Which Soaps Did You Stop Watching, Come Back to, and Couldn't Enjoy Anymore?

[mikelyons]

I know the title is long and awkward, but bear with me.

 

I was recently telling someone how much I loved OLTL in the Labine era, but I was terribly turned off when Jill Phelps took over. I stopped watching for about a year or two, tried to get back into it, but I always felt like someone had ripped the heart out of the show. People would always tell me about the great things the show was doing in its final years, yet I never reconnected with OLTL. 

 

AMC is also on this list. I stopped watching with the rape of Bianca. When I tried to tune-in based on whoever was head writer, I'd see Bianca with that child and I just couldn't stomach it anymore. 

 

I've always loved Y&R, but the minute Kevin put on that chipmunk head, I turned it off. Ever since then, I'll try to watch Y&R if I'm home during the day, but it feels like watching someone you once loved acting totally out of character. It feels like nothing about the Y&R I once loved even exists anymore. At least we'll always have "Nadia's Theme".

 

EMMERDALE was a soap I loved, but the influx of Dingles simply ruined the show for me. I tried to re-connect with the show, but the rape of Victoria Sugden was the final straw. Ugh. It felt like shock for the sake of shock. I turned it off after that.

Edited February 26, 2021 by mikelyons

[titan1978]

GH is the only one I could leave, even for a couple of years at a time, and still tune in again and pick up the habit.

 

Your example of AMC was pretty much when I stopped watching it too.  I also would pick it up when their was a new HW or I heard people talking about a good story, but it just felt hollow in a way that even JFP and Guza’s GH did not.  Plenty of classic characters still on the show and being used, unlike GH at that time.  But something felt off in Pine Valley and it was sad to watch so I didn’t.  Angie and Jesse cured a lot of that, and made it at least watchable when they came back, kind of breathed new life into it.  But I can’t say even they would have been enough at that time for me to watch for years again, because everything else was not enjoyable.

 

I felt the same way about OLTL when Dena was the head writer.  It just stopped being a good show for me at that point, and even though I watched a lot of the Carlivati era, I was never a consistent, daily viewer again.

 

I watched a lot of these shows in shallow periods.  But once it’s all characters I don’t recognize or care about, it’s easy to walk away.

[soapfan770]

Days. I enjoyed the show for almost twenty years even through the hell of Langan, Reilly 2.0, and “Touch the skies” but it was the 2011 reboot that killed my interest in Days overall. I think it was EJ and Sami having sex while mourning their briefly presumed dead son for the sake of shock value and what not along with the other ridiculous stories that reboot brought. 
 

I tuned again in 2014 for Sami’s exit but nothing else interested me on the show. Watched in 2015 for the 50th anniversary and up through Stefano’s death but then deaths  of Will & Bo left me feeling cold. The final straw for me was Chase raping Ciara when I felt Chase had so much potential. The Aiden stuff was whack.

 

I started watching Days again last July when I heard Sorel was back as Vivian as was Sami coming to crash Nicole’s wedding. The show hasn’t been too bad, favorite story by far has been the Gwen story but that recently ended with the death of Laura Horton and now Cady is gone as Jennifer. And Ben Weston is an albatross to the show.

[SFK]

General Hospital is my definitive answer. I can hardly believe how I can't make it through more than a few minutes of this show when I was such a huge fan during the Labine era. It was my favorite soap and I watched as soon as I got home from high school.

 

Things may have been different had my college schedule not been so demanding, but there was a loooong stretch in the 00's where I just did not care for AMC and OLTL. I grew up watching AMC and I was obsessed with Lord of the Banner/DID OLTL. I missed Robin Strasser for one, and both shows seemed hollow, AMC particularly gimmicky. I did ease back into the shows when I graduated and was home unemployed.

Please register in order to view this content

I'm glad that I was a viewer for their final years.

[Bill Bauer]

Days of Our Lives. It was so incredibly good in the 70s and early 80s but then it got so bad that I jumped ship for ATWT and GL. When those got cancelled, I tried going back to Days because I missed watching a daytime soap but it was as bad (actually worse) as I remember it being in the mid-to-late 80s. So I didn't stick with it long. Since then, I'll go back to it periodically hoping it will be good but it never holds my interest for long. I really want it to be good. It just seems to get worse and worse. 

[Paul Raven]

Y&R

All of the Bell era.

When Mac and Billy were recast and Jill/Katherine became mother/daughter, my interest began to waver.

Came back for early MAB until crazy Patty took over.

Tried again when Sally Sussman returned but there wasn't enough to keep me watching.

Now just follow summaries and watch irregularly.

[beebs]

Pretty much every soap I was into.

Y&R I lost interest in when Mal Young replaced Sally Sussman, but ultimately the thing that killed the show for me was making Jill be Kay's daughter, not necessarily because it was a poor story choice (it was), but because it was among the first of a looooong list of things that started the decline.

DAYS lost me during the last Dena run and never quite got me back. Ron has truly destroyed any chance the show could come back, and it's a shame.

GL lost me when Reva the Clone arrived. I came back near the end to Alan stumbling about in a suit in a grey snowy field and nearly fell off the couch laughing.

AW lost me when they killed Frankie. I came back when they announced Alice Barrett's return, and it was jarring with the sci-fi crap they were doing with the Jordan Stark story. The finale did no one any favours.

 

GH is the worst for me. The values of the show are so warped, it makes me physically angry to watch, ever since the JFP/Guza era. Sonny pulling a gun on Jax in Robin's foyer in front of her daughter and Robin being totally okay with potentially murdering someone in front of a small child and not even so much as raising her voice to Sonny over it was the straw that broke the camel's back for me. I haven't been able to even attempt to try to get back into it since.

Edited February 27, 2021 by beebs

[victoria foxton]

Even by the late 90's i was getting tired of GH. But i really gave up on it. When GH became Mob Hospital. The Guza/JFP/Pratt era was a nightmare. The Q's/Georgie being slaughtered was disgusting. Over the yrs i watched bits and pieces. 
 The last time i really enjoyed Days was under Brash/Cwikly. I did also liked Will's coming out. And early WilSon. Now it's a badly written show. With bad set. 

[wingwalker]

For me, the main one is the Young and the Restless.  Chuck Pratt's reign of terror forced me to stop watching. Even LML and end of MAB weren't as bad as Pratt. When Sally Sussman and Kay Alden came back, I was very excited and felt I was getting exactly I wanted,  two people that trained under Bell and could restore that essence of the show, but update it to modern day.  When they left or got fired, that's when I realized that the Y&R I want never going to happen. So I asked myself, can I enjoy the show for what it is today? That answer I eventually came to was no. Since then, I haven't watched Y&R. 

 

 

[All My Shadows]

Literally all four of the remaining soaps for me lol I've tried to get into each one of them at different points since ATWT and AMC left the air, but I just can't. I guess, technically, only DAYS fits the topic here for me as I watched it regularly for about two years previously.

[Fevuh]

Y&R got so dumb.  Jack/Yack and Pilar which mysteriously lost the Latina accent - then Victor claiming he had to replace Jack with the imposter to protect the familleehhh because of the dommed Paragon Virus!  Which was one year after him switching Jack out and the god awful Cady McLain being his captor.  Then there was Neil keeping Hillary in a boathouse so he could save her.  Newman tower burning but the Genoa City police only have 1 helicopter and it’s life threatening for 4 days and Victor has no helicopters but has a helipad.  And I try to tune in once in a while and it’s been the Adam show since that guy joined.  My whole familiy quit.  I know I won’t ever be back but maybe once a month:  for 5 minutes.  Stafford as Phyllis has been a bust.  I’m shocked when I read they will pair Sally with Jack possibly.  These old men bedding young girls has got to go:  this show is in dire trouble along with B&B and they’re damn lucky CBS hasn’t thought of expansion of Price is Right to 2 hours. 

[vetsoapfan]

As someone who has loved soaps for my entire life, I have been attached to most of the long-running ones at various times of my life. As shows' writers changed and the quality rose and dipped, my interest would either wan or intensify, depending on the quality of the individual programs.

 

Once daytime TV made the egregious and damaging choice to get into cretinous low-brow camp and science fiction/fantasy, however, I started dropping the shows one by one, and I have never been able to get back into any of them, despite repeated attempts. Remembering how absorbing and adult the soaps could be in the 1950s, '60s. and '70s, I simply cannot stomach the asinine garbage that has been foisted on viewers for the last several decades.

 

It's a shame because I WANT to watch serials. I had decades' worth of pleasure from following them, but the morally-degenerate GH, painfully-idiotic DAYS, dull-as-dishwasher Y&R and redundant, pointless B&B have nothing to offer.

[Faulkner]

1997 almost miraculously brought me back as a loyal viewer of GL (after JFP and McTavish drove me away), but the 1-2-3 punch of Clone Reva, the Santos crime family, and San Cristobal cut the cord for me. Even though there were things I enjoyed about the final decade of GL (GT’s Dinah being first and foremost), the spell had been fully broken and I mostly watched GH (even though it was rough as well).

[vetsoapfan]

 

I was in love with TGL for decades, but the slaughtering of its core in 1983-4 really did me in. I still wanted to watch "my" show, however, and came back in the late 1980s for Holly and Roger when I saw that the writing was vastly improved, and the show felt like itself again. But the death of Maureen Bauer, the putrid sci-fi crap, the mob, and San Cristocrap turned me off for good. I could never enjoy the series again.

[applcin]

GH - I had watched from the first L + L on-the-run-story until some years after the Sonny/Jason-ification of the show, which, on top of the latter-day Cassadine presence that I also could have done without, just finally turned me off. I think I checked back once or twice, during a Nurse's Ball time, Richard Simmons reappeared, Finola and Ian Buchanan were back...but I had no familiarity with the younger crowd and not much interest in catching up on what happened in all those years.

DOOL - this is the only other soap left on air that I had watched. My history with it wasn't actually that long, about 5 years, during that late 80s, early 90s period when Steve & Kayla were first coming together up to shortly after he "died." I lost interest shortly after that and only returned to the show when they were brought back to be reunited. I watched for a short time and then ended up dropping it again anyway and haven't seen it since.

OLTL - the situation was slightly different. Forgive me, but I was never a fan of Roscoe Born, mainly because I didn't like the characters he played across several soaps starting with RH, and I wasn't entertained by them. A couple of times that Mitch Laurence was brought back and the crazy uber-devil caca happened again were times I went on hiatus from the show. Then they had him kill Jared Banks when I had really enjoyed his story with Natalie and I was done. I briefly checked out OLTL 2.0 but the thrill was gone.

GL - I started to get really bored with it in the mid-2000s and left when DAM was fired, which was about the only reason I was still watching at that point. I did check out when they briefly brought him back but, between the bad writing, Peapack and cheap-looking production, I just couldn't.