Why I Watch Soap Operas

Or should I say; "why I watch one soap opera"?  Yes, I should clarify that.  That soap opera would be General Hospital.  So don't touch that dial!  Drop that bottle of Joy; get your fuzzy slippers and bon-bons, 'cuz this might go on for a while.  Just like the "Love In the Afternoon" line-up on ABC right around 1980!

​The reason I watch General Hospital isn't because I'm particularly enamored of the show (although, I do love it; don't get me wrong);  it's because I can't watch One Life To Live, which was my very favorite soap.  Followed by "GH" and then All My Children a close third.  My viewing of soaps over the years has been prone to life circumstances and technology; but before I get into that, let's go back.  Back to the 1970's.  1977 to be specific.  This may have been the year when soaps had reached some kind of peak.  That peak being the number of them on the airwaves.  Fourteen of them that year!  But that was not the year that I started watching.  My mother had dabbled in the daytime drama world; but with no kind of real "brand loyalty" until NBC's The Doctors.  That would be on when we came home from school.  The show had a great villainess.  None other than Kathleen Turner:

She played a character named "Nola" and when she later became a movie star; it was no surprise to me.  That voice: such a throwback.  It was that voice, mostly I think, that made her a star.  In fact, a lot of huge stars have come out of the soap world.
So, The Doctors piqued my interest in soaps.  They'd already gotten my attention as a child, with their artful openings which usually featured incredible music.  I remember before The Doctors, my mother went through a Days of Our Lives phase.  It had a couple on it they were kind of the poor man's Steve and Eydie Lawrence.

Mom would always make disparaging comments whenever they sang (maybe it was just him that sang).  She'd sigh in exasperation while muttering "Oh shut up!" or "So corny!"  I think I got my sense of sarcasm from my Mom.  I remember a Days story-line from when I was about six years old, that featured an older woman putting poison in someone's tea.  I remember it scared the crap out of me; because that actress could've been my grandmother.

Soaps have always embraced music and singing.  I always loved the music from the opening of Guiding Light.  I didn't watch it; but if I happened upon the opening I would listen to the music while watching those mysterious tree branches dappling said light:

That beautiful, dreamy music brings me right back to being home from school, sick, and drinking orange soda and Nyquil.  I wish I had watched The Guiding Light though.  One day, out of the blue, my favorite band, The B-52's were on the show.  I didn't find out about it 'til afterwards; but thanks to the beauty of the internet, we can all see it!  They sang two songs: Private Idaho and the super-obscure Throw That Beat in the Garbage Can.  ​The latter wasn't even a single.  It features a sax solo which Cindy (who didn't play sax) went to town on!

Now how and why this combination came together is anyone's guess.  I think Fred Schneider might've been a Guiding Light watcher.  He mentions the character "Reva" in at least one of their songs.  She was played by Kim Zimmer who won four Emmy awards and was known for being able to supply copious amounts of tears on demand.

So, what really got me started on soaps was my sister Kate.  Like most young teenage girls, she went through a soap opera phase and she brought me along with her.  Our go to soap was General Hospital, mostly because it came on at three o'clock, so you could watch it from start to finish after school while you had a snack.  We had snack phases too.  Kate went through an ice cream sundae phase and I was into Chun King Mini-egg rolls for most of 1978 and 1979.  The trick was submerging them in cooking oil and preparing in a toaster oven.  The toaster oven was key.  Here's an ad for the tasty little rolls.  It's not exactly politically correct; but remember, this wasn't all that long ago.  And then Chung King tried to position their products as health food.  "Try Chun King for your beautiful body!"

Luckily, a fourteen year old boy in the late 70's could eat as many mini egg-rolls as he wanted without gaining an ounce.  "Remember when it was our God-given right to be thin?"  That is a quote from my friend Scott Coblio.  He is a most profound and amusing person.  I keep telling him to write books; mostly because I want to read them.

So, I started watching GH in probably late 1978.  I came in on the tail end of a storyline that involved Laura Webber.  She had killed some guy named David who was much older than her, who she'd been having an affair with.  Her mother, Lesley, took the rap.  When that died down, Laura (played by the then 17 year-old Genie Francis (and amazingly talented) married Scotty Baldwin (the delightful Kin Shriner) and started working at The Campus Disco.  That's where she met Luke Spencer (Tony Geary) and the rest is history.  Here's a typical GH dramaturgy from that period:

How and why the "Luke and Laura" phenomenon exploded is something of a mystery.  But I think it was a culmination of kids like my sister and me who were home from school watching; the apex of daytime drama in the public imagination; incredible chemistry between two actors; and a sprinkle of magic: and WHAM!  Pop culture phenomenon.  Actually, by the time they were getting married and that whole "Luke and Laura's Wedding" thing; I was already kind of tuning out. The peak of the Luke and Laura thing, was, for me, when they went on their first adventure outside of Port Charles. It went on during the summer of 1980 and it was delightful.  However, as delightful as it was,  I was more concerned with what was going on in Llanview, Pennsylvania.  That's where Dorian Lord lived.  Dorian Lord was the greatest lady-rich-bitch-diva in the history of TV.  She could've eaten Alexis Carrington for breakfast.  And she was played by the incomparable Robin Strasser.  When she went at it with "good girl" Victoria (Erika Slezak); you were in for some great television!

Perhaps the most legendary moment, acting/drama-wise in all of Soapdom was the performance by Judith Light on OLTL in 1979.  She played a character named Karen Wolek.  Now my storyline accuracy may be a little faulty but my memory of it was that Karen was married to an All-American doctor named Larry.  Either she'd been a prostitute in her past or she was kind of doing it on the side out of boredom and being blackmailed by her hot brother-in-law (who had the hots for her).  Someone ended up dead and at the murder trial, Karen was brought to the stand and grilled about her past.  She breaks down on the stand and basically has a nervous breakdown.  I would put a clip up; but taken out of context, the performance seems a little over the top.  But this was the culmination of a slow-burn performance over months; so when the viewers watched it (myself included); the catharsis was literally shattering.  That's how good she was.  People still talk about it.  When she turned up on Who's the Boss? as the somewhat prosaic "Angela" I had to cut her some slack.  She probably would've really gone over the edge if she'd continued to play Karen. 

Of course, All My Children was a favorite during the summer, as it came on at 1pm and if you were at school you couldn't watch it.  And the major draw on that show was Erica Kane and her endless string of gorgeous paramours.  One in particular, Tom Cudahy, was a dim-witted, studly jock who Erica had tied around her finger.  It was a blast watching Erica manipulate men.  I daresay it was empowering.

​He's really acting his heart out here.  His name is Richard Shoberg.  I think he may be overacting a bit; but who could blame him?  He usually wandered through the show as though he had a concussion; but he was a football player, so maybe it was a conscious choice.  In a way, this was his big scene.  The birth control pills was the end of his marriage to Erica.  She moved on to her next "true love" with nary a backward glance.  The following promo features another favorite soap: The Edge of Night.  It came on at 4pm and was the last show in ABC's line-up:

The Edge of Night had, hands down, the best opening of any soap (and the biggest assortment of mustaches):

The Edge of Night was a rare and special gem for me.  Back in the day, the Boston ABC affiliate didn't air The Edge of Night.  It was a half-hour show in a really weird time-slot; so they aired Donahue or some such show.  The ABC station out of New Hampshire did air it though.  The problem was, the signal barely, if ever reached the house.  If you put on channel 8 or whatever it was, you had to constantly adjust the rabbit ears (after having wrapped them in Reynold's wrap tin-foil) and stand in front of the television set to maybe catch bits and pieces of scenes.  It was frustrating. I actually asked my parents if we could move to New Hampshire so I could watch the show unimpeded. And then the show was cancelled.  I remember one of the craziest soap storylines from that show.  There was a serial killler puppet, knocking off citizens of Monticello.  Yes, an actual puppet:

The Edge of Night had a great "bad girl" star in its last years in the form of "Raven."  She was played by an actress named Sharon Gabet.  

She bore a strong resemblance to Kathleen Turner.  And I think she had just as much star power.  And she was just on the brink of breaking through to "the next level" (whatever that is); but then, the The Edge of Night and Raven and Sharon disappeared.  The Edge of Night should be resurrected as a night-time drama.  If only for its title alone.  The theme song actually had lyrics.  A complete song that would sometimes play at the end when the show would run credits in their entirety. It was pretty awesome. Here you go:

The ABC soaps were always my "go to."  I had a friend who was into The Young and the Restless, so I watched that for a little bit in the mid-80's; but there was something about the CBS soaps that I didn't like.  To this day they still turn me off.  I think it's because the CBS soaps (particularly the ones produced by William J. Bell) seemed to take place in some kind of vacuum.  It was like the only people that populated the world of Genoa City were the actors playing the citizens of Genoa City.  There were like never any extras in scenes set in places like restaurants.  It kind of creeped me out.  And there was no ambient sound.  It makes a difference (to me at least).  And the acting, no matter how good, was always stilted by the "house style" of those shows.  Know what I mean?
So, my most very favorite movie is Tootsie.  Its story revolves around a fictional soap opera called Southwest General.  Now, is it because of the soap opera element that Tootsie is my favorite movie?  No.  Not entirely.  Tootsie is my favorite movie because, as Pauline Kael said, it's a "love letter to actors."

And also because it's just a great movie that reveals something new every time you watch it (and I've watched it a lot!).
But the best thing about Tootsie (besides its nearly perfect script) is that it respects actors and the soap opera genre.  Soaps are on five days a week.  That's a lot of hours.  And a lot of it is filler.  Just two people talking to one another.  For an actor, to make pedestrian conversations interesting, is the true test of their talent. 
Why do I watch General Hospital today?  Well, one reason is friendship.  Friendship you ask?  But Chris: they're fictional characters.  They don't really exist, you might say.  And I might disagree with you.  Fictional characters can be as real as any real person.  Mr. Darcy is 207 years old.  But people still get hot and bothered over him.  Batman is 82 but he's still going strong.
Yes, I feel like the people who live in Port Charles are my friends.  I live in a rather isolated area and my best friends are all hundreds/thousands of miles away from me.  But I can hang out with Laura Webber Baldwin Spencer Cassadine Collins five days a week for an hour.  And I've known her since I was a kid.  And she was a kid!
Also, I enjoy watching other actors work.  There's an actor on GH who I particularly enjoy.  His name is Roger Howarth.  He was playing a character named "Franco."  Franco was an artist who was also a deranged, psychotic serial killer.  But then, he stopped killing and tried to be nice.  His bad behavior was all because of a brain tumor, you see.  Once the tumor was removed, he was the nicest guy on Earth.  But then he died.  When Franco died, Roger Howarth went away.  But now he's back, looking exactly like Franco, only playing an entirely different character.  And nobody has yet to remark on his astounding resemblance to the late Franco.  But that's all just soap opera silliness.  What I like about Howarth is his dry sense of humor (and you know that's the actor; not the character so much).  I also admire his chameleonic experiments with his look.  What I most enjoy is watching him thrust and parry with his castmates.  He's a good actor and he knows it; and you can almost see his gears clicking when he's working with someone who's not quite at his level (not that the actors in this scene are in that category).  He comes in at the 2:05 mark.

I think it's really a shame that major networks massacred the majority of soaps about ten years ago.  I'm sure for many viewers it was a kind of murder.  I'm not saying we need fourteen soaps back on the airwaves; but did ABC really need to kill One Life to Live and All My Children with such a blood-letting?  These were important shows in many ways. Maybe they could've scaled back production to two or three days a week, for a half hour.  Destroying them was not the answer.  Maybe sometimes we should put pleasure above business.
But just think about all those soaps back in 1977.  It was really a sub-industry of the television industry.  Think of all the work it generated for not only actors; but writers and artists and all the behind the scenes people.  Now what do the networks offer us during the day?  Endless talking heads, a couple of lame game shows and two annoying coffee klatches that I would rather chew glass than have to listen to.  But not really any worse than what they're offering at night: a bunch of lame game shows, people murdering one another and people investigating it; and remakes of shows that weren't all that great to begin with.
It's no wonder the networks are dying.  They're not only not thinking outside the box; they're climbing into it and sealing themselves in.
Remember when Snoop did a version of the One Life To Live theme?  Well, here it is.

And remember when One Life To Live tried to have Two Lives To Live?  It didn't work.  I guess we really do only have one life to live.
I was going to talk about another soap, Passions, which I was into for a little while; but I'll save that for another blog.
Ciao for now.
​CR