Storyline Roulette

A lot of things go into making a fifty-two minute soap be engrossing enough for the majority of viewers. The dialogue has to be fresh, the actors have to be at their peak (or close to it), there has to be a continual thread and consistency from recent episodes, and most importantly, the stories, characters, and couples involved have got to be worth being intrigued about. Now let's face it, even though the actual quality of the creative team behind most of the soaps is without question, poor, this would be hard regardless. We are talking ten times the amount of shows that primetime shows deal with and with far less preparation time. There is no downtime, there is constant movement and struggle and coordinating all the things to make a good soap just isn't that simple. It's especially much more difficult today with so many executive decisions overriding crucial creative ones. I get that it is not easy, even if it is hard for me to remember in the moment, even if other viewers never keep it in mind. What I have low tolerance for, however, is an episode full of filler and more and more, soaps trot out at least three episodes a week that are nothing more than filler. It's like a jack in the box to watch soaps lately. You are winding, winding, winding, trying desperately to tolerate that annoyingly clunky "Pop Goes the Weasel" music, waiting desperately for something interesting, exciting, or surprising to save you from this mundane process. This is how I've been feeling with nearly every soap, especially these poor P&G soaps that are in major transitional phases (justified or not). I sit there, I have no idea what to expect from the show each day and more often than not, the entire show makes me want to yawn. Even Young and the Restless, which undoubtedly is the soap that is most likely to never leave viewers feeling apathetic, recently has managed a few episodes where IMO, nothing really truly engrossing happened. Now if Y&R is occasionally limping to give an hour of "edge of your seat" television each day, then you can definitely see this is an epidemic problem. A few hours ago, a fan gave me the best word to describe this frustrating random storytelling, fractured. Soap storytelling is fractured beyond belief; one incredibly boring story one day, one inconsistent and frustrating

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