Soaps Get No Respect
I have a beef to pick with Robert Thompson, the television historian who was interviewed for CBS Sunday Morning's "tribute" to Guiding Light's fiftieth anniversary. It was clear Thompson didn't think much of television in the first place, let alone soaps, but when he commented that the reason people loves soaps is because they are stupid, my mouth dropped open. Of course CBS decided to show clips of the numerous times Reva has been run over while he said this to only hammer home the point. I beg your pardon; soaps are no more stupid, unrealistic, and hokey then other shows in television. Talking dolphins, flying nuns, friendly ghosts, and water-skiing over sharks originated in primetime, not daytime. Actually, soaps have often lifted things from primetime, usually the more bizarre, but they get the blame.
In fact daytime has sometime done things other shows would never deal with in a realistic manner; HIV, homosexuality, down's syndrome, abortion, cancer, menopause, incest, cults, women's equality, eating disorders, racism, etc. When most African-American actors couldn't get steady work on TV, soaps like Guiding Light led the way. When primetime television chickened out of showing real homophobia, One Life to Live tackled it head on. As the World Turns is tackling Hepatitis C, something you haven't seen seriously addressed on the primetime medical shows. In fact, now, soaps have tackled serious and dangerous issues so often, it becomes a bit of a cliché. Sure, there are weird, silly stories, but you must balance the heavy drama with some escapism and it isn't any different on sitcoms and dramas. I can't be the only one who bristles when people talk about their primetime dramas saying the plots are becoming too "soap". What does that mean anyway? Someone gets sick and dies on ER and that makes it soap? Um, why? Is that an insult? I don't see how that is any different then the "drama" of M*A*S*H when Henry Blake died or even China Beach which was all about the angst of the personal woes of the people working to treat wounded. Do these critics even pay attention to the raw, serious, and emotionally gripping stories daytime does?
It's funny, I was watching Melody Thomas Scott's Intimate Portrait, a series that has covered a lot of daytime actresses' lives (and often Meredith Vieira pokes fun at the lives of their characters). They focused heavily on the slew of things Nikki got herself mixed up in and in the drama in Melody's own life. It brought me to a two-fold epiphany. One, every real life person has drama in their life; divorces, bad marriages, abuse of some sort, abortions, unplanned pregnancies, sudden deaths, illnesses, etc. Daytime is only telling real life stories on an exaggerated scale so that (originally) women could identify with the stories without feeling they led lives as wacky. The second realization I came to was that Nikki's stories all told in a lump sounded just crazy. But told one by one, I remember them as being serious, real life issues, done with yes, drama, but also gripping performances. Nikki's life of stripping, sexual abuse, were all stories that had their place and were rooted in realism. My favorite Nikki story, the cult, perfectly captured the feelings of loss and loneliness these women experience. And yet, here it all was, sort of being laughed at. Now you can laugh at some of the stuff in Nikki's life, but those were serious stories and real people can go through that kind of crap within the same lifetime. This isn't so abnormal; it's just because we see these stories for so many years, that it might seem that way. I think we could turn nearly every primetime character into soap character with little trouble. Take Major Houlihan from M*A*S*H; She had an affair with a married man (who went crazy when after she married someone else) and a superior officer died in her bed after sex. And don't forget her one night stand with her true equal Hawkeye Pierce when they thought they were going to die. Should I go on? These TV critics and historians laughing at the genre should start taking a closer look; all shows are a little bit "stupid". Somehow the ones in primetime just are considered better.
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