ALL MY CHILDREN

[EricMontreal22]

I used to always think AMC was one of the more conservative of the soaps--not in terms of issues tackled, but being more down to earth, grounded in reality, etc, as well I thought it was one of the less dark soaps that wallow in human misery. But I've been home sick the past few days and been going through hours of old episodes on Youtube, and reading the AMC coffee table book, and realize that, particularly in the 80s and 90s, while they never had aliens, people trying to freeze the world, time travel and secret cities, not to mention vampires or demon possession--they had a lot of over the top stories. Lots of plastic surgery returns, pimps trying to rape daughters in front of their mothers, babies dieing left right and center, super villains etc.

What was the difference (and I'm not saying other soaps didn't do this too--so don't get mad at me fans of other shows lol) were three things. The use of humourous, over the top characters who still almost always managed to some how seem *human*. The focus on not making EVERYONE in town filthy rich--fairly realistic of middle and even lower class homes, families, problems. And the focus on family by which I mean just what was mentioned here--tons of scenes of families just talking to each other, friends bumping into each other, reminiscing, etc. (I was re watching that terrific, high quality week of episodes from Dec 1987 that's online, and amongst stories of Julie and Nico running away from a pimp, and Cliff being lost and stuck in some mythical jungle land during a revolution, you have a ten minute scene of Joe and Ruth just chatting, flirting, and Joe looking at pictures of his family, as well as Jeremy and Silver flirting and ice skating, for example).

All of that stuff grounded it and made the over the top stuff somehow feel more realistic and grounded in reality, I think. In the later, exceedingly campy era of Rauch OLTL--to take one example--while still a lot of soapy thatrics and fun, you really don't have any of that (save for over the top characters, but they don't seem remotely real in this case).

I still think AMC still often has more of thgis than other soaps on the air, but that's saying absolutely nothing. Every so often though we get a scenes like that (we got more than a few when Broderick was HW last Spring). I don't fault the writers really--obviously when told to make things move faster, focus more on over the top plots, shorter scenes, beautiful young people, these are the first things to go. But it starts to chip away at the very thing that makes soaps appealing to *most* watchers (OK, not the viewers who made DAYS a huge hit cuz of the demon possession, but the ones who kept AMC at the top of the heap for so long). Even into the late 90s, AMC had a lot of this, though you could already see it disappearing (as mixed as Agnes' brief return in 2000 was--aside from Bianca's coming out her main strength was bringing back stuff like this).