To Die or not To Die
In the past, I've addressed in several different forms, the decision to get rid of popular characters and their portrayers. It seems like executives still don't get the point as they just randomly get rid of popular actors and/or characters and never ever replace those people with anyone more valuable. But Karen's death on Port Charles a couple of weeks ago reminded me of a column I was going to do over a year ago when I first got this column, could have sworn I already wrote and I realized that for some reason, I never did.
The idea originally came to me when I read Michael Logan's comments about As the World Turns' originally considering killing Barbara off when she was in the explosion two years ago. Obviously they spared Barbara (well physically not emotionally) and she's been one of the only veterans of the show front and center ever since. At the time, there were a lot of characters on the chopping block. All My Children had gotten rid of Gillian to rather poor results, Guiding Light killed off Catalina, and later ATWT did kill off Bryant and Jake in less than a year. But the Barbara example was different because the actress' contract wasn't up. The show threatening to kill her off had nothing to do with Colleen; just what might work for the story. However, eight times out of ten, when a character is killed off, it's because the actor is leaving, not because writers want to do something different, daring, or take a story in a drastic direction. But even if writers tried to keep the death a secret, with Internet rumors, leaks, and soap press, this makes any soap death impossible to navigate. One of the reasons even pretty nicely written swan songs haven't created the ripple ones in the past have, is because we always see it coming. Too many people already know the details of why an actor has been kicked off the show and if the fans don't agree with the reasoning behind it, they are even more hostile when the death airs.
Then there is the other two percent of soap deaths, the ones that actually are daring, unexpected, story driven deaths and the ones that are the quick and easy way of getting rid of dead weight. The latter we see all the time. GL's Catalina died because she was useless, Days' Colin died because the character never worked, and OLTL's Sam died because there was no where for his character to go anymore (if there had ever been). But if fired fan favorites' on screen deaths illicit anger and resentment, the death of characters fans have either tired of or never warmed up to creates the ultimate antipathy. Let's take for example Colin's death on Days, the convoluted murder mystery of not only who shot Colin, but who killed Colin, which shot killed Colin, how many people shot at Colin in one night, and on and on and on was only a slight problem. On the other hand, the fact that absolutely no one cared who killed Colin was a much bigger problem. If no one liked Colin, cared for Colin, bought the character of Colin, and were at best amused that it seemed like the entire cast shot Colin, the mystery could only fall flat and that is exactly what it did.
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