How much of a garbage daytime soaps really are?

[Sylph]

Honestly. There are people who downright hate them saying that they cater to the lowest of human instincts, tastes and desires, that they represent a distorted, prettified reality full of false dreams, terrible, clichéd stories written all over again, each time worse than the previous one, abysmal dialogue, dreadful acting, horrific production and so on (many of you know what cultural theorists generally keep underlining)...

Then there are those who swear by them, how true they are to the human condition, how no one does romance and longing like them and so forth...

But in reality and honestly, how much of a sheer garbage they really are? And I am not asking this sarcastically, I wonder genuinely and I hope someone will illuminate me. Among others, perhaps MarkH and marceline?

[YRBB]

It's funny that you should post this, because it is a question that I have been thinking about too during the last few days. I am very interested in seeing what others have to say.

[brimike]

I certainly don't swear that they're representative of the human condition and excel in portraying that longing in their CURRENT state, and believe they do cater to the lowest common denominator at the moment for most of the soaps on the air. But the genre definitely lends itself to being able to produce that, given the right approach.

However, I do think that for much of the last decade, the majority of the stay-at-home audience probably wasn't looking for anything more than something salacious. This may all change with the recent hits the economy has taken, but the big difference between the character-driven stories of the 70's and the more recent attempts at shock value in the 90's and 00's is that the "shock value" seems to have (unfortunately) proven to be what much of the stay-at-home audience wants to see. They're not as interested in the long-term longing, and study of the human condition, that soaps could accurately portray with 250 hours of television a year.

I'm really intrigued to see where the audience goes with more people of higher education at home now during the say. I know it probably sounds like I'm being critical of an audience, and I swear, I'm not. But daytime, for many years, was representative of women's view on the world -- sometimes fun/trashy, and other times socially relevant/psychological, so women of all socio-economic and educational backgrounds could appreciate them. As more and more women joined the work force, the shows started catering to who they believed were left - those that didn't want to "think too much" watching their "stories" during the day. (I believe the recent increase in Days' ratings proves most Days' fans with Nielsen boxes are more focused on the scandal and the fun over a long-term character study - and if it works for them, by all means, they should embrace it and run with it!) But I do wonder now that there seems to be a more level playing field with the daytime audience, if that will change at all.

I hope so - because soaps were at the best when they had something for everyone, and could merge those who wanted to see the soap cliche with those who were looking for something meatier and more substantial in their dramas.

[MarkH]

Me? Address the issue of soaps as garbage? I guess you want the contrary perspective

But here's the thing. I do think much of soaps ARE, shall we say, of lower quality. I honestly believe (and I think I disagree with you this front) that Y&R is not garbage by any metric, and that it stands up with the best of drama on commercial television.

But I think quality is honestly somewhat irrelevant. US daytime soaps, when done well, are habit. Moreover, they are a habit that brings joy. So all these issues of acting quality and writing and so forth don't matter. What you want to see is your "family" (this virtual collection of characters and sets you have followed for years) move through new adventures, and spawn new generations. This is obviously a need that I feel Y&R fills well.

I do believe this is why soaps don't gain new viewers. In addition to denying history and denying the very thing that makes soaps special (a never-ending narrative that pulls you in and keeps you), the quality issues you delimit DO turn off new, thinking viewers.

That is why I think soaps have to hook you young...when you're still stupid...before your thinking mind can overweigh your emotional connection to what you are watching.

Now, if soaps re-invent (e.g., more in a telenovela format...what I really mean is...something like fixed-ending five year shows), they will not be able to get by on this multigenerational affection and lifelong habit. Thus, when soaps reinvent, they will have to offer a quality that lures in thinking adults, and holds on to them. That will be much harder to achieve.

[YRBB]

This is perhaps an simplistic point of view, but I view soaps as both garbage and art. Their preoccupation with all the lower emotions, as well as constant preoccupation with negative desires, such as revenge, hatred, etc is an understandable reason why many people hate them. I can see why the stylistic traits of a slow paced, just talk-no action, soap opera can seem ridiculous to someone.

Perhaps it is the constant exposure (250 hours a year) that forces soaps to fall into repetitive dialogue, constant conversations of the same thing, but the reasons why do not matter. I have met people who would criticize soaps just for the mere fact that they are soaps, regardless of what's on screen. This resides to the taboo that used to be very prominent and, to this day, very much still exists (even though an abnormally large part of primetime TV is also consisted by, very popular, soaps. Dare I say that the notion that soaps are garbage, period, is because the genre was originally perceived to be a woman's medium? Could this constant determination to "put down" soaps have deeper roots?

Yes, soaps have a false reality. No-one talks that way. No-one goes to breakfast in a highly stylized yellow outfit, with puffy hair and diamond earrings. Does that mean the soaps are crap? Can the character dynamics, deep performances, complicated plotlines, psychological aspects of it be ignored? Some say that soaps are just too unrealistic, that's why they're crap. Despite possibly sounding defensive, is anything on TV realistic? Is anything on TV not crap?

[applcin]

Interesting question. For me, personally, it's a complicated one to answer (so please excuse my stream of consciousness post here), because I can't lump together all daytime soaps ever broadcast, and their styles often change throughout the years when new regimes take over. I think the answers are in the eyes of the beholders...or non-beholders. In other words, the answer, with famous last words..."it's only my opinion..." Personally, I can't stand televised sports, so to me they're garbage but I know most people are huge fans. I couldn't give a cr@p about the Superbowl, World Series, etc., but does that make them garbage just because I think it's ridiculous to pay people obscene amounts of money to play ball and I find the things just plain boring? But I digress...

I think that there has always been a stigma attached to daytime (except for perhaps a few years when Luke and Laura skyrocketed, and set off imitators, and, suddenly, soaps were hip). I think soaps have always been considered melodrama catering to housewives and SAHMs and that a lot of people who never watch them or used to watch and fell away consider them that way, and just totally lump them all together as garbage.

But then I look at my own viewing experiences with some of the soaps and how I considered them throughout the years, and what I've heard some folks say about them:

Ryan's Hope - arguably, for a long time, the most "realistic" of the soaps. For some, like me, that was a huge appeal, for others, they found it boring and mundane. Do people judge it by Mary and Jack's storyline, or by the gorilla that kidnapped Delia storyline? RH moved away from its original identity to attempt to cater to what they saw as the new tastes, the way to attract newer, younger viewers who wanted excitement.

General Hospital - timely, sensitive, exceptionally well done stories with Stone's AIDS, BJ's death, Monica's cancer....followed by a decade plus of mob stories that turned me off, literally.

Edge of Night - less emphasis on the romance and more on the mystery...sometimes a little far-fetched but still pretty well done

Another World - another fairly "realistic" type soap that also succumbed to the gimmicky attempts to woo viewers

Guiding Light - from David Grant's story of the death of the racist who was attacking him...to clones, rapid aging, traveling through mirrors, etc.

Where does the garbage start and where does it end? And why is it okay for people to love, and have loved, soapy shows like Ugly Betty, Desperate Housewives, Heroes, Dallas, Dynasty, etc. that air(ed) in prime time? Why is America Ferrera any more deserving of an award for acting than, say, Beth Ehlers? That "daytime" stigma again. Yet it's the same genre that spawned the likes of Morgan Freeman, Tommy Lee Jones, Christopher Reeve, Ray Liotta, Christian Slater, Demi Moore and countless others. It's also the same genre that attracted people like Macdonald Carey, Phil Carey, Celeste Holm, James Mitchell, David Canary, Ruth Warrick...

And...are soaps "garbage" because they just are or because they are trying to mold themselves to cater to the population? We, with our schizophrenic sensibilities and guilty pleasures, like to condemn the very things we consume. People will watch soaps and not admit to watching them.

As someone else mentioned, soaps have the luxury of more time to tell stories...which, at best, makes for great drama (Stone and Robin's experiences with HIV, for instance) but also make them repetitive (how many illegitimate children does Asa Buchanan have, how many times can the same characters marry each other and assorted relatives, why are they having the same conversations for the last 4 months, etc)? A lot depends on the people running the show and who they are trying to cater to. Some PTB make chicken, others make chicken sheet.

[DRW50]

I think daytime began a serious decline when they began to believe more and more of their viewers were idiots. The popular culture view of soap fans was that they were idiots, but I don't believe that those who ran soaps for most of their first few decades on TV shared that view. Harding Lemay wrote in his book about the viewer who wrote in giving him an extensive list of Alice Frame's history, far more extensive than the show's archives had provided. Viewers of soaps had long memories and those memories were, generally, respected.

Many of the soaps began firing/destroying/squandering beloved characters because they thought fans could just get over it. Or they thought the fans they had were too full of themselves, and they could bring in new fans. They took away what made daytime special. Many of the soaps became garbage because they thought this was what a mouthbreathing, brain-dead cliche they saw as the public needed to see in order to start watching.

I think Brian Frons is the biggest example of this attitude. He hates soaps so much that he's ripped away as much of the soap programming he can from Soapnet to show bad TV-movies and bad knockoffs of "week in review" shows that talk about what Perez/In Touch/TMZ have already picked to death.

I also think there's a good garbage and a bad garbage. You could say that many of the flashy, trashy 80s soap stories were garbage, but many of them were still entertaining, a feast for the eyes. Now it's often slapped-together pabulum which plods through the same scenes month after month, only stopping for a SHOCKING TWIST that everyone saw coming and only further serves to kill the core of the program.

[All My Shadows]

Personally, I think most of primetime is garbage itself, so I never can bring myself to compare daytime to network primetime. If network primetime is what daytime is supposed to aspire to be, I'd watch daytime less if it became that. CBS's 11 crime dramas? ABC's generic "primetime soaps" about young, obnoxious assholes with fake problems? NBC's.......Jay Leno orgasm? No thanks, folks!

There's so little variety across the big 3 networks. Everything's the same, just with different characters and locations.

[Ann_SS]

I think that there is a ton of garbage on tv, period. There are not a lot of good television shows, especially network tv though they get high ratings. Soaps are looked down on because they are targeted to lower income women, have lots of bad acting, unbelievable stories and poor production. Does that make them garbage? Yes, but it doesn't mean that they can't be entertaining.

MarkH is right. The soaps have to grab its viewers when they are young because there are not too many adults who watch the better quality prime time tv who can stomach the soaps for more than a few minutes without laughing. Unfortunately, soaps are losing their young audience because mothers and grandmothers are no longer at home watching with their children and grandchildren.

[marceline]

Ahhh Sylph. You kill me. Are daytime soaps garbage? If you define the genre by the shows on the air right now, then yes.

The shows on the air right now are stuck in the past in the worst way. They play to outdated ideas of what makes for good drama and characters. We know the list: weak stupid women, cro-magnon men, no meaningful diversity, everyone's rich but no one works, a fixation on the past...I could go on and on. Actually I have. But the bottom line is that in this market these shows and these stories don't work.

But if you define the genre by what it should be: daily serialized drama featuring complex emotional stories, then no, soaps aren't garbage. Modern soaps are now competing with daily showings of ER, Without a Trace, CSI, etc... Those shows have become what soaps used to be. They provide all the drama of soaps but with primetime production, casting and writing. The desire to lose oneself in a daily drama is still there. But current soaps are unwilling and unable to fulfill it.

I often compare the soap audience to the sci-fi audience because they're very similar: insular, devoted to a fault, loathe to tolerate outsiders, etc... But look at SoapNet and compare it to the Sci-fi Channel. Which channel truly serves it's audience? Which genre has grown and evolved?

Do I thinks soaps are garbage? Sadly, yes for the most part. But I'd give anything for a show that could make me feel otherwise.

[DRW50]

I think soaps use this as a catch-all to help explain why their ratings are falling, but I also know women who are still at home, who have families, and who gave up on their soaps because they felt like the soaps had given up on them.

What sucks is soaps didn't use to be this way. Not in most of the 90s, the 80s, the 70s, even in some 60s clips I've seen of shows like GL, women were more independent and were more outspoken. Soap producers now have this idea of the uberconservative viewer who is just waiting to see their fantasy brought to life.

[DavidEvanSmith]

Everyone brace yourselves... I agree with Marceline.

My friend came over the other day while I was watching OLTL. My friend doesn't watch soaps. But when Bo came on, he said "Oh he's still on there?!" So obviously there had been some exposure. But a scene with Jessica/Starr came on, and I was trying to explain their story to my friend.

So this girl's father is on trial because he was planning to steal her baby because he didn't want her to give it up for adoption. Meanwhile, her cousin gave birth the same day, and her baby died. SHE has multiple personalities, so one of the alters came out, and switched her dead baby for her cousin's live baby, so everyone thought Girl #1's baby had died. Her father changed his mind about kidnapping the baby, but then learned (or believes) the baby is dead. The alternate personality knows about the baby switch, but the original personality doesn't.

I am EMBARRASSED to try to tell a story like that to someone. It sounds like garbage. Especially when you scrunch it together in a paragraph and try to explain it to someone who doesn't watch daily. But if I watch, or keep up regularly, it doesn't seem like garbage to me because I've seen the progression, the beats in the story, and know why one girl has multiple personalities, and one girl's father was dead set against losing his grandchild through an adoption. And I consider OLTL the best soap right now, but if I try to explain ANY of the stories to a non-viewer, it comes across as garbage.

But I love what soaps CAN be. That's why I get so frustrated with soaps now because they are not living up to their potential to be insightful, thought-provoking, progressive slices of life.

Meanwhile, as someone who missed the Ryan's Hope boat by many years (I think it was canceled the year I was born), I was mesmerized by an episode I caught late at night on SoapNet. It was centered on Delia and Roger, and Delia was having some dinner party or something where her husband wanted to meet Delia's friend, and Roger was supposed to call her at this certain time during the party and pretend to be the friend of Delia's that she's made up to cover her affair with Roger. Well Delia's a bundle of nerves waiting for this call, and Roger is just shown sitting in his apartment by his phone, staring at it, as the time he was supposed to call ticks by. It was INTENSE and totally set up to force Delia's hand about making up the friend, and thus exposing her affair with Roger. BRILLIANT! And the whole episode concept was so basic and ordinary and REAL, I was just in love with it.

Soaps have been trying to NOT be soaps for years, GH has been trying to be a crime drama, AMC is trying to be Sex and the City, and that further contributes to the stigma that soaps aren't cool and aren't good, when the show itself bites the hand that feeds it and thinks it knows better than the audience that watches it, and basically tells it's viewers, "You're nice and all, but we want the people who watch The Sopranos and Grey's Anatomy to watch us. Sorry. But try to keep liking what we're becoming now! Thanks! Smooches! Love ya!" The audience that DOES tune in for soap feels insulted and the people who watch Sopranos and Grey's Anatomy can CLEARLY see that GH isn't that, and it's desperately trying to be. So soaps screw themselves because they're reinforcing the stereotype that has held them back.

Soaps CAN'T be Grey's and Sopranos because they're different animals. Those shows have seasons, they don't exist all year round, on an ever-shrinking budget. Doesn't it cost several millions to produce ONE episode of Heroes? How can AMC compete when they have to cut salaries to spin a couple of realistic tornadoes and keep the writing interesting and relevant for 365 days? Soaps are under a HUGE amount of pressure, so I can accept the fact that they will have missteps and detours and bad writing and bad casting because of the budget crunch, the time crunch, the production crunch. Faster! Cheaper! Better! It's hard!

Soaps DO need to evolve and change, but need to do it with pride and courage, not desperation and panic.

There's so much more I could say about it, but I'd be here forever.

[miajere]

They have alot of work to do, and yes, I think they compromised in quality and stopped taking out the garbage. More and more tptb got lazy and saw the job as an easy one- tell "soapy" dramatic stories. As long as the actors cry about it, people will relate. But slowly they started to feel inadequate because of the work they produced and blamed the genre instead of the right individuals- we call them hacks.

Slowly self loathing seaped in and it became acceptable to treat the genre with disrespect.

I believe it came from both ends. Fans combined with execs and writers. But the set example came from the networks who made this behavior acceptable.

I do think the genre has become full of garbage, but I think it could be cleaned up. I'm not sure people want to do any cleaning. Otherwise they would have to make some real changes, and change is scary.

With other fan groups, they seem to be much more sub cultured beyond the obvious. They like particular comics/graphic artists, particular sci-fi shows, and concepts. They say sci-fi to make a long story short, but there are niches in the niche.

[You're Soaking in it]

I completely echo CarlD2's sentiment - especially on the above points.

I'd also like to add: the focus on vanity (himbos and pretty ditzes masquerading as actors) over substance; the ignoring and/or catastrophic altering of history (think AMC's unabortion); the preference of gimmicks over good, character-conscious storytelling. Those factors certainly all have played a huge part in the genre's decline.

There's so much more to say, but I'm sure others have said / will say most of it as this thread continues.

[rhinohide]

I've come to the conclusion that we cling too tightly. I don't know if they're garbage or gifted anymore. I just know that 40 years is a long time for Llanview to still exist in the entertainment field. If primetime audiences were as resistant to change as daytime audiences are, we'd still be watching the Cartwrights and the Barkleys run their ranches. There would have never been SEINFELD or FRIENDS. We'd be watching Marcus Welby, MD. instead of HOUSE. Who is to say that if the genre dies, it won't be replaced by something better? Different. But perhaps better. I know I, for one, am just about ready to let it go.