The reformed trope

[titan1978]

Lots of soaps, especially in the last few decades have at least one (if not several) characters who used to be bad and are now reformed.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it’s a mess.  And there are rare examples of it not happening with long term characters too!

One that worked for me- Sean Donnelly on GH.  He worked wonderfully as an adversary at first, but he really fit in with the late 1980’s GH group of characters and Tiffany pretty well too.  The hero core with Robert, Anna, Frisco and Felicia.
 

One that didn’t- Michael Baldwin on Y&R.  He was awful in his original run, then shady and underhanded when he returned.  To now be as bland and generic as he became once his family came to town and he married Lauren- just never worked for me.  Him being friends with Cricket has never sat right with me either.

 

Never reformed- Dorian Lord OLTL and Roger Thorpe GL.  With Dorian, I know that Strasser kept that edge there because she felt Dorian was wicked at her core.  And I never felt like Dorian wasn’t still her selfish self no matter what.  Roger was certainly more shades of grey than as villainous as he had been.  But he was never reformed, he was still an angry outsider fighting for what he thought should be his.

[AlexElizabeth]

The biggest flop has to be Ben on DAYS. He strangled/murdered multiple people on screen because he got pleasure from it, but now we're supposed to believe that he's magically "reformed" and is the greatest leading man ever... because he takes psych pills now I guess. It's a joke and they won't stop pushing how "good" he is now, to the point where his wife bullied the mother of one of his murder victims for not believing that he was redeemed. It's disgusting.

[Franko]

Not sure if this counts, but soaps have long had bitchy characters who matured. Looking at you, Lisa _____.

[titan1978]

Erica too.  And Brenda on GH maybe isn’t  the vixen she was when she first arrived, but she still had an edge that say Liz no longer had.

It’s laughably bad.  I don’t care how hot he is, the lengths of redeeming him are ridiculous.

[Frank2803]

Todd Manning's redemption from a black hat villain to more of a gray villain surprisingly worked well. It was a stroke of genius making Viki his sister.

Scott Bryce's Craig should be the blueprint into turning a character from a villain to a hero 

[Paul Raven]

Bobbie GH - scheming rival to Laura to beloved nurse.

Rachel AW  from villian to lead heroine

Liz AW horrible mother in law and self centred to loveable busybody

[Spoon]

..and that was flushed down the toilet with Ben War...I mean Hunt Block in the role.

I'm all for redeeming characters but his villainous past is just supposed to be forgiven, even Luke Spencer was haunted by his misdeeds.  Ben  would've worked better as a "grey" character who is haunted by his evil deeds and is on a quest for redemption, but these Salemites just forgave him overnight. 

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[FrenchBug82]

I wonder in what category Days' Sami would fall.

She was clearly a villain - albeit from a place of hurt - at the beginning and she is a more grayish character now that I guess we are supposed to root for her.
She has had times where she was clearly written as a straight-up heroine and then they revert back to flawed schemer albeit now generally with enough of a "reason" that it doesn't come as straight-up villainous.
But she is still not a good person.

Which brings my question: where is the line between a character that has reformed (like AW's Rachel who we could not picture doing anything wicked by the end) vs a character whose edges have been sanded off to make them more durable: they are softer and have shown more layers but I'd argue their core is still selfish and ethically challenged like Sami or Todd.

[Chris B]

This is the worst I've ever seen. It's a soap and Days is a wacky soap at that, but I feel like the past year or two all Ben and Ciara do is whine about how people don't love him and forgive him. They don't HAVE to forgive him! He murdered people! The fact that Eve is still the villain to him killing her daughter is sick to me. If you wanna reform him, do it, but MOVE ON! I'm sick of listening to them whine. 

One of the best redemptions I've seen was the original redemption of Michael and Kevin on Y&R, I'd even include Phyllis. Around that 2003-2004 period the show had mostly redeemed these characters, but they still only existed on their side of Genoa City. They had their supporters, but their victims and victims families were allowed to dislike them and not want to be around them. It was the perfect balance I felt. Then as the writers changed it all shifted and their crimes were swept under the rug, their victims became the villains in the story and Kevin, Michael AND Phyllis were all turned into romantic heroes and heroine. The sad thing is, they were less interesting this way and there was less depth to the story after this was done.

[Paul Raven]

Yes, seeing Phyllis rant about Sally might have worked had her hypocrisy been called out, but Nick supported her schemes.Had he been resistant, their subsequent problems would have been more realistic.

[FrenchBug82]

It is funny coz I wrote a long comment along those lines and then deleted it because I know Phyllis is a touchy subject.
But This. I fully agree with you and I thought of the same thing. 
At least Michael and Kevin still have a rascally wink-wink attitude to misdeeds of others. But Phyllis has become the worst kind of "reformed character": she is not just a citizen of good standing in their universe, but she has the gall to be high-and-mighty and judgemental to others for their considerably more minor transgressions. And other characters enable her without anyone calling her out on it in any significant way.
You could easily have had Sharon overhear one of Phyllis' rants against Sally and commiserate with Sally on how hypocritical Phyllis is being. And that would have had the benefit of setting up even a minor interaction between Sally and Sharon which would become awkward later once Sally started dating Adam.
But at least some sense that Phyllis has a past. Nowadays it is belittled as her being a spitfire or something. She attempted to murder at least two people!

[Videnbas]

I think B&B in general does a very poor job with this trope. They routinely "redeem" characters in a way that feels completely undeserved and undeveloped. Sometimes they don't even acknowledge that a character needs redeeming, but instead move on to the next storyline as if they just hit a reset button. Redemption on B&B more or less equals saying "I have changed" (and possibly a few other characters echoing "s/he has changed"). Bell also has a thing for redemption by organ donation (three times and counting).

Some examples of failed redemption would be Quinn (who literally gets away with murder) and Flo. Then we have characters like Bill and Brooke, who never actually change or redeem thenselves but everyone just seems to forgive them no matter what they do. 

Edited November 1, 2021 by Videnbas

[SteelCity]

He's not even that hot, and his acting leaves A LOT to be desired.

[MichaelGL]

I was watching classic OLTL, and I couldn't help but to feel that Marco was redeemed from someone who would pimp outKaren/Katrina...to being someone to root for in 1983. 

ETA: It seems like Marco pretending to be Mario was used as a vehicle for the redemption.

[FrenchBug82]

Flo's was particularly insulting since it consisted of literally two steps:

- writing a storyline in which they ruined another beloved character to turn Flo into a victim
- She is Storm's daugher.
=
Redemption three months after her crimes!

I wouldn't put Brooke and Bill's transgressions in the same category. And ironically I'd say more characters still bring up past of/resent/call these two characters out than they do the outright criminals like Quinn and Flo