AMC and OLTL Canceled!

[DRW50]

Another problem is that soaps aren't fun anymore. Attempts to be fun often seem dehumanizing and offensive, because of the premise (it's not "fun" to see a woman acting like a teenager because she was brainwashed and nearly raped by her own father, like Jess on OLTL, or on Y&R, the "fun" of various men bedding Sharon when she was so mentally ill that she could not even tell them apart). In the past you had characters like Lucinda Walsh, Kirk Anderson, on ATWT, Gina on Santa Barbara, Delia on Ryan's Hope, who often had a lot of natural humor in most of what they did.

[alexisfan07]

Just read Errol's tweet about Frons laughing off the protesters. Just utterly disgusting.

[Cheap21]

they shun the fun characters away. Id rather see Roxy and Addie over on OLTL rather than what passes off as humor

[~bl~]

The Hollywood Reporter wrote about the protest, only 30 people attended. Click on the link for more details. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/soap-fans-protest-abcs-upfront-189192

[marceline]

Good Lord. Can they stop doing protests now? This is getting embarrassing.

[quartermainefan]

I think soap writers and soap fans tend to be anti-fun. Any time someone tries something silly is it dismissed as "campy". Shows like Port Charles and Passions are dismissed by the TV audience, and if you just look at this forum and what people want, they never seem to say they want fun. They say they want emotional blah blah blah, family intergenerational whatever, and cite Claire Labine as great writing: the very opposite of fun writers if ever there was one. Her depressing, melancholy, disease of the week writing is seen as mature and grown up--the very epitome of what soaps should strive to be-- while vampires or whatever is deemed embarrassing. So how can soaps be fun if the soap audience only finds cancer and tears to be fun television fodder?

Just look at OLTL. Tina in Mendorra? No. Marty and her ennui line delivery? Yes.

[dragonflies]

Colleen Zenk was at the protest, other than that I laugh at the absurdity of it all, I agree with Marceline, it is getting embarassing

[SFK]

And you know what, the only thing I made up was the date rape/lawsuit part and the dramatic reveal of the bathroom mirror in the morning. Everything else happened to a friend of mine. Real life is MORE than enough, and it provides its own dramatic springboards. John Waters knew such fun real-life characters and with the help of a little pot he just riffed like crazy off of, as you said, what he knew.

[DRW50]

I don't think that fans are anti-fun. The problem is what is fun? Tabitha and Timmy on Passions seemed very popular. Kathleen Noone's character, and the chimp, and Julian's one-liners, they all seemed popular. The last years of Passions were all about rape. Did fan protests cause them to do that?

I don't remember PC ever having any fun that people dismissed. The only comedy was the occasional scene with Lucy. Otherwise Lucy spent years crying and being miserable and having fun stories like accidentally blinding her own child.

The type of fun that soap fans enjoyed involved clever dialogue, strong female characters, playfulness - none of that is on soaps now.

If "fun" now means Billy Abbott wearing a tie on his head or Spinelli and Jason's bodyguards pulling faces, then no wonder fans aren't interested.

[quartermainefan]

[SFK]

I hear you, I think it is really a case by case thing though. Folks enjoyed Janet and Natalie down the well, Ursula blowin [!@#$%^&*] up, Viki in heaven/Old West/her first DID stories... Dark Shadows! Maybe the difference is that these *fun* stories actually took themselves pretty seriously and weren't self-aware, wink to the audience, efforted camp? It is kind of tough to pinpoint why some outlandish plots make us or . I wish I knew the formula.

[Cheap21]

this makes me embarassed to be a soap fan

[JaneAusten]

I am drawing a blank. Were the protests to the cancelling of GL and ATWT the same? I know Moonves was not as flippant about the

cancellations as Frons has been but I don't recall how many protests or Save campaigns they ran.

[Bella1974]

I think the problem is that writers have forgotten that characters have to be believable in order for the joke to work. It's not enough just to have a character around for comedic purposes, they also have to have storylines and interactions with other characters in order to make them three dimensional and human. Passions isn't the best example, but the problem wasn't that the show was campy, the problem is that they never seemed to finish a thought or storyline. There was humor, but the stories and characters never went anywhere, they were stuck in the same loop for months. Every soap has this problem. In order for people to see and believe the humor or the tragedy in a storyline, people have to believe in and care about the characters.

[marceline]

If by "the same" you mean embarrassing and poorly attended, the answer is yes. But these cancellations seem to have really brought out a more "Squeaky Fromme" element.

What I find sad interesting is this reliance on old tactics like protests and pickets. As much as these people like to cite the success of other fan campaigns, they clearly haven't bothered to study them, or talk to people involved with them to shape their strategy. Nobody from Jericho or FNL stood out on the streets screaming at people. These people are fighting a 21st century battle with a 1960s mindset.

But that's how we got here to begin with isn't it?