The Road to Redemption
I come from a long line of people who quit watching soaps. Their morality just wouldn't tolerate the storylines for very long. I share nearly every single moral my family has so it puzzles them as to how come I've been able to suffer through soaps. I watch them with incredible loyalty and then rant to family the lunacy of the stories and they wonder why I put up with it. Honestly, I don't know why. And in fact, I may not much longer because it is becoming glaring to me that bad guys have become the biggest draw in soaps. I don't mean uber-villains that escape the law and torment entire towns like Days' Stefano or ATWT's James. I'm talking about the rapists, the murders, the mobsters, and the like who always avoid jail because at the last minute, writers turn on a dime and decide they have to keep the actor and/or character or in some really frightening cases, the fans demand it. Can anyone explain to me why we all seem so eager to forgive criminals sometimes even before they've repented? Why do we often speculate on how a character be redeemed instead of how they will be punished? Why do we look for the heart of gold in characters that sometimes never had it?
Lately there has been an infestation of nefarious characters. OLTL's Mitch is really overstaying his welcome. There isn't enough of a chuckle I can get from his clever one liners and little smirks for his me to tolerate the constant terrorizing of Viki and her family. Nearly everyone on ATWT is up to something horrible or the horrible thing that they've recently done has been swept under the carpet. In fact the only really good or reformed people on the show are rarely even on our screen or have their own storylines. The same could be said for everyone on Guiding Light, if not even more so. And to add to that anyone watching every day has to see that the writers are actually trying to pair one of Edmund's former victims, Cassie, up with him. Um, what? Why is Edmund even still here? What does he have to do to be put behind bars or on a ship back to San Cristobel (preferably without any navigation equipment)? I feel that the eagerness to have a bad guy go good is much like the chicken and the egg argument. Did writers start trying to redeem their killers, rapists, and the like because fans obviously were incredibly forgiving or did the people in charge like the work of an actor or a performance so much they worked overtime to figure out a way to keep the character? However it started, now it's an endless circle. There is some charismatic actor that we like so much we want to keep. There is some untapped potential with a character that we want to hope that person can stick around even though they've done something despicable. What is frightening isn't that soaps portray it so much as the fact that viewers buy it. If we didn't, they wouldn't do it. Do we check our morals at the door because TV isn't real life? Or am I, as I've been accused of several times, just the lone prude watching daytime TV? Maybe it upsets me because I've watched enough TV in my life to know it does influence real life.
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