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By Contessa Donatella · Posted
That is a specific example where I would agree with those fans so I would be critical of the execs doing so. I frankly think that "caring" in this regard is not conducive to dialog. Basically you point out its very subjective nature. What is caring to one person might be callous disregard to another. I suggest it is a trap & we fell in it! -
Does anyone know of a place where I could watch older episodes of RC??? I really would love to watch more of this show, and I would decide if I would join the save River city campaign, I HATE when soaps are killed, but sometimes you should let them go too -
The lack of specificity around what illicit goods “the five families” so desperately covet “the waterfront” to import really undercuts the stakes here. -
By Contessa Donatella · Posted
CANARIES IN THE MINESHAFT: Essays on Politics and Media. by Renata Adler. St. Martin’s Press. New York. © 2001. “Afternoon Television: Unhappiness Enough, and Time” “You have to tolerate extremes of hatred and loneliness to follow, Monday through Friday every week. through a still undetermined period of months, the story of an educated man so bitter that he kills himself solely to frame another man for murder. Yet there is an audience of at least six million at two-thirty every afternoon New York time (other times across the country) prepared to watch this plot line, among other plot lines, develop on “The Doctors,” a television program of the genre soap opera, or daytime dramatic serial.” And, this is no joke. It is for fiction a single act of rage and isolation like this imploded revenge, a suicide caroming across the board. “This contriver of his own death to make it look like someone else’s literal crime has, …detonated incalculable threats in other lives.” “The Doctors plays this all out”. For all I know, this might happen all the time. But “The Doctors” has a special instance here. Now, no one writes high drama. But in a time of violent death, individuals in dire straits look tabloid. “Most fiction keeps its personal crises low profile and small; writers with serious claims upon the desperate dramatic themes seem to have crossed further out of tragedy and into melodrama than writers of soaps going the other way.” The term ‘pop culture , never of much use or elegance, is empty now. “There is almost no culture of any other kind.” People with a taste or instinct for the arts are thrown back on the classics or must bide their time. “The arts, first-rate, second-rate (the creative enterprise is not a horse race, after all), are just not much in evidence.” Painting is a kind of caricature: ribbons, billboards, commercials are not simply the inspiration—they are *better* than this incessant, humorless joke that passes through museums and galleries in the name of art. In writing, one would never have found a Kafka on symposiums or on the Johnny Carson show. “But, in all the modern strategies of fame, it becomes harder than ever to know where to look.” “And then there are the soaps. They are pure plot.” Maybe the grand oral tradition rambled on but we had “Iliad” and/or “Nibelungenlied”. For months the audience wasn’t told —the characters did not yet suspect—that Dr. Allison killed Dr. Allison. “But the audience knew. Everyone knew.” In line with the characters and their motivations over the last several years the only question would come out when Dr. Aldrich’s murder trial would begin. if it began and how it would come out. Conviction. Acquittal. Conviction —and perhaps months later—acquittal. “All this was not conventional suspense. Too much was known. It was more like sustained morbidity and dread. Things were going to get worse before they got better. –if they ever did.” White housewives, black housewives, children home from school, men unemployed, the aged, the preschool young, the idle, the ladies at the ironing board—there was no telling, even from the commercials, who was watching this, except that they were millions, across the country, and that they were, and are, willing to endure what has become the perfected medium of daily, inexorable, and almost unrelieved depression. “It takes about five days to catch on to the plot of a soap opera in apogee. It takes five one of these years for one of these fictions, whose beginnings and ends are as obscure as the first question of the universe, to capture and maintain an audience. There seems to be no reason for whole generations of adults still to have strong, clear memories of Helen Trent and other characters from the radio soaps.” Surely we might’ve been homesick or have ‘amnesia’ be a first word for us to call out. “But the television soap operas (the radio ones now defunct), in addition to being in the afternoon, have brought their stories far closer to home.” “As sands through the hourglass,” says a voice, over music, each day at the start of a daytime serial, “so are the days of our lives.” “The program happens to be called ‘Days of our Lives’.” In all of the time that the show has been on the air top half of the logo has never emptied and the bottom half of the logo has never filled. Fidelity, betrayal, rape, murder,, amnesia, alienation, misunderstanding, literal misconception (wives pregnant by their husbands’ brothers or by the fiance`s of their husband’s sisters), hostages, adoptions, suicides, loves, wars, friendships, deceit, insanity, operations, villains, tea—whose sands and hourglasses are these? A lot of people’s evidently. The serial “Search for Tomorrow”, which is just now floundering a bit (writers of soap operas burn out, shift programs, lose their touch, endure, go mad, or simply vanish with their own dramatic frequency), has been on television continuously for more than twenty years. “The serial ‘Another World’ became so popular and full of plot (also so pressed by NBC’s need for another loved half hour) that it split in two; the old ‘Another World’, at its usual 3 p.m., and ‘Another World'(Somerset)—later renamed simply ‘Somerset—with many of the same characters, at 4 p.m.” “The Doctors itself, at two-thirty, is NBC’s competitor with CBS’s ‘The Guiding Light’, which was once one of the most watched programs in daytime television. No more. ‘The Doctors’ was just a better-written, better-acted epic of despair. “My happiest moment on an of the soap I have watched with anything like constancy occurred some years ago, when Andrea Whiting, of “Search for Tomorrow, cracked up on the witness stand.. Her villainy had been relentless, undiscovered, pathological, for years. She had broken the engagement of her son , Len Whiting, to Pam Tate. She had refused to divorce her estranged husband, Sam Reynolds, so that he could marry his true love, Joanne Tate., Patti’s mother and the program’s heroine. Andrea Whiting had been responsible years before for the death by fire of Len’s twin. She had blamed the death on her husband, Sam, thereby estranging Sam the father from Len the son. She had tried to kill several people in the intervening years—most recently Sam—-but she had contrived to make it look like Sam had actually been trying to kill her instead. Sam was on trial. He was being defended by Doug Martin, the father of Scott Phillips, who was going to marry Lauri Something, the mother of an illegitimate child. Names have little to do with paternity on soaps. Few legitimate children have their real father’s names, for overly complicated reasons. Doug Martin, Scott’s father, was about to marry someone else. Doug had overcome a severe breakdown only recently, and his marriage, his confidence, his relationship with his own son (Scott having just returned home from Vietnam) was depending on the success of his defense of Sam! Anyway, under questioning, Andrea cracked up. The truth about the fire death came out!The truth about everything else came out!in flashbacks spanning years . Andrea was carried out. I stopped watching for many months, quitting while I was just a bit ahead, I thought. Now it turns out that while I was away Andrea returned. Sam Reynolds is in prison in Africa. Joanne, having gone blind for awhile, and thinking Sam dead, has fallen in love with her neurosurgeon. Len’s wife, Patti, has had a miscarriage, and his girl, Grace (I can’t explain about Grace), had a child and died herself. It is such a misery. I’m almost glad the writers are troubled now with quite other problems I don’t care about. Andrea is scheming again. “Nobody can match Andrea in the scheming department,” a CBS plot summary says. I do see that.) I simply don’t understand “Search for Tomorrow” now. Some characters seem to be buying a house. My second-happiest moment on a soap was a mistake. Several years ago, a girl named Rachel had, by the most unscrupulous means, ensnared Russ Matthews, son of one of the most decent families on “Another World.” They married. Many months later, a very rich self-made young man called Steven Frame came into town and fell in love with Russ’s sister, Alice. Alice Matthews loved Steven, too, but so did Rachel (by this time Mrs. Russ Matthews), in her own unscrupulous way. Rachel seduced Steve. She became pregnant, and claimed the child was Steve’s. Her husband, Russ, was naturally upset, as was his sister, Alice, who immediately broke it off with Steve. For several months I stopped watching. Then one recent soap afternoon (recent in soap terms, —that is, around July), when I was on the telephone, I had “Another World” on, with the sound off. The scene was a christening. The characters were Lenore and Walter Curtin (who had a difficult history of their own) , a chaplain, a baby, Alice, and Steve. I thought —I truly hoped—that Alice and Steve had been reconciled and married along the way and that the child was theirs. All wrong. The baby was Lenore and Walter’s although Walter had grave doubts at this time. Alice and Steve were the godparents. Since then, Alice and Steve have really married. I missed that scene, but they have passed their honeymoon, and so I know. Russ and Rachel have divorced. Rachel has remarried —a young man whose business is now being financed by Steven Frame. Russ is engaged to Rachel’s new husband’s sister. Or he was, until a few weeks ago. People have to keep meeting at parties, where there are so many problems about previous marriages and affairs and present babies. Now Rachel’s husband has been in a coma and has made sordid revelations about his past. Walter Curtin has vanished, under mysterious circumstances. Lenore has received, by messenger, a scarf. Walter has confessed by phone to the murder, in a jealous rage. of Steve’s secretary’s former husband, whom he suspected of having slept with his (Walter’s) wife, Lenore. Most recently—in fact tomorrow, as I write this—Walter has died. But om the whole such sudden acceleration of the plot are better on quick, episodic soaps, like “Edge of Night”, which are akin to close, formed, Aristotelian thrillers, which I never watch. There are moments when some aesthetic things, all art set aside are simply so. People know it, without any impulse or attempt to argue: Something is on. Such a moment, years back, protracted over many months, was the Moon Maid episode in the “Dick Tracy” comic strip. Long before the slogan “Black is beautiful” appeared in and receded from the news, longer before the astronauts reached the moon, Dick Tracy’s son, Junior, returned from the moon with Moon Maid, pleaded with her not to remove her horns or try to conceal them with a beehive hairdo, married her, and delighted in their little baby’s little horns. The word would not even be miscegenation now. Junior was light years beyond the country’s perception of its race relations problems then. The McCarthy time of “Pogo” was less golden. It was one of those finest hours that “Peanuts,” in another key, has sustained over many years with genius consistency. Something was touched. The same was true for years of the talk shows on television. They were on. They meant something. Now, regardless of Nielsen ratings, watchers, they are off. One knows it. They simply do not matter in the sense they did. It is also true, oddly enough, of television coverage of the news. It had its years and faces. Then it had the instant thing it was perfectly designed for: the shooting through the head of a man by the chief of Saigon’s national police; the moon landing. Then it lost its purchase on events and, no matter how many people watched it, it faded. The anchorman would mention an event, switch to the local correspondent, who would mention it again, then interview its source, who would mention in in his own idiom. No depth, no time, and lots of waste of time. McLuhanism was wrong. The mind needs print. Perhaps the news as captured by TV will matter again. Maybe tomorrow. The soap operas, which have endured as long as anything in television, have their own rhythms, fade, recur. It was on “Another World”, some years ago that there was a moment— or, rather, nearly a half hour—of dramatic brilliance. It was just after Rachel, still married then to Russ, had slept with Steve and spent a weekend searching for her father. Russ naturally knew that she had been away, but not where or with whom. Suddenly Russ insisted that he and Rachel pay a call that night on everyone they knew in town—to keep up appearances. Rachel resisted, in her usual sulky way, and then gave in. They made the tour. It was a masterpiece of compression. Russ and Rachel acted out their drama in such a way (by concealing it, and pretending that all was well) that all the other dramas on the program—and there were many, and of long standing— were called to mind, as though the audience were going through an Andrea flashback on the witness stand. They went to visit, for example, Walter Curtin and Lenore. Walter Curtin had been the prosecutor, several years before, in a case in which Missy Fargo was mistakenly convicted of the murder of her husband, Dan. She mad married Danny Fargo, in the first place, because Liz Matthews (another unrelenting villainess) had tried to prevent the love match of Missy and Lee’s son, Bill. Liz, the mother, had decided at the time that her son Bill should marry Lenore (now Curtin but then single and in love with Bill.) Walter, the prosecutor, and Lenore all had an interest in seeing Missy go to prison. Several years later, Missy was sprung and married Bill. Then Walter, anyhow, repentant, and in love, married Lenore. Liz, the villainess, was hysterically distressed, but she had other lives to wreck, including a long-lost daughter’s, and she did. Russ and Rachel, in their tour, met others, —-several generations of the Randolph family, for example, and Rachel’s mother, Ada, of humble origins but of major significance in solving the Missy case. What had happened since Missy’s trial (Can I go on with this?) was an interminable riveting episode in which Lee Randolph, a daughter of the Randolphs (who are related to the Matthewses by innumerable ties of blood and misunderstanding), being in love with Sam Lucas, a relative of the humble Ada’s, had, under the influence of LSD, killed someone, whose name I don’t remember, of the criminal element. This business of not remembering has an importance of its own, although insanity has replaced amnesia as the soaps operas’ most common infirmity. The files of the soaps are so sketchy that their history is almost irretrievable. “Laura comforts Susan, and Scott is surprised by a statement from Julie,” for example, is NBC’s plot note for the March 13, 1970, “Days of our Lives”. And “Nick and Althea did make it to the Powers apartment, and the dinner did not burn” was NBC’s summary of two weeks on “The Doctors” during the AFTRA strike of 1967. The only true archivists of the whole history of a soap are the perpetual watchers, the loyal audience, whom, out of a truly decent sense of tradition and constancy, the ever-changing writers try not to betray. This requires careful and intuitive examination of those files, and an attempt to avoid anything that might violate the truth of the story as it existed before a given writer’s time. Only the audience knows, and yet there are so many Scotts and Steves and Lees on various programs that even the most loyal audience can get mixed up. Anyway, Sam Lucas took the blame for Lee Randolph’s having murdered, under LSD, a thug. Everyone was acquitted in the end. Of course, there is no end. But, Lee, thinking that LSD had impaired her chromosomes, kept far away from Sam, who misunderstood her motives as having to do with the milieu from which he came. Sam Lucas married a girl named Lahoma, an earthy character who was meant to appear only briefly in the plot but who was so good she had to stay. Lee Randolph eventually killed herself. Sam, Lahoma, Missy, (now widowed again) and Missy’s baby by Danny Fargo have all moved to “Somerset.” Strangely, none of the catastrophes on soaps —and nearly every soap event is a catastrophe— are set up with much sentiment. I do not think the audience ever cries, except at Christmas, anniversaries, and other holidays, all of which are celebrated on their proper day. The celebrations are bleak enough, but it is the purest gloom to find oneself on December 25 or January 1 watching a soap or, if the football games are on, deprived of one. The other days are just alterations of being miserable and being bored, or both, and knowing that the characters are the same. Well, there were Russ and Rachel, visiting all these people on “Another World”. To someone who had not been watching, it did all come back. It is not necessary technically to *watch* Since most of the characters address each other incessantly by name, one can catch it all from another room, like radio. On the other hand, one needn’t listen either. I would have found out about my mistake about the christening soon enough. There are the most extravagant visual and aural flashbacks, ranging from “Have I told you what Russ said to me last night?” (answer:”Well, Russ did tell me”: both characters retell it anyway) to visual flashbacks that would have done credit to the cinema. In the case of the temporarily misunderstood christening, it was my telephone that had turned the set on with the sound off. The ring of a telephone is often on the same frequency as the remote control device that operates some television sets; many households have this strange mechanical rapport. A pin dropped on a table will sometimes do it, or the clicking of a belt buckle. One things one is alone. and suddenly the room is full of voices, or faces, or both, from “Another World”. Another moment, this one from “Days of our Lives.” It takes, as the whole addiction does, some bearing with Mickey Horton we know —though he does not —is infertile. Tom Horton , Mickey’s brother, returned several years ago from Korea, face changed, memory gone. His memory came back. About three years ago, Bill Horton, another brother, made pregnant Mickey’s wife, Laura, a psychiatrist. Tom Horton, before he went to Korea, had a ghastly wife, extremely ghastly. When his memory returned, she returned also. Dr. Horton, the father of Tom, Mickey and Bill knows—as Bill found out by accident, as Laura knows, as we have always known—that Laura’s offspring cannot be her husband Mickey’s. Mickey does not know. Last year, there occurred the following episode: Tom’s ghastly wife was at the senior Hortons’, trying to be nice. The senior Hortons of “Days of our Lives,” like the senior Randolphs and Matthewses of “Another World,” or the Tates of “Search for Tomorrow,” are technically known by soap writers as “tentpole characters.” on which the tragedies are raised. Anyway, as she set the table for dinner that evening at the senior Hortons’, Tom’s ghastly wife was singing. The elder Mrs. Horton said that she had a lovely voice, that she ought to make a professional thing of it. The ghastly wife went directly to Dr. Horton’s study and made a tape recording of her singing voice in song. Later that evening, Dr. Horton had a chat with his daughter-in-law Laura about her child, her husband’s infertility, and her brother-in-law’s fatherhood. The tape recorder was still on. Tom’s ghastly wife, trying later to recapture her own singing voice on tape, heard all the rest. It was unbearable. Months of blackmail, we all knew. It might have been a lifelong downer. I turned off for several years. The present moment—since July, I mean—as far as I can tell, is this. The tape incident seems nearly over. Mickey Horton, however, was believed by everyone. including himself, to have made pregnant a girl other than his wife. Even I knew this was impossible, unless Mickey’s medical tests had been in error—in which case he might be the father of Laura’s baby after all—or unless the writers, and Laura and her father-in-law, had forgotten the whole thing. When Mickey’s girl’s baby was born, it did turn out through blood tests, that the baby could not have been Mickey’s. Of course not. Anybody who had watched even five days two years ago knew that. Meanwhile, a friend of the Horton family, Susan, who had a terrible life, has been raped in the park, and is being treated by Laura, the psychiatrist. Well. One thing about a work of art is that it ends. One may wish to know what happens after the last page of “Pride and Prejudice.” Some writers give signs of wishing the reader to abide with a given novel; one of the century’s great prose works, after all, ends in such a way that the reader is obliged to begin again. But narrative time in art is closed. The soaps, although they have their own formal limitations (how many times, for example, a major character is required by contract to appear each week on-screen) are eternal and free. One can have a heart attack during a performance of “King Lear” or fall in love listening to “Mozart” but the quotidian, running-right-along-side-life quality of soaps means that whole audiences can grow up, marry, breed, divorce, leave a mark on history, and die while a single program is still on the air. Aristotle would not have cared for it. The soaps can, and sometimes do, adopt the conventional thriller form, which has a different sort of dialect altogether: the solvers, the classicists who demand a beginning, a middle and an end. There was a superb many-month conventional kidnapping episode on “The Doctors,” once, when a trustee of the hospital abducted a nurse, under enthralling circumstances, and the only one who gradually caught on was the nurse’s roommate, Carolee Simpson, a character who, like “Another World”s Lahoma was meant to stay jut briefly but has ever been so good that she is essential to the plot—particularly in the recent matter of Dr. Allison. There was also a young lady physical therapist who thought herself widowed in the Six Day War (her husband had been a correspondent in the Middle East) and who fell in love with the son of the chief of all the doctors. The son was in love with her. Then it turned out that an Israeli girl had been nursing a blind American. He was rude to her for ages. She was kind to him. He turned out, after months, to be the lady therapist’s thought-dead husband, and things were resolved. Such episodes do occur. But they are rare. They are too self-contained. Now the wife of the chief of all the doctors, having been kidnapped and returned some months ago, thinks she is going mad. Her paternal uncle was a schizophrenic in his time. There does not seem to be a single sense in which soap operas can be construed as an escapist form. There is unhappiness enough and time to occupy a real lifetime of afternoons. There is no release: not the scream, shudder, and return to real life that some people get from horror films; not the anxiety, violence, and satisfactory conclusion of detective, spy, or cowboy shows; certainly not the laughing chapters of fantasy home, like “Lucy,” “Bachelor Father,” or the “Mothers-in-law,” There is no escape except, either, from political realities. The allegations that the soaps avoid the topical are simply in error: Vietnam, psychosis, poverty, class, and generational problems—all are there. One thing that soap operas do not do is flinch. They simply bring things home, not as issues but as part of the manic-depressive cycle of the television set. And what they bring home is the most steady, open-ended sadness to be found outside life itself. No one can look forward to a soap unless he looks forward to the day, in which case he is not likely to be a watcher of soaps at all. Watchers resign themselves. There are seventeen soaps on television now [1972], some obviously less good than others ( a soap that fails is not simply dropped from the air; it is, for the audience’s sake, quickly wrapped up: The hero, for example is run over by a truck), and in their uncompromisingly funereal misery there is obviously some sort of key. Most sentimental or suspense forms —dog, horse, or spy stories, for instance—have a plotted curve. Things are briefly fine, then they’re down for a long time, then they rise for a brief finale. There is some reward. The soap line goes along almost straight, though inextricably tangled, down. The soaps are probably more true to the life of their own audience than they appear to be; certainly they are truer in pace, in content, and in subjects of concern than any other kind of television is. Not that there is much amnesia or that much insanity out here. Not that each woman’s secret fear, or hope, is that she is bearing the child of inappropriate member of her family. But the despair, the treachery, the being trapped in a community with people whom one hates and who mean one ill, the secrets one cannot expose—except once or twice — in the course of years when changes and revelations occur in sudden jumps: These must be the days of a lot of lives. This is not the evening’s entertainment, which one watches, presumably, with members of the family; not the shared family situation comedies, which (with the important exception of “All in the Family”) are comfortable distortions of what family life is like. Soap operas are watched in solitude. This is the daytime world of the Randolphs, the Matthewses, the Hortons, the Tates —a daily one-way encounter group, a mirror, an eavesdropping or the apparent depression of being just folks for more than twenty years. It is even entering the commercials now—the utter joylessness. There are still the cheery, inane commercials with white tornadoes and whiter wash. But there are beginning to be hopeless underdogs; unpretty, sarcastic Madge, who, as a manicurist, deals with actors who look as though they knew about life in cold-water flats. the emphasis on cold-water products. The view of life as a bitter, sad, dangerous ordeal, with a few seconds reprieve before the next long jolt to decent souls, cannot be confined to one side of the screen. Not on seventeen daytime serials. When, for millions, a credible villain is a suicide, dead, and well out of it. And, a hero is a man compelled to live his drama out, the daylight view of what life is like is far less sunny on television, anyway, than the view by night. -
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It was just inexcusable. SMH. I'm surprised Lisa Brown didn't change it somehow. -
So many things would have had to be different for Mary to want to go back to Reginald. It could have been interesting if it had been handled completely differently but as it was we had a very black and white Mary good/Reginald bad. If she had been able to ignore his worldly crimes and how he treated his own children there was still the fact that he had separated her from her children. Maybe if they had shown us more intimacy and affection between them and had allowed him to have real vulnerabilities it could have worked but as it played out they didn't do much to present him with any sympathetic hook. There are a lot of ways to define wanting things to work. Fans are mostly thinking of preserving or restoring characters and an atmosphere that drew them to the show. The sponsor may only be thinking of the bottom line. When a producer or HW comes in and decides that their vision will deliver for the bottom line and they need to fire most of the cast in order to do it it can feel very much like not caring. -
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I remember this getting a lot of criticism at the time. -
Maeve breaks me reading that letter. If you ever need to cry, look it up. Other than the dopey line about Henry wanting to come home to Van's rice (or tapioca) pudding (VANESSA CHAMBERLAIN DOES NOT COOK, Y'all...) it's a sweet sign-off to one of the best father/daughter relationships on soaps. Other than Ross, and Bill (if he says something, which I assume he does) and the letter, the rest of it is BS. I haven't watched it in a while, but it typifies what I dislike most about events that should be laden in history. The writers are too lazy to do the work and get it right. And it becomes about making sure characters X, Y and Z make their guarantees. Roger being there is an abomination. Henry never ever saw Nola as a gold-digger. She and Quint were practically engaged before he even knew Quint was his son. Before that, he was fairly close to Bea and enjoyed Nola's spirit. And Henry never helped Rick become an Eagle Scout. I get that maybe you don't want to play Amanda#1 or Dinahs 1&2, or Billy, Trish or Alan #1 clips, but damn it....don't make stuff up. I'd have much rather watched clips from Henry, Vanessa and Ross' early days than Rick blather on, or nuMichelle try and dig for a human-like emotion or wonder why after TEN YEARS, Dinah and Quint have never met. Do not remember anyone named Tina. I barely remember Dahlia, and that's mostly because for a while, I saw Sharon Leal in everything after she left GL. Reva and Josh airhogs? ALWAYS, darling. ALWAYS. RME. I hate to tar and feather Robert Newman with that brush, but DAMN.
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