Faulkner

For daytime soaps, it’s kinda up to us to preserve the genre. Can’t hope for the deep pockets to do anything. A small group of dedicated fans has done a lot to make material available on the biggest “streaming service” of them all: YouTube. Like everyone, I’d like more episodes to be unearthed and uploaded to different places (hopefully with the owners preserving copies in the event of inevitable purges), but there’s already more material up from the soaps than I can watch alongside other life obligations and the gazillion movies and TV series I still want to see. More material than I’d want to watch if I’m being honest. There’s just not enough hours in the day. Soaps have been excellent at times, but except for periods when these were exceptional (and perhaps even then in a few cases), there’s a lot of filler and repetition, as they were crafted for homemakers whose attention was divided. The hourlong push only made things worse. Ambient TV is certainty a thing and primetime shows are padded, but they are relatively low-commitment. Soaps feel like overwhelming projects to get into UNLESS you have a really compelling reason to dip into them, like family members or peers watching. (Game of Thrones was dense but so many people were watching or had read the GRRM novels and others wanted to know what the hell they were talking about). The stigmas of soaps have lessened but only the genre has been outright forgotten. “Oh that show’s still on?!?!” has become more a common refrain. When popular soap figures like Jackie Zeman pass away, you get a boost in conversation from nostalgic fans, but there is no connection between lapsed fans’ temporary chatter and the show as it’s existed for the 20-30 years. There’s no clamor to see how the show handles Bobbie. “Bobbie was still on GH?” would probably be most people’s first question. Understandably so: the shows have been garbage for a long time and they are literally all “filler,” scheduled to fill holes in daytime with a loyal yet aging viewership. The soap I find most easily bingeable is The Edge of Night. It hits a sweet spot between plot-driven and forward momentum/suspense and a strong sense of who the characters are even without having watched, and the arcs feel very clear. It’s also somewhat “dark” and has a timeless feel, and it wasn’t super earnest or domestic. As we’ve said throughout the years, it’s ripe for a reboot. The IP means nothing to most youngish people but there will always be an audience for a solid crime drama.

Knots is also a very slow burn at the beginning, even though its first seasons were more episodic, so it would be easy for someone to start it and abandon it. But so many of its heavily serialized peers are now streaming, so I wonder.

Moonlighting is in the works, according to Glenn Gordon Caron. But word was that even Family (the Sada Thompson/Meredith Baxter/Kristy McNichol series) is available on Tubi, although I can’t seem to find it via my mobile. I’d love to see Sisters and Herskovitz/Zwick series other than My So-Called Life streaming. Thirtysomething was on Hulu for a while.

I do wonder about the primetime soap holdouts (or in this case, holdout). Dallas, Dynasty, Falcon Crest, Melrose Place, Beverly Hills 90210, The O.C., and even Titans are all streaming but no Knots, for instance. And that’s the show I’d want to watch the most of all of the above,

And certainly Patrick Mouratoglou is under a microscope now as well. I wonder how deep this investigation goes.

Yeah, I think YouTube curation from dedicated fans is our best bet, and we’ve gotten to see a lot of gems that I never thought I would see. Yeah, the quality of the clips are mostly sh!t but it’s better than nothing. (Maybe eventually AI will be good enough to marginally improve some of the clips. Right now, clips have to be basically good quality for Topaz to enhance them. A horrible staticky VHS rip would look a mess.) It’s just a shame that certain soap clips are subject to takedowns (especially the Sony shows and Santa Barbara) when the corporations aren’t making any efforts to extract value from them.

Soaps are tricky. The types of people who adore soaps to the level that we all do, that would watch episodes and episodes of random characters we’ve only read about in some cases, are VERY few and far between. I would think curated, DVD-collection-style series focusing on the history of one character or couple (say, Sami Brady or Carly/Sonny) would be more viable but even those would require digging deep into archives that are probably collecting dust in a lot of cases, especially with the cancelled shows we’d all want to see. My guess is that even the minuscule window that classic soaps had to go to SVOD streaming is closing more and more each day with all of the belt-tightening that’s happening at the major streamers. Even the FAST channels over on Pluto won’t go that far back into classic Y&R and B&B. Hopefully some union deals will give writers and actors more residual money, but the result will be that it might become more expensive to host series.

Coco is American, young, charismatic, historically significant, and has become a massive worldwide star in the making. Just look at how packed her crowds are at events. Novak (whom I remain a fan of due to his tenacity and work ethic—and the breadth of his fan base is underrated) was and always has been most marketable as a spoiler/villain to Federer and Nadal, although his brewing rivalry with Carlos Alcaraz seems to drive a lot of interest.

Where you at, @j swift?

Jessica Pegula’s dad, yikes: https://x.com/NFL_DovKleiman/status/1701626842732437616?s=20

TSJ on Maurice Benard’s State of Mind:

TSJ is on Maurice Benard’s YouTube series:

Looks like a hostage video.

People are coming for their necks:

An update on the status of the Daytime Emmy ceremony buried in a Variety article on how the Primetime Emmy ceremony will move forward if strikes persist:

LOL!

AOC has added her tribute to Ruschell, who was interviewing her when she learned she’d won her first election:

OMG. I’m just heartbroken about this. She was so ebullient (plus she had young kids). And she was doing so well, but pancreatic cancer is such a brutal disease. The NYC news market has suffered so many losses this year.