Horror and the Soap Opera

[All My Shadows]

This is true, but IMO, Passions was still a young soap finding its way even at the end. It wasn't like DAYS, which had nearly 30 years of celebrated history under its belt but decided to have a major character possessed by the devil.

Not all soaps have to abide by the same rules of reality, but when the old days are trumpeted for being "realistic" and "true-to-life" in terms of how the audience related to the characters, the pink elephants in the room are the demonic possession, the unabortion, the characters who went back to 1968 and altered history, Casey the alien, etc. I'm all for the supernatural and fantastical stuff, but not on shows which (still) pride themselves on being easy for the audience to relate to.

IMO, there is no logic to the remaining six. That's why we're all waiting for the next cancellation notice. If the audience doesn't want to watch family drama about personal and professional relationships, then cancel the family dramas about personal and professional relationships and put something else in their place. There's always this need for soaps to last 20-30 years. I can't believe the people who honestly thought GL was "canceled too soon." It was 72 freaking years! And what did being on the air for 72 years do for it when push came to shove? And my poor ATWT, it had 54 years, but the mainstream media could barely be bothered to care. TPTB and fans forcing these shows to go on for years and years of bad ratings and panned storylines in the hopes that "things might get good!" has ultimately killed the very concept of daytime drama. Primetime shows don't (or didn't, at least) slag on for 5-10 seasons of bad ratings and unhappy fans. They get the axe and they get replaced by something else. I love the stability of daytime and that up until '09, the same CBS daytime lineup that grandma would prop me up in front of at the age of 3 was the same CBS daytime lineup I watched as a young adult, but look at every single show from that lineup now dying a slow, painful death when they could have ended years ago and still be fondly remembered.

But then again, they don't do reruns of soaps, so I think a lot of the reason why people don't want this show to die or that show to die is because once it's gone, it's pretty much gone forever, and there won't be any reruns to relive the glory days.

[passionsfan]

I never watched Port Charles, but was well aware of the horror themed/ vampire stuff they were doing with the show from promos and advertisements. Did they get horror right, or was that a factor in it not being with us today?

[Paul Raven]

ABC primetime show The Gates would have worked well as a daytime show as there was plenty of story that was rushed through due to the 60 min weekly format.The premise was that vampires and werewolves were living in an exclusive gated community and trying to live normal lives.

[DRW50]

We don't know if audiences got tired of those or not. Soaps moved away from those to try to be hip and cool and do action and sci-fi and other stuff. When soaps actually focused on family and personal and professional relationships, their ratings were far better than today.

We aren't waiting for family dramas to die. We're waiting for anti-family, anti-relationship, hollow nothings to die.

[DRW50]

I tended to see Passions as a show that had lost its way years before the cancellation. Reilly had a few basic ideas which he couldn't move beyond, so they just began resorting to more and more ugly gimmicks to fill up time.

I think DAYS, in some ways, was more fresh at the time of the possession story than PSSN was in its last years, through the story given to new characters and to characters who had recently been aged or successfully recast.

[Gray Bunny]

Reva the clone?

Teri, the plastic-surgery voice-altered Annie Dutton, using truth serum applied like hand lotion to get people to tell the truth?

Reva the time traveler?

GL tried to get on the wacky bandwagon alongside DAYS, Sunset, and later Passions, but its audience just wasn't interested.

Granted, that was 1998-1999 when they still had 5 million viewers. These days, soaps would only piss off 2 million. I just don't think the supernatural would fit any current soap, and DAYS' budget and cheap aesthetics just wouldn't look good with a goblin or light sabers or whatnot.

[Gray Bunny]

Another thing I loved about the possession story (and all of Days' stories of the mid-90's) is that they, the characters, took themselves and their situations completely seriously. There was no cutesy tongue-in-cheek, sarcastic, ironic comments that you see so much nowadays. There's so much of that self-awareness now when someone's in a less-than-realistic situation that it breaks that suspension of disbelief in a sense.

[Mitch]

Totally agree. I don't like it when someone says, "Oh, the old forumula didnt work...they should try something new." First of all, ATWT and GL weren't using their old forumlas, they tried to get away from them and that hastened their deaths. And something "new," for daytime really means something copied from another more successful genre, and copied badly, and copied well after the"blush was off the rose!" Look at Port Charles they were doing their stupid thing well after the first vampire craze was going under, and they did it laughably bad (lifting lines directly from Dracula, having that big nostril guy say "Listen to the children of the night," directly ripping off Buffy...it was all cheap imitations.) Soaps doing that type of thing is like the dorky kid in class finally catching on about a fashion trend, but doing so by buying a knock off from K-Mart!

I truly believe if they "updated," their own individual formulas they would still be on today (not saying it would have saved them from evenutal cancellation, but that is where all the soaps are headed.)Focusing on the next generations of the Hughes, Stewarts and Bauers and Spauldings, and have them dealing with current issues (i.e. letting the gays actually have sex, quit showing women just wanting to trap a man and have a baby, showing the stresses of the new economy, showing the stresses of dealing with intergenerational familya and friends.) would have made them more viable. ATWT truly started to die when fat Hogie showed up and didn't want to deal with any kinds of family or friendship relationships, all he wanted to do was "Try," to be ironic and hip, and failed badly (is there any wonder why he is still in daytime, he can't get a job outside of the industry he hates being in.)

[Mitch]

The Salem Stalker thing started out scary, but after Maggie's death it became all a big joke. Why should we care if the stakes arent high and "real."

Though I will always have a place in my heart for Tom Hortons' big disembodied head chasing Marlena out the front door!!! What a hoot that was (and made me say time and time again, so this Reilly is supposed to be a good writer???)

[EricMontreal22]

I agree with what you say--mostly. Sadly when these shows die, they're not replaced with more interesting takes on the form (despite half hearted attempts to do so--I guess particularly with The City but also with SuBe's attempt to do Melrose in Daytime, and Passions)... And I think a show can change direction *somewhat*--but I agree--there's a problem when suddenly a vampire is wandering around a town that many viewers watch partly because they see it as some (exagerated) view of their own world. When Days had all their success, many shows tried it as has been mentioned--AW with the weird Rachel Witch double thing and the hints of a vampire, AMC of course tried their voodoo story (where they were careful to not make anything concretly proven to be voodoo eithe rway--youc ould tell ther story was forced ont he show--but it still didn't have many fans), etc...

And of course before that there was Casey the Alien on GH--which might have had more success if ithad happened suring the comic book superhero early 80s era of GH and not the late 80s when they were otherwise trying to return the show to basics lol...

[All My Shadows]

And most fans did nothing but rant and rave about how horrible those shows had become in the last 5-10 years of their runs. This reminds me of the Daytime Emmys GO TO VEGAS!!!!! thing. What I believed then is what I believe now. What's the point of keeping something around if it's going to change and mutate into something completely different? Granted, GL and ATWT fared better than this year's Emmy broadcast, but still, who would be upset if GL had ended, dignity intact, before TPTB started taking these drastic measures to keep it on the air? Peapack Light wasn't Guiding Light. Even when the show ended, the focus was squarely on all of the fantabulous things they did in Peapack. I don't understand why someone would want that when they could be much more content with the memory.

This is true. But just because many of failed in the past because they were totally out of touch doesn't mean it's impossible. It just hasn't been done properly...at all...in the last 20 or so years. OLTL, GL, and some of the others jumped on the big Dallas craze in the early 80s, almost all of the soaps borrowed a bit from Dynasty. Even Dark Shadows came at a time when those Hammer movies were starting to become extremely popular. There are ways to incorporate the latest trend into an existing format, but when the trend starts to displace the format, there's a problem. Notice how after the smoke settled from the Dallas/Dynasty phenomenon in the 80s, suddenly all of these small, quaint towns were bustling metropolises with several major companies headquartered in each.

I agree. I think it would be hard, even if a soap was really, really good, to attract people to watch because as long as soaps are telling stories of family and romance and what-not, people are still going to associate them with the things that give soaps a "guilty pleasure" label. I personally don't mind my soaps being guilty pleasure, though I have no shame in my game and will gladly own my soap viewership.

That whole thing was chock full of gems. Doug and Marlena catfighting in the park. Celeste "googling" Tek and calling Marlena a "ho." Hilarious. Then the Jan/Shawn-D/Mrs. B stuff was going on at the same time. And Crystal Galore!

Right, they're replacing soaps with sh!t that won't do that much better than the soaps. They're not looking for higher ratings, they're looking for cheap production costs. It's almost like they've given up on daytime, and I'm sure they have. I think a lot of it has to do with them being SO STUCK on what they believe the "daytime audience" is that they think we won't watch anything other than the family/romance-type of drama. Call me crazy, call me absolutely silly, but I'd love to see the day when there are daytime dramas and daytime comedies and daytime reality shows and daytime game shows and daytime talk shows all mixed together to form a big, diverse/varied daytime lineup. Expanding the soaps to an hour was the real killer, not factoring in quality (which is subjective). They expanded them at a time when they were all huge, so of course the ratings shot up for the 5-10 years following most of the expansions. But once the GH fever died down in the late 80s, the ratings started to fall more and more with each year, and the lineups became more and more homogeneous.

[DRW50]

I think it was stuff like back from the dead, amnesia, evil twins, sudden/hysterical blindness/paralysis/deafness, etc. which gave a guilty pleasure label. Actual basic family drama is something which can be enjoyed by anyone and while some will always make fun of it (eg, As the Stomach Churns), there can also be a respect for it, as there was a respect in the media for, say, Agnes Nixon shows.

I don't think they care if viewers want to watch family/romance. I think they actively chased those viewers away to try to get viewers who WOULDN'T care about family/romance. They wanted young viewers and they assumed young viewers would only want to watch a lot of violence, stupidity, empty-headed 30 year olds playing 18 year olds with bad lines readings and perfect bodies, etc.

I think there were plenty of opportunities for soaps to move away from what was considered a stodgy format, and for one reason or another, most of those soaps failed. I guess that's why I don't feel like the older soaps staying on was a burden or impeding progress -- I think that some of them, even at their lowest ebbs, still managed to produce fantastic moments, like GL's anniversary episode, or Bob and Kim getting remarried. It just reminded me of what these shows could have been, and what soaps used to be.

[All My Shadows]

True, and that's kinda what I meant. I know it's not what we consider traditional soap, but it's what TPTB think qualifies as traditional soap. Nevertheless, I agree that those are the things that drive people away.

They did, you're right. My thing with ATWT was always that the storylines could be absolutely dreadful, but they never failed to put those four or five really, really good episodes a month. Those were always nice to watch and I love that we can look back on some of those great moments, but when you consider all of the crap we had to endure just to get two days of Bob and Kim goodness or one day of a soap actually celebrating the drama surrounding its creation...

[DeeeDee]

And everyone in those towns became independently wealthy.

[EricMontreal22]

I wouldn't even say it was after the smoke--OLTL added the Buchanens in 1979 after all. It also corresponded with the shows going to an hour.