When and Why did Soaps Start Making Fun of Themselves? And has That Trend Led to the End??

[Mona Kane Croft]

I can speculate on the "when."  But no idea about the "why."

I think it was soon after Luke and Laura's "freeze the world" adventure on General Hospital.  The reason I say "after" is because I think Gloria Monty took that storyline pretty seriously.  Although it was clearly over the top and fundamentally science-fiction, it really wasn't intentionally campy or humorous, in my opinion.  But soon after, it was the soap operas that attempted to copy General Hospital's style that took their efforts too far -- the earliest and most obvious example was Days of Our Lives, which quickly turned Euro-gangster Stefano Dimera into a moustache-twriling super-villain, and sent Bo and Hope on campy cloak-and-dagger adventures.  Many of the other soaps eagerly copied the trend, branching into comedy (rather than traditional soap opera humor) and maximizing the campiness, rather than focusing on believable human drama.  A few held-out, still attempting to play out believable storylines.    

But on to the "why?"  I have no idea.    

Any thoughts????

[Khan]

The fact is the soaps, and the people who work in the soaps, always have been ashamed of themselves.  They don't see what they do for their most loyal fans as being as "legitimate" as what primetime shows and movies do for their audiences.  IOW, daytime has suffered for a long time from a massive inferiority complex; and it's that complex, IMO, that has been the primary cause of its' downfall.

Edited January 8, 2024 by Khan

[DRW50]

You can see that really ossify in the '90s, with the reigns of people like JFP and Guza who so clearly hated soaps and wanted to make them more acceptable to their own standards. 

The industry had such a clear contempt for soaps - you can see that in so many TV shows and movies going back even to the '40s and '50s - but they were still able to have their own identity and didn't bow to the mass hatred until somewhere in the '80s and '90s.

What bothers me the most is someone like Carlivati who is endlessly patted on the back for loving soaps, yet also treats them as a joke. At least Guza's failed ambitions were honest. I have a harder time getting part Ron turning so much of the end of OLTL into a wankfest for his endless self-parodies.

[Paul Raven]

GH got a lot of attention and ratings success out of LnL. a failing hospital based soap was re-invented as a more action oriented serial.

So other shows thought far out stories involving young couples was what the audience wanted. They too would take on a new identity as GH had done.

And nightime soaps took off so that become the default template and  in came glamor and big business.

The domestic/ small town / generational/emotional angst angles that had been the bedrock of soaps for decades  took a back seat.

It was a short sighted approach as soaps became dependent on hot couples and plot based storylines.

 

[j swift]

I think there are a lot of third (or fourth) generation writers to blame.  The first generation created the soap, it was their baby, and they took it very seriously.  Whether that meant writing morality plays or social issues stories, they created a genre that was unique to the audience and the time of day.  The second generation rebelled against Gen I and wanted to turn daytime into something else.  They may have been playwrights or failed novelists, and they wanted to overlay the format with their own agenda.  Now we are at Gen III who grew up with soaps, they revered the format, and they comment upon the conventions either by trying to recapture the magic of the past, or through humor.  What we need is a writer who wants to push forward and adapt the romance and drama to be relevant within today's culture.

Edited January 8, 2024 by j swift

[Paul Raven]

The people involved in the soaps from the more traditional era 50's-70's slowly were edged out, retired and died.

Roy Winsor, Irna Phillips, Henry Slesar and later Harding Lemay,Pat Falken Smith, Bill Bell,Agnes Nixon plus people like Ed Trach and Bob Short at P&G. 

The list goes on.

So the next generation- people like Pam Long, Chris Goutman, Megan McTavish, Jill Farren Phelps,Chuck Pratt and Ron Carvilati really only knew soaps from the 80's style and were not aware or interested in the past. Execs were the same and kept trying to 'update' the soaps in the wrong way.

Hence Passions,The City and Sunset Beach.

 

Edited January 8, 2024 by Paul Raven

[Mona Kane Croft]

Interesting analysis, and I tend to believe you are correct.  But if the folks in charge of daytime dramas have had a long-term inferiority complex, then why did that complex only emerge in the mid-1980s, 1990s, and the 2000s, with the crazy plots, campiness, and insulting comedy?   Why were soaps so serious and compelling in the 1960s and '70s? There must have been a catalyst to propel all the change in the early 1980s.  What was it?   An outsider might suggest it was simply a misguided grab for ratings. But nearly all the soaps had very high ratings in the 1970s.  Why change something that isn't broken?    

[Khan]

Again, I have to go back to PASSIONS as being the absolute nadir of this genre.  There were bad soaps before PASSIONS, but no soap, IMO, was as bad - not just dull, like pre-Barnabas DS; or generic, like most of LOVING; but flat-out, funky-ass bad - from day damn one as PASSIONS was.  I mean, bad writing, bad acting, bad directing, bad music and sets - that piece of [!@#$%^&*] never should have seen the light of day.

But the truly funny/sad part is how PASSIONS tried to re-brand itself as tongue-in-cheek satire after they realized how much of a thud they had landed within the general soap watching community.  "It's campy, because it's supposed to be campy!"  Bitch, please!  Your show reeks and you know it!

Anyways.  Y'all were saying?

Edited January 8, 2024 by Khan

[Paul Raven]

As I said the success of GH that got media attention on soaps in a way that never happened before and the arrival of nightime soaps that gave the genre way more attention.

So TPTB decided that the slower pace domestic angle was not what the public wanted, even though that had worked for decades. Also demographics were changing with more women working, VCRs introduced and new competition from cable. Things were in a state of flux but the response was in the main wrong.

[Mona Kane Croft]

Re-brand itself?  I thought Passions was tongue-in-cheek satire from day-one.   Are you saying Passions was serious drama until it re-branded?   At what point in the storyline did Passions re-brand?  Maybe I don't understand your point.   

[Khan]

I'm saying PASSIONS and NBCD wanted us, the viewing public, to believe that what they were producing everyday was legitimately good soap opera and not anything else until they realized that they were fooling no one.  Then, rather than admit that the show was horrible, that no one other than small children thought it was any good, that NBCD had made a mistake in giving JER his own show and full creative control, and that maybe they should replace him as HW (if not as EP and show owner, too) with someone who knew what the [!@#$%^&*] they were doing, TPTB decided that they would Jedi Mind Trick everyone instead into thinking it always was meant to be camp/satire/spoof and that we were just missing the point.

Edited January 8, 2024 by Khan

[Paul Raven]

Yes, I don't recall any pre publicity stating that the show was going to be tongue in cheek or satire. Had they done that then maybe viewers/critics might have had adifferent attitude.

Instead we were promised a Peyton Place meets Twin Peaks vibe. Kinda gothic, suspenseful and mysterious, maybe a little off beat.

And what we got amongst other things in the first ep  was Galen Gering and Jesse Metcalfe on location having an episode long conversation...

[Khan]

Exactly.  

I remember JER talking up the show beforehand to the soap mags, referencing PP and other works and saying it would be a traditional soap but "with a twist" (meaning, of course, Tabitha and Timmy and that creepy girl who was warning Dana Sparks that "evil is coming!"), but nothing that said, "But we'll also give our audience a few playful winks and nudges and just have some fun with the conventions of this genre."  

Norman Lear made it clear at the outset that "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman" was not meant to be taken seriously, as did ABC with "Soap."  If your intent is to send up something like the soaps, then you say so, so your audience doesn't go in with false expectations.  Otherwise, if you don't make that clear up front, you're just confusing us.

Frankly, I think JER was the only one who thought what he was writing was any good, satire or not, and that no one else who was affiliated with PASSIONS ever had the heart to tell him otherwise.

By the way, I apologize for turning this thread into a PASSIONS-oriented one, but I've always seen that show in particular as the final, bitter outcome of a gradual dumbing-down of soaps that began all the way back in the early '80's with the Ice Princess storyline on GH.

Edited January 8, 2024 by Khan

[Xanthe]

I didn't watch Passions. Did it make fun of soap tropes and conventions specifically and directly, or was it just that it had silly outlandish supernatural storylines? I would argue that you can combine soap with other genres without necessarily undermining the soap elements.

My radical opinion is that soaps would have been better off if they had been satisfied with capturing and entertaining their own niche audiences rather than trying to mimic what other "more successful" soaps were doing and diluting their own individual brands. Don't chase the GH supervillain ice princess if your show is about a publishing magnate and his artist wife.

[DramatistDreamer]

Good topic @Mona Kane Croft. Lots of food for thought.

If people haven’t read the book When Women Invented Television I would highly recommend it, it’s worth a read but the sections on Irna Phillips would be particularly relevant to this discussion. From what I read, it appeared that Phillips felt that the executives, P&G, et al, never had much faith in her and didn’t trust her instincts. There is that story of Phillips wanting to do away with the organ music that led to ad breaks for televised soaps, insisting that it was only really necessary for radio broadcasts and if it continued on television, she feared that it would only become something that would be made light of and mocked. Obviously, TPTB didn’t agree with her and felt it was a signature of sorts, for a soap and left it in. Who was right, who was not? I don’t know if the answer is that simple but think of all of those sketch comedy shows that parody soaps, what’s the first cue that they use? Organ music?

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I think though that there was always something of a hierarchy within entertainment with television somehow being at the bottom, that has changed with the era of prestige prime time television that began around the end of the 20th century. Meanwhile, in daytime, it feels as though people making the dramas were determined to either be in on the joke or make a mockery of themselves lest they be mocked by others. 
There are other elements that went into it as well, sexism, misogyny, chauvinism, arrogance, lack of vision, lack of foresight, too much of a willingness to go with the trend and toss out the fundamental tenets of good storytelling, seeking cheap thrills.

The other part of it was that once the genre developed an inferiority complex (I would agree that it was likely industry wide some time in the 1990s) the companies that produced these shows started chasing screenwriters who couldn’t find work in films to write for these daytime dramas, whether these writers knew anything about the shows they were writing for or not.

Of course, there is no rule against genre hopping —Paddy Chayefsky was a writer that many writers wanted to emulate (minus the horrible health issues) because he was successful writing scripts for television, theater and film. But many of these writers didn’t know or seem to care about the history of the genre they were entering into.

Edited January 8, 2024 by DramatistDreamer