1972 New Yorker article

[Paul Raven]

Photograph from NBC / NBCU Photo Bank / Getty

 

You have to tolerate extremes of hatred and loneliness to follow, Monday through Friday every week, through a still unterminated period of months, the story of an educated man so bitter that he kills himself solely to frame another man for murder. Yet there is an audience of at least six million at two-thirty every afternoon New York time (other times across the country) prepared to watch this plot line, among other plot lines, develop on “The Doctors,” a television program of the genre soap opera, or daytime dramatic serial. Whatever else it is, it is no joke. There cannot in all fiction be a purer single act of rage and isolation than this imploded revenge, the carom suicide: no simple murder of somebody else, no murder of somebody else to frame a third, no ordinary suicide that might leave others feeling guilty of some metaphorical murder by neglect. This contriver of his own death to make it look like someone else’s literal crime has, in one classic solitary act, detonated incalculable threats in other lives. “The Doctors” plays it out.

For all I know, it happens all the time in life. So many events are quite other events in disguise. But “The Doctors” has a special instance here. It certainly has high tragic possibilities, except that no one writes high dramas now. In times of mass violent death, individuals in drastic personal straits look tabloid. Most fiction keeps its personal crises low-profile and small; writers with serious claims upon the desperate dramatic themes seem to have crossed further out of tragedy and into melodrama than writers of soaps have crossed going the other way. The term “pop culture,” never of much use or elegance, is empty now. There is almost no culture of any other kind. People with a taste or instinct for the arts are thrown back on the classics or must bide their time. The arts, first-rate, second-rate (the creative enterprise is not a horse race, after all), are just not much in evidence. Painting is a kind of caricature: ribbons, billboards, commercials are not simply the inspiration—they are better than this incessant, humorless joke that passes through museums and galleries in the name of art. In writing, one would never have found a Kafka on symposiums or on the Johnny Carson show. But, in all the modern strategies of fame, it becomes harder than ever to know where to look.

And then there are the soaps. They are pure plot. Perhaps the grand oral tradition rambled on this way, and then we had the Iliad and the Nibelungenlied. For months, the audience was not told—the characters did not yet suspect—that Dr. Allison killed Dr. Allison. But the audience knew. Everyone knew. It was so in line with the characters and their motives over the last four years, at least, that the only questions were when Dr. Aldrich’s murder trial would begin, if it began, and how it would come out. Conviction. Acquittal. Conviction and—perhaps months later—acquittal. All this was not conventional suspense. Too much was known. It was more like sustained morbidity and dread. Things were going to get worse before they got better, if they ever did. White housewives, black housewives, children home from school, men unemployed, the aged, the preschool young, the idle, the ladies at the ironing board—there was no telling, even from commercials, who was watching this, except that they were millions, across the country, and that they were, and are, willing to endure what has become the perfected medium of daily, inexorable, and almost unrelieved depression.

It takes about five days to catch on to the plot of a soap opera in apogee. It takes five years for one of these fictions, whose beginnings and ends are as obscure as the first questions of the universe, to capture and maintain an audience. There seems to be no reason for whole generations of adults still to have strong, clear memories of Helen Trent and other characters from the radio soaps. Surely we could not have been sick, or otherwise home from school, on so very many mornings, and “amnesia” need not have been our first word of adult pathology. But the television soap operas (the radio ones are now defunct), in addition to being in the afternoon, have brought their stories far closer to home. “As sands through the hourglass,” says a voice, over music, each day at the start of a daytime serial, “so are the days of our lives.” The program happens to be called “Days of Our Lives.” In all the years of the program’s logo, the top half of the hourglass has never emptied and the bottom never filled. It is yet another Hundred Neediest Cases of the mind. Fidelity, betrayal, rape, murder, amnesia, alienation, misunderstanding, literal misconception (wives pregnant by their husbands’ brothers or by the fiancés of their husbands’ sisters), hostages, adoptions, suicides, loves, wars, friendships, deceit, insanity, operations, villains, tea—whose sands and hourglass are these? A lot of people’s, evidently. The serial “Search for Tomorrow,” which is just now floundering a bit (writers of soap operas burn out, shift programs, lose their touch, endure, go mad, or simply vanish with their own dramatic frequency), has been on television continuously for more than twenty years. The serial “Another World” became so popular and full of plot (also so pressed by N.B.C.’s need for another loved half hour) that it split in two: the old “Another World,” at its usual 3 p.m., and “Another World (Somerset)”—later renamed simply “Somerset”—with many of the same characters, at 4 p.m. “The Doctors” itself, at two-thirty, is N.B.C.’s competitor with C.B.S.’s “The Guiding Light,” which was once one of the most watched programs in daytime television. No more. “The Doctors” was just a better-written, better-acted epic of despair.

My happiest moment on any of the soaps I have watched with anything like constancy occurred some years ago, when Andrea Whiting, of “Search for Tomorrow,” cracked up on the witness stand. Her villainy had been relentless, undiscovered, pathological for years. She had broken the engagement of her son, Len Whiting, to Patti Tate. She had refused to divorce her estranged husband, Sam Reynolds, so that he could marry his true love, Joanne Tate, Patti’s mother and the program’s heroine. Andrea Whiting had been responsible, many years before, for the death by fire of Len’s twin. She had blamed the death on her husband, Sam, thereby estranging Sam the father from Len the son. She had tried to kill several people in the intervening years—most recently Sam—but she had contrived to make it look as though Sam had been trying to kill her. Sam was on trial. He was being defended by Doug Martin, the father of Scott Phillips, who was going to marry Lauri Something, the mother of an illegitimate child. Names have little to do with paternity on any of the soaps; few legitimate children, for the most complicated reasons, have their fathers’ names. Doug Martin, Scott Phillips’ father, was about to marry someone else. Doug had overcome a severe breakdown only recently, and his marriage, his confidence, his relationship with his own son (Scott having just returned from Vietnam) depended on the success of his defense of Sam. Anyway, under questioning by Doug Martin, Andrea cracked up. The truth about the fire death came out, the truth about everything came back, in flashbacks spanning years. Andrea was carried off. I stopped watching for many months, quitting while I was just a bit ahead, I thought. Now it turns out that while I was away Andrea returned. Sam Reynolds is in prison in Africa. Joanne, having gone blind for a while, and thinking Sam dead, has fallen in love with her neurosurgeon. Len’s wife, Patti, has had a miscarriage, and his girl, Grace (I can’t explain about Grace), had a child and died herself. It is such misery. I’m almost glad the writers are troubled now, with quite other problems I don’t care about. Andrea is scheming again. (“Nobody can match Andrea in the scheming department,” a C.B.S. plot summary says. I do see that.) I simply don’t understand “Search for Tomorrow” now. Some characters seem to be buying a house.

My second-happiest moment on a soap was a mistake. Several years ago, a girl named Rachel had, by the most unscrupulous means, ensnared Russ Matthews, son of one of the most decent families on “Another World.” They married. Many months later, a very rich self-made young man called Steven Frame came into town and fell in love with Russ’s sister, Alice. Alice Matthews loved Steve, too, but so did Rachel (by this time Mrs. Russ Matthews), in her own unscrupulous way. Rachel seduced Steve. She became pregnant, and claimed that the child was Steve’s. Her husband, Russ, was, naturally, upset, as was his sister, Alice, who immediately broke off with Steve. For several months, I stopped watching. Then, one recent afternoon (recent in soap terms; that is, around July), when I was on the telephone, I had “Another World” on, with the sound off. The scene was a christening. The characters were Lenore and Walter Curtin (who had a difficult history of their own), a chaplain, a baby, Alice, and Steve. I thought—I truly hoped—that Alice and Steve had been reconciled and married while I was away, and that the child was theirs. All wrong. The baby was Lenore’s and Walter’s, although Walter had grave doubts on this very point. Alice and Steve were godparents.

Since then, Alice and Steve have really married. I missed that scene, but they have passed their honeymoon, and so I know. Russ and Rachel have divorced. Rachel has remarried—a young man whose business is now being financed by Steven Frame. Russ is engaged to Rachel’s new husband’s sister. Or he was, until a few sad weeks ago. People have to keep meeting at parties, where there are so many problems about previous marriages and affairs and present babies. Now Rachel’s husband has been in a coma and has made sordid revelations about his past. Walter Curtin has vanished, under mysterious circumstances. Lenore has received, by messenger, a scarf. Walter has confessed by phone to the murder, in a jealous rage, of Steve’s secretary’s former husband, whom he suspected of having slept with his (Walter’s) wife, Lenore. Most recently—in fact, tomorrow, as I write this—Walter has died. But on the whole such sudden accelerations of the plot are better on quick, episodic soaps, like “Edge of Night,” which are akin to closed, formed, Aristotelian thrillers, which I never watch.

There are moments when some aesthetic things, all art aside, are simply so. People know it, without any impulse or attempt to argue: something is on. Such a moment, years back, protracted over many months, was the Moon Maid episode in the “Dick Tracy” comic strip. Long before the slogan “Black is beautiful” appeared in and receded from the news, longer before the astronauts reached the moon, Dick Tracy’s son, Junior, returned from the moon with Moon Maid, pleaded with her not to remove her horns or try to conceal them with a beehive hairdo, married her, and delighted in their baby’s little horns. The word would not even be “miscegenation” now. Junior was light-years beyond the country’s perception of its race problems then. The McCarthy time of “Pogo” was less golden. It was one of those finest hours that “Peanuts,” in another key, has sustained over many years with genius consistency. Something was touched.

The same was true for years of the talk shows on television. They were on. They meant something. Now, regardless of Nielsen ratings, watchers, they are off. One knows it. They simply do not matter in the sense they did. It is also true, oddly enough, of television coverage of the news. It had its years and faces. Then it had the instant things it was perfectly designed for: the shooting through the head of a man by the chief of Saigon’s national police; the moon landing. Then it lost its purchase on events and, no matter how many people watched it, faded. The anchor man would mention an event, switch to the local correspondent, who would mention it again, then interview its source, who would mention it in his own idiom. No depth, no time, and lots of waste of time. McLuhanism was wrong. The mind needs print. Perhaps the news as captured by TV will matter again. Maybe tomorrow.

The soap operas, which have endured as long as anything in television, have their own rhythms, fade, recur. It was on “Another World,” some years ago, that there was a moment—or, rather, nearly a half hour—of dramatic brilliance. It was just after Rachel, still married then to Russ, had slept with Steve and spent a weekend searching for her father. Russ naturally knew that she had been away, but not where or with whom. Suddenly, Russ insisted that he and Rachel pay a call that night on everyone they knew in town—to keep up appearances. Rachel resisted, in her usual sulky way, and then gave in. They made the tour. It was a masterpiece of compression. Russ and Rachel acted out their drama in such a way (by concealing it, and pretending that all was well) that all the other dramas on the program—and they were many, and of long standing—were called to mind, as though the audience were going through an Andrea flashback on the witness stand.

They went to visit, for example, Walter Curtin and Lenore. Walter Curtin had been the prosecutor, several years before, in a case in which Missy Fargo was mistakenly convicted of the murder of her husband, Dan. She had married Danny Fargo, in the first place, because Liz Matthews (another unrelenting villainess) had tried to prevent the love match of Missy and Liz’s son, Bill. Liz, the mother, had decided at the time that her son, Bill, should marry Lenore, now Curtin but then single and in love with Bill. Bill loved Missy. Lenore loved Bill. Walter loved Lenore. When Danny Fargo was murdered, Liz (the mother), Walter (the prosecutor), and Lenore all had an interest in seeing Missy go to jail. Several years later, Missy was sprung and married Bill. Then Walter, repentant and, anyhow, in love, married Lenore. Liz, the villainess, was hysterically distressed, but she had other lives to wreck, including a long-lost daughter’s, and she did.

Russ and Rachel, in their tour, met others—several generations of the Randolph family, for example, and Rachel’s mother, Ada, of humble origins but of major significance in solving the Missy case. What had happened since Missy’s trial (can I go on with this?) was an interminable rivetting episode in which Lee Randolph, a daughter of the Randolphs (who are related to the Matthewses by innumerable ties of blood and misunderstanding), being in love with Sam Lucas, a relative of the humble Ada’s, had, under the influence of LSD, killed someone, whose name I don’t remember, of the criminal element.

This business of not remembering has an importance of its own, although insanity has replaced amnesia as the soap operas’ most common infirmity. The files of the soaps are so sketchy that their history is almost irretrievable. “Laura comforts Susan, and Scott is surprised by a statement from Julie,” for example, is N.B.C.’s plot note for the March 13, 1970, “Days of Our Lives.” And “Nick and Althea did make it to the Powers apartment, and the dinner did not burn” was N.B.C.’s summary of two weeks on “The Doctors” during the aftra strike of 1967. The only true archivists of the whole history of a soap are the perpetual watchers, the loyal audience, whom, out of a truly decent sense of tradition and constancy, the ever-changing writers try not to betray. This requires careful and intuitive examination of those files, and an attempt to avoid anything that might violate the truth of the story as it existed before a given writer’s time. Only the audience knows, and yet there are so many Scotts and Steves and Lees on various programs that even the most loyal audience can get mixed up.

Anyway, Sam Lucas took the blame for Lee Randolph’s having murdered, under LSD, a thug. Everyone was acquitted in the end. Of course, there is no end. But Lee, thinking that LSD had impaired her chromosomes, kept far away from Sam, who misunderstood her motives as having to do with the milieu from which he came. Sam Lucas married a girl called Lahoma, an earthy character who was meant to appear only briefly in the plot but who was so good she had to stay. Lee Randolph eventually killed herself. Sam, Lahoma, Missy (now widowed again), and Missy’s baby by Danny Fargo have all moved to “Somerset.” Strangely, none of the catastrophes on soaps—and nearly every soap event is a catastrophe—are set up with much sentiment. I do not think the audience ever cries, except at Christmas, anniversaries, and other holidays, all of which are celebrated on their proper day. The celebrations are bleak enough, but it is the purest gloom to find oneself on December 25th or January 1st watching a soap or, if the football games are on, deprived of one. The other days are just alternations of being miserable and being bored, or both, and knowing that the characters are the same.

Well, there were Russ and Rachel, visiting all these people on “Another World.” To someone who had not been watching, it did all come back. It is not necessary, technically, to watch. Since most of the characters address each other incessantly by name, one can catch it all from another room, like radio. On the other hand, one needn’t listen, either. I would have found out my mistake about the christening soon enough. There are the most extravagant visual and aural flashbacks, ranging from “Have I told you what Russ said to me last night?” (Answer, “Well, Russ did tell me;” both characters retell it anyway) to visual flashbacks that would do credit to the cinema. In the case of the temporarily misunderstood christening, it was my telephone that had turned the set on with the sound off. The ring of a telephone is often on the same frequency as the remote-control device that operates some television sets; many households have this strange mechanical rapport. A pin dropped on a table will sometimes do it, or the clicking of a belt buckle. One thinks one is alone, and suddenly the room is full of voices, or faces, or both, from “Another World.”

Another moment, this one from “Days of Our Lives.” It takes, as the whole addiction does, some bearing with. Mickey Horton we know—though he does not—is infertile. Tom Horton, Mickey’s brother, returned several years ago from Korea, face changed, memory gone. His memory came back. About three years ago, Bill Horton, another brother, impregnated Mickey’s wife, Laura, a psychiatrist. Tom Horton, before he went to Korea, had a ghastly wife, extremely ghastly. When his memory returned, she returned, too. Dr. Horton, the father of Tom, Mickey, and Bill, knows—as Bill found out by accident, as Laura knows, as we have always known—that Laura’s offspring cannot be her husband Mickey’s. Mickey does not know. Last year, there occurred the following episode: Tom’s ghastly wife was at the senior Hortons’, trying to be nice. The senior Hortons of “Days of Our Lives,” like the senior Randolphs and Matthewses of “Another World,” or the Tates of “Search for Tomorrow,” are technically known by soap writers as “tentpole characters,” on which the tragedies are raised. Anyway, as she set the table for dinner that evening at the senior Hortons’, Tom’s ghastly wife was singing. The elder Mrs. Horton said that she had a lovely voice, that she ought to make a professional thing of it. The ghastly wife went directly to Father Dr. Horton’s study and made a tape recording of her singing voice in song. She forgot, in her slovenly way, to turn the tape recorder off. Later that evening, Dr. Horton had a chat with his daughter-in-law Laura about her child, her husband’s infertility, and her brother-in-law’s fatherhood. The tape recorder was still on. Tom’s ghastly wife, trying later to recapture her own singing voice on tape, heard all the rest. It was unbearable. Months of blackmail, we all knew. It might have been a lifelong downer. I turned off for several years. The present moment—since July, I mean—as far as I can tell, is this. The tape incident seems nearly over. Mickey Horton, however, was believed by everyone, including himself, to have impregnated a girl other than his wife. Even I knew this was impossible, unless Mickey’s medical tests had been in error—in which case he might be the father of his wife Laura’s baby after all—or unless the writers, and Laura and her father-in-law, had forgotten the whole thing. When Mickey’s girl’s baby was born, it did turn out, through blood tests, that the baby could not have been Mickey’s. Of course not. Anybody who had watched even five days two years ago knew that. Meanwhile, a friend of the Horton family, Susan, who has had a terrible life, has been raped in the park, and is being treated by Laura, the psychiatrist. Well.

One thing about a work of art is that it ends. One may wish to know what happens after the last page of “Pride and Prejudice.” Some writers give signs of wishing the reader to abide with a given novel; one of the century’s great prose works, after all, ends in such a way that the reader is obliged to begin again. But narrative time in art is closed. The soaps, although they have their own formal limitations (how many times, for example, a major character is required by contract to appear each week onscreen), are eternal and free. One can have a heart attack during a performance of “King Lear” or fall in love while listening to Mozart, but the quotidian, running-right-alongside-life quality of soaps means that whole audiences can grow up, marry, breed, divorce, leave a mark on history, and die while a single program is still on the air. Aristotle would not have cared for it.

The soaps can, and sometimes do, adopt the conventional thriller form, which has a different sort of addict altogether: the solvers, the classicists who demand a beginning, a middle, and an end. There was a superb many-month conventional kidnapping episode on “The Doctors” once, when a trustee of the hospital abducted a nurse, under enthralling circumstances, and the only one who gradually caught on was the nurse’s roommate, Carolee Simpson, a character who, like “Another World’s” Lahoma, was meant to stay just briefly but has ever since been so good that she is essential to the plot—particularly in the recent matter of Dr. Allison. There was also a young lady physical therapist who thought herself widowed in the Six Day War (her husband had been a correspondent in the Middle East) and who fell in love with the son of the chief of all the doctors. The son was in love with her. Then it turned out that an Israeli girl had been nursing a blind American. He was rude to her for ages. She was kind to him. He turned out, after months, to be the lady therapist’s thought-dead husband, and things were resolved. Such episodes do occur. But they are rare. They are too self-contained. Now the wife of the chief of all the doctors, having been kidnapped and returned some months ago, thinks she is going mad. Her paternal uncle was a schizophrenic in his time.

There does not seem to be a single sense in which soap operas can be construed as an escapist form. There is unhappiness enough, and time, to occupy a real lifetime of afternoons. There is no release: not the scream, shudder, and return to real life that some people get from horror films; not the anxiety, violence, and satisfactory conclusion of detective, spy, or cowboy shows; certainly not the laughing chapters of fantasy home lives like “Lucy,” “Bachelor Father,” or “The Mothers-in-Law.” There is no escape, either, from political realities. The allegations that the soaps avoid the topical are simply false; race, Vietnam, psychosis, poverty, class, and generation problems—all are there. One thing soap operas do not do is flinch. They simply bring things home, not as issues but as part of the manic-depressive cycle of the television set. And what they bring home is the most steady, open-ended sadness to be found outside life itself.

No one can look forward to a soap unless he looks forward to the day, in which case he is not likely to be a watcher of soaps at all. Watchers resign themselves. There are seventeen soap operas on television now, some obviously less good than others (a soap that fails is not simply dropped from the air; it is, for the audience’s sake, quickly wrapped up: the hero, for example, is run over by a truck) and in their uncompromisingly funereal misery there is obviously some sort of key. Most sentimental or suspense forms—dog, horse, or spy stories, for instance—have a plotted curve: things are briefly fine, then they’re down for a long time, then they rise for a brief finale. There is some reward. The soap line goes almost straight, though inextricably tangled, down. The soaps are probably more true to the life of their own audience than they appear to be; certainly they are truer in pace, in content, and in subjects of concern than any other kind of television is. Not that there is much amnesia or that much insanity out here. Not that each woman’s secret fear, or hope, is that she is bearing the child of an inappropriate member of her family. But the despair, the treachery, the being trapped in a community with people whom one hates and who mean one ill, the secrets one cannot expose—except once or twice—in the course of years when changes and revelations occur in sudden jumps: these must be the days of a lot of lives.

This is not the evening’s entertainment, which one watches, presumably, with members of the family; not the shared family-situation comedies, which (with the important exception of “All in the Family”) are comfortable distortions of what family life is like. Soap operas are watched in solitude. This is the daytime world of the Randolphs, the Matthewses, the Hortons, the Tates—a daily one-way encounter group, a mirror, an eavesdropping on the apparent depression of being just folks for more than twenty years. It is even entering the commercials now—the utter joylessness. There are still the cheery, inane commercials with white tornadoes and whiter wash. But there are beginning to be hopeless underdogs: unpretty, sarcastic Madge, who, as a manicurist, deals with dishpan hands; a moronic young housewife who can scarcely articulate what she is shopping for; the emphasis on cold-water products, with actors who look as though they knew about life in cold-water flats. The view of life as a bitter, sad, dangerous ordeal, with a few seconds’ reprieve before the next long jolt to decent souls, cannot be confined to one side of the screen. Not on seventeen daytime dramatic serials. When, for millions, a credible villain is a suicide, dead and well out of it, and a hero is a man compelled to live his drama out, the daylight view of what life is like is far less sunny, on television, anyway, than the view by night. ♦