Are soap operas on television too often?

Eric, I know that soaps dropping back to half hours again is a pipe dream, for the reasons you state, but if we're talking about what may help soaps creatively as a genre, I feel free to post my wishlist.

If we are talking about a fundamental difference between daytime and primetime, most assuredly, it is pacing. I also think this is a small, perhaps minute, reason the genre is failing. Soaps, when done well, excel at playing every nuance, every beat of an emotional story. Soap characters have a fandom that is unparalleled, and I think it is due to the fact that watching them go through every beat is akin to watching a "friend" go through a similar situation. In essence, the first thought that would come to me when seeing them on the street would be, "There goes Brooke." Not, "There goes Julia Barr." Very few soap stars transcend this "friend" status into icon (perhaps Susan Lucci).

It really makes me cackle watching these old Edge of Night episodes that EON was supposedly so "fast-paced," or that Nixon's shows were fast-moving. In this hyperkinetic world we live in, they plod along like a snail, so I can only imagine how other soaps moved. It's always been a joke between a cousin and me that you can still tune into the Nature Show (aka B& and see the same storyline ten years later. Although, the general public often says this about a soap, it is rarely true. Soaps have definitely accelerated in the past twenty years, and especially in the last five. IMHO, Pratt is starting to move into overdrive on AMC, and this is one element of his I'm not enjoying. I watch soaps for the pacing; I've come to realize this while pondering this board since joining. I'm very interested in psychology and human nature and seeing how people interact. I enjoy plot-oriented movies and television, but they are easier for me to "leave behind" or even "drop" if I can't become attached to a character.

I really enjoy your posts. I agree with all of this--even Agnes herself has said that the difference between primetime and daytime is primetime shows the cause, or action, whereas daytime is all about the CONSEQUENCES of the cause or action (something primetime--especially when she said this back in the mid 70s when The Waltons was about as serial-y as you got--is famous for washing over).

Abotu pacing--having just seen a week or so of Summer 1981 AMC episodes I don't think what Pratt's doing *is* all that different. We haven't had a major exceleration in terms of story on AMC, (well we have since B&E's tenure but that's cuz nothign happened when they wrote ) but in terms of episode pacing--and i was surrpised that 1981's AMC did many similar things--you see Opal telling Jennie that she has a job in Center City at a place called Foxy's and the Martins lent her the car to get there, next segment they're at Foxy's already fighting with the owner who's asking about her age. It's all relative of course, but AMC does seem to have almost always had a faster pace--Bell if anything took the pacing of Irna Phillips's shows and (masterfully) slowed it all the more. James Reilly took this to an unfortunate extreme (it drove me crazy how on Passions--a show I wanted to dig for its campiness and outrageousness--would literally have the SAME dialogue played out over and over for days and fans called it clever writing). But I don't think Pratt's new model is as far off from AMC's history as I at first feared (and happily--so far anyway--he's shown us he can slow down some scenes when needed) although I get your worry.