Fear has made daytime stale

[Skin]

 

I think those expectations unfortunately are too high for Daytime during the time period in question. You barely get that even with more niched and focused primetime shows, let alone ensemble series. I feel like you can count on one hand how many shows like that existed as major television productions/series. Most of them only on premium cable networks (Queer As Folk, The L Word, Looking, Glee and maybe Grey's Anatomy if you squint) and it's 2020. Usually in a primetime series you are lucky to get one gay character, with one love interest and then the series runs it into the ground. 

 

I feel like a big reason the writers don't bring on many gay characters is they feel it limits storylines. I think that's why Pratt made Reese bi-sexual, so he could create a love square between Reese, Zach, Kendell and if he could have re-written Bianca's status as a lesbian he would have. 

[Faulkner]

I feel like streaming has done a lot of good here to carry the flag of the above shows and push things forward, with series like Sense8, High Fidelity (with Zoe Kravitz as a sexually fluid lead), Special, Dear White People, Transparent, Orange is the New Black, and dozens of series that most of us may not know but are waiting for discovery. The ability to narrowcast programming, without pressure to please a broadcast-size audience, has been sooo beneficial. Network TV isn’t even close to doing a good enough job, primetime or daytime. (The CW had been making some strides in recent years.) Cable at least has dramas like Pose, but they could be doing more, beyond the Ryan Murphy stuff and Killing Eve, etc.

 

I’m curious about the sexually fluid idea for soaps. It would definitely open up the number of available partners a character could have (the advice to be “not too specific,” so that any character could be anyone’s brother or sister or lover).
 

But a lot of us mention that the secret between Kyle and Theo on Y&R should have been that they were lovers, instead of the banal stupidity about drugs and girls that it ultimately became. Would the blue hairs in the audience have accepted Kyle with Summer and Lola with the knowledge that he banged/got banged by a dude? No. 1, the writers don’t have the luxury of setting that story up properly (patience just isn’t a thing that soaps value these days), and No. 2, they’ve struggled so hard for years to find a youngish male lead who clicked with the audience, which Michael Mealor has done, and they don’t want to “taint” him with risky storytelling. Especially when they felt they ticked that box with Mariah, which they’ll pat themselves on the back for but won’t really invest in. (I know they also did it with Adam, but his sex with Rafe was a homophobic attempt to show how much of a sociopath he was, which only made his “rescue” by Sharon’s love more appealing.) I think soaps feel much more comfortable creating fluid female characters, and we have all of two of them on daytime (Kristina on GH and Mariah).

 

Soaps have always also done LGBT stories with characters under 40. The few major exceptions have been psychos (Nora’s serial killer husband on OLTL and the dude Lucinda was dating who was creeping on Luke on ATWT). I sort of get it, because they’re using LGBT stories to pull in younger viewers, but it feels like a missed opportunity. There’s so much richness in the lives of older characters.

[Vee]

To me the issue with the Reese/Zach/Bianca, etc. storyline wasn't that Reese was bisexual or had chemistry with Zach; it was that Bianca and their much-hyped relationship, brought on with great fanfare, was just a vehicle for delivering Tamara Braun and pairing her with Thorsten Kaye. (I think Braun was sold a bill of goods as well; she was committed to the romance with Bianca.)

 

On another show, with better writers, the bisexual angles with Reese, Bianca and Zach could have played well and been edgy but smart, complicated but daring, but they needed to put the time into committing to Bianca, who was the money with the audience, and Bianca and Reece together, and they didn't. They prioritized Zach and the hot new hire who'd they sold on the back of Bianca's immense popularity. Supposedly Eden may have left over a plan for Bianca to sleep with Ryan out of revenge, or something - I would've watched that! Though it seems nonsensical, at least it would be soapy and complicated. But Pratt's stated goal was to cement Reese as a bisexual vixen on canvas aimed primarily towards the men of his choice, not to present a major lesbian couple which did have star power or play a tangled, edgy bisexual triangle. The latter would've worked for me.

Edited July 13, 2020 by Vee

[All My Shadows]

It would have been interesting to see how Bianca Montgomery and Luke Snyder aged had their respective shows continued on, with those characters remaining on the canvas. AMC, I think, would be better the bet bc they were so comfortable with Bianca's sexuality partly because of how - and idk if this is the word - mainstream she was. She was everything any other younger female from Pine Valley, Pennsylvania, could have been, it's just that she pursued relationships with women. She grew up to become a typical Pine Valley mom, and I think that at some point, they would have paired her with a long-term love interest, and with time, they easily could have become daytime's first/only lesbian tentpole couple. Had the show continued and continued, it wouldn't have been outside the realm of possibility to have the big Christmas celebration at their house, and Bianca would be reading the AMC poem (which she already did for the 35th anni.).

 

The only daily soap that I know of that did a older gay characters/couple was Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman near the end of its first set of 130 episodes. The storyline centered on Mary's new neighbors Ed and Howard, who were awkwardly pretending to be brothers while living together until it was revealed they were actually a couple conflicted on whether or not to just come out openly and get married (which is what Ed, the older one, wanted - Howard was like 5-10 years younger and was less confident). Their story was all too short, and I wished they would have kept them on as part of the show's stable of characters, but still, they did a decent job at a time when Y&R and DAYS both backed down from their planned stories.

[Skin]

Luke and Bianca both had one thing that other needed to be fully realized soap characters. 

 

The biggest problem with Bianca was having a meaningful love interest. She had more or less great writing, great development and the commitment of her show but her writing was never focused on her romances. The show did everything in it's power to keep Bianca single. Frankie, Lena, Maggie, Zoey, Reese, Marissa one after another they just gave her pointless love interests that went nowhere. Marissa was probably the closest that came to a long-term love interest that was stable. They had children together and wanted to have a family together but they ended up killing her off. They loved Bianca as a character but hated her love life. 

 

Luke had love interests, and actually had two popular ships but the show was not interested in good story-telling for him and as time went on, they cared less and less about him as a character. So you end up with two solid couples more or less with Luke and Noah and Luke and Reid, but with piss poor story-telling, low investment and back-burner status. 

 

 

Edited July 13, 2020 by Skin

[Soapsuds]

Luke and Will had the same problem. They were stuck in boring pairings.The money couples were Will and Paul and Luke and Reid and in both cases the fans got shafted.

[TV4Me]

Only having four soaps has made daytime stale. The same small pool of actors that seem to move back and forth between the four shows. A few years ago, an ABC executive said the soap opera genre is dead and that there will never be another new soap. It's been about 20 years since the last new one. They went from twelve shows to four. They used to replace the ones they cancelled with new ones. That changed.

[Meredith]

At first I thought this thread was about fear of covid.  It was pretty lame how Rey gave Sharon her engagement ring on Y&R.   He left it on the coffee table, then waited on the sofa for her to come in and find it.