off episode when Haiduk's Patty confronted Susan Walters' Diane during a brief visit.

Opportunity: Patty is missing. No one knows where she is. We have a sense that she may be "around", when Adam talked on the phone to "someone" last week, telling him/her to stay away and that he was sending him/her enough money.

Character: Patty's a killer. Kitty-Kitty, Zapato, endangering Summer with peanut butter. It also seems likely -- although the show introduced ambiguity here -- that Patty killed Richard Hightower. (Adam reminded her that she did it...but we weren't clear if he'd really uncovered the memory, or if he'd implanted it). Let's not forget that as early is the early-80s, Patty went into a fugue state and shot Jack (for revealing, to Jill, he never loved Patty). Remember that Patty shot Jack MULTIPLE times? Just like Diane got bashed in the head MULTIPLE times. Girl's got anger issues.

Rumor: Someone told me, after I guessed this, that Haiduk had been seen on the Y&R set for a few episodes to "wrap up" her character. Plot construction: Suddenly, the criminally ignored Doug Davidson resurfaces. He's sudden the lead local detective (special investigator) on the Diane Jenkins murder. (Negative points to Y&R for ignoring how many years Paul and Diane had intertwined lives, from when she was married to his partner/best friend Andy. Davidson should have been allowed to grieve for what Diane once was). Anyway, why put Paul on the case (rather than, say, Coco from FAME??). So he can react with trademark shock and heartbreak when he realizes HIS SISTER IS THE KILLER.

I must confess, it is this last part of it...rooting this murder in 30 years of history and positioning Davidson to play the emotional beats of it...that makes me hate this story less.

Rationally and Respectfully Saving AMC/OLTL

2011-04-11T05:48:00.000-07:00

The always-entertaining blogger of Daytime Confidential, Jamey Giddens, proposed a number of constructive, rational ways of trying to save AMC/OLTL. Note that each of his suggestions are respectful, business minded, free of insult. They seek to use the demographic and marketing clout of the devoted soap audience to make a logical case for the perpetuation of daytime drama.

I reproduce his suggestions below, and fill in my own "followup" in blue. These are all from the Sunday April 10, 2011 Twitter timeline of @Jamey_Giddens

Hearing a decision will be announced re: ABC Daytime THIS WEEK! Keep calling Anne Sweeney! (818) 460-7700
Neither are safe, but one could have more time. Keep calling, keep writing, I am serious. ABC wants out of the soap game.
Look up your local entertainment reporters at your local newsapers. Ask them to do articles in favor of ABC soaps.
Do the same for local morning talk shows, radio, etc. Tell them ABC's soaps are in danger and to do stories.
Tweet (poilitely) famous ABC soap fans/alum ala Rosie O'Donnell, Oprah, Roseanne Barr, Carol Burnett, Nathan Fillion. Ask 4 their help!
Snoop Dogg, Wendy Williams, etc.Make noise! Email top bloggers in mainstream, Perez, Just Jared, Michael Ausiello, Nikki Finke, etc.
Go to message boards like Daytime Royalty, the Soap Opera Network and Soap Opera Source forum and organize. (From MarkH: SoapCentral too)
Contact We Love Soaps, Michael Fairman, Carolyn Hinsey, Nelson Branco, whoever, just let the soap fans' collective voice be heard!
And remember, be polite and sane. Don't be talking all crazy and stuff. They already expect that from soap fans. Prove them wrong.
In your emails, point to the success of telenovelas, essentially Latin soaps that are winning timeslots in primetime.
It's not the soaps that need to go, it's the execs who have run out of ideas and ran them into the ground. Serialized stories are viable. (MarkH: the final bolded part seems most important to me...don't think we should add anti-exec rhetoric right now.)
Watch the commercials between ABC soaps this week. Write down the sponsors, contact those brands. Tell them you saw their product on ABCD.
Now is the time for sane, rational solutions 2 attempt to stave off a bloodbath.

Hope springs eternal (confessions of a fanboi)

2011-04-01T02:08:00.000-07:00

As the free world knows, EW "broke", and a Twitter trend confirms, Genie Francis is coming to The Young and the Restless as Cane's mom.

I know to be cynical. For all the high-powered infusions of outside soap stars to Y&R in recent years, some show signs of being amazing (especially when written for): Jeff Branson, Elizabeth Hendrickson, Tristan Rogers, Maura West, Marcy Rylan; some have been shoehorned into the most awful, unlikeable character-actor combinations (shocking because the stars are so good): Eden Riegel, Stephen Nichols, John Driscoll; and some are criminally ignored (Judith Chapman; jury is still out on Kin Shriner's Jeff Bardwell).

The casting also sends chills regarding a luminous cast of contract and recurring vine who are already dying on the vine or have had long story droughts (Melody Thomas Scott, Jess Walton, Jeanne Cooper, Michael Fairman, Kristoff St. John, Bryton McClure, Tracey Bregman, Doug Davidson, Tricia Cast, Tricia Cast, Peter Bergman, Eileen Davidson ... and I'm adding Beth Maitland because I mss the heck out of her).

But even as the thinking part of my brain thinks these dark thoughts, the fanboi in me can't stop this silly smile of delight. GENIE FRANCIS! The likeable part of the Luke&Laura story (and the REAL reason we all loved it). The chance to see her reunited with some of her best General Hospital co-stars is just extra icing on the cake...but she brings such a deep likeability to all her roles, I can't wait to see how this plays out.

Y&R is playing some good tales these days...Newman corporate/family drama, Nikki drinking. I'm even finally interested in a Neil-Sophia-Leslie triangle because we finally have three people with some chemistry. I deplored the Lily-Cane union, but the current beat (haunting/gaslighting of Lily, hints of relationship rejuvation for the chemistry-in-spades Daniel-Lily...echoes of their youthful love-on-the-run) has me remembering why I liked all these characters. Michelle Stafford and Michael Muhney have found a mojo with each other that they've largely lacked in other recent pairings (though Muhney's yearing for Sharon Case's character is always superb). No scene chilled me more recently than when Victor INSISTED his new wife Diane wear her diamond necklace everywhere--his mark of ownership confirming that it was really a "diamond dog collar". The luminous Maura West played her discomfort beautifully--but then one episode later played genuine delight in her husbands growing financial fortune--it is wonderful to finally see that Emmy-winning actress worthy of her. I'm going to think that Y&R is on an upswing...and that Genie's casting helps that alone.

We'll always have Paris! The Bold and the Beautiful

2011-03-30T05:44:00.000-07:00

B&B is on a creative high these days, in part by fully embracing its identity. It plays adults (and senior adults) more than kids. It does bit of socially relevant stuff. It centers on the never ending drama of Brooke Logan and her Ridge. It knows that camp, vague incestuousness, vague perversity, and constant partner switching is its RECIPE...and it's doing it just fine. This week, the luminous Heather Tom's Katie is in the midst of (I think) a re-awakening triangle with ex-lover Nick (who is also the ex-husband of her sister and her niece) and Bill Spencer Jr. (my fave, Don Diamont). Ridge and Brooke--a "destiny/westiny" couple according to her son Rick--had an ultimate over-the-top moment in Paris (see image at top)...and then seconds later Brooke undermined her reunion with husband Ridge by having a flirtatious Skype session with his drop-dead-gorgeous son Thomas. We won't even mention the fact that my favorite, Amber, is in a three-way-who's-the-daddy tale (and I don't think she realizes her baby is going to be African American!). The show is firing on all cylinders.

the bold and the beautiful brooke and ridge by forrestersabrina

Why are its ratings not good? Why are its demos so awful? Oh well...even if B&B is not long for the world, we'll always have Paris!

Doppelgangers: Without comment

2011-03-30T05:17:00.000-07:00

On Y&R, we recently saw Daniel Goddard's "Cane" gunned down. He died in one of the most gruesome daytime deaths in a long time...and in his wife's arms. Lest there be any doubt, we saw his cold cold body on a morgue slab for some time, and we've seen (I think) his ghost. In the scope of soap deaths, Cane is dead-dead. No? (Hard to tell. After B&B had an open-casket funeral for Taylor Hayes...who also died on screen...we later learned her body had been replaced by a wax doll, and that she'd been saved by her sheikh benefactor, Prince Omar).

Well, yesterday we saw this smirking guy, looking at Lily from an elevator. It can't be Cane, as Cane would have stared at her with a look of love or longing or pain...or he would have run to be with her. We're supposed to think it's Lily's delusion/hallucination, but I'm inclined to believe (as are many others), that this is a double hired by Cane's daddy (the sublime Tristan Rogers as "Colin") to create the impression of Lily's incompetence. If he can get Lily ruled an unfit mother, then as the blood relative of her twins, he may be able to abscond somehow with her twins.

Some folks on Twitter (e.g., @kate4lane) have taken to calling this new guy "Bane". Twitter user @unlimitedjason further says this stands for "Bullshit Cane". Sigh and double sigh. While I'm thrilled to see Mr. Goddard have a chance to essay a darker character, does Y&R need another doppelganger? Twitter user @jdracoules suggests that Y&R may now be in the running with Dark Shadows for the biggest number of dual roles in daytime. The wordle at the top of this page is presented without further comment.

Thanks also to Twitter users @_PhilParis, @Scott_Novick, @Robansuefarm, @berry198 for making sure my list of doppelgangers was complete.

Daytime on the Bubble: Renew/Cancel Index for Daytime

2011-02-24T14:41:00.000-08:00

TVByTheNumbers has accurate "renew/cancel" index for primetime. A show's 18-49 rating is divided by network's average. See http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/the-renew-cancel-index for details.

I computed a renew/cancel for daytime,, dividing each show's 18-49 rating by the average of all 6 soaps. I couldn't really do a network-by-network renew/cancel (like the parent site does) because the pool of soaps is too small. I guess I could use the network daytime average (if I could find equivalent ratings for The View and the Talk, etc)...but I think what I did is already pretty informative.

In the Renew/Cancel index, numbers above 1 (the further above, the better) are "safe", around 1 are "bubble" and below 1 are "likely to be cancelled.

Renew/Cancel Index for Daytime, as of last week:
Y&R 1.43;
DAYS 1.05;
GH 1.05;
OLTL 0.95;
B&B 0.76;
AMC 0.76

Now, what makes this intriguing is the rumor, at Daytime Confidential, that ABC is seriously considering the future of its daypart, and whether to cancel a soap to make room for a talk show.

As once-stalwart (now lapsed) viewer of all ABC soaps, but especially AMC, this would make me sad.

Looking at those numbers, one wonders by B&B isn't similarly on the bubble?

Well, first of all, maybe it is. But, secondly, Les Moonves last year implied that it was one of the "special soaps", and therefore might survive. What could save B&B? Presumably the fact that it is the world's #1 most watched soap, and the international revenue helps the Bell family keep licensing costs extra-low for CBS? With a brand-new high tech opening sequence and a recent two-year renewal, B&B will survive at least as long as Stephanie Forrester (who currently has Stage IV lung cancer).

Emmys: Triumph (?) of the blogosphere?

2009-08-31T07:34:00.000-07:00

The Daytime Emmys aired last night. This was an unusual year. The major broadcast networks didn't want to air the show, so a production firm (ATI) cobbled together a deal that used an "available" night owned by MGM on the CW (which is owned by CBS). The show was shipped to smaller venue (The Orpheum in Los Angeles).

Production wise, others with more inside knowledge have far more knowledgeable stuff to say than I. I will say I personally thought the show elevated the game over previous years, without screeching fans who drowned out the actors, and comedians dashing through banquet-style dinner tables screeching about the show. The CW broadcast was carefully constructed to promote CW fall shows (which should appeal to soap fans).

The only weakness of the show was that too much time was allocated to early awards, and Vanessa Williams (beautiful, talented) got one song too many to sing (to promote her forthcoming album)...and this led to a tribute for 72-year old Guiding Light be cut off, omitted 10-second clip packages for the final (big) awards, and the best show winner not having time for a speech.

Errol at Soap Opera Network (via Twitter) has said that, on this little network, smaller viewership numbers are expected. He has also said that if the show didn't pull in 2 million viewers, it may be toast in the future.

SoapOperaNetwrk@MarkHsoap If the show can pull in more than 2 million viewers at best, there is some hope. If not, it's done on broadcast.6:12 PM Aug 29th from web in reply to MarkHsoap

(As I type this, Errol tweets:

Emmy Ratings: Telecast pulls in 2.4 HH Rating with approximately 3 million viewiers! Highest Ratings on The CW in many months!)

But my main point is that, more fully than ever before, this broadcast showed that the BLOGOSPHERE has emerged as the "journalists of record" at the Daytime Emmys.

Evidence:

1. On the CW pre-show, "expert panelists" handicapped the awards. Two of the three panelists (Jamey Giddens of DaytimeConfidential.com; Nelson Branco of TVGuide.ca) have mostly on-line followings. Only SOD's Stephanie Sloane was the lone print refugee. (Did anyone think she lost some credibility by arguing that Peter Reckell and Days of our Lives should win, when her Days-love was roundly criticized last summer?)

2. Several online sites provided real-time live-blogging and live twittering, including DaytimeConfidential, Soap Opera Network, Soap Opera Source, and Daytime Royalty.

3. The pre-show has been well supplemented by CBS pre-show interviews that are more detailed and more informative.

4. NaVell Lee, Roger Newcomb, Damon Jacobs and Jamey Giddens all converged as a visible force at the awards. They are providing/will provide more of a real-time report; by the time SOD/SOW get the news out, it will be "old"

5. Twittering stars provided real-time "you are there" perspectives. Michael Muhney wins top prize for showing his co-stars in the Orpheum seats, but Christian Leblanc wins "artistic merit" for showing the red carpet from an actor's POV!

Is there really any relevance left for the print press in this situation?

It's hard to know what this all means? Does it mean that (like many niche genres) "buzz" for soaps has now really left mainstream press, and moved to the blogosphere? And that a movement to the media-of-the-future bodes well for the future of the genre?

Or is it that, in the last gasp of a dying industry, "free" media is the only one that will still cover the industry?

As a soap fan whose love of daytime is DNA-coded, I hope it is the former!

The soap magazines hung on better than the soaps!

2009-06-17T15:01:00.000-07:00

Today, I was fiddling around with my usual ratings charts. What started it was the claim by Brenda Dickson (to TVGuide.ca's Nelson Branco) that when she came and left to Y&R, that coincided with Y&R hitting and leaving #1 status. That seems palpably false, since she last left Y&R in 1987 and Y&R didn't hit #1 (where it has stayed) till the 1998-1999 season. This figure illustrates the point.

You can't help but look at those lines after 1990, though, and just click your tongue at the unrelenting bleeding.

So then I got to wondering, "how badly did this all this soap decline hurt the magazines"? The figures and tables below provide some data about this, and they are somewhat surprising. During the 2000s, the magazines have pretty much "held on". Indeed, Soaps in Depth emerged in this decade, and quickly overtook Soap Opera Digest (both the ABC and CBS versions separately overtook SOD in newsstand sales). Some caveats:

A. Data come from the Audit Bureau of Circulations, and only are available free/to the public from 1998 forward (with 1997 data embedded)
B. Public data are limited to the top 100. Soap magazines dropped out of the top 100 in total circulation after 2002, and only Soap Opera Digest appeared in the top 100. So, I don't know about later data.
C. Looking at "single copy sales" (newsstand), the story is less bleak--it actually seems to show relative stability. 3-4 soap magazines appear in the top 100 in every year from 1997-present. Soap Opera Weekly dropped out of the top 100 in 2008 though, so I estimated its average newsstand circulation (at 100,000) for 2008. That may be an over-estimate. (The bleeding circulation for SOW may explain some of the Carolyn Hinsey sacking? Even though it was probably not her fault).

The figures are actually encouraging to me, because it suggests a kind of levelling off of circulation (relative to the shows themselves). From 1997-2000, the single-copy sales include Soap Opera Digest, Soap Opera Weekly, and Soap Opera Update. (In 1997-98, Soap Opera Magazine is also included). After 2000, Soap Opera Update disappears, but is replaced by Soaps in Depth (CBS and ABC) in the newsstand top-100. Interestingly, from 2005 on, Soaps in Depth (both versions) actually EXCEED Soap Opera Digest in newsstand sales.

Since the soap magazines held on better than the soaps themselves, it does make one wonder if viewers who "lapsed" in watching the shows continued to "keep up" by reading the magazines. And if this is the case, is this a good thing or a bad thing? Does the availability of spoilers, recaps and pictures actually hurt the original product?

If anyone is interested, I have the magazine-specific data, and can share it at a later date.

Total circulation of Soap Opera Digest during the years in which it appeared in the Audit Bureau Top 100 Total Circulation

Newsstand circulation of Soap Opera Digest from 1997-2008

Total newsstand circulation of all soap magazines listed in the Audit Bureau top-100, 1997-2008.
(Note, 2008 figure for Soap Opera Weekly is an estimate)

Cast Melody Thomas Scott as Beth Logan on B&B

2009-06-05T14:11:00.000-07:00

The picture above is a dated composite of Beth and the Logan girls, created before the advent of good image manipulation software

Nelson Branco reports that Melody Thomas Scott is being written out of Y&R, since her contract negotiations are not going well.

I am dismayed.

This is the wrong thing to do. There are 20 (I'm not exaggerating) less interesting cast members who should be cut first...I'd give up 10-15 folks for Melody as Nikki. This (cutting core veterans for financial reasons) is the sickness that has killed the rest of daytime. It has been happening for a while on Y&R (Victoria Rowell, Jerry Douglas, Don Diamont), but this is the worst. Clearly, Eric Braeden is probably next. It's wrong, wrong wrong.

But, okay...even though this is just wrong, but I'm over it. Because the perfect role exists for Melody.

Melody as Beth Logan on B&B. Hear me out:

- Melody in catfights with Susan Flannery's Stephanie. Priceless.
- Melody as the mother to Heather Tom's Katie. SUPER-PRICELESS. Nikki and Victoria re-united.
- Melody as the mother to Jennifer Gareis' Donna (after cussing her out for years as Y&R's Grace Turner). Priceless
- Melody having confrontations with Don Diamont's Bill Spencer Jr. (after Nikki's many years with Brad Carlton). SUPER-PRICELESS.

Plus, Melody's skills at broad comedy and archness would fit in excellently in the campy B&B universe. I'd love to see her "counsel" grandchildren Rick and Bridget in their wicked romantic ways.

Sadly, Beth (save for a few days when she was played by Marla Adams -- Y&R's former Dina Mergeron) has been dull as dishwater. It's time to amp her up, and make her a mother SUITABLE for her Logan-slut daughters.

I just think Melody and Katherine Kelly Lang's Brooke would just SHINE in scenes! I'd love to see MTS's Beth constantly "coaching" Brooke in how to get her various men back.

I even think Melody sparring with Alley Mills' Pamela would be a hoot.

Universe, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE make this happen! I'll even send money.

The Old and the Restless? Who skews older?

2009-05-31T11:12:00.000-07:00

On SON's message board today, user CSF (Classicsoapfan) asked about my expression of the legend that B&B skews older than all of the other soaps. So, I decided to look at that using this week's data.

In the table below, I used the data provided by Toups at Soap Opera Network. I took this week's total viewers and subtracted women 18-49, girls 12-17, and men 18+. The "residual" in the second-from-right column is the leftover viewers. While a few boys under 18 and girls under 12 might be included in the residual numbers. These would be negligible. So, the column on the second-from-right mostly represents older women. What it shows us is that B&B is second only to Y&R in absolute number of these (mostly) older women. More importantly, the right-most column shows is the PROPORTION of all viewers that are older. This is a fascinating number, no? It does show in absolute terms, at least last week, that B&B has highest proportion of older viewers. But its' number is only 1% greater than its next neighbors.

The implication is definitely this: If the advertisers truly only value the 18-49 demographic, we can see that CBS has a serious problem...and we have an understanding of why (despite lower numbers) Days remains alive. It is the youngest of ALL the soaps. Why would NBC want to kill that?

One hopes that CBS is able to show the marketing value of reaching such a strong older audience. After all, ads for Depends and Centrum Silver have to run somewhere (just joking)!

SHOW	TOTAL	18-49	12-17	MEN	Residual (mostly women over 49)	% of viewers who are older
Y&R	4,874,000	1,085,000	18,000	1,104,000	2,667,000	55%
B&B	3,369,000	691,000	17,000	718,000	1,943,000	58%
OLTL	2,560,000	848,000	27,000	411,000	1,274,000	50%
GH	2,550,000	905,000	49,000	386,000	1,210,000	47%
DAYS	2,527,000	802,000	42,000	470,000	1,213,000	48%
AMC	2,518,000	793,000	8,000	461,000	1,256,000	50%
ATWT	2,394,000	530,000	17,000	488,000	1,359,000	57%
GL	1,951,000	434,000	15,000	396,000	1,106,000	57%

ETA: Carolyn1980 at SON tells me that the 18+ male figure includes men over 50 (of course) which, she says, constitute the MAJORITY of the male soap viewers. Thus, she is saying the proportion of older viewers is even higher than my right column would indicate. You could probably inflate those numbers by a substantial percentage. Wow...that is definitely an aging genre.

ETA2: I added the figure above to help visualize.

Y&R: "Rating" the headwriters

2009-04-26T19:42:00.000-07:00

[Click on the link below to see the full version, if it is trucated]

ETA. SON User Paul Raven was able to give me 1999 ratings, which fleshes out data for Kay Alden. The pattern of data was identical to what I had published in an earlier draft, but it gives me more confidence in the Alden results.

Last week at Daytime Confidential, writer Jamey Giddens wrote an eloquent review of Tom Casiello's first breakdown at Y&R. It was a terrific review, and I agree with almost all of it.

But a funny thing happened in the comment thread. Jamey and a user named Monamis got into a debate about the relative impact of Lynn Latham on the ratings. Monamis points out things really went south with current headwriter (HW) Maria Arena Bell took over, but Jamey Giddens argues that Latham lost a million viewers.

What is the truth? Well, it sounds like a data analysis, and that's my thing.

Here is what I did. I wanted to go back to the start of Kay Alden's regime as solo Headwriter, but Toups' ratings archive at Soap Opera Network only gives me weekly ratings as far back as 2000. Okay, I'd start there.

Because different tenures lasted different periods of time, I thought I should post average weekly changes. These represent the slope coefficients that result when the household (HH) ratings are regressed on week. They represent the single best way to express ratings change in a common metric, despite the varying writing tenures on the show.

The figure at the top illustrates the data graphically. You can see that, as always, there was a lot of week to week variability. So, I am just extracting the linear trends from these data.

I divided the tenures this way:

Alden = Alden solo, before the arrival of Jack Smith
Smith = any period after Smith returned to the show, but before Latham joined
Latham = any period after she was formally named HW, even while Alden and Smith were still there
ArenaBell&Griffith = the disastrous (for ratings) period that began with the WGA writer's strike of 2007, and continued until Griffith's ouster in early 2008
ArenaBell = the post-Griffith period, in which she led a team that included Hogan Sheffer, Scott Hamner, and mahy others.

I further broke Latham's tenure into two pieces. 2006 was when she still had the legacy team (Alden, Smith, Ed Scott and many others) for most of it, and 2007, when she essentially had absolute control over her team without any "legacy" interference.

The table looks like this:

HW regime	Average weekly HH ratings change
Kay Alden	-0.010
Jack Smith with Kay Alden	-0.004
Lynn Latham (overall)	-0.003
Lynn Latham (2006 with legacy team)	+0.001
Lynn Latham (2007 without legacy team)	-0.006
Arena Bell/Griffth	-0.028
Arena Bell	+0.004

What do these numbers show?

It means the worst regime for the show was that Arena Bell/Griffth collaboration, that coincided with the WGA writer's strike and the sudde dismissal of Lynn Latham. Story-wise, the rushed introduction of Sabrina and her whirlwind romance with Victor seems to caused so much disgust that viewers tuned out in droves.

Alden's solo regime was next in problematic ratings. On average, she lost about 0.5 HH ratings points a year, which is a lot.

What that means is that the most disastrous period in the Toups/SON ratings archive is the several month period in which Arena Bell was writing with Josh Griffith. During this period, which encompassed the writer's strike and brief period thereafter, there were non-trivial declines on a week-by-week basis. "Bleeding". Many internet bloggers/message boarders blame this on the "damaged ground" that these writers inherited from Latham, but the descent was so precipitous, I have to believe that the introduction the much-younger Sabrina and Victor's whirlwind romance with her provoked a "disgust" response that led to massive tuneout.

More impressive is that in the time since Griffith left, Arena has actually stemmed the bleeding, and she is the only HW since Bill Bell to show ratings GROWTH.Now the growth is actually fairly anemic (.004 HH ratings points per week, on average), but in this climate, any growth is breath-taking.

Ratings-wise, the second-most difficult period in the post-Bell era was Kay Alden's solo regime, at least in the period beginning with 2000. Every ten weeks, on average, the show could be expected to lose 0.1 ratings points, or about 0.5 ratings points a year.

It seems that Alden's collaboration with Smith stemmed the tide...during this period, a much slower rate of decline set in.

And here is where it gets interesting. Latham was brough into shake things up. But, overall, her weekly rate of ratings decline (-.003) was only trivially different from the Smith & Alden era. She was not any more destructive to the ratings than her predecessors, but she was also not helpful. The truth, of course, is that Latham's era can be broken into "early Latham" and "late Latham", with these distinguished by when she had Alden/Smith/Scott around and when she didn't. If you compare these periods (roughly delimited by 2006 versus 2007), you find this:

In 2006, Latham and the legacy team achieved a weekly ratings change, on average of +.001...or slight gain. But in 2007, when Latham was solo (i.e., no legacy team) her ratings changed, on average, to a weekly decline of -.006!

Thus, Latham-solo was almost as negative as Alden solo.

Jack Smith's addition did stem the flow, and the rate of decline was much slower...but continuous. Interestingly, overall, Latham's weekly rate of decline was almost identical to Smith's, even though she was brought in to "fix things up". Ironically, a closer examination shows that when she worked with Alden/Smith and other legacy team members, she was actually experiencing slight ratings gain. But, once she let go of the team, her solo rate of decline was actually almost twice as bad as that experienced by Jack Smith.

The optimistic closer, of course, is Maria Arena Bell's current trend, which is actually positive. There has been a slow but steady very slight ratings gain. A little hope for the future....

Rafe: And so it begins...

2009-04-25T10:55:00.001-07:00

ETA: The incredible Anthony D. Langford has started a "Rafe's Story" series on Youtube. I have embedded the first video just beneath the photo.

If you watched the Friday 4/24/09 episode of Y&R, you heard this dialogue:

Lily: Hey, you're gonna find someone. You have to just get back out there. I thought you were gonna go on that, um, that dating site.

Colleen: (Scoffs) yeah, I have.

Lily: And? What do you think so far?

Colleen: Eh.

Lily: (Whispering) hey, do you remember the lawyer that helped ana?

Colleen: (Whispering) yes, I remember. He's cute.

Lily: (Normal voice) hey, rafe.

[snip]

Lily: Yeah. Thank you. Um, so, what's a, uh, a good-looking guy like you doing all alone on a friday night?

Rafe: Um, I'm heading to a, uh, friend's birthday party.

Lily: Uh, are you going with anyone?

Colleen: (Clears throat)

Rafe: Actually, no.

[snip]

Colleen: Bye.

Lily: Bye.

Rafe: Good seeing you.

Colleen: (Chuckles) she's subtle, isn't she?

Rafe: Obviously, she doesn't know I'm gay.

Colleen: Well, matchmaker Lily strikes again.

Rafe: Hey, it's the thought that counts, right?

Colleen: Right. But, you know, we should still check out that bar. We could look for guys together. (Laughs)

Rafe: (Laughs) definitely. It's a date.

and later:

J.T.: That rafe seems like a pretty cool dude.

Colleen: Yeah, he is.

J.T.: It's good to see you dating again.

Colleen: (Chuckles) we are just friends.

J.T.: Oh, give it some time. I'm sure he won't be able to resist you.

Colleen: Oh, I'm sure he will. You, on the other hand...

J.T.: What about me?

Colleen: Much more his type.

J.T.: Uh... oh. Oh. (Chuckles) hey, you taking off?

Rafe: Mm. I got court tomorrow.

J.T.: All right.

Rafe: It was good seeing you, J.T.

J.T.: Yeah, you, too, man.

Rafe: Good night.

Colleen: Bye.

Rafe: Bye.

Colleen: This was fun.

Rafe: We'll come back soon, go trolling together.

Colleen: (Clicks tongue) it's a date.

Rafe: All right. See you guys.

Colleen: (Laughs)

And with that, Y&R launched it's first gay storyline since Katherine Chancellor took a liking to Joanne, back in 1977.

The introduction of the story was...subtle. Rafe's gayness was introduced without controversy...it is an aspect of him, like hair color or eye color. Moreover, although there was a moment of discomfort with Colleen and JT (both of them were a little surprised...the default expectation still reasonably remains "straightness"), it quickly passed. There was no judgement.

Some critics have complained that making a recurring, non-central character is a "cheat", and demonstrates a lack of commitment to the show. But which of their hitherto-straight characters should they turn gay?

The proof will be in the pudding, as we see which characters Rafe hooks up with, and how truly committed the story seems to be to telling his story.

I'm not worried about Rafe's current status. The Williams family was originally introduced in the same way (on the back of recurring island character Paul Williams). So too was the Winters family (Olivia and later Dru were introduced around recurring Aunt Mamie, the Abbott maid...and went on to become a key family for Y&R for many years). So, since Rafe is already tied to the Newman concierge, Estella, I'm hopeful this could lead to the introduction of a whole hispanic/latino family. If the story flows, the character will grow.

It is delicious to speculate where Rafe might find love. My picture at the top of this post sort of signals my wishes...in part because I'd just love to see the boys in bed together. I'm being truthful. It seems like it'd be a delicious sight...for male and female fans :).

The trick will be tying Rafe to a family we care about.

If it is Adam, many of us like him, and he is tied to the Newmans. Maybe finally being honest about his (bi)sexuality will free Adam, and bring him to the light. So it works.

If it is Billy (my wild speculation, since he and Rafe were school friends), it means Rafe is on a wild ride with the town man- whore...again, that will make many of us care.

If it is Phillip IV, that works too...because while we don't know adult Phillip, we saw him conceived, born, and fought over. He's a real lynchpin character, and returning into the maelstrom of the Abbott-Chancellors these days will be interesting. He's already been defined as interesting, because he's a returning soldier. We know he didn't go to Iraq for money (Nina's loaded), which means he did it for "call of duty"...and that makes him instantly interesting to me. If he's a gay "don't ask-don't tell soldier"...and a "hero"...what a truly interesting and innovative character. If, then, as P-IV is introduced to us, he also finds love .. with Rafe...well, I'm popping the corn for that as we speak!

I doubt it is JT. That would be a hard pretzel to twist. On the other hand, we saw Thad play gay (or, maybe, opportunistically bisexual) on Nip/Tuck, and the boy has glutes-of-steel. So, if that is the ride we're going on, bring it on.

The only one I refuse to believe it will be is Kevin (Michael's too old for this arc...they're not going there...he's happy with Lauren). I am totally in agreement that Kevin COULD go that way...it's clear he has spent his life confused, and a lot of his emotions for women were animus, not love. His best female relationships (Mac, Amber) were pure platonic friendship with no real sexual overtones (though I intuit that will change). And Jana...well....there isn't a lot of sexual chemistry there. The actors (Emily O'Brien and Greg Rikaart) even admitted that...they're not the couple that are shown in bed together. And with Jana's headaches, it seems either the couple has more of a "soul connection" (her headaches are his pain), or it's a doomed romance. Either way, it could be Kevin.

But here is why I don't want it to be Kevin. 'Cause Kevin is SCREWED UP. What a message to perpetuate..."the screwed up guy is the fag". That just feeds into too much stuff. On the other hand, I suppose if the arc is "when Kevin admits his sexuality, he is finally free", I will buy it. But I'd really hope not.

Right now, my hopes are (1) Adam, (2) the to-be-seen Phillip IV.

The question is whether we'll get gay bed scenes on Y&R -- something ATWT has so far avoided. (Brothers and Sisters, finally last week, showed a bona fide shirtless kissing/foreplay scene, and I admit even I was scandalized...simply because we'd NEVER seen something like that on primetime before). I doubt Y&R will go there...but they were so beautifully nonchalant about Rafe's sexuality...it was like eye color...I'm hopeful everything about this arc will be natural, realistic, not so unhealthy.

My one worry is the Bell family experience with "disgust" and massive viewer tune-out in the late 1970s. Let's see how they deal with that this time. I think it means there will be a cautious, subtle introduction to this story...and activist gay viewers need to be patient and just go along for the ride. There is much to be rewarded by trust.

Daytime and primetime ratings: Pas de deux?

2009-04-19T13:53:00.000-07:00

A user over at SON asked “how tied have the fortunes of daytime and primetime been?” Is there any truth that as primetime declined on a network, so did daytime? The answer seems to be “yes, the fortunes of daytime and primetime have been tied together”. But it is somewhat more complex, because the ratings have shown stronger and weaker associations, depending on the network and decade. Data sources for primetime ratings are, and for daytime ratings are contained in the two threads linked below. Thanks are due to SON users dmarex, ReddFoxx, AllMyShadows and Sean, who helped me figure out which soaps aired on which networks.

I once previously examined primetime/daytime ratings overlap, but this is different. This analysis is more accurate, in some ways, than the overlapping slopes I presented before, for two reasons. First, this analysis breaks it down by network, and second, by now having coupled ratings for daytime and primetime in each season, we could more accurately examine actual year-by-year correlations.

We examined the association between primetime and daytime ratings (aggregate, averaged over all shows) for all networks from 1965 to 2009. I eliminated seasons before 1965 because, particularly for ABC, there was enormous initial variability as the networks grew.

What you see below is an analysis of variance table. The upshot of it is “the story is complicated”. The association between daytime and primetime ratings varied by network and by decade. But, look at that “R-squared” value, which says how much of the variance in daytime ratings we explained with this model: 94%. The legend, for the statistically minded: Dependent variable is Daytime Rating (D_Rat). Independent variables are Network, Decade, and Primetime Rating (P_Rat), and all possible interactions. (Click on the figure to see the full version, if it is truncated)

So, next, I examined the daytime/primetime associations separately by decade and network. The results look like this: (Click on the figure to see the full version, if it is truncated)

Now this is initially confusing, because it shows that the trends really varied by decade and network. “Green” means they changed together; “Red” means they did not or that primetime and daytime actually moved in opposite directions. The best way to visualize this is to look at the ratings, year-by-year, for daytime and primetime together. The next graphs show these: (Click on the figure to see the full version, if it is truncated)

Let’s note, overall, that a story I have told before – that soap ratings really began to decline almost from the beginning – is palpably obvious. ABC soaps grew through the early 70s, rebounded again with Gloria Monty’s GH, and then have declined ever after. In the 70s, ABC’s primetime lineup was growing at a faster rate than daytime…which was struggling with up-and-down. Just as ABC primetime was reaching heights (with Charlie’s Angels and Happy Days) its soaps were in descent. But then, beginning in the 1980s, ABC’s daytime and primetime lineups were yoked, falling in tandem. That association has broken a bit in the 2000s, as ABC primetime has experienced some upticks (Lost, Desperate Housewives, Dancing with the Stars) while the daypart has been on a linear decline trajectory.

For CBS, the story is quite similar. Remarkably, as you can see, the soap ratings were in decline through almost the entire period. That’s as close to a straight-line decline, for CBS daytime, as you’ll ever find. “OJ killed the soaps”. BALDERDASH. That slope of decline is remarkably constant since 1965, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. In contrast, CBS primetime was moving in almost the opposite direction all through the 1980s, as Carol Burnett and Mary Tyler Moore and Archie Bunker and their network compatriots created a grand era of gain and maintenance… There was a late 80s fall, then a massive early 90s rescue, then freefall in the early 1990s from which CBS primetime has never recovered. Thus, from about 1993, daytime and primetime fell together. But again, by the 2000s, as with ABC, we see a separation of trajectories. Primetime has managed relative stability (CSI anyone?), while daytime has been in linear decline.

Except in the 1970s, for NBC, daytime and primetime have been a pas de deux. NBC daytime has been in decline, steadily, since the early 1970s. So has primetime, except for slow growth and decline in the 1970s that was followed by the mid-80s revolution that Cosby, Family Ties, and Cheers achieved, along with the early-mid 90s rebound that ER brought.

Looking at both the graphs, and the table above, we see that daytime and primetime had yoked trajectories, more or less, in eight out of 15 “decade-by-network” cells. Moreover, the overlapping trajectories were greatest in the 1980s and 1990s, as larger forces of global, systemic decline drove both sets of ratings down. This association has actually been weakened a bit in the 2000s as, for two networks, the rate of decline for daytime has been somewhat steeper than primetime (for ABC and CBS).

This last fact is, in my opinion, somewhat ominous for daytime. Although viewers are being lost all over the dial, if primetime is has declined at a slightly lower rate, it would seem to suggest extra vulnerability for the soaps. Indeed, I think that may be part of the reason CBS lost patience with Guiding Light.

Ratings in context: Soaps near bottom, but slower decline

2009-04-19T09:40:00.001-07:00

Roger Newcomb recently linked an article reporting the recent March Sweeps ratings performance (both household rating, and one-year or season-to-date trends) of syndicated daytime and early prime shows. I decided to ask the question of "where do soaps fit in?". I had two questions. First, compared to other genres, how does the average ratings of soaps compare? Second, how does the one-year change rate compare? The answers follow in detail, but in summary, soaps really aren't doing very well in the overall daytime landscape, but their bleeding seems to have slowed. Other genres (judge shows, sitcoms) declined faster in the past year, but because they are cheaper and pull better numbers (sitcoms, anyway), I imagine they might still be more viable.

These answers were a little surprising to me, because I don't pay much attention to other genres. As a caveat, I am showing brute averages, and it would probably be more correct to do weighted averages that adjust for numbers of viewers, etc. In addition, these focus on household ratings numbers (which is all I could get, for the most part)--when we're constantly told it is that 18-49 or 18-34 demo we care more about.

Sitcoms: HH = 3.3
1st Hour morning news (e.g., Today): HH = 3.2
Game Shows: HH = 3.2
Entertainment news (e.g., ET): HH = 2.6
Soaps: HH = 2.2
Talk shows: HH = 2.1
Judge shows: HH = 1.6

That's pretty striking. In terms of delivering eyeballs, the relatively expensive soaps are in the bottom half of daily stripped programming! Yikes! If you were a bean counter, what genre would you pick to deliver eyeballs? Probably not a long-running drama that skews old in the demographics.

Now, the one-year decline trends tell a slightly different story...but this is again a bit of a problematic analysis (because it mixes new programs with long-running shows, and it doesn't control for things like affiliate clearance rates and the like). Still, I think several interesting stories emerge from these numbers:

Sitcoms: -13%
Game Shows: -7%
Entertainment news (e.g., ET): -3%
Soaps: 0%
Talk shows: +3%
Judge shows: -13%

First, in the short term, the soaps seem to have bottomed out, something Sara Bibel has also recently wondered. While we have still seen declines in many shows (B&B, GH, ATWT, GL), these have been offset by minimal decline and gain for others (Y&R, DOOL, AMC, OLTL).

Second, the highest decline rates seem to be for judge shows and sitcoms...but both of these are so relatively cheap. The judge shows, both at the bottom of the ratings pack and with the steepest descent, would seem to be at greatest risk...but they cost so little. The sitcom decline is more interesting to me, since the era of the "grand hit" (Friends, Cosby, Seinfeld) is over, and so I don't know if that genre can flourish without another big primetime hit. On the other hand, since there are no incremental production costs for repurposing and stripping primetime shows, I think all it means is that affiliates will be able to license syndicated shows at a lower rate.

Third, there is enormous variability within genres. That talk genre has some shows that show big to huge gains (Oprah, Ellen, The Doctors, Steve Wilkos, Bonnie Hunt), and these all suggest the talk genre still has momentum. On the other hand, no sitcom, judge show, or game show showed gain...and that suggests that some of those genres may be even more stale than soaps. Still, because those other genres are cheap, I'd still predict they have a better shot of persisting than soaps. The celebrity fascination is still viable, with several gossip/entertainment news shows showing growth.Maybe Soapnet is right to bet on more celebrity-oriented fare? It is somewhat surprising that 'reality' has still not found a foothold on daytime.

Wheel of Fortune^a	7.2	-8%
Jeopardy	5.8	-6%
Oprah	5.4	+10%
Two and a Half Men	4.8	-8%
Judge Judy	4.4	-6%
Entertainment Tonight	4.3	-2%
Today Show (1st hour)^b	4.2
Family Guy	4.0	-13%
The Young and the Restless^c	3.7	-1%
Seinfeld	3.6	-12%
The View^d	3.5
Dr Phil	3.5	-17%
Good Morning America (1st hour)	3.4
Everybody Loves Raymond	3.1	-16%
The Price is Right^e	3.0
Inside Edition	3.0	-6%
George Lopez	2.8	-13%
King of Queens	2.8	-7%
King of the Hill	2.7	-17%
Live with Regis & Kelly	2.6	-4%
Friends	2.5	-14%
Today (2nd hour)	2.5
The Bold and the Beautiful	2.5	-9%
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire	2.4	-14%
Ellen Degeneres	2.3	+10%
TMZ	2.3	+5%
Judge Joe Brown	2.2	-12%
Access Hollywood	2.2	-4%
Days of Our Lives	2.2	+2%
CBS Early Show (1st hour)	2.1
All My Children	2.0	+12%
One Life to Live	2.0	+11%
General Hospital	2.0	-7%
The Doctors	1.9	+46%
People's Court	1.9	-17%
As The World Turns	1.9	-7%
Rachel Ray	1.8	-5%
Maury	1.8	-5%
Extra	1.8	+6%
Insider	1.8	-14%
Deal or No Deal	1.7	+6%
Judge Mathis	1.6	-20%
Guiding Light	1.6	-4%
Judge Alex	1.5	-12%
Family Feud	1.5	-21%
Today (3rd hour)	1.4
Divorce Court	1.4	-18%
Tyra	1.1	0%
Cristina's Court	1.1	-8%
Jerry Springer	1.1	-8%
Steve Wilkos	1.1	+22%
Bonnie Hunt	1.0	+25%
Judge Karen	0.9	-18%
Morning Show with Mike and Juliet	0.9	-10%
Judge David Young	0.8	0%
Martha Stewart	0.7	-30%
Trivial Pursuit	0.6	0%
Family Court	0.5	-17%

^a Ratings and change data taken from http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/196222-Syndication_Ratings_Doctors_Ahead_of_the_Pack_in_Rookie_Field_During_Sweeps.php; where the show had been on for less than a year, ratings reflected change since premier

^b Morning show ratings taken from http://nbcumv.com/release_detail.nbc/news-20090409000000-big039today039.html One year change data were not readily available.

^c Soap opera season to date ratings taken from Soap Opera Network, http://boards.soapoperanetwork.com/index.php?s=&showtopic=30056&view=findpost&p=704665. One year change rates computed from one-year change in total viewers as reported at SON

^d The View ratings taken from ABC daytime press release http://tvbythenumbers.com/2009/04/09/sweeps-ratings-for-abc-daytime-programming/16404, total viewers = 4,100,000. HH rating estimated by linear regression (Rating = viewers), using data from Soap Opera Network (see footnote c above). The conversion formula was Rating = .096 + 7.081E-7*Viewers. One year change data were not readily available.

^e. The Price is Right ratings were averaged over Part 1 and
Part 2(first and second half hour), and reflect season-to-date as reported in January at http://www.medialifemagazine.com/artman2/publish/Dayparts_update_51/Price_is_Right_falls_off_with_new_host.asp, total viewers = 4,800,000. HH rating estimated by linear regression (Rating = viewers), using data from Soap Opera Network (see footnote c above). The conversion formula was Rating = .096 + 7.081E-7*Viewers. One year change data were not readily available.

A good "Break" for the future of the serial?

2009-04-13T09:10:00.000-07:00

One of the reasons I'm not so disappointed about the apparently sunsetting of the daytime soap genre is because I think I have seen the future...and I love it.

This post was motivated by last night's episode of Breaking Bad, which is (for my money) truly the best show on television right now. But more on that later....

===

When I was a child, primetime drama was all procedural, all episodic. Even long-running shows, like Gunsmoke or Bonanza, really had no continuing stories or themes. A guest star this week would likely never return to the show again...at least not playing the same character. Marcus Welby, Owen Marshall, Columbo, Barnaby Jones, Mannix...on and on. There was a heavy dose of cop/lawyer/doctor shows, and they also seemed to retain no threads that ran through the series. Only the regular characters and their consistent reactions provided continuity to the shows.

Thus, for continuing, character-based, emotional drama or melodrama, daytime was it.

===

I'm not being unique when I parrot the idea that Hill Street Blues changed primetime drama forever in 1981. Suddenly, we had a show that -- on the face of it -- was another cop show. But embedded in it were continuing characters with narrative threads that extended over many episodes. Scenes were written simply for character and atmosphere (e.g., close-of-episode intimate moments between Furillo and Davenport).

The melodramatic serial clearly had bits of life in prime time (Peyton Place being the most obvious 1960s exemplar), but serials were uncommon. Dallas had debuted a few years earlier (1978), but it was not until it connected more fully with its soapy identity (melodramatic tales, episode-ending cliffhangers) that the show took off. "Who Shot JR?", in the summer of 1980, launched the birth/rebirth of the primetime soap. Hill Street Blues would modulate that a year later, when it provided a less sensationalistic, more thought-provoking, more cinematic template for the serial a year later.

From these two auspicious beginnings, the primetime landscape was transformed. On the melodrama side, we had Flamingo Road, Knot's Landing, Falcon Crest, Dynasty, and later 90210 and Melrose Place, and these days Gossip Girl and ... On the serious adult drama, we got St. Elsewhere, Thirtysomething, and LA Law and, later, ER, and still later, the Sopranos and Six Feet Under. As I write this, three unconventional serials (24, Lost, Heroes) are at least moderate TV successes, and both are noteworthy because they curry favor with a large male audience.

The serial has become so common place that even the primetime procedurals (NCIS, CSI, Law and Order) have small snippets of continuing narrative and character history that recurs throughout the shows, making the characters more relatable and themselves (outside of the situation of the week) more interesting to follow.

===

No better exemplar of the wholesale transformation of primetime can be seen than in the difference between Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation. Star Trek was a complete episodic. Never once did Kirk, for example, remember a girl he met in Season One when he encountered a similar girl in Season Three. It just didn't happen. By the time Captain Picard and gang came along, all kinds of multi-season arcs were in play, including the Crusher-Picard romance, the Troi-Riker-Worf triangle, Worf's troubled family history, Data's enduring quest to become a "real boy" (i.e., have an emotion chip). The serial had become commonplace.

I have argued elsewhere in this blog that what the serial uniquely does is create a sense of home. Familiar characters, familiar situations, narrative throughlines that (like any good novel) make you want to read the next chapter. Serials make you want to come back, to see how it will turn out. (In contrast, procedurals make you come back to see how they'll solve the puzzle "this time"...but there is nothing in the story itself that compels your return). I cannot wait to see what will happen to Nora and her children on Brothers and Sisters. I simply cannot wait.

So, we have come to place where you don't just have to look to daytime for that "sense of home". Instead, you can find it in primetime...all over the dial.

===

Now, as we are the cusp of the demise of broadcast TV (in favor of some kind of more pay-as-you go cable/internet model), it seems that cable television has appropriated the serial and made some delicious motivdations of its own.

HBO and Showtime have been playing with serials for some time. But it is commonly held that the one-two punch of HBO's The Sopranos and Sex and the City really remade the serial for cable. Uncommon, envelope-pushing premises ("the domestic travails of a mobster and his consorts in New Jersey"; "the romantic travails of a fashionista/columnist and her girlfriends in the big city"), but with clear serial narrative elements. It was a grafting of the ordinary quotidien life onto words that we, the viewers, would never experience directly. Suddenly, the serial format let us live with these unusual, surprising characters and situations. We followed them, and vicariously joined them.

But HBO (with Six Feet Under and Big Love and Rome and Deadwood and John from Cincinnati), and later Showtime (with Weeds and Queer as Folk and the Tudors and the L-Word) effected another transformation: Serials were no longer meat-and-potatoes...they had become confections--not filling, but satisfying.

There is nothing more "meat and potatoes" than a daily serving of soap opera. Day in and day out it's there. Not particularly special; indeed, the soap's very ordinariness, blended into the daily life of the housewife, meant that you could skip a day...and catch up again. Like a meal of staple foods, it gets you through the day, but you probably won't remember it next week.

What HBO and Showtime did was transform the serial into 10- or 13-week nuggets. Little appetizers that kept you breathlessly tuning in from week to week...and then they were gone. If the show was renewed, you might have to wait 39 weeks or longer for your next serving. Instead of the long hiatus breeding boredom and disconnection, the long breaks between seasons served to frustrate, tease...build a growing lust for fulfillment.

(In passing, I also note that HBO and Showtime have worked hard to build "appointment TV"...a fixed time, usually on Sunday nights, when you just have to watch the show live...you can't delay the next installment for another minute).

Of course, the HBO model has been so successful, they've had a hard time topping it. And better yet, "basic cable" has stolen the methdology. The Shield, Damages, Nip/Tuck, Rescue Me, Battlestar Galactica, Mad Men, Breaking Bad. Whole networks are now being built around these "nuggets". Come for the treat, and our promos will keep you coming back for other offerings.

===

Which leads me back to Breaking Bad.

The premise is this: An embittered high school chemistry teacher, Walter, who feels cheated by life, has been living just-at-his-means in a working class Albuquerque suburb with his wife and disabled son (Walter Jr. -- one of the most attractive, engaging new young men on television today). In a drab house with olive-toned kitchen appliances, the "rut" of their daily lives is interrupted by the dual traumas of his wife's unexpected mid-life pregnancy, and his own terminal lung cancer diagnosis.

What to do? How to provide for his family after he is gone? (Walter seems to have little confidence that his wife and son will manage; he has control issues and seems to need to 'fix' the situation). The answer is "become a manufacturer of crystal meth". Walter pairs with one of his worst former pupils, Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul, who is a revelation).

As the series spins out, it compares favorably to the Sopranos. We're plunged in a life of addicts and dealers and DEA agents...seedy and grim and violent...but the serial drama and the "ordinary" protagonists serve as our passport into this surprising and shocking world. The writers also creatively shift the rooting dynamics. Jesse Pinkman is an irresponsible stoner...but as time goes on, we see he is hurt by his failings, and that he has a good heart for children and ... even insects. Walter, on the other hand, the "noble" science teacher has serious issues of wounded pride, deceptiveness, and amorality. Who knew Jesse would turn out to be the good guy?

Like the best of the HBO dramas, the unrelenting drama is leavened by humor, and there are dozens of laugh-out-loud moments in every episode. In addition, most episodes end with a breathtaking cliffhanger...one dare not miss the next episode.

===

One thing the Sopranos and Deadwood and Lost and Breaking Bad all share is that they stay with me. After the episode is done, I cannot stop thinking about them, cannot stop quoting key lines. The episodes compel re-viewing, to catch nuances one missed.

I cannot remember (outside of Y&R these days) when a daytime soap last engaged me thus.

Maybe this is the level of investment and respect that the soap always deserved? Maybe the ending of the unsustainable daytime dinosaurs--deprived of their "specialness" by being so unrelentingly available, day after day--means that the actors and writers and characters get a deeper, more loving treatment? I'm still getting my "soap" fix, but in a very different way.

This is why I am optimistic. The serial is alive, well and ubiquitous. It has evolved into short-term gems that consume the imagination, and that satisfy the viewer long after the closing credits have rolled.

Should-less and savor more?

2009-04-12T10:48:00.000-07:00

One the topics I mentioned wanting to address a few weeks ago was “Damon Jacobs and "Shouldless". That is only tangentially related to soaps, and yet I really think he has an awful lot to tell us all.” I’m going to meander just a bit to get there, ‘cause that’s what I do.

==

Back in 1988, I think, when I was in graduate school (and scraping by on about $500/month), I was shocked when I saw a new (to me) magazine at the grocery store, Soap Opera Weekly. I could scarcely imagine spending the money on it, but I did. It was not the last time.

As the magazine evolved, one of my favorite weekly features was “Marlena Delacroix”. In that era, there was precious little criticism available (in magazines, and I never even heard of e-mail until 1987…I didn’t discover Usenet as a soap community until 1989), and even less that was as erudite and well-argued as Ms. Delacroix. Wrapped in a humorous package of “moi” and “toi” and “mon ami”, it was addictive and thought provoking.

Therefore, several years back, when Marlena re-appeared on Jack Myers’ website, I was delighted and, being the true fanboy I am, sent her an email of gratitude and welcome. As she established her own site, I cheered and have visited regularly since.

In the best tradition of soapdom, Ms. Delacroix has used her own “veteran” status to nurture young talent. In this case, she introduced me (and many others) to two fabulous new voices (at least, voices we hadn’t heard before)…Patrick Erwin and Damon Jacobs. I’ve cited Patrick here many times (including in my penultimate post, before this one).

Damon, on Marlena’s site, works as the “Soap Shrink”. In that role, he tries to provide a cogent analysis of how our favorite dysfunctional characters have come to be as they are. For me, the insights he tries to provide into possible motivations and origins only deepens my enjoyment of the characters. Spinelli has Aspergers? I’m not sure, but it sure is fun to think about.

==

Soap Shrink led me to Damon’s own site, Absolutely Should-Less. Now, fair disclosure: Damon and I kind of share a profession (not really…but I work as a psychologist and methodologist in a university) as well as a soap obsession, so I’m probably especially interested in his insights.

I’m not alone. Just last week, the Canadian TV Guide’s Nelson Branco featured a list of “Should-less” guidelines for daytime.

Totally paraphrasing (and probably mis-characterizing…I hope not), I read Damon’s core message as having two key pieces: First, fight the triumph of the super-ego. Let go of the excessive shoulds and oughts that rule our behaviors (and bring us guilt and shame and all their attendant consequences), and live authentically and concordant with one's goals. Second, live in the now. Don’t focus on what should have been or what ought to be; take the current and controllable circumstances of your life and optimize your happiness and goal pursuit within that context.

From Damon’s site:

If you have ever experienced any stress or sadness from looking in the mirror and telling yourself you should lose weight, make more money, think smarter, look better, or be any different than who you are today, then you are suffering the consequences of devastating "shoulds" … What makes this book different from other self-help books is that it identifies the role and responsibility of media and culture in the creating and sustaining of harmful "shoulds." It recognizes how institutional racism, sexism, and homophobia play a significant role in determining one's self-esteem, and how the "status-quo" stands to benefit from individuals feeling bad about themselves.

A visit to Damon’s current site shows that in March he did a series on having the “Best Recession Ever”. With insights like “Lose the "should" about your money...at least for now,” and “Resist holiday gift-giving ‘shoulds’” and “Recognize the Recession in your mind”, Jacobs’ entries really show how the many expectations and obligations of our social world can really work to make the current economic crisis even more difficult, phenomenologically, than it needs to be. Consequently, closing one’s ears to media and social influences that shape our expectations, as well as taking a firm inventory of what we really need and want, can really help us weather the trials of these economic days.

Important messages! For any one of us who have laid waste to vast portions of our lives by listening to the “other” and not to ourselves, there cannot be better advice. Damon leads us to life than can be relatively free of the self-judgment that causes us to miss so many happy moments. And that is my segue back to the world of soaps….

==

...I am a regular participant on several soap opera boards and blogs, and there is a persistent place where I disagree with many of my colleagues. It goes something like this:

OTHERS (this is a mini-compendium): Soaps are in the current state they are because of creative bankruptcy. The “suits” made bad decisions to increase the ‘shock value’ and ‘youth appeal’ of the soaps. We can lay the blame at Gloria Monty’s feet. She started the disregard of veterans and history – the “youthquake” – that has ruined daytime with sensationalism. Moreover, the writing teams and executive producers of these shows should listen to the fans more. They should write genuine happiness more often. They should…

And on it goes.

ME: Soaps would be, more or less, where they are today regardless of a single creative decision. There are larger demographic and viewership factors at play. These factors have led to the ratings and economic decline of all of network television, not just soaps. Soaps would still be where they are because women no longer work at home as much, families don’t watch together as much. Moreover, each generation needs to identify its own cultural signposts, and soaps – sadly – are the signposts of our mothers and grandmothers.

So how does this relate to “Should-less”?

Take the cancellation of Guiding Light. I have read people say they would turn off CBS for cancelling the show. (Ignoring the 72 years of investment CBS has made). I have seen desperation to continue the show elsewhere (and that worries me that anticipatory socialization, to prepare for the show’s passing, is not being done). I have seen so much anger directed at a host of past creative types (Jill Farren Phelps, John Conboy, Paul Rauch, Mary Alice Dwyer Dobbin, Ellen Weston, Ellen Wheeler, David Kreizman, and on and on).

In all the blame and rancor, it seems likely to me that for some fans, the light might go out in a blaze of anger and recrimination.

Therewith goes the joy.

I think, whether in 2009 or 2016, the Guiding Light would have been extinguished sooner than later…even if Nancy Curlee or Douglas Marland had never stopped writing, and even if Gail Kobe had never stopped producing, and even if Ed Trach were still at P&G. It would have happened. Because forces outside of daytime and outside of creative influence are bringing us to this place. The genre is gradually passing, as all genres must.

What if we just threw the shoulds away? What if we savored what we were enjoying (Otalia! Phillip happens here! Shane and Dinah! Rick and Mindy! Might Reva survive and reunite with Josh before it is all over?)? What if we treasured these final days, and looked back on the 72 or 57 or whatever years of enjoyment? And let the rest go?

Instead of focusing on the myriad shoulds that might have given GL a tiny bit more of (maybe lower quality) life, what if we looked back in gratitude and thanks? What if we used the rich gift of a lifetime of GL, and used it to inspire our next creative pursuit? What if, in stormy times, we looked back on moments we once enjoyed, and took comfort in having known Springfield?

Let me also say, this is not specific to GL. As I have expressed elsewhere on this blog, I think every one of us soap fans will experience this in the near future. Shall we repeat the litany of blame and anger each time? Or is there another way? "Thanks for the memories"?

Damon’s lessons for living, I think, can help us through this sunsetting of the genre. Indeed, with regard to GL, I think there may already be some good models, like DaytimeDirect and the GL Appreciation thread at SoapOperaNetwork. I'd encourage those who are angry to maybe look at these sites. I think they might help.

Using the GL evolution as an experiment

2009-04-11T10:26:00.000-07:00

As a non-GL viewer, my reaction to GL's apparent passing is not emotional, but intellectual. I do view the loss of the oldest soap, one of the last Irna Phillips soaps, the only soap to make it from radio to the present, as a major symbolic loss for the genre. GL bordered on "sacred cow", so when we're ready to kill that one...

In this post, though, I want to focus on a more optimistic future, and some personal "brainstorming" I have been doing to think about what a next-generation GL might look like.

The rumors are that GL is looking for a new home. DaytimeConfidential suggests that the most serious talks are with the Lifetime Network.

Since Lifetime is "Television for Women", I don't watch that a lot...it seems to be the new home of women-in-peril movies (what we used to call "Movies of the Week" or "Sunday Night Movies"). In principle, such an emotional, women-oriented platform seems ideal for soaps.

But there is also a fundamental difference. The two-hour movie is self-contained. You get your emotional fix and then you move on, never again to revisit those characters. That is the antithesis of a soap.

So, how to graft the two together? My feeling is that the secret is to move in the direction of a telenovela...a self-contained story that is fixed in time. (I know this has been tried and failed...OLTL was reviled when Michael Malone played with short arcs, and Port Charles is no longer around -- a testament to the failure of that experiment. Indeed, some attribute GL's most recent fall to its lack of melodramatic and serial elements during the first year of the new production model).

So, what if Springfield/GL is used as the fictional universe (with all the history back there, but maybe not front and center), and a series of 13-week 30- or 60-minute ensemble dramas (set to play once a week...not daily) were set there?

For example, using the current buzzworthy tale, what if for 13 weeks Lifetime presented: "Otalia" (with, in smaller letters, at the bottom of the screen, "A Guiding Light/Springfield story").

Now, let's pretend that for the first 13-weeks, the "A" story of "Otalia" is about these two women becoming open and committed lovers (say the last episode of GL = Otalia getting married, so the new series picks up on their married life). As an ensemble show, there could be "B" and "C" stories anchored in Otalia (their co-workers, relatives, friends), but distinct. Some of those "B" and "C" stories could come from the rest of the GL universe--AS LONG AS THEY WERE THEMATICALLY TIED IN (e.g., Doris tries, finally, to open her heart to love while her daughter has a hard time coping; Frank tries to move on in the world, looking for a woman who can finally appreciate him for what he is).

At the end of the 13-week arc, Otalia would rest. Maybe it would come back "next season" (next year), or maybe not. That would depend on fan response.

Meanwhile, after the 13-week arc is over, another 13-week novel would begin. For example (don't roll your eyes...I'm trying to play to a Lifetime audience here): "Healing Hearts: The Story of Dinah and Shane". Again, at the bottom of the screen, it would be signalled as "A Guiding Light/Springfield Story".

As that couple plays out its 13-week drama, again supported by related "B" and "C" stories (I really think these shows have to be tighter and more contained...new viewers MUST be able to sample without getting lost), there could be weeks with "Special Guest Star Kim Zimmer" or "Special Guest Star Maeve Kinkead" (spelling fixed per comment below). At that could be the link to classic GL.

Soap opera towns and universes are fictional places that we love to return to over and over again. In the new financials and the evolving universe, where the patience and time for a daily experience may not longer exist, and where the "burden" of decades of history may actually serve as a turnoff for viewers, can GL pioneer (as it has before) the evolution of the form? Can Springfield and the 70 years of history that went before serve as the "franchise" in which self-contained short arc stories...featuring people we know and people we don't know...keep the town alive?

Maybe returning to Springfield and Guiding Light in a different way would be the method of achieving this "place to come home to" while building something that requires a little less commitment?

I note that the GH:Night Shift experiment did something very much like this. If anything, it was too tied to the "mothership", using too many characters from the daytime show (enough that discontinuities between the two series annoyed some fans). Night Shift I was a ratings success for Soapnet (but not a critical one). Night Shift II was a critical success but ratings failure. I know that a version of this experiment (ATWT's Eileen Fulton spinoff, Our Private World, penned in part by Bill Bell) did not succeed in the 1960s...but that was not so fully situated in the Oakdale universe. It was a true spinoff, and those are always risky.

Maybe Lifetime (or whomever is lucky enough to participate in the evolution of the GL franchise) can find a way to tell new stories rooted in Springfield. If lightning strikes, this new GL might satisfy both the commercial needs of the network, and storytelling needs of hungry fans, all of whom believe there is still life in the "old girl".

For all of them, I wish that the genre trailblazer continues to push soaps forward into the new media landscape.

Soapnet and SyFy and Guiding Light

2009-04-06T12:30:00.000-07:00

In this entry, I want to briefly acknowledge the reality that cable networks, including Soapnet are fickle things. They have to constantly evolve to survive. With that being the case, there is little reason to believe that Soapnet is going to be a viable home for the future of daytime--certainly not Guiding Light. Personally, I think P&G/Telenext has the exciting -- and risky -- opportunity to create its own new exclusive-content online distribution channels. These channels will connect them directly with their intended ad recipients. If P&G shows leadership here, they may in fact have figured out a way to be the leaders for the third major soap evolution (TV to online), just as they blazed the trail from radio to TV in the 1950s.

Here's how I think:

a. Soapnet continues to evolve, and it has to to stay alive. As an advertiser- and subscriber-supported network, they have to run the stuff that gets the coveted eyeballs (18-49 women) and makes money.

b. All cable networks seem to do this. The template for cable network evolution is all over the board...Nick at Nite, TVLand, MTV, GSN, Bravo, A&E, TruTV. Every one of these networks started with one identity and programming concept, but has now become somthing very different. Some have had wholesale identity shifts (TruTv which started as CourtTV), others have tweaked their program mix away from what was their core brand (MTV now barely plays music; GSN has minimized the classic game shows; AMC has banging original shows and newer movies...not the black and white commercial free classics they started with).

So it is with Soapnet. Another World is gone. Ryan's Hope is stuck in a perpetual loop at 4 am. Weekend marathons of most soaps are gone. Original soap-related programming (Soap Talk, Soapcenter, Soapography, One Day With, Night Shift) is gone.

Many feel cheated by the brand evolution, but it is very clear to me that it is a survival strategy.

Why should we hate these companies for doing what they need to to make money?

SyFy is one of the most glaring recent examples. Their recent evolution from the network for Battlestar Galactica and Doctor Who into the network for ... something really different ... simply shows that being the niche sci-fi channel couldn't work for them anymore.

Let me say, though, that while I'm kind of blase about these brand switches, they INFURIATE a lot of my fellow viewers. With regard to Soapnet, specifically, viewers feel betrayed. "We called our cable provider to put Soapnet on so we could watch Another World, and then they took it away!" or "Brian Frons hates soaps, so he minimizes their presence on his network".

Honestly I do not believe it is anything that malevolent--or specific to soaps.. I just think that these cable networks are so fragile and marginal that they have to quickly evolve or die. Why would we expect less of a soap network? It is clear that this is a survival strategy that has affected most of the viable networks out there. Anyone remember "Outdoor Living Network?" Oh yeah...they're called VS now. Where is the Nashville Network? Oh yeah...that's Spike.

3. Soapnet, though, may be kind of screwed. Why? Because despite their attempts to revise their brand, their big numbers still come from same day primetime reruns of daytime of soaps. What to?? Your big numbers come from the "granny shows". You're screwed!

That suggests to me that Soapnet may not fully evolve until it dumps the daytime shows and rebrands (Reality-and-Celebrity-net).

4. What about soaps, then?

The rebranding of Soapnet actually may portend hope for soaps -- but not on TV. Soapnet itself seems to be moving into the online distribution world...and its inhospitable (to soaps) broadcast platform may help more quickly move soaps onto the internets. It is there -- if anywhere -- that I think survival can be found. (Once we figure out how to properly monetize and protect these streams)

For example the network just recently acquired online streaming rights for Days of our Lives...which is interesting, because their website currently doesn't stream shows...and DOOL has been uniquely available via I-tunes.

Maybe the online portal -- where infrastructure costs are much lower -- will be the place for daytime soaps and classic soaps. That fits in well with the rapid emergence of an on-demand on-line television culture (Hulu, Fancast, TV.com, etc). Indeed, perhaps Soapnet should strive to become the exclusive online distributor of soaps (all other services have to license content through them...and use their advertisers).

5. What does this have to do with Guiding Light?

Well, Brian Cahill of TeleNext is talking about finding new homes for his show.

I would not urge him to talk to Soapnet. Not only does that network not have real-estate for the P&G shows, but history shows they are not loyal to original programming (few last more than a season). And the network clearly wants to get One Tree Hill/Gilmore Girl viewers and Lifetime Movie women...who seem to be a little different (younger?) than soap viewers.

Indeed, I think P&G should just bite the bullet and create its own online distribution channel. They have already been going great guns to create online niches that deliver content to the viewers they seek to advertise too.

"If you build it, they will come". P&G should just continue to control GL, and use it as the experimental vehicle to build a new "soaps" channel. GL continues in that way to be the leader (just as it moved from radio over 50 years ago, now it can be the first mover to the internet). Initially, this GL might be a loss leader...but eventually it could build an intriguing new online brand that might represent the future of soaps.

6. Is this pie in the sky?

On April 1, I would have said there was no hope for GL to continue to exist. Now, I'm starting to get the sense that P&G/Telenext might be serious about trying to do something to at least explore whether the brand can be revitalized and made more relevant off of CBS.

If so, I want to remind P&G: A big part of your GL problem was that you could not fully control the creative product (thanks to corporate overseers) or the distribution (thanks to recalcitrant affiliates that either refused to air the show, or put it on at goofy times). I urge P&G to retain control of the content during this next evolution, and to control the channel. It is from that control (let's call it "protection") that I could imagine that a 'safe harbor' for the evolution of daytime might actually emerge.

Patrick Erwin's Domino hypothesis: Wacky?

2009-04-05T14:04:00.001-07:00

Patrick blogged on his website today, reacting to a TVWeek columnist who apparently felt that Patrick's "domino thesis", expressed thusly

”Understand that if GL is canceled, it will start a domino effect. If/when GL and/or DAYS disappears, you can expect other shows to follow quickly in their footsteps.”

was "wacky".

Since I'm all about understanding causal factors and modeling them, this domino hypothesis (what some statisticians would call a Markov chain) is very intriguing to me? In the end, I do not believe that the proposition that the fall of GL will contribute to the fall of other soaps is a testable one. Intuitively, I think he has a point, though.

============

1. Per se, the cancellation of Guiding Light will have no necessary effect on any other soap. Just like canceling, say Jericho, had no effect for CBS on Criminal Minds or CSI:Everywhere, I don't think that cancelling GL will necessarily impact any other show.

============

2. Will cancellation lead to more or less promotion for other soaps? It really doesn't matter. The loss of GL, in principle, costs a promotion venue for other soaps, pitched at soap watchers. But the reality is that a daytime replacement (say Pyramid) could have soap promotions, and they might actually be more effective, because they might court new non-soap viewers. Moreover, with one recent exception (CBS' promotion of Y&R's Sudden Impact arc), there is no evidence AT ALL that promotion influences short-term ratings. In October 2007, for example, CBS bought ad time on other networks to promote its Y&R Out of the Ashes arc...and ratings actually went down.

============

3. It is the "taint of death" that may kill them all. I think there is much greater risk to the genre in further heightening the widespread understanding that daytime is a dying genre. Phil Rosenthal writes in today's Chicago Tribune that

The laws of physics don't change: Mass times acceleration still equals force. But with audiences splintering across an ever-widening spectrum of content, individual mass media outlets simply don't have as much mass as they used to, leaving acceleration to pick up the slack—and it's the speed with which word of that content travels rather than the content itself that creates the impact...."Light" has its own devoutly faithful followers, to be sure, although that number has declined. When it comes to daytime drama, people are far more likely to be talking about the latest blowup on ABC's "The View" which averages 4.25 million viewers.

Translation: "buzz" matters. And the cancellation of Guiding Light, he would argue, is in part because it was no longer buzzworthy. (That's wrong, by the way. Proof: Otalia).

But, in support of Patrick's thesis, the cancellation of Guiding Light produces a followup negative buzz. If "Grandma's soap" or "the oldest soap" or "the only soap to survive radio" dies, it doesn't take much for some cultural consumers to further understand that soaps are a dying genre. And that WILL influence their likelihood of sampling other soaps.

Case in point: "Disco Sucks":

Only by killing disco could rock affirm its threatened masculinity and restore the holy dyad of cold brew and undemanding sex partners. Disco bashing became a major preoccupation in 1977. At the moment when Saturday Night Fever and Studio 54 achieved zeitgeist status, rock rediscovered a rage it had been lacking since the '60s, but this time the enemy was a culture with "plastic" and "mindless" (read effeminate) musical tastes. Examined in light of the ensuing political backlash, it's clear that the slogan of this movement--"Disco Sucks!"--was the first cry of the angry white male. -- Peter Braunstein

The 'Disco Sucks' campaign was a white, macho reaction against gay liberation and black pride more than a musical reaction against drum machines. In England, in the same year as the 'Disco Sucks' demo in America, The Young Nationalist - a British National Party publication - told its readers: 'Disco and its melting pot pseudo-philosophy must be fought or Britain's streets will be full of black-worshipping soul boys.'...Then WLUP-DJ Steve Dahl is credited by many with singlehandedly ending the disco era. On July 12, 1979, after several smaller anti-disco events, Dahl's "Disco Demolition" between games of a twi-night doubleheader at old Comiskey park, ended up with the field completely trashed, and the White Sox forced to forfeit the second game.

It is this reinforcement of soaps as a dying genre ... in the minds of ad executives, network leaders, and cultural consumers that could, in effect, be a Donna-Summer-style-soap-killer.

============

4. But here's the thing: Soaps are dying. Short of holding on to GL as some kind of public/historical service, soaps are dying. My recent post with some new prediction models kind of illustrates that inescapable conclusion, I think (albeit, with a little hope thrown in).

In that sense, I really think it is important not to over-inflate the significance of the GL cancel.

Really, truly, rationally, we knew this was coming. Some of us thought it might wait till 2010, but Ellen Wheeler talked candidly about this with the GL bloggers late last year.

Moreover, as that figure above shows, most of us kind of know the pecking order of impending cancellations, and that hasn't changed since GL's cancellation. It is "foreordained" by the numbers and the trends...and the sad fact that for most of the population soaps are now as hopelessly out of date as disco and Lawrence Welk and manual typewriters.

Cultural obsolesence, coupled with changing daytime demographics and changing advertiser economics is what did this.

============

5. Whither soap opera? Maybe that is more correctly asked as "what is the future of the serial?"

The future is not in the daytime. The future is not melodramatic. The future is not necessarily woman-oriented. The future is not daily. The future is not on broadcast TV.

The evolution is being televised.

Friday Night Lights. ER. Brothers and Sisters. Lost. True Blood. Continuing themes in NCIS. The serial is really alive and well. Adult drama is live and well (well, thanks to Jay Leno on NBC...maybe not so well right now).

The soap -- a particular commercial form for women to "listen" to at home while ironing and cooking -- that is on the way out. For those of us who loved it, that is lamentable...but we can take comfort in all the contributions soaps have made for most of the 20th century and a smidgen of the 21st.

============

6. Wacky? Not at all. Not one bit. But the use of that word "wacky" is a fundamental one--and it displays the kind of cultural bias that soaps have had to work against from the beginning.

Too commercial (e.g., James Thurber's "Anacinville")
Too women-oriented (melodrama produces eye rolls in the network executive)
Too emotional and relationship oriented (that's basically misogyny and, in more recent times, homophobia)
Too old (When we call them "grandma's stories", we're basically buying into both ageism, and the prevailing belief that generations can't share popular culture)

Wacky is just the latest line of insults that soaps and their supporters have had to endure. So, as we have for the better part of a century, our best course of action is to ignore the insulters. Because they do not understand how these "worlds without end" have given us a sense of home and narrative throughline that runs through our lives. They cannot know what we will be missing, because they never had the joy of experiencing it for themselves in the first place.

Jess Walton "hysteria"? I think not!

2009-04-04T09:12:00.001-07:00

I adore Sara Bibel's blog. She has this no-bullshit way of cutting through the melodrama (a task I fail at) and sort of offering an incisive analysis. She is usually spot-on, because she blends industry knowledge, phenomenological experience from the Y&R creative team, and a history as a ratings analyst. That ivy-league education doesn't hurt either.

But Sara espoused something about the recent Jess Walton contract negotiations that I disagree with. (For those not following every twist, Y&R issued a recasting call for "Jill", ostensibly because Walton was 'under the weather'. Sources indicated, however, that it was really part of a tense negotiation between Walton and Sony/Bell/Y&R in which TPTB sought to lower Walton's episode guarantee and/or rate. The recast notice was publicized by Soap Opera Digest last Friday, but by late Monday, initial word came that Walton had re-signed. In other words, one side or both blinked).

Sara said this:

Jess Walton is leaving The Young & The Restless because she’s sick! No, it’s because the show is going to cut her appearances to once a month and her salary to minimum wage! Deidre Hall is going to take over the role. No, Anna Stuart. Actually, Jessica Lange and Goldie Hawn are going to dye their hair and split the role in a casting coup. Even though the show can’t afford Walton. Wait, Walton just signed a new deal. Nevermind.

As for l’affaire de Walton, it seems like it was a standard contract negotiation that unfortunately played out in the press. Unfortunately, everyone in daytime is being asked to take pay cuts these days. Hell, everyone in America is. Nobody likes them. Rest assured, your favorite soap star won’t be showing up at your local food bank anytime soon. They’re still making six figures, just less than they were before. Soaps often take the step of putting out casting calls for recasts when actors balk. It isn’t a friendly tactic. Sometimes it backfires (see Byrne, Martha). But, it often makes people sign on the dotted line. That’s what happened here. The winner, in this case, in the audience who gets to keep watching Walton in the meatiest storyline she has had in years.

Hmmm. Internet over-reaction? Excessive support for an actress during 'customary' negotiations? After all, she won't go hungry (says the previously self-titled 'unemployed' writer).

My view on this is completely different. I think that "l'affaire Walton" demonstrates the new engaged, activist audience, and there are many lessons in the furious weekend of Walton scribblings. At Soap Opera Network, half the posters changed their avatars to Walton images for the weekend!

For the record, the word "hysteria" I use below is the connotation I took from Bibel's piece (and other writers and posters from the same period), and is NOT a quote.

1. Fans had a right to mistrust. A frequent term was the "ABC-Dification of Y&R"...used to refer to the fact that veterans on ABC have been set to recurring or low guarantees...and then become non-viable. This has happened trans-genre.
2. It was compounded by the fact that the LUMINOUS, REMARKABLE, BEST-WORK-OF-HER-CAREER Walton was finally back on the front burner after five years of -- ahem -- misguided storytelling. Now, finally, when Michael Jordan is back and scoring, you're gonna even THREATEN to cut him from the team? This part of the fan response was simply an expression of love -- not hysteria.
3. Y&R itself has a relatively recent history of "botching" (in the fan mind) many of these tense negotiations. While opinions are mixed, the loss of Heather Tom and Victoria Rowell is attributed by many to an unproductively unflinching TPTB. Injudicious cast cutting, in the eyes of some, cost us Jerry Douglas and Don Diamont. Ridiculous inflexibility led to long hiatuses for fan faves like Melody Thomas Scott (who reportedly cleared out her dressing room), Eric Braeden, Joshua Morrow, and Sharon Case. Nobody wanted that for "Jill", the sole "legacy character" who has been there from the beginning.
4. It is true that the news about the negotiations was remarkably 'real time'. Just a few years ago, I'd get my news about 'tense negotiations' from Soap Opera Digest, and by the time I read it, a new deal had already been made. Therefore, it is quite a sign of journalistic evolution that the news now was immediate. Was the fan response "hysteria". In my opinion, the new era of real-time news means that the fans were co-participants in the negotiation! Like a papal nomination, we were thronging outside the Vatican, looking for the color of the smoke.
5. "Tense" negotiations, eh? But they got resolved over a weekend! During that period, many people -- informed by the real time news -- sent notes of protest and support to CBS, Bell, Sony and Walton. One source (another fallacious internet rumor? maybe?) indicates to me that these notes DID reach TPTB, and that some executives WERE surprised at the level of pro-Walton support.

Let's pretend the last point is true? Maybe the fan voices ("hysteria"), in some small way, shifted the valence of the negotiations. Maybe the fan voices made it just a little harder for TPTB to maintain the claim to Walton of "you can be easily replaced". Maybe, just maybe, "hysterical" fans helped prevent the kind of painful, damaging, protracted negotations (often with "bad" outcomes from a fan perspective) that happened before?

Who knows. Even if the fan voices were irrelevant, one cannot underestimate the powerful well-being benefits of a little self-efficacy and locus of control. The illusion of playing a small role in affecting an outcome is -- itself -- a wonderful thing. If that weren't true, why else would many of us go out and vote in elections?

In the end, though, I love happy endings! Glad you're sticking around, Jess!

PS: Ms Walton, I hope you have given up smoking! (A lot of us were scared by that 'under the weather' comment)

Optimism/Another Graph/GL's fate is not Ellen Wheeler's fault

2009-04-04T07:33:00.000-07:00

A persistent irritant for me is the claim that the fate of GL (and all soaps) is due to "bad writing" and mismanagement. Ellen Wheeler is heralded as the anti-Christ. If not she, then Paul Rauch, John Conboy, Ellen Weston, Jill Farren Phelps, Mary Alice Dwyer Dobbin and a whole cast of villains gets blamed for what happened.

I have tried to prove here, elsewhere that:

- the rate of decline is virtually identical for all the soaps; excluding small variations (where soaps jockey for different positions in the rank order) they've all gone down in lockstep
- no 'resurgence' (not even GH's celebrated early 80s triumph) has had any long-term impact on the decline process that started in the 1970s or earlier (and became clearly manifest by 1980)
- indeed, in the last decade, the rate of decline in daytime has mirrored that of primetime, suggesting that the problem may be more related to "broadcast TV" than soaps in particular.

I've been called naive, immature and misguided for this. I still think I am right :). When the same thing happens to every show, you have to believe it is something about the industry or the genre or the platform.

What I believe is that the creative state of soap CAN influence its relative position. For example, I think the reason Y&R has been consistently #1 for almost two decades relates, in part, to its use of a consistent cast, production style, narrative throughline from the beginning. "Jill and Kay", two presently front burner characters, were both on the front burner in 1973. I also think CBS and her affiliates have been more supportive of Y&R, scheduling the show during a higher-viewership time (lunchtime, for many), and not punting the show all over the daypart.

But, even Y&R has declined, more or less, at the same rate as all the other shows. Which tells me, as someone who thinks a lot about "systems level processes" in my day job, that this is more about factors extrinsic to soaps.

In the past, therefore, I (erroneously?) concluded that all soaps are going to follow this death trajectory. By using some simplified projections (a linear rate of decline that is constant for all soaps) I went so far as to say the last soap, Y&R, might be cancelled in 2016.

Now, I think I might be wrong. At the behest of several posters at SON, I redid the above analysis, making a few changes: First, I did not require linear decline (that is important, because it means that if any show seems to be "levelling off" in decline, this new model will pick that up). Second, I did not impose the same decline slope for all shows -- I let the actual data from the past decade, for each show, determine the decline slope. Using that, and picking an arbitrary cancellation criterion of Household Neilsen Rating = 1.5 (which I picked out of thin air), some interesting things happened.

First, I replicated some of my previous findings: It would appear that ATWT, DOOL, AMC and OLTL are all on a pretty unstoppable "death" trajectory (but only if my assumptions are right!).
Second, three soaps (GH, Y&R, B&B) would seem to have the possibility of levelling off. Which means, if you project into the reasonable future (e.g., 2013), there is no reason to project (on strictly quantitative groups) that they will reach the cancellation threshold.

Is the rate of decline REALLY levelling off? Well, I plotted the four-year HH ratings (which I realize many don't care about, because it's all about the 18-49 female demo, but I care more about how many absolute Live+Same Day viewers a show gets), and sure enough, the slope of descent has apparently slowed from higher rates earlier in the decade.

"A little hope, a little romance, a big fat bulge in the hero's pants" (from Soaps in the Bunker).

Thank you, Guiding Light. A lesson taken from ER's goodbye

2009-04-03T04:06:00.000-07:00

For fourteen of its fifteen years, I have been a loyal viewer of ER (the first year I lived overseas). I consider ER a "soap" (in the sense that it is a serial drama with an ensemble cast), but it was an innovative one stylistically and narratively. Although ratings fell over the years, and the format became less fresh, I found it an enjoyable run. You'd think I would have been choked up at the series finale, but it was done so lovingly (returning vets, going out with a full-blast sense of energy [this is not an ending...it's just that our time of being there with County General has passed], circle-of-life promises [oh look, there's Mark Greene's daughter!] and metaphors of death to help us through the ending [Earnest Borgnine's heart-breaking performance]), how can one do anything but say "Thanks for the memories".

As a "soap", ER defied a lot of the assumptions of today's disgruntled viewers. "Shaky cam" production model? Look--ER pioneered it. Departing vets? The show did fine on the backs of newbies...in the final seasons (not counting guest stints) not a single original starring/front-burner cast member remained. Still, even with a show that strong, there is something about this long-form that is stifling. By staying true to its identity, ER eventually became just a little stale. Which means, as good as it was, the numbers fell (in part because of what happened to broadcast TV in general, but even the relative position of ER on Thursdays at 10 pm was clearly no longer a 'juggernaut'). It was just a little less 'must see', because it was repeating itself.

However, there is no sense in which this 'series finale' was a failure! Indeed, in a move of utter beauty, the writers brought back Ernest Borgnine, who had to sit back and let his wife die. "Is there nothing we can do?" he implored. No, said the doctors. It is time. When the last monitor was switched off, his searching eyes asked "Is that it?". Yes. A complicated life (her daughter loved her, but her husband treasured her), well lived, had come to a timely conclusion. Everything has a lifespan, and our job is to treasure what came before death, and not to perseverate on the death itself. Ernest's character got to lay with his wife's body a few minutes longer, to say a proper goodbye. As we did, with ER.

And so I turn to Guiding Light. First, my sympathies to the millions of fans who still loved her. I was never a regular viewer, but I would feel the same grief -- the same hole in my life -- if my long-running soap (they're ALL long-running at this point) were to disappear. I also know that, in the minds of some viewers, Guiding Light is not dead. P&G's press release says they're trying to find a new home, and so forth. For those banking on these new options, I wish you best of luck, even as I confess that the failure to let go makes me a little uneasy.

I can't help but think that there is a lesson in dignity, fitting endings, letting go, and so forth, in what we experienced with ER.

72 years! My goodness, how can that be viewed as anything but a beautiful, excellent, never-to-be-repeated thing? I have read angry viewers saying "I'll never watch CBS again" or "How dare CBS do this?!?". This network gave 72 years of air time to this show (and made a lot of money doing so). Does the inevitable act of cancellation (the lifespan of no entity is infinite) negate the foregoing decades? Not for me....

The objective facts show that GL was at the bottom of the soap ratings for at least a decade, was experiencing a faster-than-other decline rate in the recent years, earned a lot of fan and critical disgruntlement for both its storytelling and production style (offset by a recent glorious resurgence in part of the canvas). Affiliates time shifted the show all over the map. In many ways, the fact that GL remained alive in 2009 was a miracle...a testament to the pluckiness of its EP, the resolve of the parent company and -- yes -- even the unusual patience of its network. In the end, especially in a depleted economy, CBS' patience could not be boundless. But bless them for giving it this long.

As I look at the impressive "petitions" devised to save GL (over 3,600 signatures in 24 hours, for the one I saw), the comments are stunning. "I'm the sixth generation to watch this show". "I watched with my grandmother and mother, and now my daughter watches with me." "I remember Roger Thorpe", "I remember Beverley McKinsey". On and on it goes, a beautiful river of nostalgia.

But there's the rub. Almost nothing in those comments says "Oh, I sure miss the Manny supercouple" or "I really most love Grady and Cyrus". The sadness is for a GL that used to be, not one that exists today.

There are exceptions. Phillip Spaulding's return has clearly energized the show, and Otalia (the budding lesbian romance) has genuinely touched hearts. Are these stories a case of "too little, too late"? Not in my mind. Hell No! Instead, they are a remarkable gift to the fans: GL has a chance of going out on a high note! What a wonderful thing!

My wish, for the fans of GL, is that we get an ER-style send off. Someone, tipping the hat to the cultural institution GL was and all the money that it once made, should let the stories return to the veterans, bring back all the loved ones from the past (like ER) for a final goodbye. If we are left with the sense that Springfield will keep on going, and only that our (the viewers') sojourn through the fields has passed, that can be quite satisfying. Because then the show can live on in our imaginations. (That is why P&G/Telenext should move no GL characters to ATWT!! Let GL pass with dignity!)

There is something to be said for letting this dear old girl go out with smiles and fanfare and happiness and "thanks for the memories".

One of my favorite songs is "From Where I Stand" by Amanda McBroom. How about, as we say farewell to one of the last of Irna Phillips' grand shows, we honor the spirit of these words?

From where I stand
I see the bridges burning
From where I stand
Our love is goin' down

So close your eyes,
it isn't worth the cryin'
The sun will rise
and dry your tears away
And no, there's no hard feelings
I wish you all the best
Just leave behind your memory,
the devil take the rest.
And I watch you turn and walk away
I find there's nothin' left to say
I can't go back to yesterday
I'll never find the way.
From where I stand.

Coming Soon

2009-04-01T06:09:00.000-07:00

Friends, thanks to those who have emailed and wondered if I abandoned blogging. No. Four things have kept me away: (a) Work, work and more work, (b) A spate of family illnesses and deaths, (c) I made an email switch, and thus missed many of your comments (they should have been forwarded, but were not), and (d) I felt like I was beginning to repeat myself. So, it felt like a good time to let things gestate. The advantage of doing a blog simply as a diary of my own thoughts, rather than as a job or on an externally imposed deadline is that the timing of things can be more natural and organic to the writer.

I have a few things to talk about though, in the next little while:

1. Soapnet ratings, and Soapnet critical response, and Soapnet's new deal for internet distribution of DOOL.

2. The gathering storm over Guiding Light.

3. The new role of the Internet, with a specific reference to the Jess Walton/Y&R situation.

4. My growing love for Nelson Branco at Canadian TV Guide, and why I think he is good for soaps. Also, an ever-growing appreciation for what Roger Newcomb is catalyzing -- both with his site, and with the new blogger coalition he is a part of.

5. SciFi becoming SyFy...yes, I think there is a soap tie-in here.

6. Damon Jacobs and "Shouldless". That is only tangentially related to soaps, and yet I really think he has an awful lot to tell us all.

In the meantime, I find that soap operas are flourishing on the internet (in terms of what is being written and talked about), and that is a very enjoyable way to extend the soap opera experience for those of us who don't get enough from our daily fix.

Now, if only Snark would weigh in again!

Soapy's Tribute to Don Diamont

2009-02-08T06:59:00.001-08:00

I don't usually just link to other posts here, but Soaphunks.net has assembled a really nice tribute to Don Diamont. If you visit, you'll see that the site's owner talks about the ways in which Diamont actually played a formative role in his life. More importantly, there is lots of classic Don to appreciate. Please visit!

Wrong! But I still love you....

2009-02-05T16:32:00.000-08:00

Well, my heart and my brain are telling me different things.

Maria, I think by now you know I love you. I've suggested that you are saving daytime, merely by following Marland's rules. Heck, I have always loved your show...even when it went through a shaky period. I still love your show, and I'll be tuned in every blessed day.

But why oh why did they have to find Brad's body?

Of all the characters on daytime, Brad's situation was perfectly set up to be the body that was never found. He slipped under the ice. It could have taken till Spring to be able to drag the lake...and by then what might have remained of the corpse? And Brad, nee George Kaplan, knows a thing or two about "dying" and coming back in a new persona.

See, I understand why you might have killed off Brad, even if I'm not totally happy about the decision.

He was on the backburner all of last year, so it is clear you didn't really have any story in mind for him
By some accounts, the character was destroyed by the -- ahem -- previous administration, when he was given a ridiculous on-the-run-from Nazis storyline
Moreover, the character compromised the integrity of much of the Y&R characters, because they were all accessories to crimes he committeed: Brad killed two men (one with his thighs), but nobody brought him to justice (even to report it as self-defense). Thus, the whole canvas was tainted.
Daytime is in a financial rut, so even your show probably has to lose some expensive veterans. Arguably, on Y&R, Don Diamont and Doug Davidson (sob) are currently the two most expendable veterans.
Killing Brad spins off a bunch of wonderful story. Sharon's guilt. Noah's Saving Private Ryan-style "Earn This" maturation. Deepening of Phyllis' guilt (she sent him to his death, in some ways). Colleen's turn to the dark side (will she disrupt Victoria and JT's marriage in the process?). Abby's resentment toward her bio-dad (Victor was awful to Brad) and of Eden...the bad girl who set some of this in motion by planning an illicit skating trip. Ashley's guilt for being unkind to Brad in his final days. So, lots of stories can (and, knowing you, WILL) spin off from this.
I'll bet you get sick of people asking when Victoria Rowell is coming back. After all, they never found the body. So, I'll bet that you decided to show the body, so that everyone knew Brad was really, truly dead.

Even as I understand all this, and even as I put handsome Diamont out of my mind for a moment, you so diabolically made Brad more interesting than ever these last few weeks. Fearing the loss of his daughter Abby to Victor. Thwarted desire for Sharon. Hot hate-chemistry with Phyllis. At loose ends in business. So much to develop here. The character of Brad was ripe for remaking under your pen, Maria.

So, I am sad that you decided to make this so final. Unlike your brother-in-law's soap, I can't even count on the possibility of a device like "That wasn't Brad...that was a wax doll substituted by an Arabian prince".

I shall miss Brad and Diamont. I hope that he will show up soon in a new venue. I congratulate you in spinning another fine tale. But I'm really sorry that you chose to make it final. But I'll keep watching every riveting chapter of your story. Because you and your team are that good. I have put my trust in your storytelling abilities. There is no denying, if you're gonna kill off a veteran, this is the way to do it!

Giving this finality to Brad was wrong. At least, that's what my heart says. But I still love you, Y&R. See you tomorrow!

Veterans away: What (not) to do

2009-01-30T17:29:00.000-08:00

Today, by all accounts, was the final appearance of Don Diamont on the Young and the Restless. The story was told cryptically. By a series of coincidences, Brad was in the Wisconsin woods at the same time as Noah Newman had fallen through ice and was dying. The hero came out in Brad, and he tried to rescue Noah.

Then, in an interesting storytelling device, next we saw Noah, he was in hospital and apparently on the road to recovery. No sign of Brad, but the final shot of the episode was on an emergency lantern at water's edge...flickering, and about to be extinguished.

Only the most spoilerphobic do not know what will happen next.

My point, though, is to address how fundamentally respectfully Y&R dealt with this transition. In the days before this event, they actually ramped up Brad's story. He was in conflict with his ex-wife, his (adopted) daughter was starting to drift away to her biological father, he was at a crossroads in business. He confessed his true love to Sharon Newman, and was rebuffed. He even had a sweet reunion with his first (Genoa City) wife, Traci Abbott.

Now, this is an intriguing writing choice. It makes any subsequent loss of Brad even more poignant. He doesn't just fade away. He is, instead, snatched away with a plethora of unfinished business and a whole new bevy of storylines (fighting Victor, reclaiming his daughter's love, finding new romance and new occupation). In the last days, Brad had been more active than he'd been since Lynn Latham left the show.

Then, on top of it, he is apparently given a hero's farewell. He died (did he?) saving the son of the woman who had just rejected him!

If previews for the next episode are to be believed, this will also spin out in months of new stories...all premised around Brad's death. Nick and Sharon reunited, after a fashion. The increasingly psycho Phyllis will discover Nick's betrayal. Colleen will be bereft...and apparently turn to the (hitherto happily married) first love JT. Abby will surely be rocked by guilt...probably Ashley and Victoria too. Good, juicy, soapy stuff.

Killing a character off like that -- with long term repercussions -- is an act of love. It says, palpably, "you will be missed; your absence will be felt".

========

Now, I contrast this with the 1/23/2009 farewell of John and Marlena on Days of our Lives. Pillars of the show, they'd languished under years of uneven writing, sudden story switches, and -- most criminally -- long phases of backburner neglect.

Their story was tied up -- literally -- within the span of a single episode. Then...off they were...to Switzerland (presumably never to be seen again). Since leaving, their departures have scarcely been mentioned.

No opportunity for farewells...even with daughters Sami or Belle. No dramatic or heroic departure. No repercussions. By my previous criteria, that equals disrespect...for John and Marlena, and for the fans who loved them for so long.

========

Time and again, Y&R shows how it should be done...and Days...doesn't. Could this, possibly, be part of the reason for the huge ratings difference between them?

And yet, I scratch my head. By all accounts, DOOL is the only show that is consistently GAINING viewers these days. That makes me think I do not understand what soap fans even want. I do know what I want....respect for fans.

Oh yeah. And that they never find Brad's body.

Truth in the Bunker/A Farewell of Sorts

2009-01-25T09:14:00.000-08:00

This is really two posts in one.

1. The Bunker

Some of you have surely seen the hilarious (I mean, for me, LITERALLY tear-inducing) viral video Soaps in The Bunker. At a site called Overstream.net, lots of users have apparently been taking a popular German clip (Hitler confronting the reality of his defeat during his final hours in Berlin) and imposing subtitles over it to reflect...whatever. A user named Chris Dunn has done this with soaps...specifically, the inability for the Daytime Emmys to find a network home, which leads to a greater disappointment about the state of the genre. If you haven't seen it, I embedded it at bottom. (If you need any of the "inside" jokes explained, check out this link).

Like all good satire, the best of this video is that has an insider's knowledge, and skewers much (the networks for not showing the Emmys--especially ABC's Brian Frons; columnists Michael Logan and Carolyn Hinsey, bloggers, and the creative state of daytime itself). So, there is a line, during Hitler's final reflections, that tries to be a little serious. It says:

What am I talking about? We brought this on ourselves. We forgot the cardinal rule of daytime. A little hope. A little romance. And a big fat bulge in the hero's pants. Bold and the Beautiful does the same story twelve years running. Did they think no one would notice? All My Kids does a tornado. A tornado! What do they think it is? 1985! They are killing us!

The piece is especially effective because of the use of the quiet tone of the end, and the overlay of this killer nostalgic irony.

Maybe all isn't lost. ... When I turn on my television, just seeing John and Marlena makes me know everything will be alright. Everything will be alright.

In succinct form, the video identifies the chief causes of decline: Redundancy and lack of originality, emphasis on sensations and events rather than real storytelling, overemphasis on prurient interests, and disregard for history and veterans. (Goodbye, John and Marlena)

I have argued repeatedly in this blog that the ratings status of daytime would have happened no matter what--that we're at the mercy of demographic changes and changes in viewing trends. What is happening to daytime is, in many ways, nothing but a microcosm of what is happening to all of the last generation of media. I also believe that at least some of what has happened to soaps creatively has been a reaction to (and perhaps a secondary cause of) this viewership loss. We're seeing the consequences of budget cuts on screen. We're seeing desperation moves (ultimately futile) to stem the demographic tide.

I still stand by that. But there is no denying that daytime is -- creatively -- at a low ebb. We now measure great "moments" on shows, rather than great shows. There are likely differences of opinion about this last statement. Which makes the video--after the tears and stomach pains from the laughing have passed--so effective. I am left, in the end, with the quietness of the end of the Hitler scene. Hope is a delusion. Where we are now is the final chapter of a myriad of earlier strategic missteps. I hope that endnote is wrong.

2. Casiello rejoins the creative side

Congratulations are due to Tom Casiello, who announced that he will begin a trial period as a breakdown writer for The Young and the Restless. I am among the legions of his readers who ardently hope that this is an excellent fit, that he meshes well with his bosses, and enjoys a good long run in the position.

At the same time, it means that Tom will have to leave the blogosphere (he has announced, more or less, that he is doing so). Way back, on his myspace blog (now deleted), he mentioned that there needed to be a firewall of sorts between the creative and fandom sides.

Tom (along with Sara Bibel) has occupied a unique niche in daytime writing. He has been an insider-outsider bridge. He went into daytime writing as a fan, and he has remained one. But he has done a careful job, during these fourteen months of unemployment, at studying the genre and the form. We have explored Douglas Marland's bible with him. He did detailed fan focus groups of every show still on the air (lost, I fear, to Myspace). He explained things to the viewers (e.g., limited use of sets). With his departure from the scene, we lose that soap scholar with an inside view.

The internet message boards have been, strangely, filled with mixed opinions about Tom's move. Those who have enjoyed him and his blogs are congratulatory. Grinches (my word), on the other hand, argue that he has become a cause celebre solely because he "spoke to the fans", and so the joy at his promotion are more about his accessibility to fans than his writing skill. Others emphasize that the breakdown writer has limited creative control over a show (and nowhere is that likely truer than a Bell soap), so his impact is unlikely to be felt.

I think this misses the point! Tom has humanized the soap writer. He has offered glimpses through the keyhole (or maybe, through the keyboard). The fact that fans lapped up his blog (tens of thousands of hits, he told us) shows that he filled an unmet need. The shows and the soap press have pretty systematically refused to try to address the deep fan hunger for "meta" content. They don't realize that part of the fun of soap fandom is a peculiar version of "fantasy football". Tom, however, understood it.

Daytime's refusal to acknowledge fandom as co-owners of the creative product is quite in contrast to primetime, I think. Some of the real buzz shows (Heroes, Friday Night Lights, Lost, Gossip Girl, etc) have writers and producers who regularly speak to the fans. They do so directly (e.g., ComicCon) and indirectly (through regular and frequently interviews with folks like Michael Ausiello). Marceline at SON emphasizes that these writers are simply treating the audience as customers, and the customers reward them with loyalty. Presumably, though, this dialogue also opens up a two-way street. Fans feel heard! And, sometimes, shows can improve in response.

This interactive model of creative-fan interactions is definitely in counterpart to the "auteur theory". Bill Bell, for example, was ostensibly legendary in not really listening to fan feedback or network notes. (There were exceptions. As Sara Bibel has told us, when ratings began to plummet after Y&R's Katherine Chancellor appeared to dally with lesbianism, the story was instantly ended. And, when there was a huge negative fan reaction to a baby's death on Days of Our Lives, Bill Bell reportedly vowed never to do it again...although he finally reluctantly did it with Lauren's faux-child Dylan on Y&R in the early 90s). And that worked. Bill Bell was left unimpeded, and so the viewers just needed to go along for the ride on his creative vision. And what an enjoyable ride it usually was.

But most of daytime is not like that now. For the most part, daytime has lost sight of what the customer wants. I take this less from the plummeting ratings (because I think that has more macro-structural causes), but from the universally negative theme in fan internet boards, letters to the soap mags, and critical opinions.

So, it is kind of ironic that Tom is going to the best show on daytime -- and, arguably, only one of two shows that are still auteur-driven. His fourteen months of study, his "open mike" to the fans...the very things that could potentially have made him a kind of "Damon Lindelof of daytime"...are the very things that Y&R probably needs to avoid.

It is GH or ATWT or GL or AMC or DOOL that need to listen to an educated writer with his finger on the pulse of fandom. Sadly, most of those shows don't employ breakdown writers anymore.

So, I salute Tom and thank him for the gifts he has shared with us these past 14 months. I wish him great luck, satisfaction and longevity at Y&R. I hope this trial turns into a long deal. I suspect he'll still take his lessons of the last year and build them into his outlines. Maybe, in some small way, even on his strongly written show, he'll be able to inject his obvious love for the fans in small ways. This is a good passage, but I will surely miss him.

The gay male soap fan

2009-01-20T02:40:00.000-08:00

With gays erupting all over daytime :-), I thought this historical article might offer some interesting historical context on a segment of the audience that was long ignored.

In another long-promised excerpt from that out of print soap book I have been drawing from, I wanted to share this tail-end excerpt from Jane Feuer's chapter, "Different Soaps for Different Folks". Her broader chapter considers the question of how soaps, programmed for such a mainstream audience, have come to have such specialized appeal for subgroups like African American women and gay men. Because the appeal of soaps to gay men has been a through theme in this blog, I thought I'd include some her comments on that topic. The article is old (1997), so it would be interesting to think about whether what it says is still relevant almost 12 years later.

=========

The Fan and the Gay Male Audience

Although they may not he counted as a commodity audience, demographic groups other than women in the age range of eighteen to forty-nine may he interested in soap opera as an art form. The common word for those viewers who are overly invested emotionally in soap operas is fans, and according to Michael Kape, the level of affective investment differentiates the fan from the ordinary viewer. (Very few soap fans are as extreme as, say, the one who stalked soap star Andrea Evans and forced her to leave One Life to Live.) Kape makes a distinction between fans who merely have an emotional investment and the readers of Soap Opera Now, whom he sees as better educated and more discriminating. But not everyone agrees with this distinction. Many academics believe that the audience/fan distinction has been too sharply drawn, and they now feel that viewers may be deeply emotionally involved in soaps and, at the same time, may be critical of them.

If fans have been given bad press, perhaps too sharply setting them oft from other viewers, then one group of viewers presents a particularly interesting case: gay men. Gay men are known to be more devoted fans of soap operas than straight men. Since many gay fans are not forthcoming about their sexual identities, this is an impossible audience to study statistically. Yet Michael Kape believes that the networks are aware of their presence, and that they will do more to cultivate this audience in the future. According to Sean Griffin of the University of Southern California, who has researched among gay male fans of All My Children, the show's producers are aware of this audience, or hoped to increase its size by creating the openly gay male character, Michael Delaney.

Network recognition of the gay male fans is only part of the reason why this alternative group may be of interest to students of soap operas. Gay male viewers, like African American women viewers, raise the question whether different audiences receive different messages from the same programs; that is, whether or not they constitute interpretive communities that differ from the assumed eighteen- to forty-nine-year-old housewife audience. The experts I interviewed disagree about whether gay men create different meanings from soaps than other audiences. Michael Kape does not believe that gay men respond differently from other groups. He says that if you look at the origins of soap opera as a form that relies heavily on emotional response, you will discover that "people are people," that sexuality ultimately does not affect responses to powerful soap opera dramatics. Sean Griffin, on the other hand, says that it does. His interviews with gay male fans of soaps from the Internet news group "rec.arts.tv.soaps.abc" led him to the conclusion that gay men had a fundamentally different response from other viewers to the introduction, for example, of the gay character Michael Delaney (played by Chris Bruno) on All My Children. According to Griffin, however, the responses of gay men are not uniform, and some conform to those of women and straight men. Some gay men, for instance, agree with some straight viewers that actor Chris Bruno is perfectly believable; other gay men find that the actor, who has declared that he is straight, is uncomfortable in the role. (There are straight fans who share this view too.) Griffin says that "Gay men seem more often to do a 'double reading'. While they remain completely engrossed in the story lines and characters, they also see the whole thing through the eyes of ‘camp'."

Griffin's research found that the gay culture's investment in the diva phenomenon (as explored in The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and The Mystery of Desire by Wayne Koestenbaum) factors into the pleasure of some gay male fans. Griffin makes the comparison of certain gay men who are staunch defenders of Erica Kane with those who are tired of her snotty egotism. Griffin also finds that gay men generally have a greater sense of whimsy or irony with regards to soaps, because they know that they are not the networks' intended audience. He also believes that the ability to read the small clues or social signs that help gay men identify one another in an often hostile society may help them in reading where soap story lines are going (in other words, which two characters are being set up for a romance, or that a character has been limping although others ignore it).

Lastly, gay men obviously like looking at handsome male actors. Here, it is hard to differentiate between how straight women and gay men appreciate the show. In the online discussions of soap opera Web sites on the Internet, Tad Martin was usually spoken for by the female fans, while Pierce Riley (at least when played by Jim Fitzpatrick) was championed by gay men. When asked why this research is important, Griffin replied, "Well, my main interest (other than I am a gay male myself who loves soaps!) is how gay male fans challenge the often rigid ideas about how who the viewers of soaps are and how they read these things." If this is true, then the title of this article, "Different Soaps for Different Folks," is a lot more complex than it seems. It is not so much a question of say, Generations being targeted at black viewers and The Bold and the Beautiful at whites. The issue is really that different audiences seem to make different meanings out of the same soaps.

A little Nuke and the world explodes

2009-01-19T16:29:00.000-08:00

Well, I realize this is a post that is happening a week after Luke and Noah had sex on ATWT. In my defense, I have been away at a family funeral. In addition, though, I really wanted to let the event gestate a bit. There has been so much written about it (hence the explosion of the title), and so much of it was contrary to what I thought I saw, I needed to let it all percolate. If you missed it, here is what I'm talking about:

In the end, my thoughts about the event are positive, and in line with Nelson Branco's quote from Sri Rao (writer of Night Shift 2): “Good for them. One small step for Nuke, one giant leap for daytime...”

Rao should know. He accomplished, with Night Shift 2, what daytime had failed to do: tender conversations between two men who really got to know each other, were confident in their sexuality (for the most part), and for whom a kiss was not a huge deal, but just beautifully tender and arousing to almost anyone who saw it. If you missed it, I mean this.

For me, Nuke sex was beautiful because (a) of the passion we got see leading up to it, (b) because NO LONGER can it be denied that Luke (scion of a core family) is a sexual being who -- yup -- has actually seen his love naked and actually related to him in a sexual way. (Make no mistake about it...there was contingent out there that thought Luke's celibacy was an 'appropriate' response to his 'wrong' attractions), and (c) because it is almost like the "last wall" has fallen (More on that below).

Most importantly, we're past it now. If Nuke ever has sex again, it won't be such a big deal (nor should it be). The big obstacle has been jumped. And for those who don't like Nuke, well, now the way has been paved for a couple you might like more. Never again will a gay male couple have to go through all this nonsense to merely kiss on daytime. That is a victory.

To be clear, All My Children accomplished the same thing for lesbian sexuality years ago, with Bianca. To see the remarkable intimacy of Reese and Bianca now, it is easy to forget how difficult it was for Bianca to be given on-screen kisses with Lena or Maggie years ago. But, those "outrages" perpetrated, Reese and Bianca are now free to be more openly loving.

The gay male sexuality was an extra hurdle. Make no mistake about it, when Brian Frons says "our lesbians are cuter", he is reflecting the fact that woman-on-woman sex is simply not as taboo anymore. Of course, this plays into the whole straight-male-porn-fantasy. Straight women never seemed to have a parallel enjoyment of gay porn in the mainstream, even though Carrie Bradshaw and the Sex and the City girls seemed to like it.

Indeed, Michael Moore suggested, tongue-in-cheek, in Mike's Election Guide 2008 that if the gay marriage amendments had been about lesbians, they would have readily passed. Showing a picture of two brides-in-veils with interlinked tongues, Moore wrote (pp. 35-36)

I am told that no one is opposed to watching two women kiss. Men love it, women love it, and the women doing it love it -- something for everybody! I don't think it is female-on-female love that has so many people (men) discombobulated. I think when they say they are against gay marriage, what they really mean is that they are against this:

(picture of two men kissing)

Now that is disgusting! Guys going all borkeback on each other--gimme a break! The state can't sanction that!

So, as a sociopolitical act of activism, I honestly believe Nuke is so, so important! Not because it is the first mainstream depiction of gay male sexuality, but maybe because it is the last important one! Let me expand on this by addressing some of the many critiques I have read about the story these last weeks.

This was not a "first". Indeed the whole story shows how locked in a conservative past soaps are.

The core premise, for me, is what Kay Alden meant when she said "Soaps are not an avante garde medium". (She said this at Sam Ford's MIT symposium, in relation to his Masters defense).

Another way I viewed the Nuke sex, specifically, was as "My heavens! There are boinking on homo-sect-choo-als on Aunt Mildred's STORIES!!! On ATWT!!! On one of the two oldest daytime shows! On a show that debuted in the Eisenhower era! On a show with a median viewer age in excess of 60 years! "

Much of the negative commentary about the "innovativeness" of this relates to the fact that Dynasty and Melrose Place and Brothers and Sisters and Hollyoaks and what have you all did it before.

True, that! And AMC has to continue to get credit for really having a core gay character first. (The history is longer, as you can see here).

So, why am I celebrating so much?

ATWT's gay male sex is not necessary the FIRST shoe to drop. Instead, I think Nuke may be interesting because it is the LAST shoe to drop. If we take the conservative, staid, stuck-in-the-past, pander-to-the-mainstream, do-not-inflame soap genre (I don't actually think it is all like that), and THEY have homo-sect-choo-als kissing and more...it is a true marker of culture change.

But in the end, my connection to this tale is more emotional, and it all goes back, again, to the fact that these are Aunt Mildred's STORIES! And now, with the wavy-whisps of an old-school flashback, I'm drawn back into the past... I am sorry this is a ramble, but it shows you that I'm not responding intellectually to this tale....

... what a difference might it have made to young men 30 years ago, if Nuke had been around then. Back in the day when soaps were more truly intergenerational? To show that gay men were decent, loving, respectworthy members of core families. That their mothers and grandmothers and neighbors still loved them, even though they were attracted to the 'wrong' sex. How many doors of healthy conversation and attitude change might it have opened?

[For those who do not believe that the generational experience of coming out is a whole different thing, compare Saul and Kevin on Brothers and Sisters. That is a totally authentic representation of how things have changed.]

Young gay men probably look at Nuke and say "come on! No big deal! We've been here and queer forever! The timidity and forcedness of the Nuke story is so in contrast with our lives".

Maybe.

But man oh man oh man has the world changed!

Someone from my genereation looks at Luke Snyder in AWE! The world has CHANGED! Imagine if, 37 years ago, Phil Brent had been a young gay man on AMC, and the triangle involving Chuck and Tara had been because Phil wanted Chuck! What a different world that would have been!

Even as the world moved along, soaps just DIDN'T. Not in major or significant ways (although that link above shows that some brave souls TRIED).

Now, finally, the "soap train" has arrived at the station. That is a big deal. (The "station", by the way, is the acceptance of gay male sexuality...as I posted earlier...for women it has been futher along).

When I look back on my nearly 44 years (damn, I feel old on this board), I simply cannot tell you how stunning Nuke is. It is truly akin (I know you'll accuse me of aggrandizing) how I imagine some African Americans felt when Obama became president. The world has changed!

All the feelings of things you could never achieve when you were younger...well that ceiling suddenly opens up...and you almost get a feeling of vertigo....imagine if the world had always been thus! How different might life have been?

Thirty years ago, there was NO ROLE MODEL, certainly not on soaps. Think about what Luke IS! He's the white-bread scion of a countrified-citified Oakdale...middle America...no crazy hair or dress or lifestyle. And average fella, he probably shops at malls instead of Soho thrift shops, not "loud and proud"...just a typical guy. (Yes, I know he is a Grimaldi...but I am ignoring that). To SEE THAT EVERY DAY!! EVERY DAY!!! Wow!

That changes the world! At least mine!

From the perspective of "jaded youth" that is well past all of this, I can see how Nuke is nothing special. From the perspective of someone who NEVER THOUGHT this day would come EVER....it is very special indeed.

For me, this is as fundamental as Uhura-Kirk. That interracial kiss was subversive, IMO, not because it was 'first', but because it infiltrated the white-male bastion of SciFi. If you were going to show that kind of 'miscegnation' to THAT audience....well...you had pushed the audience very far. ATWT is a very similar bastion....with a mainstream audience of older, homebound women....mothers of sons who live in environments where it still may not be acceptable to be gay. (You know...Prop 8 voters). Now, every day, even here, they cannot deny the existence of this reality. Maybe, if they don't tune out, they'll see that Luke and Noah are decent and regular. Not perverts or pedophiles or sluts. Just striped-shirt wearing doofuses who go to college. Maybe they will recognize their sons...and judge less harshly, having had their attitudes adjusted, if they sons turn out to be gay too. For all of you who are 'way past' a society that does not accept gay male sexuality, I'm here to remind you that the MAJORITY of people in many areas are NOT 'way past' the issue. ATWT and its ilk can be fundamental tools in the cultural evolution. (That is also why it is important to not yet p*ss those people off and show them sweaty thrusting in a bed. Get them ready in baby steps. That day will come...)

The story was lousy. Nuke was a terrible insta-couple.

This critique points to the origins of the story where, it seems, Luke's unreciprocated attraction to Noah was a little rushed. The basis for the mutual attraction was never firmly established, so -- other than the fact that these are two gay men -- we don't really know why they are together at this point.

I think this is a broader critique of ATWT's writing, and so it is not specific to Nuke. Also, at this point, I really don't think it is fair to call them an "insta-couple". After over two years? INSTACOUPLE?? That just is no longer true. The FOUNDATIONS of the union may be shaky...and I'm not saying this is terrific writing. But honestly, they've earned the right with enough shared history to be more than an insta-couple.

The whole thing was rushed, shoehorned into a single episode. It was almost like "let's get this over with".

The point is that a gay man, who is a member of a core family, whom the audience has been allowed -- more or less -- to see grow up has also been allowed to become a fully embodied sexual being on his show. And that is major. Within the context of this single episode, it was also a good soapy setup -- from the fight in Midtown to the feverish kissing and locking of doors, to the post-coital tenderness. Since ATWT is trying to get us to view the show in a more "episodic" way, this was a good episode vis-a-vis Nuke.

Sex on this particular day made little sense

This is Tom Casiello's point. This love scene didn't get the build-up of some "losing virginity" stories on other shows. Given how long this couple has been denying themselves, why on this random January Monday?

I don't know. I can't defend that choice in particular. But in the real world, people have sex. They don't schedule it for particular days or plan it or announce it with weeks of foreshadowing. They just "throw down". Nuke could no longer deny it.

I actually think it was a beautiful breakthrough for the precipitant of Noah's passion to be Luke's admonition that "You're selfish with your feelings". Finally, finally, Noah had an epiphany. And the forceful way that he kissed Luke was both hot and completely appropriate for the heated conversation that preceded it. So, for me, watching this episode (I confess!) in isolation...it made perfect sense. It seemed like a classic moment of anger-dissolving-into-passion. Indeed, the utter "prototypicality" of that kiss made me happy...Nuke was getting treated like just about every other soap couple. That's all we can ask for.

The scene should have been comparable to what we see with het couples, otherwise gay men are on the "back of the bus"

This "back of the bus" comment showed up on both Usenet, and in a comment to Tom Casiello's piece on this topic.

So, the activist in me says...sure...sweaty naked men kissing all over each other in bed MIGHT WELL have been the more appropriate soap template to use. Except Luke and Noah are young, and soaps typically use a more chaste approach for young sex.

Second, can we remind ourselves of the national realities here? Gay marriage amendments were turned down by the MAJORITY of voters in three states in November 2008. For us to ignore the context in which this story plays out is ... naive. I suspect there is a lot of overlap, for example, between the population that voted against gay marriage and the population that watches P&G soaps.

In addition, P&G/CBS received vociferous protest against Nuke kissing (thank you, Rev. Wildmon)! A scant year ago, there was even a visible kissing ban! P&G/Televest/Telenext/whatever was sufficiently scared that they ran a PHONE POLL to help them decide whether to continue the Nuke tale!

In light of the extreme caution that has been taken so far, why would we now want to engage in a sudden act of sensory 'flooding' and show hot sweaty sex? Baby steps is the key....

I may have a different opinion here. I believe that a softer, more "lamb-like" approach is the right one to take here, given that the majority of Americans is still not comfortable with gay male sexuality.

Let's face it. If I want to watch sex -- gay or straight -- I can find lots of porn on this here old internet.

So, soap sex is ... well ... usually hokey. At its WORST, it is arched backs and sweaty brows and treacly music.

I'm not saying, sometimes, that can't be remarkable to see, but for the most part, I'll pass.

Most of soap sex is off screen. Every married couple on soaps gets to have their sex off screen. And that's fine. I really don't need to to see ATWT's Tom and Margo grunting away fortnightly, or however often they do it .

This was Nuke's FIRST sex. It may get "hotter" as time passes. For me, what is important is that the threshold has been crossed.

Now, EVERY TIME we see those men on screen, America will know that they have seen each other naked, in a lustful way. That new reality suffuses every scene. That is DIFFERENT. That is ground breaking. That is what Monday opened. Two men who are explicitly sexual with each other, on the front burner. Now, when they touch, we will know it is a "knowing" touch...and like Tom and Margo or -- heck -- most days Brad and Katie -- we know they'll follow up on the "touch" later. No longer is this denied.

Once the conservatives catch their breath and stop their puking (men having SEX! how AWFUL!), the next sex scene (whenever it happens) could well be shirtless in bed together kissing. Who knows? Who cares? Again, if we want to see two men in flagrante delicto....well...there are other sites for that.

This is commercial TV! It plays to all kinds of sensibilities. How often are African American characters (the few who exist) given those arched-back scenes? How often are characters over 40 given those scenes? There are all kinds of racist, sexist, ageist and homophobic sensibilities that are being 'considered' as these soaps get put out...that's the reality of an advertiser-supported medium that needs to appeal to the "minivan majority" (ugh).

The fact remains....we KNOW, and we cannot deny, that two men now exist in Oakdale who related to one another fully as loving and sexual beings. That is ENORMOUS. I cannot believe people aren't just jaw-droppingly astounded at how ENORMOUS this is.

There should have been advance publicity

When she was still at SOD/SOW, Carolyn Hinsey expressed this point regarding Nuke's first kiss. Recently, I have seen this opinion expressed -- say -- via the Marlena Delacroix site.

I could not disagree more. I think this publicity is working EXACTLY as it should. Why?

First, again, let us not deny the hordes of protesters. Let us not forget the early 90s, when Thirtysomething lost all advertisers for an episode because two gay men were simply shown in bed together. Why give them an advance warning to get organized?

Second, let us not forget that the method-of-the-day is viral. I defy you, in the modern era, to show me many examples of where advance publicity has had ANY effect on ratings! Genie Francis' returns to General Hospital have been promoted...and there was scarcely a ratings blip. The sole exception to the "benefits of publicity" that I can recall was during the "Sudden Impact" arc on Young and Restless (8/6/2008). There, clever banner ads and some out-of-daypart-and-off-network TV ads did convince lapsed viewers to come back to see the newly re-energized Y&R.

But, for the most part, publicity is irrelevant now.

Instead, Roger Newcomb reports that over 300,000 have watched the Nuke sex on Youtube alone. Who knows how many more people saw it on Fancast or CBS.com, etc.

Those who proclaim the need for publicity are LOCKED IN AN OLD WORLD, where the only way to watch a soap was on TV. "Set your VCR" is an outdated phraseology, even if you substitute the word "DVR". If you miss a show, you can catch it (legally) online, and the network gets to count both the "hit" and the advertising revenue!

Indeed, the lack of advance publicity is BRILLIANT. It teaches viewers they HAVE TO WATCH, or they'll miss it. That avoids a one-day ratings spike (useless), and might encourage return viewership.

Viral, viral, viral, viral.

Whenever you want to complain about a lack of publicity, just remember these phrases: "TV is dead" and "Viral is in". ATWT is playing well to the modern world!

And for those who feel the lack of publicity was "defensive", as in "The network was chicken, and afraid to stir up protest"...well....when everyone is out to get you it is OKAY to be defensive. When you're going to stir up a hornet's nest, it is okay to wear protective gear! That's not cowardly...that's smart!

Sharing ice cream with grandma, post-coitally, was icky and diminished the moment

Yeah, Lucinda coming in the house was a bit icky...but remember that Nuke had sex in a house that they share with half of Oakdale. In that context, given the fracture that occurred between Luke and Lucinda over Brian's hidden sexuality, it was a moment of rapprochement that actually felt very good in light of the preceding tension between them.

MOREOVER, think how radical the scene was!!! Luke and Noah had just exchanged bodily fluids!! They had actively had sex. Even if Lucinda didn't know it, these now fully-embodied sexual young men were sitting next to her, in a moment of healing, eating ice cream. In other words, Luke and Noah's sexuality didn't distinguish them or ostracize them. They could simply co-exist, do normal things, have nice family scenes. Yes, a little post-coital languishing might have been nice...but the normalization and routineness of the Oakdale scene was nice, too.

It reinforced that gay male sexuality did not lead to the end of the World. Indeed, it kept on turning like always. What a terrific message!

On the Rise of the Soap Superblog

2009-01-07T08:25:00.000-08:00

An interesting thing happened yesterday. Eric Braeden did his 9,000th interview for The Man Who Came Back. (Just kidding...but he has generated terrific press. Publicist Charles Sherman should be pleased that even the New York Times covered the story. *I stuck a mini-review at the bottom of this post).

Anyway, the interview was with Soaptownusa.com. Not Soap Opera Digest or Soap Opera Weekly. With a little soap blog. (Of course, he does plenty of interviews with the mags too).

New, fan-driven media are on the rise. It seems the old soap (print) press may be left behind in the dust?

Eric Braeden is a sharp businessman. His decision to do an interview with a blogger suggests, to me, that the worm has turned. Moreover, it isn't just Braeden. If you look at the major fan-driven internet radio shows, like Buzzworthy Radio or In The Zone or Stardish Radio or Daytime Confidential, each of them have had major and minor soap stars...in spades!...during this last year. It is not just actors. These radio shows have also featured some top writers, giving die-hard fans FINALLY some insight into the creative process. (My only quibble about the radio stuff is that it is very hard for hearing impaired people like me, especially since mostly telephones are used for the interviews. I wish wish wish there could be transcripts. Indeed, if that were to happen, there would be widespread forwarding...and the impact of these interviews would be greater. Look at what happened with Victoria Rowell!).

And, if we want to talk about the ascendancy of soap blogs (and, I believe, the decline of soap magazines), we need only look at the Guiding Light Blogger-experiment. Someone is paying attention!

That this all ties in to the concept of new media, and finding new ways of having active, engaged fans promote the genre to their peers...something Sam Ford and Tom Casiello have talked to us about...is even more engaging!

In addition, there is the emergence of two new classes of websites that, I think, attract many eyeballs. The first is the rise of the just-in-time news site! Week after week, Nelson Branco breaks major news and gossip, and he also consolidates other news in an unrivalled way. Daily, Daytime Confidential does the same thing, with a mix of opinion and spoilers that is unrivalled. And Roger Newcomb consolidates news, globally, several times a day.

The poor old print outlets, with their delayed release and poor mailing times by their fulfillment houses end up giving us old, cold news. When you take what they offer wrapped up in ads for psychics and collector plates and "fashion spreads" that have little interest for most readers...the days of the clunking magazine dinosaurs seem, sadly, nigh.

There was a time when the mags were the only game in town. What a blessing! But that era seems to have passed.

Also emerging is the "opinion columnist". Now, opinions are never in short supply on the internet (heck, look at me!), but there are a few columnists with genuine street cred! From soap writers Sara Bibel and Tom Casiello to soap-mag-pioneers like Marlena Delacroix, we get opinions based on experience. The insights are truly breathtaking sometimes!

Roger Newcomb and Tom Casiello, in particular, have further been doing something that the magazines fail to do: Embrace history! Roger has shared excerpts from many historical clippings (e.g., Time, Newsweek) on the soaps. Tom has also shared some truly amazing historical documents. SteveFrame's SoapsWEB is a treasure trove of archived historical material. No magazine...no "professional" site...can touch that!

More and more, if I want to look for good criticism, insider insight into the creative and marketing process, breaking soaps "news", or historical documents and perspectives, I look to the Superblogs. Can the soap magazines survive?

On the other hand, can the bloggers survive? For the most part, I suspect, we are seeing "labors of love". If they don't pay the rent too, are they sustainable? Maybe...because they are written for love, not money.

==
* Mini-review:

(By the way, I saw the film. You know...for what it was billed as...a Western revenge picture...it's a fine movie. It is really terrific, as a long-time Braeden fan, to see him bring his particular intensity to this genre. The film is genuinely discomfiting in places -- which it is meant to be. The only sad part is that the film was originally meant to be centered around a large African American labor action in the Reconstruction era. There are still threads of that story in the film, but most of it ended up in the "deleted scenes" part of the DVD. Clearly, they decided to tighten the narrative, and to focus on the more dramatically interesting violation-and-revenge arc. I'd recommend the film to anyone who enjoys Braeden, and wants to see him in a different milieu. Since he had total creative control over the project, the film also offers insights into the kinds of stories that Braeden likes to tell.)

Y&R When Brad Carlton had a lightness...

2009-01-05T10:43:00.000-08:00

A usenet poster, Travlr, sent me this, and at long last it is online.

In it, Brad Carlton (Don Diamont) proposes to Ashley Abbott (Brenda Epperson) in 1990, on the Young and the Restless. He uses an innovative "rap" song ("When Will You Say Yes"). This was a fun, goofy departure from the then-usually-serious Y&R.

It also shows a time when Brad still had an appealing lightness, rather than the darkness that will soon cause us to lose him. But I have lamented his departure elsewhere....

A great day on ABC! (Should we be optimistic?)

2008-12-30T07:14:00.000-08:00

I am not a regular ABC watcher anymore, and I also usually refrain from commenting on current shows/stories per se.

But the Monday 12/29/2008 ABC shows were, in large measure, perfect soap confections...enough that even this lapsed viewer might tune in tomorrow...which, after all, (per J. Bernard Jones) is the point.

Of the three ABC shows, All My Children was the weakest. However, a trio of villains has energized this show and restored some rooting value. David Hayward is just dastardly, but Vincent Irizarry is a revelation. Unlike his flopped character (David Chow on Y&R), Hayward has an unapologetic agenda. He wants to claim his grand-daughter, and 'avenge' Babe's death. The character's throughline is fairly clear. Amanda...well, I know her troubled background, and Chrisell Stause plays just the right note of ambivalence and guilt to make her deeds more interesting. Melissa Claire Egan plays her psycho with such a powerful vulnerability and childishness, and again (from her dead brother Richie) we understand that there are likely dark roots that explain her behavior. The big thing is that when any of these three are on the screen, they captivate and keep the show interesting.

Better was One Life to Live, which just seemed like payoff city. Asa's video-from-the-dead, revealing both his connection to David Vickers and his challenge to his sons to come out on top. The unrivalled Tuc Watkins, playing just the right amount of winking as a 'reformed' (and Buddhist) David Chow returns to town. Payoff that Viki and Charlie found out about Dorian's role in their previous undoing. Payoff that Dorian is trying to high-tail it out of town. Payoff that Marty is getting Todd right where she wants him. I literally could not wait to see the next chapter...and it helped that a lot of the characters on the canvas are those I would recognize from decades past.

And, shockingly to me, best was General Hospital. Yup. Start with the mob that everyone hates. Except Jason and Sonny had a heartfelt scene, remembering that it was Michael's birthday, and remembering their next rivalry. The delightful chemistry between Jax and Carly continues to add an element of romance to a show that often forgets the importance of this element. SpinMax...who can eat the show...were much fun, and I enjoyed Bradford Anderson's romantic fantasy, as a debonair young man dancing with his Maxie. But, of course, everything Scorpio-Drake was perfection...from the vows, the toasts, the flashbacks, the dyadic conversations on the edges of the dance floor. For one episode, GH reclaimed all that it had won this summer on (the cancelled?) Night Shift II...and restored hope that the "mothership" could again rediscover its heart.

It seemed that these episodes are being scripted for people like me...lapsed viewers who are home during the holiday "break", and who might be enticed to keep watching. This strategy can work, too. As long as ABC doesn't do a bait-and-switch and return to the usual dreck. Might the network be rediscovering that heart, history, engaging villains and innocents, and payoff all work together to make a show watchable?

I'm always encouraged by these flashes of greatness, because they show me the potential is still there. The trick is to make it more regular and consistent.

The "Auteur Theory" as applied to soaps

2008-12-28T10:35:00.000-08:00

I hope those who are celebrating holidays right now are having enjoyable, peaceful days. To break up the break, this is the second historical entry I want to share (the first one is here; there will be one more)...and then I'll get back to commenting. Each of these pieces serves as some building blocks for some ideas ratting around in my head.

This excerpt, from the same out of print source as my last entry, was written by Robert J. Thompson, and is called "Architects of the Afternoon". The emphasis in red notes is from me, and represents particular points I want to consider in a future posting. The rest of this post is all quotation from that chapter.

==========

For all its 100 million-plus viewers worldwide, the American soap opera remains shrouded in anonymity. Production credits do not even appear on most daily installments, and, unlike episodes in prime-time series, even the names of the stars of the soaps are not identified in the opening sequences. Although many devotees of daytime serials follow the creative processes as they are reported in fan magazines and Web sites, many others have little idea who created their favorite stories, much less who writes, produces, and directs them. Strangely enough, the only truly famous soap personage, Susan Lucci, made her way into the American consciousness through the phenomenal string of Emmy awards she didn't win.

None of this, of course, should come as any surprise. With some notable exceptions, the people who make mass media entertainment do so, as far as most consumers are concerned, incognito. The widespread recognition of the behind-the-scenes people who make movies did not really begin in any significant way until a group of French critics developed the auteur (authorship) theory in the fifties. This theory advances the idea that the director of a film could be seen as the author, that is, the driving creative force, even in the seemingly anonymous workings of the Hollywood studio system. Over time this critical perspective has become a useful way to look at the primary creative force behind other forms of popular entertainment, including television. As for radio, although profiles of and interviews with prolific artists such as Orson Welles and Norman Corwin appeared in the popular press during the years they were active in the medium, a systematic study of radio authorship never developed.

The Secret Life of Soap Operas: James Thurber as Broadcasting Auteur

Which brings us to James Thurber, a writer ahead of his time in both the harm and the good that he did in helping Americans to understand the soap opera. On the one hand, as a major author writing in a major national magazine, Thurber consolidated and perpetuated the glib generalizations that were already circulating about the daytime serial. Thurber set the tone for the shallow treatments of the soap opera that are very much in evidence to this day by taking the soap as an easy target for facile humor based on its complicated plot descriptions and affinity for narrative contrivances such as amnesia.

He also did something in his five-part 1948 New Yorker series that has some real historic significance: he launched the series with "0 Pioneers!," a piece that identifies the real people who were churning out thousands of words per week in the very popular but already intellectually disdained form of the daytime radio serial. By refraining from treating these programs, as most others did, and still do, as something that materialized out of thin air, Thurber himself was a pioneer of sorts.

The elevation of popular culture creators to the status of subjects for serious studies is not a particularly fashionable strategy among many intellectuals. Many believe that attention and legitimacy given to individual artists distracts us from the social and economic factors that are so crucial to the production of mass-media entertainment. In the case of the soap opera, programs were developed by station and network executives, advertising agencies, writers, and producers to serve the commercial needs of big businesses which, many argue, ultimately determined the form the soap would take. Robert C. Allen wrote in Speaking of Soap Operas that "the force exercised by individual genius in the origins of the soap opera was slight, despite the roles played in its early development by such figures as Irna Phillips and the Hummerts."

Although the early radio soaps were indeed very much in the service of their sponsors' marketing needs—characters would hawk products within the narrative of the show and story lines were developed around the sponsors' goods—we still must remember that individuals, not industries, ultimately create programming. Thurber seemed to recognize the need to identify both the people and the context in which they worked. After introducing the major creative players in his first essay, he goes on to discuss the roles ot sponsors, actors, and audiences in subsequent essays. Thurber doesn't reduce the study of soaps merely to the study of single individuals; rather, he identifies individuals who work within a swirl of competing commercial and creative forces.

As we might expect in essays written so long ago, Thurber's prescient auteurist leanings had their limits. Though he does supply brief career profiles of several radio artists, he never really gets around to identifying individual creative styles. We learn, for example, that the prolific soap creator Elaine Carrington dictated her scripts into a tape recorder while standing up (although later accounts say she dictated them while smoking in bed). Thurber, however, tells us little about her style. His comments that her dialogue was "frequent and facile" and that she liked to deal with "the frustrations, heartbreaks, kindliness, nastiness, cruelties and tragedies of the middle class" appear in a description of the short stories she wrote for women's magazines, not of her subsequent work in radio soaps. Thurber says nothing about the gushing romance and unpretentious, prosaic narratives that distinguished Carrington's programs such as Red Adams, which evolved into the immensely popular Pepper Young's Family, from the work of other suppliers. All he gives us on Paul Rhymer, the creator of the hit serial Vie and Sade, was that his material was funny, and, for all of Thurber's fascination with itinerant writer Robert H. Andrews, we are left knowing little more than the fact that he wrote really fast.

Thurber, like most people who write and think about soaps, identified Frank and Anne Hummert and Irna Phillips as the two founding forces of the broadcast soap opera. Phillips usually gets credit for creating the first local radio soap, Painted Dreams, which began airing on WGN in Chicago in 1930, while the first national soap opera is usually attributed to the Hummerts' Betty and Boh, which debuted on NBC's Blue network in 1932. Phillips would create a legacy that is still active today; the Hummerts would disappear with the coming of television.

We Remember Irna

Of all the soap artists Thurber mentions, only Irna Phillips still remains much on the American mind. A prime-time celebration of the genre on CBS in 1994, for example, included a loving, eight-minute panegyric to the "queen of the soaps" and two of her proteges. In the entire two-hour program, the Hummerts, Robert Andrews, and Elaine Carrington get not a single mention. While unknown by most Americans, Phillips's name continues to come up with some frequency in everything from Ph.D. dissertations to soap digests.

The principal reason for this is that Irna Phillips's radio serials had a distinct and unique style that was adaptable to the new medium of television, while none of the other radio soap creators were able to make this transition. Unfortunately, Thurber's essays are not much help in determining what this style was. In his second installment, "Ivorytown, Rinsoville, Anacinburg, and Crisco Corners," Thurber defines the genre by lumping all the soaps together and coming up with a list of conventions and characteristics common to the form. Overall, it's a pretty good survey of the art in 1948, but it doesn't recognize how different producers and writers used these conventions in unique and individual ways. Thurber identifies the soaps' predilection for small town settings, for example, hut he then fails to distinguish the difference between a Hummert small town and a Phillips small town.

He does, however, give us a place from which to start. Many of the stylistic differences between the leading soap suppliers were the result of differences in production philosophies. The Hummerts were, primarily, manufacturers. Starting out as employees of an ad agency, they produced not only serials, but mysteries and dramas as well, selling them to sponsors and taking the finished product to the networks, from whom they needed nothing but airtime. According to radio historian John Dunning, the Hummerts were buying as much as 8 percent of available network time slots at the peak of their assembly-line production. While Anne Hummert did some other own writing and apparently dictated plotlines the Hummerts were known for employing a stable of dialoguers, who wrote most of the actual scripts. Robert Andrews was one of their most productive employees, a "hack" on a colossal scale.

Serial historian Raymond W. Stedman suggests that the Hummerts nudged out the possibility of a higher aesthetic standard in daytime drama. "If one serial factory had not been in such a dominant position [in the second half of the 1930s]," he argues, "a few more Carringtons, or [Gertrude] Bergs, might have begun writing daytime serials. As it happened, the genre had little attraction for good writers because of the relatively narrow opportunity to place worthwhile dramas on the air."

If the Hummerts were producers and Robert Andrews was a hired gun writing for someone else's creations, Irna Phillips was a true candidate for the status of broadcast auteur. Like Carrington, she created worlds, then produced and wrote about them herself. The Hummerts created the production style of the soaps, explain sociologists Muriel Cantor and Suzanne Pingree in their book The Soap Opera, but Phillips developed modern soap opera content.

Phillips was first and foremost a writer, and she remained intimately involved in the stories she created. She not only wrote 520 scripts for her first creation, Painted Dreams, she also acted in the program. Once her product was in high demand, she used a system similar to the one developed by the Hummerts: plotting shows and approving scripts but employing others to write some of the dialogue. She continued to do much other own writing, however, some two to three million broadcast words per year during her prime.

Radio historian J. Fred MacDonald wrote in 1979 that "unlike the massive operation of the Hummerts, which could have as many as a dozen different series broadcast weekly, Phillips confined her efforts to four or five quality serials per season. She also avoided the fantasy that sometimes entered the Hummert product, and preferred dramas about people caught up in more realistic predicaments." Stedman agrees, arguing that Phillips was a principal creator of a style of soap opera that "displayed literary quality beyond that turned out by the 'dialoguers.'' Phillips sought to present what she saw as the ultimate goal of American women: a safe and secure family. "The foundations of all dreams of all the men and women in the world," declared the matriarch of Today’s Children, Phillips's second soap, are "love, family, home."

Phillips knew, of course, that all drama needed conflict, but in a 1972 interview in the trade magazine Broadcasting, she pointed out that conflict between characters didn't need to be sordid to be interesting. Dramatic tension could be achieved by introducing realistic threats to the ideal family situation. "I'm trying to get back to the fundamentals," she explained. "For example, the way in which a death in the family or serious illness brings members of the family closer together, gives them a real sense of how much they're dependent on each other."'

The Hummerts also claimed that they "painted against the canvas of everyday American life" and we see plenty of homespun material in Thurber's descriptions of many of the soaps from the forties. But the degrees of realism in the homey settings of the soaps could vary dramatically. Stedman points out that "the canvas of American life was not filled with so many crimes, trials, strange diseases, lost mates, and causes for extended suffering as was the canvas of the daytime serial, especially as painted by Frank and Anne Hummert."The Cinderella story, for example, was one of the Hummerts' favorite fairy-tale inspirations. Our Gal Sunday concerned an orphan girl from a depression-era mining camp in Silver Creek, Colorado, who goes on to marry England's richest, most handsome lord. In Backstage Wife, a stenographer from rural Iowa marries a matinee idol beloved by a million other women.

Phillips's serials, on the other hand, were less exaggerated, less melodramatic, and less fantastic than those of the Hummerts. Her characters and their problems were more like those that listeners might actually encounter, both personally and professionally. Thurber lamented that "Many a soap town appears to have no policemen, mailmen, milkmen, storekeepers, lawyers, ministers, or even neighbors" and that while we might hear about a hospital or a courtroom, we seldom saw one. This wasn't, in fact, true of many contemporary soaps, and it certainly wasn't true of those made by Phillips. Both Guiding Light and The Brighter Day were centered around a clergyman, and professional settings like hospitals and courtrooms would become a Phillips trademark, especially in her later television work.

Screen Test

Irna Phillips thrived during the soap opera's move from radio to television. The worlds that she brought to television on Guiding Light, As the World Turns, Another World, and Days of Our Lives, are still on the air today. Guiding Light, which effortlessly went to television after fifteen years on the radio and four years simulcast on both radio and television, has been running for sixty years, the longest continuous story ever told. Of the ten soaps currently on the air, nine were created by Phillips or people who started out working on Phillips's soaps. The work of the Hummerts, on the other hand, never made it out of radio.

Only two radio soaps, in fact, met with any long-term success when they were moved to television. Both Guiding Light and The Brighter Day were concocted by Phillips, who has been identified by popular culture expert Carol Traynor Williams as "one of the few (and best) radio writers to be energized by television." Phillips's television work continued to emphasize realistic presentations of family life, professional settings, and rich characterizations that drove the narrative. Her homey realism was consistent with the small screens and claustrophobic settings of fifties television. Her characters' bent toward amateur philosophy and psychotherapy provided a perfect opportunity for the use of long, lingering close-ups that television was so good at providing. Some of the less realistic creations of the Hummerts, though, could never have worked on television. In The Romance of Helen Trent, for example, Helen remains somewhere on the far side of thirty five for more than twenty-seven years. Even with modern makeup, this could never have been pulled off on television.

Furthermore, Irna Phillips trained a new generation of soap creators that would move the genre to places Thurber could never have imagined. Agnes Nixon was a Phillips protege and employee who would bring the television soap into the relevance era of the sixties, seventies, and beyond, with creations that include All My Children, One Life to Live, and Loving. Nixon took the basic formula that she had learned from Phillips and added contemporary social issues. Announcing that she wanted her soaps to educate and inform as well as to entertain, she introduced topical stories concerning race, abortion, infertility, depression, child abuse, AIDS, and a host of other subjects that would have turned crimson the cheek of her Victorian mentor (who had once quit her job as a consultant on Peyton Place because the subject matter was too risque). An extended story line on Loving in 1984 explored the plight of Vietnam veterans three years before prime-rime television would introduce its first dramatic series about the war.

William J. Bell, another former employee of Irna Phillips, and his wife, Lee Phillip Bell, followed a path similar to Nixon's. The Young and the Restless, like the Nixon soaps, injected topical issues (its 1975 story about breast cancer was especially notorious) and, in so doing, brought an increasingly younger audience to the soap opera. As Nixon had introduced a new visual style to the soap by occasionally taking her shows on location (St. Croix, the streets of New York), the Bells offered an element of glamour with the glitzy costuming on The Bold and the Beautiful, which was set in the fashion industry of Los Angeles. For all their updated subject matter, however, neither Agnes Nixon nor the Bells ever saw the need to stray far from the Irna Phillips formula. In most cases, their soaps continued to center around two families in small cities, and the basic narrative structure that Phillips had developed hack in the radio days remained intact.

Insight, Foresight, Hindsight

Although James Thurber had the insight to recognize the soaps' creators and introduce them to the wide readership of the New Yorker, his decision not to flesh out the unique ways in which each of those creators used a set of formulaic dramatic ingredients in the end left his readers without much of an idea that individual style matters, even in a commercially driven, factory-produced art form like the soap opera. Unfortunately, the most-often quoted bit from the five essays reveals their greatest weakness: a tendency to define all soap opera with generalizations. "A soap opera is a kind of sandwich," Thurber writes in the first essay, "whose recipe is simple enough, although it took years to compound. Between thick slices of advertising, spread twelve minutes of dialogue, add predicament, villainy, and female suffering in equal measure, throw in a dash of nobility, sprinkle with tears, season with organ music, cover with a rich announcer sauce, and serve five times a week."

Comments like this perpetuate our inability to make distinctions of quality between the products in our most popular media. John Ford's Westerns, of course, had horses and cacti and marshals and outlaws just like hundreds of B Westerns, but how he used all those ingredients makes Stagecoach a better and more important film than Six Shootin Sheriff. The auteur theorists showed us one way to make these distinctions with regard to movies.

They didn't do this, however, until movies had been around for over half a century. Thurber, on the other hand, was writing about the soap opera less than twenty years after its invention. That his essays did not lead to a more sophisticated understanding of the daytime serial is probably more the fault of his readers than of Thurber himself. Had they chosen to concentrate on Thurber's innovative invitations to focus on the people who made the soaps rather than on his characteristic humorous broadsides, the genre may have received—nearly fifty years ago—the attention it is finally getting today.

From the Pickwick Papers to Passions

2008-12-23T07:54:00.000-08:00

For the holidays, I thought I'd share three "gifts". Seriously, they have been gifts to me...they are excerpts from a remarkable book from 1987. The book accompanied a museum exhibition on the history of the soap opera in the United States (and, to some extent, internationally).

The excerpts that follow in this first post (more to come on other days) come from a historical article, entitled "Serial Seduction", by Ron Simon, who curated the exhibit. The article is a tremendous resource, providing a genuine critical review of the soap genre's history from the emergence of serial (English) fiction to the present (well, 1997). The article comes from this (sadly) out of print book. I urge you to get a remaindered copy though...the whole book, from cover to cover, is an awesome read for fans of the genre.

The second post is here.

There is method in the madness of my posting this: I'll come back in my next post to talk about some of the "lessons learned" in this article and how -- again, as with Marland's rules -- they often seem to be ignored.

The remainder of this post is quoted excerpts from that source.

Prelude

Is it possible that Irna Phillips, the former schoolteacher who became the doyenne of the soap opera, was somehow influenced by philosopher George Santayana's dictum, "another world to live in ... is what we mean by having a religion," as she created and then developed the daytime serial over forty years? Phillips certainly approached the genre with a spiritual discipline and intensity, and in 1964 even titled one other creations Another World. More than any other art form, the soap opera creates an alternative world, where the characters and their environment seem to exist in a parallel dimension. Unlike individual works of art—a poem, novel, or film— which require Coleridge's temporary "suspension of disbelief," the serial demands ongoing belief and a daily commitment from the follower. Such surrender to an imaginative universe has engendered a loyalty and devotion that supersedes all rules of engagement: perhaps that is one reason why the soaps and their enthusiasts have been treated with suspicion, and sometimes contempt. The well-made classical work of fiction is conscious of its structure: exposition in the beginning leads to a well-reasoned middle, culminating in the catharsis of the denouement. The never-ending soap, however, is a relentless series of beginnings and middles, without any final resolutions. The soap's characters take on a life of their own, often growing beyond the intentions, and even the lifetime, of the original author. When Guiding Light turned sixty in 1997, the serial had already outlived its creator, Irna Phillips, by twenty-three years. As they say, "life is short, and art is long," but how did an art get this long?

Since the beginning of mass culture at the turn of the nineteenth century, authors and entrepreneurs have tried to hook an audience and keep it coming back for more. Magazines, books, comic strips, and films have all employed a serial narrative to actively engage consumers. The soap opera was an invention of American radio, perhaps the only new term created by the media. Critic Gilbert Seldes thought that the serial was "[radio's] single notable contribution to the art of fiction."- This new form offered writers no temporal restrictions and thus the ability to achieve a whole new way of storytelling with a realism unheard of in any other art. Over time, the daily soap exploited the defining quality that made radio and then television distinct from other artistic experiences: their pervasive presence in the home, day in and day out. Characters could live, love, and die, experiencing the same happiness and hardships through the years as their audience. No doubt this is why a special kinship arose between soap characters and the listeners and viewers, a relationship so intense that psychologists have been analyzing the bond for more than fifty years.

It is certainly not the nature of a genre to have a single inventor, but the soap opera comes close, having been suffused from the beginning with the philosophy of Irna Phillips. More than sixty-five years after her first serial aired on radio, most of the television soaps can be traced back directly to Phillips and her disciples. How Phillips came to engender the serial tradition in broadcasting is a story worthy of the master herself. And like much that she wrote, it still continues today.

The Serial Narrative Before Radio

One can date the start of the serial narrative as we understand it from 1836, when publishers Chapman and Hall offered fledging newspaper columnist Charles Dickens the opportunity to sustain a story in monthly installments to accompany the illustrations of popular cartoonist Robert Seymour. Dickens was asked to write about the comic exploits of a metropolitan club whose members would include character types that mirrored the new urban population. Publishers had issued completed stories in serial installments before, but this was the first time that a story was published without the ending in sight. The Pickwick Papers became the 1830s equivalent of a pop culture phenomenon. The publishers had at first set a print run of four hundred copies; by the end they were printing forty thousand. One contemporary commentator wrote that "needy admirers flattened their noses against the booksellers' windows eager to secure a good look at the etchings and to peruse every line of the letterpress that might be exposed to view, frequently reading aloud to applauding bystanders ... so great was the craze." From that point on, the serial narrative combining the word and the image has thrived.

In America in 1850, Harper's Monthly magazine inspired the development of the serialized novel, and American readers found themselves immersed in the continuing tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, and Henry James. As in England, readers identified with the characters and actively sought out fellow subscribers to discuss what was going to happen next. In fact, many publications had a regular forum that allowed readers to offer their feelings on the developing action. Such camaraderie has been part and parcel of the serial narrative ever since, as anyone in a soap opera chat room on the Internet can testify. At the turn of the century the serial narrative was further popularized in daily newspapers through comic strips, descendants of the drawings that accompanied the Dickens installments. One of the earliest "funnies," A. Mutt (later to become Mutt and Jeff), was conceived by Harry Conway "Bud" Fisher and began running in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1907, appearing seven days a week. Fisher understood the power of the comics to bring readers back morning after morning. Increasingly, he showed his protagonist, compulsive gambler Augustus Mutt, engaging in activities that could be resolved in future strips.

The next advance in comic strip serials involved a penetrating look at everyday family life. Cartoonist Sidney Smith and his publisher Captain Joseph Patterson of the Chicago Tribune conceived The Gumps to be a visual equivalent of Theodore Dreiser's social-realist novels. The Gumps were a typical American family yearning to experience the prosperity of the Jazz Age. Smith wanted "everyday things to happen to them,"'' which found a resonance in the audience. When one of the characters died after her wedding was disrupted, there was an outpouring of emotion across the nation.

Print and pictures also coalesced in a serial narrative for the movies. Charles Dwyer, editor of The Ladies' World, involved his magazine readers in a contest to predict the fate of virginal heroine Mary, whose fictional story, featuring a portrait by Charles Dana Gibson, appeared in a 1912 issue. Dwyer joined forces with Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope Company, and Mary's adventures were soon presented monthly both in print and film. Noticing the public's enthusiasm, the Chicago Tribune combined a continuing newspaper scenario with a biweekly screen version of The Adventures of Kathlyn, spawning a cycle of women-in-peril imitations. The serial, thus, became a part of regular moviegoing, especially for adolescents, who enjoyed the continuing exploits of such heroes as Tarzan and Dick Tracy, who were also comic strip favorites.

The Serial Comes to Radio

Much of the mystique of radio derived from the compelling power of the individual voice. Think of the intimate chats of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the crooning of Bing Crosby, or the harangues of Father Charles Coughlin. But no single person, regardless of how artful, can sustain an audience day in and day out. Dialogue between two people, however, has been the basis of daily radio serials for many years. The roots of the serial lie in the intimate conversation of two characters eavesdropped on by an entire nation: Amos and Andy, Ma Perkins and one of her daughters, Reverend Ruthledge and a parishioner of The Guiding Light.

The serial first came to radio in 1926, when the Chicago Tribune decided to bring a comic strip and its daily newspaper audience to its station, WGN. The Gumps, those middle-class dreamers, were chosen. Two veterans of touring comedy and minstrel shows, Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, were approached to lend their voices. The two performers, however, proposed another series more in keeping with their training. They suggested a serial about two poor black Southerners, Sam and Henry, who were forced to migrate to the big city. The Gumps went on the air without them, but for two years Sam 'n' Henry was broadcast six nights a week in ten-minute episodes. In 1928 Gosden and Correll wanted to syndicate the show nationally, so they left WON to create a similar series, called Amos 'n' Andy, for a competing radio station, an NEC affiliate, owned by the Chicago Daily News. As audiences identified with the economic hardships of the two displaced Georgians, Amos 'n Andy became broadcasting's first mass phenomenon, a nightly ritual for most of the nation. Radio writers began to copy the Amos 'n Andy formula and created programs with fictional locales peopled with characters who reflected universal emotions: Paul Rhymer evoked the entire small town of Crooper, Illinois, through his characters Vie and Sade; Carlton Morse delineated the Barbour clan of Sea Cliff, San Francisco, in One Man's Family; and Gertrude Berg, creator of The Goldbergs, made millions of listeners care about a poor Jewish family on New York's lower East Side.

Nearly all of this earliest radio programming was scheduled in the evening, because executives were concerned that housewives would not be able to concentrate on a program while performing their chores. During the formative years, radio was, as one scholar has noted, an "evening, family, and father-controlled entertainment."' That soon changed as the home products manufacturer General Mills looked for ways to integrate information about the home into an instructional program for women. In 1926 the food company created the character "Betty Crocker" to give daily hints on how to shop and take care of the home more efficiently. The late twenties saw a boom in these specialized programs for women. NBC created The Women's Magazine of the Air to combine ideas and entertainment of "genuine inspiration and help." Procter & Gamble became one of the main sponsors of the series and advertised three times during the week: health and beauty on Monday, underwritten by Camay soap; "Crisco Cooking Lessons" on Thursday, spotlighting "everyday dishes that are new, simple and different" and Ivory Flakes' fashion trends on Friday. The manufacturer encouraged listeners to request companion guide booklets, which further connected the audience to the program.

Irna Phillips

Now enters Irna Phillips, the former teacher who was struggling to break into radio as an actress. She began her career as host of the inspirational show Thought for a Day for Chicago Tribune's WGN in 1930. Station executives were not satisfied with her thespian talents and suggested that she take a crack at scriptwriting to create a serial along the lines of their previous successes, The Gumps and Sam 'n Henry. Phillips melded several key elements in her work—the structure of the serial, the homey philosophy of the woman's program, and aspects other own lonely, introspective life—to create one of the most resilient genres of broadcasting, the soap opera. Few writers would have such an impact on the history of radio and television: Phillips's disciples, Agnes Nixon and William J. Bell, have kept her paradigm going after more than sixty-five years. Despite this achievement, Phillips has gone largely unrecognized outside the scope of daytime radio and television broadcasting. She is not mentioned in Eric Barnouw's sweeping history of the mediums, and her one-time bosses, David Sarnoff at NBC Radio and William S. Paley of CBS Television, give no credit to one of their key moneymakers in their autobiographies.

Phillips's first series, Painted Dreams, debuted unsponsored in the fall of 1930. In it, she formed the bedrock of all the soaps that followed—a core family surviving the trials and tribulations of daily life. Phillips focused on the role of Mother Moynihan, a part she played herself, who oversaw a large family and ran a boardinghouse. The scripts emphasized the domestic sphere and personal relationships; Mother Moynihan's biggest worry was the future of her youngest daughter Irene, who fancied herself a modern girl, ambitious for a successful career very much like the creator herself. The tensions between the old and new ways of life were played out in a series of interlocking story lines as characters grasped for their own happiness. Phillips was also shrewd enough to develop ideas that might interest potential sponsors, arguing that for any radio series to be a "utility to its sponsor, [it] must actually sell merchandise; otherwise the object of radio advertising has failed." Among other story elements, Phillips conceived of an engagement and wedding that offered the possibility for product tie-ins.

With a good head for business, Phillips saw the national possibilities for her daily serial and wanted to sell it to one of the networks. She took WGN to court over their claim to the copyright of Painted Dreams, but lost the case. Then, acting as an independent producer, she retooled her concept for the NBC Chicago affiliate WMAQ and created Today’s Children for national network broadcast. The program's opening epigram delineates a major principle of all soap opera: "And today's children with their hopes and dreams, their laughter and tears, shall be the builders of a brighter world tomorrow." Mother Moynihan became Mother Moran, but in Phillips's mind both were modeled on her own mother. So closely were reality and the fictional world intertwined for the creator that when her mother died in 1938, a heartbroken Irna Phillips decided to do the unthinkable in the soap world—she canceled her own serial.

In 1937 Phillips, wanting to capture "life as most of us know it," created her "never-ending" saga, The Guiding Light, which has become the longest-running drama in broadcasting history. In the first incarnation of the serial—the life and times of a nonsectarian minister, Dr. John Ruthledge, and his flock in small-town Five Points—Phillips fully realized the essence of the soap opera: a continuous series of first and second acts, with a complex juggling act of dominant and secondary stories that never reach a final denouement. A year after the series began Phillips supervised publication of a companion volume for fans that traced the backstory (the unwritten history that exists before a soap goes on) of The Guiding Light (Ed: Oh how I'd love to see this book), "authored" by the fictitious Dr. Ruthledge. In it she made clear that each character's pain and confusion is interlocked with others in the community. Rose Kransky, for example, born of Jewish parents but refusing to define herself by orthodox rules (very much a reflection of Irna herself), was nurtured by her friendship with Mary Ruthledge, the Reverend's daughter. If Phillips felt the pain of Rose Kransky, her alter superego was Ruthledge, whose philosophy was that "no matter how difficult your problems may be ... others have been faced with the same obstacles, and with faith and determination and courage have managed to overcome them."10

By the early forties Irna Phillips was assigned the mantle "Queen of the Soap Opera" by the press. She served as independent producer of her work, packaging entire programs for a sponsor, generally Procter & Gamble, the genre's leading impresario. Working on several serials at the same time, she was generating two million words a year, the equivalent of approximately twenty-five novels. When five serials became too taxing, Phillips hired assistant writers to fill in the dialogue after she blocked the story, but she continued to be the wellspring of plot devices, one of which became a staple of the genre, the amnesia story line. To get them to tune in again, she once said she liked to "cliff-hang" her audience.

There was such a defined universe to a Phillips serial that three of her stories were programmed consecutively to constitute The General Mills Hour, which ran for one year in 1945. Within this larger narrative framework Phillips allowed her characters to drift from serial to serial. One of the remaining examples of this experiment of running together programs that are connected by the characters and themes of one creator is a remarkable self-reflexive deliberation on the nature of the soap opera. In the broadcast of May 7, 1945, the eve of V-E Day, Phillips has a character, a World War II veteran, produce a radio drama about his own disability. The fictitious broadcast is listened to and discussed by the other characters in all three serials, who comment that radio stories "taken out of life" can help make "their own" lives better.

The Hummerts and the Serial Factory

Frank and Anne Hummert provide a fascinating contrast to Irna Phillips. Frank Hummert had been working in copywriting and advertising when he noticed "the success of serial fiction in newspapers and magazines." In the early thirties, he decided to translate that serial narrative to the infant medium of radio. He wanted his radio dramas to accommodate the daily pattern of the homemaker, but at the same time to offer a release into the world of romance and fantasy—very different from the "real" world of Irna Phillips. He worked with his assistant Anne Ashenhurst (whom he married in 1935) and writer Charles Robert Douglas Hardy Andrews to devise fantasies to help alleviate the boredom and repetition of ritualistic housework. By the mid-forties the Hummerts were producing twelve serials a day and were operating what was derided as a soap opera mill, which now might be considered the prototype for a television soap opera's writing staff, where various aspects of the scripts are written by different people.

Each Hummert serial answered a basic rhetorical question, around which multiple plots were woven. For Our Gal Sunday the question was "can this girl from a small mining town in the West find happiness as the wife of a wealthy and titled Englishman?" In Backstage Wife the audience learned what it meant for Mary Noble, the small-town Iowa girl, "to he the wife of a famous Broadway star, dream sweetheart of a million other women." Most of the Hummert plots focused on the gap between the wealthy and the aspiring middle class, bringing comfort to millions of listeners who were struggling with the reality of deprivation, first during the depression years and then World War II. A notable example is the Hummerts' 1938 adaptation of the 1937 film Stella Dallas. In the Barbara Stanwyck movie, the self-sacrificing mother is resigned to wait outside the gates of a mansion, feeling she is not good enough to attend her daughter's wedding to the son of the wealthy family. The Hummerts reconcile that disjunction in their fantasy world, and the mother, still obviously from a lower class, feels right at home in the grand Grosvenor mansion and helps both the upstairs and downstairs characters with their problems. Thus, the Hummerts did not try to reflect reality, but rather to improve it, or, as Frank Hummert stated, to paint "against the canvas of everyday American life."

The Daytime Controversy

During the early forties there were more than seventy daytime serials on the air, listened to by approximately half of all women at home. Beginning in 1939, the genre was regularly referred to as "soap opera" by the press, mocking these sentimental tales that were sponsored almost exclusively by manufacturers of household products, especially cleansers. Educators and psychologists were disturbed by the morbid content of the soaps, also called "washboard weepers," and tried to analyze why the audience was habitually addicted to endless stories of calamity and unhappiness. As the country prepared for war, cultural critics theorized that all the suffering on the airwaves was undermining the moral fiber of American womanhood. New York psychiatrist Dr. Louis Berg compared the repetitiveness of the soaps to Hitler's propaganda machine, claiming that each was corrupting the human nervous system.

In the wake of the widespread success of the soaps, a small industry trying to understand the effects of long-term listening began to flourish. Paul Lazarsfeld, director of the Office of Radio Research at Columbia University, discovered two almost contradictory gratifications that women received from the soaps: the first, pure escapism, removed the listener from the drudgery of daily life; and the second, moral guidance, helped the housewife solve her own personal problems. In examining the audience, various studies sponsored by the networks proved that there was little difference in social and cultural activities between listeners and nonlisteners.

Although fantasy remained a consistent aspect of soaps, during World War II the radio serial matured to create more story lines about the realities of wartime. Stella Dallas worked in a munitions factory; one of Ma Perkins's sons died on the European battlefield. The real change in the radio serial, however, came after World War II, and not from reformers hut from the television industry, when major daytime sponsors such as General Mills and Pillsbury were lured to the new medium, leaving a major vacuum in the radio schedule. Without the hacking of a single advertiser, radio networks experimented with programs that attracted multiple sponsors, including talk and variety programs. By the mid-fifties, many broadcasting executives felt the serial was a product of depression America and had outlived its usefulness, although the radio soap lingered on until 1960.

The Soap Opera on Television

Despite the serial's proven success in magazine publishing, at the movies, and on radio, there was genuine resistance by television executives to employ the form. One of the visionaries of early television, NBC president Sylvester "Pat" Weaver, felt that the old radio soap opera technique would not work in a visual medium "because of the higher absorption and tension demands of television over radio."' Prime-time entertainment first hit its stride in 1948 with the success of Milton Berle's translation of vaudeville to television; it would take at least three more years for the soap opera to successfully adapt to the new technology.

While the established networks, CBS and NBC, concentrated on weekly programs for their nightly schedules, it was newcomer DuMont that experimented with the low-budget serial. In 1944 Lever Brothers sponsored television versions of two radio soaps, Big Sister and Aunt Jenny’s True Life Stories, on DuMont's New York affiliate, and two years later DuMont created the serial Faraway Hill especially for the network. Its producer, David P. Lewis, searched for techniques that would not require total viewer attention, allowing the housewife time "to turn away and go on peeling potatoes or knitting." He devised a stream-of-consciousness technique, an offscreen voice that probed the interior motives of the series heroine, Karen St. John, a widow searching for emotional refuge in the country. The most successful television programs immediately after World War II, however, were live remote broadcasts, especially boxing, and the studio-bound Faraway Hill faded after three months. Even Irna Phillips failed in her initial attempt, a reworking other first radio serial Painted Dreams, because she made no concessions to the visual medium.

One influential experiment from Chicago, a production center noted for its low-key realism, was Hawkins Falls, a self-proclaimed television novel about a typical small town that wistfully evoked an earlier America whose way of life was being transformed by the fifties flight to the suburbs. Although this rural community with a population of 6,200 was too far removed from the contemporary American experience to make the show successful in terms of the great soaps (Hawkins Falls ran three months in prime time and four years in the afternoon), the genre had finally found a template that would be developed further by co-creator Roy Winsor. In 1951, a veteran of the Hummerts' Ma Perkins, Winsor used the dominant heroine archetype from his predecessors' tradition to build the first viable soap, Search for Tomorrow, around one female character, Jo Tate. (Jo was played by the indomitable Mary Stuart from day one until the serial ended in 1986.) Winsor insisted on a bare-stage technique for his series and emphasized the close-up to connect his characters to the audience. There was no need for elaborate sets or long shots, since most of the action took place in the living room or kitchen, key places in the geography of a soap. The critical importance of Search for Tomorrow is that it found an audience that was emotionally invested enough to make a daily commitment, which proved that the serial had a future on daytime television.

Ten months after Search, Irna Phillips brought The Guiding Light to television. Reverend Ruthledge and his family had been written out of the series years before, and "the guiding light" in the title no longer had religious connotations, but rather the camaraderie of a loving family in times of upheaval. The core family was now the Bauers, a German American brood trying to find a better life, first in Selby Flats, a fictionalized West Coast suburb, and later in Springfield, the prototype for the midwestern towns that would provide a haven for most of the soap world.

When Phillips first brought the show to television, the series followed the fifteen-minute format of the ongoing radio program. Up to this point, soaps had always run fifteen minutes, which came to formalize the way a story progressed. Then, in 1956, she created As the World Turns and threw out the rules of the radio serial. With this new series she pioneered the first thirty-minute drama, and in the process, reconceived the genre for the visual medium. Few people at the time realized that the thirty-minute serial revolutionized the dynamics of serial storytelling. The longer format allowed Phillips to underline two central tenets: that the heart of the serial is the exchange of feeling and memories between two characters; and that any incident should not affect a handful of characters but the whole community. Serial tellers now had the time to go beyond the core family and explore two families from different social classes, reflecting the search for the American dream of advancement and happiness.

Phillips's other groundbreaking work came in creating the visual look for the entire genre. She worked with her producer/director from radio, Ted Corday, to create an intimate style that emphasized the interior lives other characters. Slow, lingering close-ups during intimate revelations became the visual paradigm of the serial and presented many possibilities for character revelation.

As the World Turns was structured around the patrician Lowells and the solidly middle-class Hugheses, a clan whose ambitions and frustrations would be a motif for over forty years. It also provided the dominant story line of the late fifties, the romance between Penny Hughes and Jeff Baker, played by Rosemary Prinz and Mark Rydell, who later became a film director. The impetuous Penny and the spoiled Jeff, whom many consider soap's first "supercouple," gave youth its own reasons in the television soap. Phillips, with a new generation of writers, was able to reflect the rebellion and disillusionment of the developing youth culture, while still keeping the family-oriented serial intact.

Daytime Versus Early Prime Time

Whatever the ultimate root of the critical prejudice against the television soap opera, it is interesting to note that it existed from the beginning, even when daytime and prime-time dramas were much closer in tone and style. During the fifties, daytime serial and live drama shared many of the same aesthetic values: both emphasized psychology of character and the power of the revelatory close-up; both employed actors who had training in the theater and writers working in the realistic tradition of the Broadway problem play; both were performed live, solidifying their association with a theatrical experience. The phrase that defined the apogee of anthology drama, Chayefsky's "this marvelous world of the ordinary," could equally apply to the best of lrna Phillips. Yet whereas the masters of live drama—Paddy Chayefsky, Rod Serling, and Gore Vidal—were praised for authenticity and depth, there was little critical appraisal of any kind for daytime.

By the end of the decade, serial and prime-time television were on divergent paths. West Coast studios were producing the evening schedule, and television was no longer live hut recorded on film, with Hollywood production values. (Soaps were broadcast live until the late sixties and then performed as if live, on tape.) The first genre to conquer prime time, the Western, underlined the rigid dichotomy between television in the afternoon and in the evening—the soap opera and the horse opera. Daytime was the province of perceived feminine values, talk and negotiation; prime time was the arena for masculine resolve, on the range or in the streets. Soaps catered to character growth and memory—Bert Bauer matured from an anxious housewife into Guiding Light's philosophical matriarch—while prime time was an existential wilderness, where lead characters acted without the past as a guide. The new heroes of prime time, Cheyenne and Matt Dillon, discovered themselves anew each week, continuing characters without the benefit of the soap's connecting memories.

A Look at Sponsorship

Throughout the fifties the most successful serials were put together by advertising agencies for a sponsor. This sponsor-originated formula had its roots in radio and ceded production control to the agency, which in theory better understood the needs of its intended audience. CBS dominated the daytime ratings because of its alliance with Procter & Gamble, which worked directly with the early soap auteurs, Irna Phillips and Roy Winsor. September 3, 1951, proved to he a defining day for P&G: it not only debuted Search for Tomorrow, but also marketed two new products, Joy and Spic and Span, to its largely female audience. With the sponsor owning the production, the network's role was passive, providing the airwaves and exercising little creative authority. To compete with P&G's tightly controlled schedule on CBS, both ABC and NBC decided to package their own soaps, assuming greater control over daytime programming. After several misfires by both networks, in 1963 ABC hired Frank and Doris Hursley, longtime writers of Search for Tomorrow, to create a "daytime Ben Casey” the popular evening series starring Vince Edwards. The hospital, that dramatic intersection where personal and professional spheres collided, had been a fixture on radio serials. Irna Phillips had remarked that doctors especially were "an integral part of everything I have written," introducing the first serial surgeon on The Road of Life in 1937. It is ironic that in the early sixties daytime executives were looking to prime time for inspiration, instead of the soap's own considerable history on radio.

The Hursleys' creation, General Hospital, was produced at the ABC facilities in Hollywood and brought a new element to the soap. Until then most of the serials had been produced in New York, with roots in the city's performing arts heritage. Beginning with General Hospital, soap producers on the West Coast started their own tradition, using videotape, but searching for the more polished look and artful camera angles associated with the movies. Casting directors now searched for actors who had performed on film, whether in the movies or on television. The star of General Hospital, John Beradino, had previously been featured in the syndicated series I Led Three Lives and worked in such genre series on film as Cheyenne and The Untouchables. In 1965 the collaboration between Hollywood and the serial was further solidified when Columbia Pictures Television became a partner in another medical soap, Days of Our Lives. Although created by Irna Phillips and Ted Corday, an East Coast team, Days featured Hollywood leading man Macdonald Carey. It was the first serial to be broadcast in color, although for NBC, which had pioneered color technology in the early fifties, this was late in the game for bringing color to the daytime soap.

Agnes Nixon and William J. Bell

Irna Phillips taught her most gifted progeny, Agnes Nixon and William J. Bell (who were toddlers when the domestic soaps began), not only story structure and character development, but, more importantly, a respect for the metier. In Nixon's words, from this respect emerges "the ability and capacity to develop one's craft and perhaps even raise the standards of the form.19 Both Nixon and Bell served an arduous apprenticeship under Phillips, and emerged with the belief that soap opera had meaning and relevance in the turbulent world of the late sixties.

Nixon began as a dialogue writer on Phillips's Woman in White, a radio serial about the checkered romance between a nurse and a fledgling surgeon. She wrote scripts for early television anthologies and developed the inaugural stories for Search for Tomorrow. Returning to the Phillips fold, she wrote for Guiding Light for thirteen years, eight as head writer, and co-created the defining television soap, As the World Turns. During these years with Phillips the Nixon touch emerges in her treatment of Bert Bauer, the "tentpole" character of Guiding Light. Bert, played by Charita Bauer for thirty-five years, had matured into the homey philosopher of the series by the early sixties, and viewers were stunned when she underwent treatment for uterine cancer. Nixon had struggled with P&G executives and network censors to have Bert first undergo a Pap smear test. Capitalizing on the temporal quality of the serial, Nixon played the cancer story line out over many months, educating her public about the necessity of medical prevention. The soap form and the pedagogical story coalesced perfectly, and the positive viewer reaction suggested a more sophisticated audience than the industry had realized.

While she was head writing Guiding Light, Nixon had created the bible for what would become All My Children. Procter & Gamble was not able to find a slot for it, but offered her head-writing duties on a struggling show, Another World, which Phillips and Bill Bell created in 1964. Much has been written about Nixon's ability to dramatize topical issues, hut here she displayed her mastery of traditional soap fundamentals. Nixon revived Another World with a romantic triangle that sustained itself for more than seven years. With the success of General Hospital on ABC, the network allowed Nixon to create a signature series, One Live to Live, allowing her to realize a personal ambition to take soap operas out of WASP Valley. She conceived a multicultural community of ethnic types and challenged her audience to confront their prejudices. While prime-time television was receiving congratulations for starring Diahann Carroll as the innocuous black nurse on Julia, Nixon developed a black character, Carla Gray, who was passing for white. In superb use of dramatic irony, the audience was clued in to her heritage before her suitors, a white doctor and a black intern.

Nixon consolidated soap traditions and advanced the respectability of the genre. While she maintained the theatrical base other mentor, having all her serials produced in New York facilities, her work has made creative use of videotape. (Two important examples are the exploration of the fantasies and desires of lead characters, notably the split personality of Victoria Lord, and going on location outside the studio, as for the unscripted Odyssey House sequences for One Life to Live.) Most importantly, she sustained the moral seriousness that characterized Phillips's creations. When her story of a peace activist was debated in the New York Times, Nixon brought daytime to a critical plateau it never had reached. Her examinations of the generation gap and sixties politics predated by several years prime time's breakthrough series, All in the Family.

Bill Bell was in advertising before Irna Phillips made him dialogue writer on the Guiding Light in 1957. Working in the same room with Phillips he co-wrote As the World Turns for nine years, where he developed the ability to capture an audience with expansive storytelling, and to allow stories to go on past the traditional breaking points. Remaining in Chicago, Bell was appointed head writer of Days of Our Lives on the West Coast in an effort to salvage one of Phillips's floundering co-creations. Sensing a potential audience fascination with abnormal psychology, Bell ventured into sexual territories hitherto unexplored anywhere in television. His signature storyline for Days was the return of an amnesiac Korean War veteran, whose looks had been horribly disfigured in captivity. Having undergone plastic surgery, he returns unrecognized to the nurturing community of Salem and falls in love with his sister. Integrating such sexual taboos as incest and rape into the narrative of the soap has remained Bell's specialty.

Where the center of Phillips's soap universe had been the kitchen and the living room, Bell staked his claim to the bedroom. His first creation with his wife, Lee Phillip Bell, The Young and the Restless, took for granted the sexual revolution that was sweeping America. Although he appropriated from Phillips the two-family schemata that he knew so well, Bell focused on the sexual desires and entrapments of the younger characters. The Young and the Restless, packaged by Columbia Pictures Television, furthered the integration of Hollywood production values into the serial. Bell and his production team cast glamorous model types for lead roles and photographed his stars in sensuous lighting. There was no mistaking a Bell close-up; its lingering caress would have made Garbo or Dietrich proud. In 1987 Bell underscored the Hollywood connection with his next creation, The Bold and the Beautiful, by setting the serial in Los Angeles, one of the few specific sites in the soap world, and by concentrating on the chic fashion industry.

One of the many defining legacies of the Phillips-Nixon-Bell collaboration is the soap archetype that transformed and defined the entire genre: the bitch goddess. Since the sixties no character has energized more plots than the girl from the wrong side of the tracks who will stop at nothing to achieve material happiness. The once-passive Cinderella of radio serials, a lowly commoner waiting to be swept off her feet, was transformed in the early sixties into a hurricane of lustful desires. Phillips and Bell conspired with actress Eileen Fulton to create the prototypical home-wrecking villainess of unlimited ambition, Lisa Miller on As the World Turns. Nixon revitalized Phillips and Bell's Another World with the Bitch of Bay City, Rachel Davis, who lusted after power and privilege. Rachel was modeled on a character that Nixon envisioned for her own soap, which took five years to find a sponsor. When that serial, All My Children, was finally produced in 1970, Nixon unleashed Erica Kane as a conniving teenage vixen. After years of amorous escapades and serial marriages, Susan Lucci's character has become the femme fatale incarnate. For Nixon and Bell, who have led the way in exploring family problems, the avenging goddess archetype borrows from the Hummerts' tradition an element of pure fantasy, thereby giving their work the possibility of outrageous fun and exaggerated melodrama that is missing from their mentor's.

The Monty Revolution

By the mid-seventies most soaps had expanded into an hour every day. As production became more costly and complex, the role of the executive producer became as crucial as the head writer's. It fell to the producer to fuse the writing and production teams into a unified whole, sustaining the look and rhythm of a specific soap world, day in and day out, fifty-two weeks a year. Producing the equivalent of more than 100 movies, the executive producer was like the mogul of old, overseeing a highly coordinated studio.

The producer who epitomized this new power was a longtime veteran of the field, Gloria Monty. A director of Roy Winsor's The Secret Storm for sixteen years, Monty left, and experimented with ways to make daytime drama less studiobound. She directed the first daytime special shot entirely on location, This Child of Mine, but when she was put in charge of General Hospital she changed all the rules. During her first meeting with Tony Geary, the actor confessed, "I hate soap opera." Monty replied: "Honey, so do I. I want you to help me change all that."22

Monty subverted all the strictures that she had learned during her live television days in New York. For one thing, she wanted the pacing of a prime-time program, so she eliminated the long pauses of the serial and ordered more than twice the number of scenes per episode of the average soap. In addition to redesigning the sets and costumes, she challenged the form itself. She romantically paired troubled teen Laura Vining with the streetwise, antihero Luke Spencer. United by a problematic rape scene, which Monty labeled a "choreographed seduction," but which others saw as unmitigated violence, Luke and Laura spent the summer of 1980 on the lam, an unprecedented story line that liberated the characters from the established community. Monty enlivened the escapades with homages to Hitchcock and, particularly, to Frank Capra's It Happened One Night. With the new look capturing a youthful and collegiate audience, General Hospital became a cultural phenomenon; a benchmark equal to anything in the history of television.

Serial Memory

For almost fifty years, beginning in radio, the techniques and strategies of the daytime serial were rejected by evening entertainment. Prime time's major experiment with the serial, Peyton Place (1964-69), had limited appeal; only the heavily promoted first season reached the Nielsen top twenty-five programs. Nighttime's most successful use of the genre was parody, epitomized by "As the Stomach Turns," a series of sketches on The Carol Burnett Show, and the almost surrealistic serials Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and Soap. In the late seventies, with competition from the cable industry, network producers began looking for new ways to capture an audience. They reconsidered the form of the soap opera, a genre that they had derided for years. Both Dallas and Dynasty employed the cliff-hanger to engage an audience in the continuing sagas of greed and lust in a core family, the Ewings and Carringtons, respectively. In the eighties, the writers of episodic television, wanting to find more dimensions for their characters, experimented with stories that lingered over many episodes and with characters who had a consciousness of their own histories. Several prime-time series did pioneering work in employing the serial structure, including St. Elsewhere, Cheers, and L.A. Law. But the place it really all began for nighttime was Hill Street Blues.

Whereas Joe Friday of the fifties Dragnet seemed to have neither a personal life nor any memories of his previous cases, Captain Frank Furillo entered the landscape of Hill Street Blues with a complicated backstory: a son and an ex-wife, a job in turmoil, and a budding romance with the district attorney. Importantly, Furillo's history was not just a premise. Co-creator Steven Bochco used the details of the character's life to spin story lines that explored the private and public turmoils of Furillo's life each week, interlocking those situations with equally rich vignettes of ten or more characters. This soap opera structure forms the basis for the powerful storytelling that characterizes Bochco's series. The audience is drawn deeper and deeper into the world of the Hill Street station, gathering memories of the series and its characters over many years.

Time and memory for both the characters and the audience are at the heart of the soap opera. While prime-time programming since Hill Street has incorporated the serial as a sustaining narrative element, there is no way that evening drama can match how familiar a character can become to a soap opera viewer: the combined run of Hill Street Blues and Cheers equals approximately one year's worth of any hour long soap. Moreover, the very narrative structure of the soap demands that the viewer bring memories of the pain and joy and subtle emotional nuances to each scene.

When characters with such rich, penetrating histories as Victor Newman and Nikki Reed on The Young and the Restless or Alan and Monica Quartermaine on General Hospital confront each other, the viewer fills in the sustained silences and piercing reaction shots that characterize the genre with a keen knowledge of their pasts, thus becoming an important partner in the scene. This deep, emotional involvement in a story that is unfolding day by day over years is ultimately the triumph of the soap opera. No other art form can achieve, much less sustain, this kind of connection with an audience for so long in such a deeply satisfying way.

The audience for the daytime serial is following in the footsteps of Dickens's passionate admirers, who likewise embraced fictionalized characters as another family: that has been the essential quality of the serial, linking story with audience. The history of the soap opera on radio and television, lasting more than sixty-five years, is in itself a continuing story, with the work of lrna Phillips being carried forward by Agnes Nixon and William J. Bell. As new creative forces enter the world of daytime, whoever carries on the work of Nixon and Bell well into the twenty-first century will by lineage have some connection to Irna Phillips, no doubt reaffirming her vision that "we do not live in this world alone, but in a thousand other worlds."

Go for classic, not for fad

2008-12-22T13:31:00.001-08:00

GL, you cannot know how much I am pulling for you to succeed. I truly feel you are the canary in the coal mine. You've perfected, in my opinion, the production model. Now, bring the writing along!

I wasn't planning to write this, but I stumbled on this item. I don't usually mention Perez Hilton here, but in this case...

In a pst today, the gossip blogger writes:

Viewership for The Hills is down.
Way down!

Original episodes have tumbled 26% in the coveted 12-34 y.o. viewer demographic in the fourth quarter, compared with the same period last year.

Okay, now...sigh...

This is actually a lesson soaps (should have) learned after Gloria Monty elevated General Hospital to all-time highs. As Roger Newcomb's blog reminds us today, the viewers attracted for a pop culture phenom were not the "foundational" audience that stays with a show for decades. Two years after the Ice Princess, GH was in freefall.

The lesson then, as now, is that you have to program for mom and grandma, but do it in such a compelling way that they suck their daughters (and sometimes sons) into watching too. That is not the MTV model. But it is how soaps are built.

So how is this relevant to GL? Remember this article about GL?

The villain in this piece is the reality show. When veteran soap-opera producer Mary-Ellis Bunim created The Real World for MTV in 1992, soap opera’s exclusive grip on emotionally manipulative programming began to loosen.

Notice the Laguna Beach mention in the next quote. That is, ahem, the progenitor of that falling morass mentioned by Perez, The Hills!

Where other daytime producers are amping up the supernatural plots and onscreen text messaging to attract viewers, Wheeler has given her show an extreme makeover, reality-show style. For the first time, fans can see the actual streets of Springfield, a midwestern town in an undisclosed state—which look suspiciously like the streets in Peapack, New Jersey, where one-fifth of the scenes are being shot, all with handheld cameras. “We finally get to come into their world,” says Wheeler, who was inspired by shows like Laguna Beach and Friday Night Lights.

The elusive quest for 12 year olds....

With its face-lift, Guiding Light is banking on pulling in a whole new generation of viewers. “I do think if you were flipping through the channels you wouldn’t say, ‘Oh, this is a soap opera, I’m not going to stop,’ ” says Wheeler. “You wouldn’t know what it was.”

...leaves 39 year olds behind...

When the “new” show debuted on February 29, there was the expected backlash. Fans immediately hit CBS with online complaints about the artsy flourishes (producers have toned them down). “These shows are created to be romantic fantasy and fantastical adventure,” says TV Guide’s soap columnist, Michael Logan. “We don’t want reality when we’re watching a soap. We want a ‘Calgon, take me away’ moment.”

I wasn't planning it, but I think this blog post serves as a kind of companion for the other one I wrote today.

I deeply believe that Ellen Wheeler/GL's production model can and should work. It produces a cheaper show to make, and it looks pretty darn good on my (computer) screen. I applaud the show for conducting the experiment! Michael Bruno said (in last week's SOD) that GL is actually making money! So, by that metric, GL is a success. And these shows have to make money to survive! (If you don't like conceding to the commercial demands of television, go to some art house film or an experimental theater).

GL has exemplars that show it can be a storytelling success too, even with this lower-cost production model. We know there are pop culture hits (critically and/or box office) that use a similar style, it can work! It is now time to invest, though, in some writers of immense vision. Don't let the inspiration be MTV's Real World. Even if you draw in 12 year old viewers...they won't stick around. It doesn't work that way anymore. Let your models be Cloverfield or the Office or both. Those things entertain.

The secret is to stay away from the pedestrian (e.g., a routine conversation in an autumnal field), and give us the exciting. Give us big stakes that are in our face. Let the narrative make use of the intimacy and immediacy of the form, and the shaky anxiety of its hand-held cams, and write to that!

Form and Function

2008-12-22T06:01:00.001-08:00

Check out these clips, and tell me what they have in common?

Cloverfield. Blair Witch. Friday Night Lights. The Office. By my reckoning, each one has powerful similarities to GL's new production model. Admittedly, each of these shows has much higher budgets, but at the core, it is the use of digital video, intimate hand held cameras. In the case of all four clips/shows, the production model conveys a "you are there" feeling that is actually quite remarkable, and contributes to the power of the show.

For Cloverfield and Blair Witch, the limited perspective was actually used to create suspense and confusion, so that we were suffering through the un-named horror with the same lack of information as the protagonists. This made the film far more effective. The intimacy, limited perspective, shakiness all worked together to ramp up the tension.

In a strange way, The Office works the same way. The Office is all about the cringeworthy moments that emerge from people caged like rats...too closely spaced, too different, yet thrown together every day. So, again, the "you are here" feeling really works. We hide our faces when Michael Scott does something especially boorish, because he is in our faces.

Now, Friday Night Lights, which I have watched with less frequency, uses the same quality in a more traditional drama. Again, it is effective. When characters are having conversations in cars or homes, we are there with them. In the locker room, we're in the middle of disputes and conversations. And on the field, we are pacing with coaches or privy to heated exchanges. Since football is fundamentally action, and the characters are mostly the action-filled young players and the people in their lives, all that movement works to give us a feeling of verisimilitude that simply makes us feel more involved.

The production model, which I am not the first to point out, is pretty similar to what Ellen Wheeler and her team are trying to accomplish at Guiding Light. Yet, pretty widely, many viewers and critics seem to feel that the model just isn't working for GL.

Notice the common theme for each of the foregoing examples. Action, tension, suspense, nervousness. In each example case above, the production model works perfectly with the writing, almost a kind of "partner" to create the tone and atmosphere that supports the narrative goals of the piece.

Now, at GL, we have something different. We see an attempt to use the technique for very pedestrian scenes with very little tension--conversations for the most part. The scenes are not narratively filled with high emotion or unrelenting energy, so there is a mismatch between this potentially effective style and underlying story and tone.

Imagine if GL had been revamped not just in production style, but if the narrative style had been shift to more nervous, high energy, anxious, high stakes. It would have been an abrupt departure from classic GL...from classic daytime in general...but it could have worked. Indeed, with a constant level of anxiety and stress and speed and movement, the show could have been edgy and could have attracted the attention of those young viewers everyone wants.

I think a mistake that GL has made is that they are patterning themselves after a reality show...but reality can often be boring. Their production model lends itself perfectly for high-stakes adrenaline storytelling...and I think that could have attracted an audience.

It all comes back to the same point: form should follow function. If GL sought to remake itself, it should have remade its narrative structure too. Storytelling at GL seems to have taken a backseat to the production model. In this next critical year, it is time for nothing less than a wholesale reinvention of the script writing, probably with the help of a fresh eye. Imagine if some hotshot young auteur were matched with a senior consultant who knows the story bones of GL (think Nancy Curlee or even Pam Long). That could be something. If the show played a more constant state of emotional tension and intimate high stakes, with that very fresh and modern production model, I think we might actually not be able to stay away!

Myrtle's Farewell

2008-12-21T12:25:00.000-08:00

I have already gone on record with my sadness at the passage "Great Aunt Myrtle". Beyond losing the phenomenal Eileen Herlie, long-term lapsed viewers like me also lost yet another touchstone to the Pine Valley of our memories. And, along with the loss of folks like Darlene Conley (B&B's Sally Spectra), it also seems that the era of the great "broads" (meant with ultimate respect, as strong women who spoke their mind and fiercely protected their "brood") has passed.

So, of course, I would not miss her funeral for the world! In this post, I confess that I feel a bit petty for having some less than positive things to say. I have no complaint about the way Myrtle was honored per se, but I find myself reacting to the fact that I think this funeral was actually a fair demonstration of the relatively poor health of All My Children these days. It is in that "meta" sense that I offer these impressions. I apologize to those who feel AMC is doing better these days, or who loved the episode unabashedly.

Now, let me start with fulsome praise. The fact that AMC would even honor its fallen vet, in the modern era, is remarkable. For a show that just let Julia Barr disappear, this is a terrific gift. There was genuine love, too, from all of the cast members who were present. Thorsten Kaye showed every drop of his true love for Herlie, and his poem at the end was goosebump inducing. The flashbacks were a special treat.

But even as I was grateful for all this, as a lapsed viewer who just watched the "funeral" for Katherine Chancellor on "my" show (Y&R)...well...the contrasts were stunning.

Where was Dr. Joe? Where was Tad? Where was Linc Tyler? Where was granddaugther Skye Alcazar? (They explained that daughter Rae Cummings was overseas).

All in all, there was so much sparseness...in the sets used, the characters used (some of whom had little meaningful connection to Myrtle). There was only one notable return, even though most of Pine Valley has lived with Myrtle at some point.

Sadly, I have to compare this to Y&R, where no expense was spared, from a sumptuous church set, to a half dozen returning favorites (who made sense and were logically connected to Kay).

There was also a heavy handedness in the AMC treatment that I, as a non-regular viewer, didn't like. The tinkling bells everywhere. The gold-burnished fadeouts on the flashbacks. The "crystal ball" made me feel I was watching Passions, and there was no need for that device...especially one that broadcast images to both Opal and Petey simultaneously. That, sadly, purely provoked eye rolls.

In the end, as a "visiting" viewer, it was clear to me that this was a departure episode with very little integration into the larger current canvas of the show. Moreover, as a "historical" episode, apart from a few flashbacks, there was very little attempt to link Myrtle into her larger history on the show. No flashback of Lenny/Langley?

There was no greater testament of how separated today's AMC has come from its' history than when "legacy" character (I know some folks hate that term) Petey Cortland had this exchange with his mother:

Opal: She wasn't fooling anybody. This here crystal ball's the real McCoy. She had this from way back when Phoebe Wallingford pulled her out of a homeless shelter to pose as Kitty Shea's mama.

Pete: Who?

It is such a sign of how much AMC has lost its historical throughline that Petey, legimitately, could have no idea whom his mother Opal she was talking about.

Ah, but in the end, at least Myrtle was honored, and that is all that mattered. In that context, I feel petty even listing these grievances. The heart strings were duly plucked.

It is my own selfish nostalgia...wishing for an AMC of my youth... I call this wish "selfish" because I did not hold up my end of the bargain. I did not "age along" with my old show. I stopped watching some time in the 80s, so AMC doesn't owe me any historical "feel good" hour. Theirs was an episode for current viewers.

Like a real funeral with a family you no longer often see, it was nice, for an hour, to come together with my old show, and some faces I remembered, and say goodbye to that wonderful old friend. The final poem by Thorsten Kaye was a beautiful ending, and I reproduce it here with gratitude, courtesy of the TV Megasite:

Now who will lead our carnival?
And who will make us stronger?
Who will mend our broken sleep when she is here no longer?
For whose part do we stand and bow?
What stories do we tell?
And will we memorize the day when great and greatness fell?
Say will this valley overcome, and will these shadows fade?
And will we lift our eyes to see the beauty that she made?
The disappearing last of her that leads to worlds unknown
has left a path to softly tread when sadness wanders home.
I'll meet thee where the highland winds divide wild mountain tyne,
where I will be forever yours and you,
forever mine.

The Template for Saving Daytime, Part 2

2008-12-19T06:51:00.000-08:00

In my last post, I suggested that Marland's Rules, plus a few others, were essentially being used by Maria Arena Bell to "save" the Young and The Restless. The show had become mired in sensationalistic plots, changing characters (e.g., Nikki now a senatorial candidate???), and a general disorganization that did not bode well for the future. I suggested that Maria Arena Bell and her team have "saved" the show creatively.

But "saving" a show creatively IS NOT equivalent to saving it financially. The primetime landscape is littered with shows that were very good--often critically successful--that didn't last more than a few episodes.

In the world of commercial TV, the only way a show can survive is to attract enough (of the right kind of) eyeballs to make it appealing to advertisers to pay the freight. With ever shrinking numbers of viewers, the traditional broadcast advertiser-supported model is getting trickier and tricker to uphold.

In his remarkable interview with Maria Arena Bell and Paul Rauch, from which I quoted heavily in my last post, Nelson Branco also revealed that this leader has keen insights into the evolution of the business model. I believe she is on the right track regarding how to save daytime financially too. Now...if only someone would listen!

What the rest of this show suggests is that the Bell team has figured out a way to maximize viewership using a mix of quality and sumptuousness, DVR loyalty, cable and internet distribution, and international distribution. In other countries, viewership has been further maximized by moving to late afternoon/early evening time slots (Canada, eh!).

It is up to the media outlets and the advertisers to figure out how to monetize that. Y&R is delivering the eyeballs. By my count, the number is close to 8-10 million daily viewers in the US, and substantially more in international distribution. (CBS claims 5.6 million domestically and about another 4.5 million globally, but I think these are underestimates only count live TV broadcast viewers). Now, it is time for those in charge of making money to capitalize on those well delivered eyeballs.

Here is what I mean:

1. Maintain a unified creative vision and historical integrity

Translation: You have to want to watch the show!

Arena Bells says:

We have a very respectful relationship with the network. But this is my show and my vision.

This is standard for primetime. A showrunner is selected, and the show rises and falls with the showrunner's vision. Of course there is (always, endemically) corporate interference, but there is some respect for the "auteur". Daytime has really let that go in the last two decades.

If the show isn't watchable...if it doesn't produce an enjoyable and coherent experience...people won't tune in. This is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for the survival of a soap.

One of the reasons Y&R still 'works' just happened in my home. My parents visited. They haven't watched the show regularly since the late 1980s. But, when I clicked it on, there was Katherine and Jill and Nikki and Victor and Paul and Jack and Ashley and Neil and Brad... Moreover, to the extent that those characters were seen, they all still acted like they used to. Victor was still controlling, and still in his love-hate dance with Nikki. Jack was still trying to bring down the moustache.

Because Y&R offers a consistent feeling of "home" to its loyal viewers, they keep returning. Obviously in ever-shrinking numbers (see below...there are reasons for that)...but more of them keep returning than for any other show.

(I should add that Y&R also manages to remain visually pleasurable to watch. Sumptuous sets and lighting, in crisp widescreen high definition. Y&R has been the trademark 'beautiful' soap from the beginning. It is easier for viewers to keep tuning into something that is a sensual treat, with stirring music, and a wide array of captivating sets...than to watch something that just looks cheap).

But what about the future?

2. Consider changing the timeslots

I have previously written that, in the rest of the world, soaps have mostly left the daytime. In those countries where they are enormously successful, late afternoon/early evening/even primetime berths assure sufficient numbers.

To this, Maria Arena Bell says, in her Branco interview,

All I can tell you is that there is talk about a lot of possibilities. We’ll have to see. As you know, there are constant changes in programming. Look at Jay Leno — he is filling the 10 p.m. slot five days a week! So, who knows?

In my view, the experiment to do is to let Y&R premiere each new episode weeknights at 8 pm (Eastern Time), and then rebroadcast the next day (on CBS) at 12:30 pm (Eastern Time), or the equivalent Central/Mountain/Pacific times. The cost savings for CBS would be enormous...that is five hours of primetime they wouldn't have to program. There would be only relatively small incremental licensing costs to Bell. If CBS follows the "Leno" model, I'd urge them to try it with Y&R. (This would likely mean cancelling the Soapnet deal).

3. On TV: Build it, they will come, and then show the advertisers

Following on what Sara Bibel said, Maria Bell notes in her Branco interview:

If you take into account that a third more viewers are watching our show since that’s the statistic — if you factor in DVR+7 — then the soaps have not taken the dip media analysts have claimed. There are still a lot of eyes on this show. Yesterday, we celebrated 20 years as the No. 1 soap opera in America — along with being No. 1 in all the demos by the widest margin we’ve ever had. Yes, I agree — we need the numbers from viewers who catch us on their computer, DVR, and SOAPnet. Even without those numbers, we’re second only to Oprah in daytime. That’s a lot of eyes! We’re certainly more viable than people give us credit for.

Think about that! It is true. Y&R is usually the #2 show in daytime...overall and with the "desirable" demographic.

Moreover, it gains a large number with those DVR views. I confess I am one of them.

This is a huge audience. The problem is not the show's...they are still delivering the eyeballs.

The flaw is the networks and the advertisers, who have failed to find better ways to capture these fast-forwarding eyeballs. The lack of creativity is on the part of the advertisers and the broadcasters.

Why are none of the successful internet strategies being used on TV? Banner ads? DVR codes that prohibit fast-forwarding (with the quid-pro-quo of fewer and more memorable ads)? Ads that flash a single "slide like" message on screen...so you can't miss the message even if you fast forward?

Product placement is also a clever approach, but it has really been done badly so far.

The next few points were not stated by Arena Bell, but are consistent (I believe) with her vision.

4. On the Internet: Build it, they will come, and then show the advertisers

I have mentioned before how broadly Y&R is streaming these days: Fancast.com, msn.com, cbs.com, youtube.com, yr.globaltv.com.

Every one of these is a countable hit, often with a cookie-trackable user, and with the ability to track minute-by-minute tuneouts, fast-forwards, reversals, quits. CBS.com even recently added a social networking/chat component (dish while you watch). Honestly, it is a data analyst's wet dream. Think of all the rich qualitative data you could get from the chat transcripts!

Interestingly this is all being done with virtually no promotion. My fear is that they don't want to inflame the affiliates.

Technologically, they have already figured out that delivering a smaller number of ads makes the audience happy, and increases the memorability of the ads. The presentations sometimes allow surrounding screens and banners to keep the ad ALWAYS PRESENT during the show. You cannot skip or fast forward the ads...but few fans get upset because the promotions are few in number.

Let us also add that if we could just DUMP the expensive infrastructure of affiliates and broadcast (too many middlemen), it would cost a lot less to deliver these shows over the internet. No FCC licensing.

The infrastructure is there. It is time to stop living in fear of the old media, and to sell-sell-sell the new!

There are clear indications of success in this sphere. In Canada, Y&R was recently listed among the top internet search terms. At CBS.com, Y&R consistently appears (solely among daytime soaps) as among the "most popular" streaming shows.

I'd add "move to cable" as an option...but...err...Soapnet hasn't exactly embraced soaps these days. I will note, though, that by airing Y&R in "early prime", that show is the number-one rated show for the network. Soapnet may not want soaps anymore...but surely some cable outfit wouldn't mind?

5. Cultivate and maintain an international base

The Bell shows are clear international winners. B&B is the big daddy here, but Y&R does pretty well too. Per the Young and the Restless 35th anniversary fact sheet,

The Young and the Restless international markets include Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Greece, India, Israel, Italy, the Middle East, New Zealand, Romania, Slovenia, South Africa, Switzerland, Turkey and the U.K.

The Young and the Restless is currently distributed in nearly 30 foreign countries on five continents through Sony Pictures Television International. The episodes currently aired abroad are not concurrent with the episodes airing in the U.S. and Canada.

The Young and the Restless is the top-rated daytime drama (M-F) in France.

These are extra sources of revenue. Along with (hopefully) growing revenues from cable and internet streaming and clever ways of monetizing DVR views, this international base buttresses a show against declines in the homeland.

I also think that the historical consistency and lush beauty of the show helps in international distribution. Having lived overseas, one of the things that international viewers love about American serials is their conspicuous consumption. Big cars, big houses, (at one time) big shoulders. Y&R is one of the few soaps that still embraces this quintessential component of the American serial.

Personally, I love verite too. I think there is room for that. But the traditional base of the international appeal of US shows is "lifestyles of the rich and famous". Y&R offers that.

The Template for Saving Daytime, Part 1

2008-12-19T05:05:00.000-08:00

This post is inspired by one of the best soap interviews I have ever read, conducted by Nelson Branco of the Canadian TV Guide (links below). I thank that reporter for one of the most insightful interviews in this area ever published.

This post is one of two. This first post talks about saving daytime CREATIVELY, in terms of storytelling and fan appeal. The second post talks about saving daytime FINANCIALLY, in terms of generating revenue in the new media landscape.

For both parts, I make the assumption that "my" show, The Young and the Restless, may be the template. In this post, I'll briefly try to suggest that Y&R is, at least for now, creatively 'saved' (acknowledging that it takes no more than ONE boneheaded corporate decision to undo it), and review how that was done. In the next post, I'll make the argument that no show is financially safe...but that Y&R has carefully done just about everything it can to maximize the probability of longevity. This post addresses the proposition that, as a the strong central leader, Maria Arena Bell creatively rescued Y&R. "How she did it", below, refers to the strategies engaged in by Bell. Interesting, many of these strategies have an older name: "Marland's rules".

None of this causes me to retreat from the idea that, ON THE CURRENT TRACK, relying ONLY on network (CBS) ratings, Y&R can't survive past the mid-2010 decade. I believe, however, that if our model for appraising and remunerating success is modernized, Y&R may well flourish beyond this time.

A. Subjective evidence for creative salvation

What makes me say Y&R is creatively saved? Well, first there is my own opinion. A lifelong fan of Y&R, I have gone through dry spells. One of them was at the end of Bill Bell's reign. (Nikki marrying her gynecologist? Kay Alden quickly undid that mess). Another was at the end of Jack Smith's reign. (I loved his Cassie-death story...with a passion...but after years of "all Brittany Hodges all the time", I could hardly stand it).

Twice, in recent years, my passion for the show has been restored. The first was early in Lynn Latham's regime. (Yup!). This is when Kay Alden and Jack Smith and Ed Scott and Kathryn Foster and Jim Houghton and Trent Jones, etc., were all still with her. There was that brief window after Nikki's mugging, where Victor was smelling lavender, and John was having dizzy spells, and Brad was suddenly looking at faded newspaper clips about a brutal murder in Parma, OH...and I hadn't been as excited about the multiple mysteries in AGES. I loved the story structure. We were focusing on John's neurological problems and Nikki's spinal health (would she...like her last spinal injury on horseback...descend again into painkillers?)...when the REAL story was Victor's burgeoning seizure disorder.

Like every fan on the planet, my enthusiasm about Lynn Latham's Y&R didn't last. As it became a disorganized mess, with little throughline, little emotional resonance, too many newbies, and characters changed to suit plot...

But now...since the middle of 2008, Y&R has been on a never-ending high roll. Launched with Sabrina's Sudden Impact death, followed up with the remarkable Return-of-the-House-of-Abbott and the incredible "Kay's Death" umbrella, the show is hitting all the right notes. When Lauren Fenmore apologized to Traci Abbott for being a "mean girl" two decades ago (this is a scene between two recurring characters!!), I understood how fully the show was being written for us loyalists...those who have been there from the beginning.

Here's the thing (and I am not alone...I'm reading this everywhere). Y&R is in a place right now where many of us CANNOT WAIT till the next episode. Moreover, most episodes deliver "oooh" and "aaah" moments. Note, these are not moments borne of plot (explosions, gunfights, etc.). These are moments of characters connecting, or characters battling. Some of the best moments on Y&R this last month or so were the Traci-Lauren scene, Kay's will reading, Jack FINALLY unleashing his venom at Gloria (for the tainted cream scandal), or the remarkable Vail Bloom and Chris Engen playing EVERY emotional nuance in their tortured romance (compatible, two loners from similar backgrounds who found each other, sexually incendiary, sweet and sexy together, but she's a law and order girl and he's a really bad boy). Old and new, the show is truly doing well in almost every domain.

B. General critical praise

I'm a fanboy, prone to hyperbole, so it is easy to dismiss me.

But look at the parade of "laudatory" awards Y&R received this year:

Roger Newcomb (qualified praise)
Canadian TV Guide
US TV Guide

with copious praise from Soap Opera Digest for its major stories.

and (if you read message boards) fans everywhere. Maybe this is group think...mass hysteria...but I think most people understand that Y&R is creatively terrific right now.

C. How she did it

Interestingly, it seems that the formula used was deviously simple. So simple, it has been known for several decades as "Marland's rules" or "How Not to Wreck a Show". His article was published in the April 27, 1993 issue of Soap Opera Digest, shortly after his passing.

Marland's Rule	What Maria did	Source
Watch the show.	"Yes. Listen, I admit — I didn’t watch every episode, but I followed Y&R since I worked here in the 1980s. Despite being a Bell, I’ve always loved soaps, and especially Y&R. So yeah, I followed Y&R like a fan. If you’re working in this business, you must be a fan. Even as [the boss], when I watch the show, I forget I work on it, because I switch back into fan mode. I cried like crazy at Katherine’s funeral!"	TVGuide.ca
Learn the history of the show. You would be surprised at the ideas that you can get from the back story of your characters.	"It’s been incredible to utilize Bill’s bible. The characters and the history he left have only grown richer and richer over the years. My job is to move Genoa City into the 21st century."	TVGuide.ca
Read the fan mail. The very characters that are not thrilling to you may be the audience's favorites.	Bell, in an interview with Paul Rauch in Soaps in Depth (December 2008) said that they listened to "fans" and "focus groups", and that this indicated that classic characters and actors were what they wanted to see.	Soaps In Depth
Be objective. When I came in to ATWT, the first thing I said was, what is pleasing the audience? You have to put your own personal likes and dislikes aside and develop the characters that the audience wants to see.	"When I returned to Y&R, a lot of things had changed. A lot of the characters and storylines had [swung] in some wonky, strange directions. I didn’t want to be one of those people who came in and changed direction by forgetting what viewers had experienced onscreen during past regimes. Instead, I felt it was really important to build on what was already here; wrap up stories that were left dangling for too long; and give viewers the satisfaction of a resolution and pay off. After we accomplished that, we moved in a new, fresh direction."	TVGuide.ca
Talk to everyone; writers and actors especially. There may be something in a character's history that will work beautifully for you, and who would know better than the actor who has been playing the role?	"Omigod — working with Hogan has been a great deal of fun, as you can imagine. Although I’m the primary head writer and storyteller on the show, I have been lucky to have him on our team because he brings a fun sensibility to the stories he writes. He knows how to lay out a storyline. Hogan’s one of the funniest people on the planet. And Scott Hamner offers this incredible sense of integrity in his writing. Our show is really cohesive."	TVGuide.ca
Don't change a core character. You can certainly give them edges they didn't have before, or give them a logical reason to change their behavior. But when the audience says, "He would never do that," then you have failed.	See the "wonky" quote above.	TVGuide.ca
Build new characters slowly. Everyone knows that it takes six months to a year for an audience to care about a new character. Tie them in to existing characters. Don't shove them down the viewers' throats.	Here, the evidence is in production. Think of the introductions of Billy Abbott or Adam Wilson or Chloe/Kate Valentine Chancellor. Each are important scions of core families. None are truly front burner...they're on more like 2-3 days a week. Each one is tied to multiple veterans. Each one has shades of good and bad (mostly bad, though...but that sets up the redemption arc).
If you feel staff changes are in order, look within the organization first. P&G [Procter & Gamble] does a lot of promoting from within. Almost all of our producers worked their way up from staff positions, and that means they know the show.	Some of the subsequent rehires, both as directors (e.g., Mike Denney) and writers (e.g., Janice Ferri Esser) have been from the "vintage" era. Of course, promoting from within was the classic ultimate "Bell" tradition.	Soap Opera Network Writers and Directors Thread,
Don't fire anyone for six months. I feel very deeply that you should look at the show's canvas before you do anything.	In Toup's Soap Opera Network Writers and Directors Thread, he notes that many of Lynn Latham's hires were not fired until given a chance to show their business. Correspondingly, "Darin Goldberg & Shelley Meals last listed as Writers on June 25", "Valerie Ahern & Christian McLaughlin last listed as Writers on July 7", "Cherie Bennett & Jeff Gottesfeld last listed as Writers on August 19", and "Josh Griffith last listed as Co-Executive Producer on October 2". Vincent Irizarry's David Chow was universally reviled (even the actor says the character was inconsistently written by the previous regime, in a December Soap Opera Digest), but Arena Bell kept him on canvas from December 27/2007 through August 6/2008. She brought the character to a satisfying resolution (killed in a car wreck, his ashes thrown in a wheelbarrow of horse manure), rather than just dumping him.	Soap Opera Network Writers and Directors Thread,
Good soap opera is good storytelling. It's very simple.	My focus here? It’s as a writer and a storyteller. It’s important as a writer to ensure your story is taken to the screen to its absolute highest height. Since Paul’s been here, the material has been fulfilled. Really, my job is to write the show. In daytime, especially these days, having creative control is important. You need to be able and free to tell the stories you want to tell — in the way you want to tell them. If you have a vision and the passion, people will come along with you for the ride.	TVGuide.ca

Now, Nelson Branco's interview (heavily quoted above--you must read the whole thing, because it contains so much more!) was also revelatory because it also showed a few more key ways in which Arena Bell has strengthened her show.

I. Production should follow storytelling, not follow it.
Form must follow function, and not the reverse. As much as I have applauded Ellen Wheeler's GL experiment, they have it backward. On that show, storytelling is following the new production model...and is therefore weakened. Storytelling should come first.

The other lesson is that a sumptuous production model may be more appealing than a lean "verite" one.

"Paul couldn’t be a better or a more experienced producer. He ensures our show is produced to perfection. When I watch Y&R, I’m always blown away at how our material is perfectly [realized] onscreen." (Source: TVGuide.ca)

II. A singular creative vision, free from corporate interference, is essential.
Bill Bell understood that. Sadly, CBS, ABC, NBC, Sony, Corday, Disney...they all might not. And daytime is weakened by the misunderstanding. I'll write more about the "auteur" model of daytime in a future post.

"In daytime, especially these days, having creative control is important. You need to be able and free to tell the stories you want to tell — in the way you want to tell them." and "They all defer to my vision, and yet, because we share the same goal, we have all professionally jelled rather beautifully. As you know, you can’t run a soap opera if there are too many cooks in the kitchen — especially when it comes to story. Yes, soap opera is a collaborative medium, but there must always be one vision." (Source: TVGuide.ca)

III. Write soaps only if you love the genre.

"The people who are the most successful in this business are people who love it inside and out. I think you make a colossal mistake if you think soap operas is anything less than any other medium or storytelling forum. We never dumb down our show in any way." (Source: TVGuide.ca)

I contrast this with Leah Laiman (ATWT), who recently indicated she had a hard time coming up with compelling stories.

With one hour a day, five days a week, fifty-two weeks a year to fill, I am in constant search for inspiration. I can adapt a plot from classic Greek tragedy (you can´t go wrong with Oedipus) or classic vintage movies (It Happened One Night works for almost any new couple). Newspapers and magazines offer an embarrassment of riches. The old chestnut switched-at-birth-baby story you might encounter on any number of shows I´ve written (General Hospital, Days of Our Lives, One Life to Live, Another World, Guiding Light) was the subject of numerous articles and, needless to say, a hefty lawsuit, several years ago. I grant you there aren´t too many people who return from the dead just as a former spouse is on the verge of marrying a new partner. Still, thwarted romance, in all its many guises, is a recurrent theme in reality as well as fiction.

In my next post, I'll talk about financial rescue of daytime.

Ratings: What is meaningful variation?

2008-12-15T13:05:00.001-08:00

Soap Opera Network has started an interesting new feature labelled "Daytime's 40 Most Popular Shows" The first week ratings analysis, for the week of 12/01/2008, were posted today.

Writer and site manager Errol says: "The mindset behind the new chart was to compare episodes on a week to week basis, instead of just a weekly average. This is how Cable ratings are compared, not as averages. For instance, Bill O'Reilly's Wednesday episode can rank #1 in the Nielsen's, but it wouldn't if it were averaged for the whole week."

And, indeed, his accompanying ratings analysis makes a point of showing how show rankings can vary across the week. For example:

While NBC's "Days of our Lives" loses 40% of its budget in the upcoming year and a loss of its two stars (Deidre Hall and Drake Hogestyn), three out of its five weekly episodes (Friday, Tuesday, and Monday) outranked every episode of ABC's "All My Children" and "One Life to Live." The highest episode was its Friday broadcast with 2.9 million viewers. For the week, "DAYS" averaged 2.7 million viewers.

So, I'm interested by Errol's basic claim that people are interested in the dailies. I know he is right. SON's weekly ratings thread is among its most active. Every week, posters try to link day-to-day variations in the ratings to stories that were happening, characters that appeared, or particular promotions that were run.

I'm not so sure this sheds much light, for the most part. For example, I took the data Errol charted and plotted in here (click for full-size versions):

Is this meaningful fluctuation, or random variation? For example, there is a general trend for mid-week to be slumpy, and for many shows to start the week stronger than they finish. When you look at it in the millions of viewers (top chart), shows can lose 10% or more of their audience in a given week.

What I am struggling with is whether this is meaningful. I don't really think so. Take Errol's analysis about Days of Our Lives above, for example. Although the ranking may vary over the course of week, I question whether these ranking fluctuations are statistically meaningful. To me, it basically says the shows are neck-in-neck. Do advertisers care about these fluctuations? I suspect they should not.

As I said to Errol, I think a longer-time frame is the appropriate unit of analysis:

Even weeklies, I would argue, are not often meaningful barometers of a show's performance. The most useful number, I would argue, is the SLOPE (unit change over time). Perhaps even more useful is the STANDARDIZED SLOPE (which puts all shows in a common metric before examining their trajectory). That implies the gathering of these ratings over some period of time.

The sole exception, in my opinion, is when the dailies are being used to check on the effectiveness of a particular promotion. I, for example, was glued to the ratings after CBS' heavy promotion of Y&R: Sudden Impact (and, to be fair, a year earlier, Y&R: Out of the Ashes). Sudden Impact got on-network promotion, off-network promotion (E!), and banner ads in lots of places. In addition, the soap press was breathlessly promoting the "big changes" that would come in August. Sure enough, at least in the short term, the dailies responded...Y&R got a bump.

Interestingly, even here I question the value of the dailies. Because the Y&R Sudden Impact bump wore off...and it returned to fluctuating about its regular and lower average.

I have a vague sense that over-focus on the dailies and weeklies may actually be destructive, because it promotes stunt plotting and stunt promotion. (In primetime, the weekly ratings make more sense...because shows have fewer episodes). The barometer of a show's health, I think, is where it is trending.

In that sense, I am actually encouraged by what Barbara Bloom is quoted as saying this week: “It's not just about stopping the erosion. It’s still possible to raise the ratings.”

I am encouraged by the fact that, to me, this suggests Bloom is more focused on trend than snapshot performance. On the other hand, I see no evidence in any quarter that ratings are improvable over the short- or long-haul. I'd love to know what she is thinking, and how she plans to get there, and whether it can work.