Primetime Soaps Then and Now

[Vee]

Rewatching some of my old favorite shows, as well as some others I wasn't so familiar with, I was just thinking about this lately - it seems like a lot of the primetime soaps back in the day had a much easier time of maintaining their internal consistency than so many other floundering or failed efforts do now.

Dallas and Dynasty, Knots Landing, Falcon Crest, they all stayed true to much of their vision and ensembles and kept their ships running fairly smoothly by today's low standards. Even when there was turnover, it seems as though a lot of those shows remained guided by many of the same hands, or at least very competent new ones. (When even people on SON are split on the Latham/Lechowick collective's years at KL, they had to be doing something right back then.) Often those shows would have bad spots, then right themselves, though I suppose that wasn't necessarily the case in the very last year of Falcon Crest. And in the '90s, even shows like the original 90210 and Melrose Place, which were full of rot in the later years, retained many of the same key personnel and characters over the years and kept their overall tone relatively intact, and ran for either a decade or close to.

Compare that to the latter-day 90210, where the only consistency has been its reputation as an incoherent, incomprehensible mess passing to and from various hands - I should know, I watched the first 3 seasons - or the recent failed Melrose revival which retooled, got new showrunners, and died in a year. Or so many other shows that lose showrunners almost immediately and flop. Even Smash, which I still enjoy despite its flaws - I haven't seen the Season 2 premiere yet - is already on its first new showrunner with a massive revamp.

Why did those shows keep a relatively firmer hand back then as opposed to now? Is it a simple matter of executive/network confidence and interference being far less so than today, or something more?

An interesting side note, also, would be the British soaps, which do technically run in primetime but very regularly change hands. However, unlike the primetime soaps, they seem to have more of the institutional value and tone of our daytime dramas, where the show is less a product of its showrunners than of a larger historical framework, passing from steward to steward. Our primetime soaps have always been different from that, had a different 'feel.'

[VirginiaHamilton]

Personally, I think it all boils down to today's showrunners catering to a fast-food viewership that wants their payoffs right here and right now, as opposed to taking the time to sit through the blossoming of a storyline from beginning to end.

I can't think of a single current primetime soap that would've taken the care to draw out a triangle in the manner that they'd done with OG 90210's Brenda/Dylan/Kelly triangle 20 years ago, as they wouldn't trusted that there'd be viewers that'd be willing to sit through the full length of it.

[DRW50]

I don't even feel like most of these shows are soaps. I think they run from the label, and if they have any "soapy" moments, it's treated as a joke or a parody. Look at something like Revenge. This was hyped as a primetime soap because rich people had parties. Nothing about the show as it seems to be now has any tie to true soap drama. Instead you have generic corporate blather and generic spy blather.

Something like The Walking Dead - which also has huge chaos backstage, of course - is more in line with soaps, somehow. You have your triangles, you have your against all odds supercouples, you have a relatively multi-generational cast.

[Soaplovers]

I've noticed when watching the old school prime-time soaps, that the overall plot-lines were not limited.

For instance, Knots Landing started out as married couples living on a cul-de-sac and it evolved beyond that later on. It still maintained the cul-de-sac aspect, it just expanded beyond that.

On the other hand, Revenge is about some girls revenge against a wealthy family who framed her dad. Already, the show has limited itself in terms of long-term success. Either you resolve the plot-line in one to two seasons, or you try to pro-long it by placing distracting elements onto the canvas. Season 2 has basically answered which way the show-runners are going... by taking the focus off of revenge toward some high tech outfit that would make Lex Luther look realistic. Not only that, this outfit wants to cause a power outage through New York City.

That is what I'm thinking is the big difference between old school prime time soaps.. and current day prime time soaps.

[All My Shadows]

Most of today's "primetime soaps" are developed as mini-series, and that's the first mistake.