2009: The Directors and Writers Thread

[Sylph]

Wow, brimike, that was lovely. And so true. A great conclusion.

[brimike]

That being said, I love a good throw-down as much as the next message board post-er. And I kinda loved the heated direction the thread took. :lol:

[rangethatrover]

That's why I like Mark and Sylph! Their opinions are so strong regarding Y&R, I think mine are too. I wish there were more Y&R defenders to throw down with!!

COME OUT COME OUT WHEREEVER YOU ARE!!!! lol.

[Sylph]

You're a sucker for a good soap! This was a soapy SON episode!

[Darlotto99]

Y&R is the standard when it comes to soaps it is the class of daytime if their was a soap hall of fame Y&R would have it's own wing. .I would rather staple my lips closed then watch any of the crap on ABC then again what else do you expect from the mickey mouse network. like it or not Y&R is #1 for a reason it's the best run soap from storyline to actors/characters on daytime.

[Sylph]

SON: Bringing Drama Closer. Funny how that never gets old.

[Y&RWorldTurner]

Well, I guess this thread needed something to bitch about, it certainly isn't any writer changes lately.

I don't know, but I guess that's the case with many of these similar programs...

[MarkH]

I apologize in advance to my SON colleagues here. Please just skip this.

Well, I apologize that my timing seems off. The truth is that -- specific to the Morgan Fairchild thing -- I have concluded my response is visceral/emotional, and not intellectual. Therefore, I'm having a hard time explaining my response. To justify it more intellectually, I would need to actually rewatch her stuff. Unfortunately...

... and this relates to my apparently 'non-timely' responses...my personal life has turned into a bit of a soap opera...and really, in the form of a huge event that is totally changing the direction of things...plus I work an 80-hour a week job ... so I'm sorry if details fall through. It will continue to happen.

I don't actually understand most of that, but I really don't want to keep dragging out this discussion. Zero end results? What end results am I striving for on a soap discussion board?? I'm not always trying to reach conclusions....I'm trying to talk through and think through interesting issues.

that is why I love your posts, Sylph. You often try to stimulate the discussion and the thinking, and you do so well. But I did not realize we were trying to come to solutions .

Like many of us here, I have regularly watched almost every soap currently on air. (Really, the only ones I never watched were the P&G soaps). I really started losing touch with them...First Days, then GH, then OLTL, then AMC beginning in about 1983. By 1987, the only two soaps I was still regularly watching were Y&R and B&B. So, it is a fair accusation that I have a view of soaps that is based in the past. At the same time, I have kept myself aware of casting and storylines on all the shows continuously (even when I lived in Europe, I got my weekly SOD), and I have tuned in whenever possible.

I am a fan, therefore, of the genre.

But why am I NOT a fan of, say, GH or AMC? Well, on GH, the characters I loved were Lesley and Rick and Jeff and Annie and Monica and Alan and Steve and Audrey and Lucille and ... And to a one, every one of these people is either gone or marginalized. So, there is nothing to welcome me home. Tristan Rogers has an excellent, excellent blog on this today.

The same with AMC...which looks a little bit more like what I enjoyed. But during my preferred AMC era, the stories were about Phoebe and Myrtle and Langley and Jenny and Greg and Jesse and Angie and Opal and Palmer and Cliff and Nina. I guess I also liked Tad-Liza-Marian. Now, unlike GH, some of these people (few) are still around. So, when I tune in, I can still feel a connection. I don't need the current soap to be the same as the past...but if "Pine Valley" wants me to come back once in a while or often...it needs to draw me in somehow. Familiar faces is the way to go.

I personally see this happen with Y&R when family members visit. They haven't seen Y&R regularly since 1987. But, when they visit my home, Y&R goes on...and they instantly recognize old friends. And they ask me "Whatever happened to so and so". And because Y&R has maintained a connection to its past, within days they are "up to speed", and they can follow up and enjoy the current stories -- even understanding context.

As I said before, I see no reason to let a thing live for 36 years if its identity bears no throughline. I see no reason to keep a show on that long if "old friends" are now welcomed back, and feel like they're returning to a familiar place.

Take ER. Upon its recent cancellation, many of the critics who reviewed the finale said something like "Good job. I stopped watching the show five years ago, when I no longer recognized the characters, but the finale was familiar to me". Uh huh. To them, ER stopped being ER when only the "place" remained the same. One could argue that ER "evolved", the the sense that it showed that the drama could continue in a given setting, even as there was generational succession in the cast. Moreover, if you were a steady viewer, you saw the entrances and exits, and it didn't feel so discontinuous. But that didn't help retain the viewers who couldn't watch every turn.

I'll come back to this point below.

I don't understand all of this. On the HD theme: I'd never watch a show JUST because it is in HD. But the "visual feast" part of a show is one variable in a larger equation that makes a show appealing to me. Ironically, I'd probably love Y&R if it was shot without props against a black velvet curtain. But....that it looks so beautiful simply makes it more rewarding to me.

But I don't understand the second part. Given my discipline, and age, I generally don't like anything just for plot. I tend to like continuing stories with evolving mysteries or that strive to be psychological character studies. But I don't think that's what you mean...

To return to the ER example: Many viewers stopped liking it when the characters they learned to love left.

Prior to 2005-2006, I used to think I wanted shows to "evolve"...I didn't care so much about rootedness in the past. But then I watched Latham (whom I initially greatly enjoyed) come and try to take Y&R in a new difection. And, in so doing, I watched the audience become more and more viscerally opposed. Shirl, over at Usenet, compared to changing "Coke" to "New Coke" ... a horrible disrespect, she felt, for a brand that had been quite successful.

I then also watched the torrents of love when MAB took over. Literally, on 12/26/2007 there are posts (right hear on SON) where fans are ecstatic about changes that signal "return" to musical cues, phrasings, stagings, pacing. Look at the euphoria at SON about the return of Ashley,

etc.

So, this is where I then have come to fundamentally disagree with your next point:

No, no, no. A soap is a book. Or it should be. (Linking to your recurrent mentions of telenovelas). Or, maybe, a book series. A book series makes NO SENSE if the last book doesn't narratively tie up to the first.

When you are ready to 'evolve', I have come to realize, you must end your current book and start a new one.

In that sense, Loving/The City was probably a very good model. (Never mind that Loving made me physically ill, and I never watched The City). It said "This is a new story". The second they did that (in part because of the serial killer that had come before), THEY HAD NO OBLIGATION TO KEEP THE ALDEN FAMILY OR THE VOCHEKS OR WHATEVER. Viewers of The City knew this was a new story. That is how it should be.

As long as it is Y&R, it should have a connection to its past. I say this, fully aware that Bill Bell himself jettisoned his core families and started over with Abbotts/Newmans/Williams. (And Irna Phillips did the same thing as she evolved Guiding Light). But, in the modern era, fans no longer seem to tolerate these evolutions. (Example: JFP introduced the Rappaports on OLTL). So, it seems wiser to me to bring these shows to an end, and start anew.

(I know this is unrealistic in the current climate of non-investment, but I think perverting the identity of extant soaps is consistently a mistake).

For example, I think the GL evolution would have p!ssed fewer people off if they had created a new show called ... whatever...Springfield ... Into the Sunlight ... whatever. Then people would have understood that this was a new show, not bound by the past...and the long-term viewers would have been grateful for the small vestiges of a beloved older show that were being allowed to survive.

Yes, Phyllis was a short-termer. Except, she inspired Bill Bell, and she was inherently compelling. He (or his successors) remade her, and rejoined her to the core families, and it has worked. Indeed, in Stafford, it has given us one of the most compelling, multi-layered performances on daytime.

I don't want Phyllis retained because of history...I want her retained because she rocks. That said, history makes the character richer. I know that she came to the show as a desperate social climber who believed so little in her own value that she had to trap a man. I know that that constitutes the sick background to all her behavior now. How pleasurable that I can actually see the evolution of where she came from, and it makes sense. No other form of televised drama offers me that.

I don't see how you could quickly dispose of such a gift? You say you love drama and fiction?

No...I give writing zero credit in a soap's failure. That's quite a difference.

If this were a statistics class, I would say that there are factors that predict genre-level failure, and then there are other factors that predict failure within the genre.

In general--the average rating of soaps today--I in-no-way associate with the writing. AT ALL. I have lots of evidence to support this contention, but in the main, the decline trajectories of daytime and primetime have been yoked since at least 1990, and the decline trajectory of soaps closely matches that of newpaper circulation, record sales and non-soap daytime programs. This is a "general process", and is IRRELEVANT to writing.

Now, within the soap genre (I have never written much about this before...but my thinking on this topic is evolving), I believe writing COULD BE relevant to 'relative position'.

Except, I think the evidence even here does not support the importance of writing. DOOL is now back up in third place. Huh? Most viewers feel it is horribly written...but there it is, #3.

Writing doesn't matter. Not globally and not within the genre. I wish it did. I am incredulous writing doesn't matter. But it doesn't. (And neither, by the way, does retaining vets. Otherwise, DOOL and GH would not be in positions #3 and #4).

I snipped a lot above...suffice it to say I welcome the debate, but remain leery of being tedious for my colleagues here. On this last note, though, I would not agree with you. I would say "It took this long for the majority of people to say that Carlivati is not being allowed to do his thing".

But you also prove a point: OLTL is now better rated in households than GH. So, whether OLTL is well written or not is irrelevant. Its relative position within the genre has improved. Its one-year ratings evince better stability than GH's. So, how is Carlivati's writing important one way or another?

[Sylph]

I am not going to reply to any of this. Sorry. It's kind of not interesting anymore for me.

[MarkH]

Thank you!

[Sylph]

I kind of lost interest and I didn't even read what you had to say, not a nice thing to do, I admit, but it'll just make me furious because I have a fundamental communication problem with you. Everything ends up... Twisted. Or whatever. We'll end up disagreeing, anyway, so what's the point?

But one thing is clear: you don't understand drama and dramatic writing. No matter how much you try proving that you do, you do not. You know zero. All that bullsh!t about seeing familiar faces who draw you in, blah, blah, how just plot won't draw you in (after I've just written that there's no plot without character and vice versa, that just shows how much attention you pay in class )... Infuriating.

[dm.]

Drama, drama, drama.

[brimike]

You couldn't just let sleeping dogs lie with the "Thank you", could ya, Sylph?

Bored now. Toups, quick! Tell us someone got fired so this thread can move on! LOL!

[Sylph]

:D But didn't that Thank you disturb the dogs? :lo:

I think that "familiar faces" is another myth that needs serious annihilation and neutralisation. Proof: Harding Lemay. He came to AW, and even though there were fans that were unhappy because he made the main character an alcoholic (because "she would never do that"), he managed to transform it from Irna Phillips people show into Harding Lemay people show. He introduced new characters, shifted the focus and told the tales he wanted to tell. He, of course, kept some older characters, too and successfully transformed some of them into what he thought they should be. End result: probably one of the best tenures in TV writing ever.

Conclusion: Harding Lemay & his student Douglas Marland are perhaps two greatest soap opera writers ever. I would even go on to say better than Agnes and Bill.

[MarkH]

Yeah, I'm not gonna extend this.

But to cite examples from the 70s and 80s...when the universe has changed?? Lemay and Marland could not get away with that kind of transformation these days...nor could Bill Bell.

As Marceline reminds us often, the residual audience for US soaps is nostalgia-driven. The demos bear witness to this.

Thus, for the brief remaining life of the current soaps, like all comfort food, emphasize familiarity and not nutrition.

That said, Y&R is an exception . That show has managed to provide both.