Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome

[Marco Dane]

How many children have been "SORASED" Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome ?

[All My Shadows]

FAR.

TOO.

MANY.

I have absolutely no idea why no one ever put their foot down and said "NO!" to SORAS years ago.

[quartermainefan]

I can see why they do it. Babies are useless except as props and plot devices for the parents. Then they reach the age where they aren't even useful as that anymore but still too young to have their own stories. So you make then teenagers and suddenly a host of stories are available. OLTL made decent attempts with Matthew and Starr to keep the kids going concerns though.

[All My Shadows]

But see, then we complain about them pushing older characters into the background to focus on the new flavor of the month SORASees. They don't have to write for those characters because they are kids. We don't even have to see them often if they don't want to, just at least acknowledge that they exist (up in their room, at a friend's, at the playground, at school, etc). They could keep the focus on the adults and bring the kids into the drama when they're old enough. Or better yet, they can tackle some of the MANY kid/pre-teen storylines that have never been done in daytime before.

[Khan]

Oh, Lord, no. It's bad enough watching older actors who can't act. Pre-teens and kids do not have the capabilities necessary to carry a scene, let alone an entire story.

As I've said before, I look at SORAS'ing as a necessary evil. It isn't the greatest thing to happen to soaps, but it's far from being the worst.

[quartermainefan]

I like teenagers generally as a character type because they have a ton of stories that are ridiculous if given to adults (like we see on GH since they have no teenagers). Young love, first love, teen angst in general is perfect material for a soap. I liked it the old way when the kids would come into the front during the summer like when Jenny Gardner ran away to NY, but these days they want kids all the time. In some case it has been a rousing success like with Belle and Shawn on DOOL. GH did a decent job with Lucky and Emily, but conversely they also did a good job SORASing AJ and Jason. I think it depends on how old they are when we meet them.

[SFK]

I think that when you decide to make a character pregnant you should just sleep in the bed you made and let the kids age rather realistically. Of course now you have people like Starr who goes for weeks hanging with her simple boyfriend, child sight unseen. I don't like how the soaps work around children. They should adopt teenage children more often.

[All My Shadows]

They can still do teen stories, though, with the characters who are actually teens, the ones who naturally grew into the teen role. For example, AMC's teen set throughout most of the last ten years would have been JR, Jamie, Bianca, Amanda, Petey (who was born around the same time as Amanda), Danielle (if they cared about her), etc. They would have had a good, solid set of teens with almost permanent ties to Pine Valley and the show, instead of the random drop-ins they had like Sean, Lily, that weird Sydney chick, Dre, etc.

I hate to sound like an [email protected]#$%^&*] But I can't accept SORASing. Not when the UK soaps have managed to avoid it, for the most part, for 50 years. And until very recently, you didn't see their fans complaining because perfectly capable and viable vets were made to languish on the backburner.

[Paul Raven]

SORAS is unneccesary and is basically lazy writing. If shows want teens on the canvas they need to PLAN for them rather than turning 6 yr olds into teens. Are they so bereft of creativity that the only solution for established actors stories is to turn them into parents of teens?

Also,half the time the actors playing the so called teens are in the early 20's and look it.

Also,shows do it inconsistently so characters born around the same time can vary wildly in ages.It pushes the actors playing the parents into an older age group and comes back to bite the shows as eventually they run out of children to age.

Using up of so much story is another factor in the poor state of soaps today.

[quartermainefan]

well that I have no problem with. That is just a Hollywood convention, from Grease, to West Side Story, to Welcome Back Kotter and Happy Days, Family Ties and on and on and on. You don't want real teenagers playing teenagers on TV because when you do you wind up with Kristina on GH, who looks and sounds like a member of the Lullaby League. She's awful and it is really disturbing watcher her act opposite Nathan Parsons on GH. They look like he wants to say "hey little girl, want candy?" Or maybe he looks like Greg Brady's older brother, and she looks like Cindy Brady's kid sister.

[juniorz1]

When I think of SORAS, I think of the absolute mess that is Marcy Rylan's Abby and Garrett Ryan's Kyle. For Christ sake, they were conceived out of the same sperm switcheroo! The whole thing is preposterous.

[Marley]

I don't mind sorasing and in fact welcome it most of the time as long as they don't screw up the history of the show. The sorasing of Kyle and Abby is just ridiculous, either soras both or neither and then there is GL and their de-sorasing of Daisy/Susan which was completely useless.

Completely agree.

Kristina is at the age (18) when she should be having teenage romances and first love storylines but the thought of her being involved with any man skeeves me out because she looks 12. They don't even need to soras Kristina, just recast her with an actress that looks legal.

[All My Shadows]

I'd love it if soaps cast real teenagers to play teenagers. It makes things look more true to life, that's for sure. As ridiculous as Starr Manning looked carrying around a baby belly, that's just how ridiculous some of these chicks around here look.

Not to mention there are probably tons of capable teens out there who could take the material and run with it if given a chance. But then soaps would have to start hiring actors again and not models.

[Antoyne]

It's a necessary evil, unless of course you have DAYS current cast of kids. You can't beat Theo, Ciara, and the twins who play Johnny.

[tune_in_tomorrow]

I prefer reasonable SORASing to the alternative of bringing in long-lost/previously unknown teenage or young adult children. I think SORAS at least keeps core families involved. Otherwise, I think many of them have been phased out a lot sooner. On all current and recent soaps, most legacy characters who were "born" on the air were aged. Hope Williams would have been about 10 years old when the Bo and Hope pairing started on DAYS in 1983 and whether you think that pairing has outlived its usefulness, it was a critical piece of the show's 1980s and kept the Hortons on the canvas. Bianca was "born" in 1988 on AMC and her coming out story began just 12 years later. The story had even greater impact since she was Erica's daughter.

There are of course ridiculous examples of the error of SORAS. When I first watched ATWT around 1987, I thought that Ellen and Betsy as grandmother and granddaughter made absolutely no sense because they looked around 55 and 30 years old, respectively. I learned later it was because they aged Ellen's son so that he was practically her age.