Star Trek recipe for soaps?

[MarkH]

Sorry to be late to the party, but I just have to say this thread has been bothering me since it began. Indeed, when they started trashing Trek and the new Doctor Who I thought..."Damn, I belong on a different planet".

Then, Vee, thank HEAVENS you come along and say what I was thinking, but lacked the eloquence to say!

What a terrific, terrific post!

[P.J.]

I think you hit on what would revitalize the soaps. The answer is not special effects, or some "reinvention of the wheel" solution. It is to go back to the fundamentals----tell a good story. Give your audience hope. Stop glorifying violence. Show characters growing---not perfect---but bettering themselves in some way.

Star Trek, for all the bells and whistles, was a morality play. It took the issues of the day, threw them into space, and dealt with them.

[Sylph]

I love it how Vee thinks I want to work for daytime. It's priceless. And superfun. It gets to him every time.

[Vee]

Sylph, you don't get to me because you never surprise me. In fact, I don't think you surprise anyone. Maybe that's why you're sitting here talking about writing for a living while some of us are doing it. And that's why you fail to understand the lesson of Star Trek, or Doctor Who, or soaps - yes, even the dreaded soaps (remember, this is a soap forum, not an encounter group) have something to teach us.

Maybe if you spent a little less time telling people how they need to feel about soaps and entertainment in order to be smart like you, you'd feel a little less aimless and unfulfilled. At the very least, you'd stop posting off-topic threads all about asking us questions you already think you have the wrong answers to.

[Sylph]

Like I said, you fall into my "trap" every time. You always reply hating Sylph. Every single time. Why is that? Why is Ignore not an option for you?

[Vee]

Yes, it's an insidious trap you've got going when your threads fall apart and you vanish or resort to self-pity every time I appear. It's very simple: As long as you start off-topic threads designed to belittle and demean people for watching soaps, then I'll be around to check you.

But maybe I'll put you on Ignore if you say "please."

[Sylph]

They fall apart, I know that the moment I start them, because you enter, the followers salute you, sing songs of praise, and it's done. You kill them every time. I just know it's about to happen.

Ohhhhh... That's it!!!

Never going to happen. The choice is yours: you want to ignore, OK. You don't? Not OK, but acceptable.

[Vee]

I don't have followers, Sylph. I don't want them. I'm mean to everyone. I called the mods incompetent to their face. But the difference between us is, I don't live to be mean here. I actually talk about soaps on the soap opera board. I don't use the threads as a way to work out my daily manic-depression and misanthropy. Your issues with Y&R, etc. are more about attacking other posters and their "fake-like." Cause ain't nobody can be happy if Sylph ain't happy. And I don't think you've been happy in a long time, darlin'.

You want me to go away, all you have to do is stop hijacking threads to see how many people you can bully and talk down until they break.

[Sylph]

We have steered off topic, as always, so I won't continue. God knows, we could go on like this forever.

[Vee]

Everything you do here is off-topic, because it's never really about the soaps. It's about you and testing how badly you can treat people and demean their opinions when you can't do it in the real world. Spend one day, take a deep breath, look through your posting history, and see if you can honestly tell yourself you are not the commonality in these incidents of yours. I'm not even in most of the Y&R threads where you smack people around like two-dollar hoes and they take it for some godforsaken reason.

[MarkH]

Slight redirection of the thread...

I was never a major Trekkie/Trekker. I watched the original show millions of times, and I bought many of the 70s novelizations/short stories (especially the animated series adaptations, Star Trek Log, by Alan Dean Foster). I also was a first-day premiere to see the movies kind of guy (which was not true for anything else, really).

But, by the time TNG came along, I was less interested...I watched when I could, but not religiously. I never saw those TNG movies. I had moved to Europe by the time Voyager and DS9 came along, so I missed their debuts...and wasn't really interested in picking them up when I moved back Stateside. I never saw an episode of Enterprise.

Still, when TNG came along, I remember thinking "You know, why not use the Star Trek universe for a next-generation soap opera? Why not set it on one of the Federation space stations? That would be like a small town. You could build on an established audience, have male-appeal, reinvent the soap opera (at least in context)".

Well, then DS9 came along, and that kind of shot my innovativeness to hell .

But it did make me wonder why, outside of Dark Shadows/Passions, nobody ever explored grafting the soap format onto a different genre.

[marceline]

Just for clarification, when you say "soap format" do you mean make a daily production of it? Because I think that's what makes soaps a "bad" bet for any network. It's too cost prohibitive. Otherwise, I think the soapiness has been grafted onto other genres although most frequently sci-fi. For all its mythology, time travel and quantum physics, Lost is really just one romance after another in the bigger context of good vs. evil. Although soaps seems to have drifted away from good vs evil a bit but that's for a different thread. Assuming I'd be allowed to start it.

A wise decision. One I wish that I'd made. Unfortunately, I'll follow Bakula into the jaws of death.

[DRW50]

The episodes with the men in their underwear are entertaining.

I also liked the finale, although someone forgot to tell them it was an Enterprise finale, not TNG.

[MarkH]

You're right, I meant the daily format--and I meant grafting melodrama and romance and community and social issues onto something like a "space station" or "futuristic" universe. I personally think the serial is alive and well in primetime and cable...flourishing even...which is why the demise of daytime doesn't worry me much. But moving the soap (daily melodrama) beyond the living rooms and kitchens and hospitals and law offices...into new universes (in it's day...the Western...sci fi) never seems to have been seriously tried, outside of brief experiments at OLTL.

I don't so much mean now, for the economic reasons you indicate. But in the heyday (whenever that was...let's pretend late 70s/early 80s), why did they never migrate/expand to new genres? Luke and Laura and the weather machine showed that there could be an appetite for (bad) sci fi in daytime, and the long run of Edge showed, to a point, that the cop show could flourish there.

Nowadays--I'm with you. With the Big Three shortening primetime seasons to 10-13 episodes, there is no budget to move soaps in this direction. These soaps will coast out their remaining days, and then that daily thing is done for a while.

LOL.

[Sylph]

That would flop before it even got its start! Oh, the dreck a daily Star Trek show would be...