Unpopular opinions: cancelled soaps edition

[Mitch]

I think the skeleton's dancing was on Bo's phone after his mom or Maggie "died" ..wasn't it death never takes a holiday, or something. The start to the SS was eerie and good, but the pile on and pile on of deaths made it...a joke..and nothing else was happening and no one was mourning and no one was the least bit afraid that a killer was targeting too families. Death had become so cheap on soaps (and Days) that we knew there would be no long term anything.   Add to that it as you and others said, made no sense (Victor dies by other means then the SS, yet he is on the Island...) Marlena was the WORST serial killer on record..she left tons of DNA and was on the site of a great majority of the killings, the camp level was up to 250...(not only was the SS going around town, but Doug and Julie just happen to have a tiger..they bring to town for...reasons...and it gets loose and everyone goes about their business with both a killer and a tiger on the loose...) The only thing good about it was that it made me feel "Oh ATWT and GL arent so bad.."

 

I would still love to know what Reilly really intended..(besides his own seeming dislike for Days) did Marlena have a brain tumor or something, a split personality...obviously Alice was thrown in after he had to change things and keep everyone alive...they could write a book about this!!!

Edited November 3, 2021 by Mitch

[Vee]

Nope. Which was fine by me. I assumed she had gotten back together with Brody, which the ABC finale hinted at. Jessica needed a long break.

[koos]

A pair of characters, possibly Jack and someone else, were walking through an alley and a line of skeleton children shuffled and danced past them. It was totally random.

Edited November 3, 2021 by koos

[Forever8]

True! But they at least could've said Jessica got a new job at The Dallas News and she and the kids and Brody moved there. 

[Mitch]

Ah...I didn't remember that..but it did add to the other wordly eerie feeling it all started as...but then it all became a joke and as the bodies piled up there were no stakes. If they had kept it as a couple of characters "died" and maybe other people were attacked and survived...and the feeling around town would be.."Who do I trust" it could be anyone..and people start to turn on each other...to paraphrase a really bad movie..."That the real curse of the Dimera's paranoia and fear!"

 

[Soaplovers]

Guiding Light:

While I liked the early 90s of GL, I wouldn't call it a golden age.  It was well done, but lacked spirit.  And I found that Alexandra, Nadine, Holly, and Maureen were written more to certain tropes (Alexandra = woman scorned, Nadine = desperate woman, Holly = super neurotic, and Maureen = judgemental).

When Long was there, all of these women had different facets that got sidelined (Alexandra = warm, Nadine = sly, Holly = confident, and Maureen = human and funny).

I just think early 90s GL had good points, but no warmth or a sense of fun.

[AMCOLTLLover]

Unpopular Opinion about GH:

I know that TC will always be Nikolas Cassadine but when he abruptly left in 2016 and Nick Stabile took over i kinda started to like NS in that role.

I would've been completley fine with Nick Stabile playing Nikolas on a permanent basis.

 

 

[Spoon]

This. There was something lacking in the early 90s, I could never place my finger on it but you hit the nail on the head. The exodus of numerous 80s mainstays between 1989 and 1991 really signalled the end of an era.

[amybrickwallace]

Tyler will always be the definitive Nikolas, but NS definitely had good points in the role. 

[Frank2803]

I think from a nostalgic point of view the early to mid 90s are considered a golden era because it was before the soap industry got hit by OJ Simpson trial, cancellations, and other factors.

[DramatistDreamer]

Daytime soaps stopped any genuine moves toward innovation about twenty years ago. 

[amybrickwallace]

Sad but true!

[FrenchBug82]

That's not entirely true.

The story arcs on Port Charles, GH Night Shift/Beyond Salem, Prospect Park, the Peapack experiment...
There have been attempts. The former were not particularly revolutionary and the latter have been a flaming disaster but it is not entirely true that there has been zero efforts in the past twenty years to try and help the soap genre "modernize".

My personal take is that the problem with all of these is that they tinker either with the actual format - which I don't think is the problem - or the production model (which could be spruced up towards a more UK soap look but I think Peapack traumatized too many execs for anybody to try something like that again) rather than the content.

I think soaps should focus on becoming bolder content-wise, telling new kinds of stories, be blunter about real-life issues and stop catering the conservative instincts (not just politically, temperamentally more generally) of some of its audience.
It is their fear of alienating what's left of their shrinking audience that is making them so timid and too paralyzed to attempt anything risky to *grow* it. So they stay on cruise control.

Soap executives and a lot of people argue that soaps are dying because the format is not adapted to our ADD modern age and flexible lifestyles. I disagree. I think there is plenty of room for stable one-hour of entertainment every day in the same universe - no reason soaps would be thriving in other countries when the structural conditions are the same.
No, the problem is that American soaps are stale content-wise and what IS true is that every network and soap executive and EP have largely almost entirely focused any rebooting attempts at the way soaps look or feel rather than what they SAY.
One important factor of the success of the soaps back in the day was that they actually told bold stories that spoke to people and even pushed them a little (a well-remembered example being Erica's abortion). It might have gotten some blowback but it created a real faithful audience who cared one way or another.

They have given up trying to make us care and are just trying to entertain us in a shallow way because they think modern audiences can't hold on to something long enough before being distracted by something else. That's a big mistake because the entire point of soaps is that the interest, pleasure, satisfaction or any other feeling we feel is something that is built and reverbates long-term. And when they forget that, they just end up looking like cheaper versions of all kinds of other better shows we see out there.
Execs believing that soaps are dying because modern ADD viewers can't care for a story for too long and who therefore push for stories with immediate payoffs has a huge self-fulfilling prophecy aspect to it. Coz if you don't write long-term story, you don't get long-term investment from viewers. Which then reinforces their assumption that the reason for the genre's decline is structural.

 

[DramatistDreamer]

We will have to agree to disagree. Those changes are around the edges, rather superficial. This is why I stipulated genuine. I am not talking about change for change's sake, or change due to budgetary restraints. Pretty much all of those changes were borne out of necessity, not in a genuine spirit of innovation.

[FrenchBug82]

Actually, I completely agree on that latter point.

But I am interested in what kind of "genuine" change you are thinking of that would be of a different nature from what was tried - production models with Peapack, differnt type of story-telling with story arcs, different platforms with PP/BS - or from what I was talking about which was content.