Living in Villainy
As my previous columns have alluded to in the past, I've had my fill of villains. Once upon a time they were literally a necessary evil of daytime, then they morphed into the lynchpin of the adventure era, and now, they have basically sucked the life out of soaps. But as long as I'm watching soaps, it is something I have to suck up and deal with. Of course, that doesn't mean that I can't give writers a few helpful hints on how to at least make their villains more meaningful and boy do they need the hints.
Not all villains are supposed to be cut from the same cloth. Some are long term thorns in a character's side, some actually have a wrap sheet longer than the cast of characters, some only pull petty stunts but still get under viewers' skin, and some are there solely for one purpose and then die in a blaze of glory. Some turn out to have a heart of gold, some turn out to be the illegitimate demon seed of a core character, some are not all bad, and some are just there to turn on the camp and make people scream. And it is today's writers' constant blindness to the fact that variety is the spice of soaps that is resulting in these cookie cutter villains who might as well be Snidely Whiplash. Has anyone noticed how obvious villains have been these days? Every single villain, whether a day player, recurring, or contract character, male or female is only missing the handlebar mustache. They're all so cheesy, so obvious, so ridiculous, and so clearly nuts. From All My Children's Michael to General Hospital's Alcazar, when a villain walks onto our screen, whether it is immediately obvious or not, once their evil intent becomes known, they become cheesy. And that lately has been more troublesome to me than the ratio of villains per soap.
A soap that has been drowning in cheesy badies is One Life to Live. There are a few really obvious villains in Llanview with one of the most recent ones being the return of Mitch. His return certainly wasn't the worst idea in the word and had plenty of potential. Mitch had his place in the eighties as the bad boy who spent two years manipulating people (usually women) to do his dirty work. Mitch served the purpose all the good and memorable villains did, he terrorized the town for awhile, all with a cool and alluring twinkle in his eye and the died a horrible and deserved death. Meanwhile, the town's heroine Viki Lord was triumphant as she survived his constant attempts to make her life miserable. So returning to town after his supposed scheme to switch Viki's baby Jessica was fraught with conflict, theoretically. Perhaps in the hands of stronger writers it would have worked. Instead very quickly Mitch's smarmy attitude and constant one-liners didn't only become old, but his schemes and intentions went into the column of absolutely unbelievable. All of the sudden, a character that had just barely avoided becoming a cartoon, was a cartoon villain. When Jessica is freaking out upon seeing his ghost in the mirror and Natalie's IQ drops and she considers sleeping with him, the whole point I think has been lost.
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