Do soaps need court scenes?

[VirginiaHamilton]

[DeliaIrisFan]

Watching the Desperate Housewives finale, I couldn't help but think that nearly everything in Bree's trial had been done before on daytime soaps, and could be done to greater effect in that medium. What Mrs. McCloskey did to protect her friends would have been epic as a story for a matriarch in the twilight of her life on a daytime soap, and the daily format would have allowed the drama in every soapy detail to be played up. In the heyday of daytime soaps, she would have overheard what really happened on a Thursday, then made up her mind to go to court at the beginning of a Friday show, and we would have seen how she made her way there and all the back and forth getting the lawyer to let her testify, etc. throughout the episode, with her finally taking the stand just in time for the week's cliffhanger. Then her whole testimony would have been extended throughout Monday's show, which maybe would have ended with Gabbie bursting in to confess. And there would have been so many more characters involved who would have had their own reactions to everything. It made me kind of sad watching that, to think that many of the formulas daytime created are still being employed successfully (well, I guess DH was going off the air, but still) in inferior primetime series, while daytime soaps are at just about the same stage of life as Mrs. McCloskey.

As with all soap events, though, a trial only has as much impact as the characters and stories that are reaching a turning point during it. It's been so long since a soap I've watched had a trial/murder mystery that wasn't a lazy plot device to get rid of a character that wasn't working...in general, if a story has to be truncated because viewers aren't engaged, watching it being rehashed in testimony isn't likely to be anymore compelling. But then, most soap stories in the past decade-plus have been jettisoned before there is time for the kind of buildup that a good courtroom story would need. I agree that soaps shouldn't bother to do trials given the current budget limits, but typically they weren't very effective plot devices 10-15 years ago when the budget was there but the storytelling typically wasn't.

However, to answer the original question, I agree with others that, back in the day, I loved a good soap trial that was the climax of a solid, suspenseful story. Sometimes, trials even rose above some otherwise mediocre stories that precipitated them (Marley's trial for shooting Jake on AW was hands and above the best thing Donna Swajeski ever wrote on that show, and certainly leaps and bounds better than anything that didn't overlap with Lemay's material...Vicky impersonating Marley after she went on the lam, Donna confessing to protect her daughters, etc.).

[soapfave06]

I was thinking about this thread the entire time I was watching that DH finale. It had so many unexpected moments and many people present, you wouldn't get that today.

[Gray Bunny]

The last two gripping courtroom storylines for me was Reva's in 1997 on GL and John on trial for Tony's "death" in Aremid in 1996. Everything else has been very rushed and anti-climactic or just not very captivating (like GL's Michelle on trial for killing Ben Warren)