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Y&R: September 17 preview


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Bingo!

Y&R may be the last to go (but only if CBS wants a single-soap universe...and I'm not sure they do). If that is the case, we still have at best about 5-6 more years...unless there is a seismic shift in the funding model (e.g., internet streams actually pay the bills).

I do believe this existentialist finality has led to the writing teams saying: "Let's go for what works NOW, rather than what builds the long-term of our show". Hence, perverting or killing members of 'legacy' families is not a problem...because they've stopped believing in the legacy (or, worse yet, as GH's Quartermaines evince, view the legacy as an albatross).

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The problem is soaps really can't manage to break away from the core families. When they make an effort, they almost always fail.

To use Y&R as an example, I would say every new character they have introduced since MAB took over has been somewhere between a complete failure and a barely qualified success. So many mistakes with Tyra, with Deacon, with Sabrina, with Eden. Even the few who could have been something, like MJ, were mangled. Yet the attempts to write for core families have also been failures, as Nick and Victor have been seriously compromised as characters, Nikki is now utterly irrelevant, Victoria is hollow and dithering, and Adam has been destroyed beyond repair. The Abbotts barely tolerate each other and only click when Traci, who appears a handful of times a year, shows up. The Chancellors don't seem to have any connection whatsoever and have somehow managed to become devoid of drama, thanks to the genius writers burning through years of story in a few months.

People who don't know how to write for soap won't even know where the gap is, much less how to bridge it. That's daytime's biggest reason for impending death, in my opinion.

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and thats the biggest issue soaps have.

if you believe thats it, were done anyways, usually you essentially stop really caring or trying.

and i dont have an issue with killing legacy characters, i have an issue with shock and awe death that comes out of poor writing. if you wanna kill her why not give her lily's cancer story and actually let the cancer kill her. you get so much more out of it, raising awareness and showing that no cancer isnt always going to be ok. you get family scenes. you get tons of play. tracy watching her daughter die slowly from cancer? the abbots rallying around to support her? thats soapy.

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Interesting that you quoted that little blurb..because my every instincts tell me that now would have been the time for all the soap magazines to have the headline "this will change Y&R forever"!! :lol::lol: Because as plot-driven as this is, this is going to change the landscape of the show in a big way IMO!

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I think this will change the show about as much as Brad's death, which is, in a few months, or less, it will be as if the character never existed.

That clock/watch thing is quite clever though. I know I was blown away by the idea...on St. Elsewhere, 25+ years ago.

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St. Elsewhere doesn't get enough credit for their innovative storytelling. They had stories about so many topics which were rarely approached in that era, or even now. I don't know if the clock was new to TV before them but I think they were among the first to have stories about AIDS, they had stories about the Internet, about a man who was going to transition to being a woman, and the first to have scene where someone dies and then their loved one goes to listen to the chest of the person who got their heart.

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