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The Vets Vent Part One© Sarah Lee
Aug 30, 2002
I seriously can't avoid the complaint, no matter which message board or newsgroup I read. "Where are the vets?" Summer and fall previews every year seem to avoid the older crowd. It is teens this, twenty somethings that, blah, blah, blah, blah. If the adults have a storyline, they are usually surrounding one of the younger characters (i.e. Port Charles, Bold and the Beautiful). Should they be fortunate to have a story of their own, then there is the question of whether it is an intelligent story which it rarely is (i.e. Erica's "trial", OLTL's Viki's latest Niki episode, Days' jumbled Bo/Billie mess). It simply seems like from network executives, to soap producers, to soap headwriters, for the most part, they seem bored by the crowd who has a wrinkle here and a wrinkle there, a grandchild here, a grandchild there, a gray hair here and a gray hair there. I feel like perhaps the writers create storylines for the younger characters and then they're perplexed when they realize how many contract players aren't involved in storylines. They then push and shove them into contrived storylines in order to keep them busy and quiet. The way adults have been given the shaft in the last four years or so, frankly I'm surprised so many of them are still around. I guess we should then break down what we mean when we say we want vets to have more airtime. And we can start with the definition of "vets". A lot of pretty young people are "vets" like Martha Byrne on ATWT or Lauralee Bell on Y&R, both on their respective shows for over fifteen years collectively. Or what about those who have been on longer but aren't sixty like Deidre Hall or Susan Lucci? Those types of "vets" still have plenty of airtime, whether quality or not. Of course, on other soaps, people in this age bracket may not be getting a fair amount of airtime, like on ATWT. With the exception of Ben Hendrickson and Colleen Zenk-Pinter, anyone in the fifties age bracket gets very little airtime. It is the thirty-five and under set, most who have not been there even ten years, who dominate the screen. But for the most part, people in this age group get a lot of airplay and the criticisms are completely different. So let's leave that for next week's column and deal this week with the amount of airtime for the set over fifty and those mainly in their sixties, the ones who are definitely put in "grandmother" mode and when seen, don't do much but impart seeds of wisdom.
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