As The World Turns Discussion Thread

[DramatistDreamer]

Be careful, so as not to engage in ticking off of those boxes though.

 

I agree that distilling ethnicity (I don't even like using the word race, which is pretty much a social construct that was handed down by eugenicists and white supremacist theory) down to black and white seems reductive but you have to remember that U.S. network TV is like several decades behind other media and daytime is even farther behind U.S. primetime.

 

 

 

What was done to T. Marshall Travers character makes me especially angry and disgusted with Sheffer. 

 

He took the character from an arrogrant, know it all blowhard with some charisma to a flat-out rapist.  I'm not the type who expects every character of color to be a paragon of virtue (I was engaged with Rucker's portrayal of the character as something of a jerk in the vein of a Kirk Anderson) but considering the fact that Tunie and Rucker had such fiery romantic and adversarial chemistry (something Tunie's Jessica had never had on the show before), I thought the potential was there for Jessica and Marshall to be a very hot couple and it was all dashed to hell when Sheffer decided to make Travers rape Jessica. 

It extinguished all possibility for that.  It also made me wonder whether this was done deliberately to diminish any possibility of a non-white couple taking too much of the focus off the show's favored couples.

[JarrodMFiresofLove]

 

I doubt it was deliberate. I think it was more objectionable that a self-confident professional woman like Jessica was reduced to a target, to victimization. Yes, I know that happens in real life. But Jessica seemed a lot smarter, like she would have extricated herself from any situation where it ever seemed as if it would go in that direction. The storyline harmed her character more than it did them as a couple.

 

Other soap couples dealt with rape, where the two still managed to love each other and remain connected in meaningful ways (GH's Luke & Laura and GL's Roger & Holly). So if they were truly popular or driving up the ratings, then his character would have atoned and they would have stayed together. Trying to imply the producers or writers were racist is a conspiracy theory in my opinion that makes things too black and white again, and seems like a narrow minded political agenda.

 

If anything, I'd say they designed the story to give Tamara Tunie some Emmy-worthy material to play because they trusted in her abilities as an actress to deliver the goods. They also knew Rucker was strong enough to convey the volatility that was required for the story to work. If they didn't have confidence in the actors, they wouldn't have given them a frontburner story and Marshall would have left quietly like so many others before him.

 

Almost anything on a soap can be undone....rape, murder, various other crimes. The audience will forgive a transgression if they still manage to like the character, regardless of what a storyline is having them do. Barbara Ryan remained popular and she did a lot of heinous things under Sheffer. Nobody said, "he's destroying her character because she's white and he's trying to make powerful white women look evil." He was devising dramatic scenarios that he believed the performers could handle, and usually they met the challenge.

 

Incidentally I don't agree with the comment that daytime is necessarily behind other forms of television in the handling of ethnic characters. It becomes box-ticking if someone is shoved on to the front burner in a story devised to raise social awareness. But if there was a reboot and we saw Andy's daughter Hope, it wouldn't be box-ticking to include her if the idea was to have her reconnecting with her grandmother Kim, and reconnecting with her father, because she's part of the family. But of course she'd be different from Kim's other grandkids (if Chris or Sabrina had children for example). So she'd be included not to tick a box but to remind viewers that she's Kim's granddaughter, and a side benefit would be that Oakdale is place where there is diversity and race is no longer an issue people need to obsess over.

 

I sometimes think African American people are so unable to break away from a discussion of race because it was thrust on them by society but also because they refuse to let some of it go, so they let that part of society get the better of them. I think LGBT people also have the same struggle, they are over-defined by their orientation to where it consumes them and becomes a lens that distorts how they see the world. If I wanted my enemies to suffer forever, I'd throw some phobia or weird construct on them, then make them go their whole life dealing with it. But my enemies should be smarter than me and see the construct for something phony, to disengage from it and create more meaningful proactive discussions that have nothing to do with those old views and labels.

[DramatistDreamer]

Soaps have a very duplicitous history with writing rape.  Most just didn't do a very good job at it because they tended to romanticize the outcome. 

 

The Young and the Restless tried to write a similar story and it left a rift in the audience with the character of Paul and Christine, mostly because social mores had changed significantly since the 1970s and 1980s and audiences (even soap audiences) were no longer interested in seeing a romance between a woman and her sexual assaulter. 

 

Jessica and Marshall was never going to work after that rape because it was no longer the 1980s or 70s, women just weren't going to accept romance between a woman and her rapist.

 

There are people to this day who detested William Fichtner's character Josh and were disgusted by him getting together with Meg after the rape of Iva.  As great as Marland was as a writer, it was tone deaf of him to try to make Josh some type of romantic hero (remember when he saved Lily?) after he'd raped a thirteen year old girl, who he believed was his cousin at the time.  But I can't entirely chastize Marland because he must've believed that he was doing what every other soap had done and gotten away with in the past, but even at that point, times were beginning to change. 

 

What an audience of woman would accept in the 1970s and 1980s is different from what they'd accept in the 2000s.  Also, at the risk of injecting race/ethnicity, anyone who doesn't recognize the possibility that stereotypes can play a big part in how a character is perceived just doesn't recognize reality.

 

When I was at grad school for Dramatic Writing, we were instructed that you cannot have a character remain viable once you put him/her that far out there.  You take them out to the edge but don't cross that line because you won't realistically be able to pull them back from the brink.

 

It makes me think that perhaps one (of many) reason soaps lost so much of their popularity was because they didn't adapt fast enough to the changing mores. 

You can't blame women for tuning out permanently, if you continue to write tone deaf stories where you believe they'd want to see a rapist being transitioned into a romantic lead.  It's not that hard to figure out why Marshall Travers' character was killed soon after--he became completely unviable.

 

African American people can talk about a variety of topics but America has a very clear problem with race and until people are willing to deal with race and racism in America, it will be a lingering, festering topic.  You can't expect people to shut up about it while nooses are still being hung and people are still being terrorized for the color of their skin.  Also, African American people can also be subjected to sexism and homophobia because...intersectionality. 

 

If you feel attacked, that's not my intention but if you know you're not the problem, why be so defensive about it?

 

IMO, I also believe that sexism and homophobia haven't been honestly discussed in America and neither will be resolved until they are. 

 

 

Sorry but this made absolutely no sense to me. 

Edited December 1, 2018 by DramatistDreamer

[Soaplovers]

 

I agree with how tone deaf modern soap operas are especially with what resonates with modern day viewers vs viewers from the 70s/80s.  However, soaps still do write this kind of story.. and some viewers actually eat it up... case in point...

 

Y & R: Sharon and Adam... the man stole her baby.. and she still had feelings and even thought of going back to him evne if that meant losing custody of her daughter (the same child that Adam stole from her and made her believe was dead for months).  Ratings dropped.. and yet it still carried forward for a long period of time.

 

Days: Ciara and Ben... a serial killer that is getting a romantic story.. and Hope is viewed as the baddie for actually having reservations about her daughter going with an unbalance guy known to serial kill.  The scary thing is on social media, it's a popular coupling and anyone that questions it gets roasted by their fan base.

 

So when the show messed up the potential of Travers character, they at least knew that a romantic pairing between him and Jessica was not in the cards.

 

And yes, I do question why Marland couldn't find a place for Heather on the canvas when he took over.  He even admitted it in his initial story bible when he took over as head-writer.. and she was gone within a few months.  Heather and Jessica, like mentioned, were vastly different characters.. and would have been good to see the contrasts between the two characters.   The show briefly tried that with Denise, Camille (still thought it was a waste writing her off), and Jessica in the late 90s for a time.

[DramatistDreamer]

@Soaplovers but Days is in 3rd, 4th place, right?  They may feel as though they have nothing to lose.  They may not care about how they get viewers to watch and shock value might be an easy way to get them there, but how long will viewers stay?  I've heard some disaffected Y&R viewers claim that they've defected to Days, so Y&R's loss might be Days' gain, in spite of the ridiculous storyline. 

There are now only 4 soaps left, so diehard soap viewers tend to scrounge around for any soap that they can tolerate.  I've given up on them all but I know many haven't and for them Days' storyline may not be an entire dealbreaker for desperate soap fans, whereas when there were more soaps on air, Days might have been punished in the ratings for this type of thing.

 

In terms of the Sharon/Adam thing...I don't know, I think Sharon suffered some blowback down the road.  MM inexplicably has a very vocal band of fans but there are Y&R fans who to this day, used to like Sharon but cannot stand her over the past six, seven years or so now.  Some will claim that it was because the character was married to all three Newman men or that she held onto the baby that Nick thought was his (but really belongs to Adam) but considering the fact that Sharon never burned a fetus in a fireplace, I think people have turned on her pretty harshly.  Adam seemed to have suffered less fallout than her, but then again he's dead (and unlike others, I don't see any plans for his return).  So, in a way, there was a price to be paid...it was just further down the road so it wasn't immediate.  For Sharon, it seems that she paid a price, especially among women viewers.

 

By the time that they'd made Marshall Travers a rapist, I think it was pretty obvious that TPTB had no interest in the character remaining on the show.  After that, Jessica didn't have much to do, really.

 

Oh, don't remind me about the Camille and Denise dynamic. It was just bad bad bad, all the way around, so very poorly written.  I tried to watch some of the story last year on You Tube.  It did not age well.  A shame because both actresses were so solid.

 

It's like @Mitch so aptly said, having a diverse body of writers in the room makes a big difference.  And I'm not just talking racial/ethnic diversity.  Also socio-economic diversity as well.

[P.J.]

I'm not sure Sheffer ever really had a direction for Marshall past getting Barbara off for kidnapping Carly, Em and Rose. 

 

I think WT used the story to try and touch some social issues, but failed. (and while badly executed,  it wasn't nearly as insulting as the Margo/Doc Reese/Jess "triangle" a few years later)

[All My Shadows]

Here's an extremely random find. An artist created sand-on-canvas renderings of vintage soap logos and used ATWT as the title piece. The gorgeous ATWT and OLTL pieces are sold, but you can still purchase AMC and AW.

[DRW50]

 

[DramatistDreamer]

Was Michael Park at Priyanka Chopra and Nick Jonas' wedding? 

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[NothinButAttitude]

God I miss Eileen Fulton on TV. Just old school, classic diva at its finest. 

 

And this is the first I've heard of them possibly killing Lisa. Are they crazy?! I am glad that was scrapped. I don't see how this show could've went on without Oakdale's #1 busy body. 

 

Again, I miss Eileen, Kathy, Don, Liz... I just miss Oakdale. Especially around this time of year with Thanksgiving and Christmas. 

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[JarrodMFiresofLove]

 

I think you're a smart person and certainly an interesting writer but I find a lot of your posts alienating because you persist in playing the race card. It's like the one thing you have to cling on to, instead of being more proactive in your criticism of stories and characters. When you're not playing the race card, you're playing the feminist card, or trying to play both cards at once. I don't feel attacked by you and I am not defensive about anything. Though I think your ongoing view of victimization, where you cite extreme examples, could suggest you feel attacked and act defensively on behalf of your race and gender.

 

I don't see other people pushing the race debate as much as you do, which makes me think you are obsessed with the topic. You barely go a week without some racially loaded comment in this thread. I find it peculiar that if race was and is such a big issue for you why you wanted to watch ATWT and didn't focus on Generations or Passions, which used more African American characters.

 

But what's worse is how you try to justify your approach. I think it's people like you who keep racism and stereotypes alive with such a reactionary point of view. If you spent that energy playing up positive portrayals it would go so much further in advancing the cause. But you prefer to look at the negatives. And if someone intelligent like me comes along and calls you out, then you start accusing us because we either (in your mind) are part of the ongoing problem or don't identify with your outdated victimization and tactics. Just saying.

 

Also you have no idea if I am multiracial/multicultural. Or others on this board. We are not shoving our ethnic heritage front and center in the majority of our posts. I think you get a weird satisfaction from going round and round in circles about race. I am not against a good dialogue about race, but you have to start saying something new, something different, not beat the same old drum all the time. It alienates others who would likely be on your side because they believe in progressive issues as a whole. I feel sorry for black people who over identify with being black; I feel sorry for white people who over identify with being white; and with gay people who over identify with being gay, etc. It's only one part of who you are. Stop narrowly defining yourself and clinging to victimization. Be truly progressive and move yourself forward. The second A in NAACP stands for advancement. Advance yourself, stop pulling yourself back and allowing yourself to be defined by one part of yourself that you can't even be positive about, a part that on some level must seem like an inescapable curse.

 

On another note I don't think you had very adequate graduate courses in writing if you were told that characters can't cross a line. Drama comes from crossing the line, it also comes from crossing back and learning from mistakes. In the soap format characters have to do extreme things that they can grow from and bounce back from. Or else Barbara Ryan would have been killed off, and John Dixon would have been killed off, and Lisa would have been run out of town back in her early days. A good writer sees the sacredness and the evil in all his/her characters and pushes them in a way that challenges the characters and the audience. I think Hogan Sheffer did that with many of the characters. He wasn't always successful, but his stories always gave us something to ponder, even the most outlandish plots and character "deviations."

 

Finally I find it odd that you are trying to lecture about the changing mores of women in society. I would say most of us are aware of those changes, regarding the roles of women AND men in American society. But there are still women in the 2010s who stay with their rapists, and there are still rapists who are trying to atone for what they've done. To borrow that ironic phrase, nothing is entirely black and white.

[DramatistDreamer]

Feel free to ignore my posts, if they offend your sensibilities.  @JarrodMFiresofLove

 

I won't go round after round with you and others have expressed that they actually like to read my posts and engage with them.  I won't stop posting just to suit your delicate sensibilities, so feel free to avert your gaze.

 

I remember you stomping off in a temper tantrum from this thread the last time someone disagreed with you and you were unable to bully them into dropping their post, so feel to resort to whatever reaction suits you best.

 

 

 

On to more interesting comments, thanks to Carl, for this Eileen Fulton interview.  Only when I started to venture onto the soaps messageboards, had I heard about the 'grandma clause' and the ramifications.  We all know that soap fans can get out of proportion with their reactions to...well, everything!  If people wanted someone to blame, why not look at the writing?  Why go after the actress? 

It's a shame that Gregg Marx wanted to leave since he and HBS had such great, sultry chemistry and personally, he was my favorite Tom.

 

 

Edited December 2, 2018 by DramatistDreamer

[Juliajms]

And I don't think you are a smart person or an interesting writer. I find you and everything you write alienating because you think people on this board have to cater to what you think the topics should be.  By the way, no one has to get over anything when it comes to past oppression and atrocity and you are no one to tell them they should. Check yourself if you are capable of doing so, which I doubt.

[P.J.]

I miss ATWT more around the holidays too. No matter what was going on, there was always a sense of comfort offered along the way. 

[JarrodMFiresofLove]

 

I think it's easier to call you out on your pro-racism agenda than to stomp off anywhere. You keep repeating that you are offending me because you want to offend me...somehow in your mind you've convinced yourself the rest of us are racist if we don't agree with your views. It's irrelevant to me if others like your posts. I find many of your posts quite predictable and extremely one-dimensional especially when you try to play the race card so often. I also find it odd that you have used a white person's photo as your avatar which makes me wonder if you want to be white. I've never encountered that before. I'm used to black people who are proud of their heritage and do not see it as one wrapped up in victimization and bigotry at nearly every turn.

 

And your view on this is supposed to matter to anyone...because...? As if anyone of us needs to check ourselves because you've told us to do so. Check yourself first then we'll talk. Thanks.