The Best and Worst of 2003: Soaps© Sarah Lee
Dec 26, 2003
The Soap with the Most Missed Opportunities: The last thing The Bold and the Beautiful has been this year, has been bold. Every five seconds the writers would get their feet wet with unique and intriguing stories and then they would quickly pull back and go for the conventional story. They practically dropped the tantalizing twist of Darla and Thorne while killing off Macy only a couple of months after she started going off the deep end. They were too afraid to really separate Eric and Stephanie despite his severe anger over the truth of Ridge's paternity. Nick and Brooke's romance literally ended in the middle as she went from kissing him to sleeping with Ridge after the Forrester coup. Perhaps Brad Bell thought about the risks he had already taken with Bridget and Ridge or April and decided he should go the safe route of Brooke hatred, Sheila, and paternity tests. But while it was smart for him to pull the plug on those stories, getting rid of everything else that wasn't familiar was just a bad idea.
The Worst Soap Trend: Oh, so many things to choose from here. It could be the rash of serial killer storylines, it could be the rash of poorly told rape stories, or it could be the infestation of "who's the daddy?" storylines. But actually, I chose the musical chairs of actors as the worst trend of the year. Think of all the switching we've seen this year; Roger Howarth moving from OLTL to ATWT, Matthew Ashford moving from Days to OLTL, Heather Tom leaving Y&R for OLTL, Bobbie Eakes going from B&B to AMC. And don't forget the incredibly desperate race to employ Port Charles' refugees (all the wrong ones might I add) really were the biggest stories of the year. But with such famous faces taking on new ones, recasts or not, it always dwarfed the actual work being done, especially behind the cameras with the writers. But this might have been better tolerated if so many other soaps didn't dump actors as well. There is a firing spree happening in Port Charles and Salem with little thought as to the long-term ramifications of it. Meanwhile actors are voluntarily leaving many soaps, tired of their storylines and/or the state of the show as a whole. Haven't these producers learned that in an era when finding the right writers is like finding a needle in a haystack, talented and smart actors are their most valuable resource? You decide that you can lose a talent like Jim Reynolds or Anna Lee for what, the cluster of models that can barely deliver their lines convincingly? I've always known soaps were destroying themselves from the inside with such poor managing and writing, but the constant cast juggling just might kill soaps faster than poor writing will.
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