Daytime's Biggest Mistakes: Part 2

So since the anger at One Life To Live and All My Children's cancellations have cooled slightly (at least for me), it's time to get back down to business. WHY are we in such a state? It'd be easy to say it's the ratings, but that hardly explains even a quarter of it. No one's ratings have been going up since 1996 in any appreciable way, and daytime's fallen faster than prime time, despite the fact cable during the day is probably the most uninspired television I've ever seen (any time I have the choice of over 100 channels and end up turning the TV off because the most exciting thing on my screen is Rachael Ray's smoker-phlegm voice screaming at me is not a good time).

And besides that, how can anyone tell me the reason ratings are going down is because there are "less women in the home during the day". That doesn't fly with me. If that was the truth, you'd be seeing the timeslot shares falling as well, and guess what? They're about on par with where they were 15 years ago for a comparable rating. So it's all on quality. Not SFX quality, not set design quality, STORY quality. As far as I'm concerned, there is absolutely no season the soaps shouldn't be averaging at least a 3.0 rating right now. Instead, we're seeing ratings falling into the 1s, and widespread cancellation. Why is this happening? Let's go into some of the awful truths:


YOUR STORIES MAKE NO SENSE
  
Any time I turn on a TV and see a man who shouldn't exist because he was aborted in 1973 in a landmark, year-long story arc, I get angry. I change the channel. Any time I turn on that same channel and find out that he was actually implanted into another woman's uterus instead WHICH IS IMPOSSIBLE, I get angry. I change the channel. 

The "Un-Abortion" himself, Josh Madden (AMC)

Head Writer Megan McTavish pretty much ruined any chance of All My Children recovering from her 2007 travesty storyline, unflatteringly titled "The Un-Abortion" by fans. McTavish had always gone for the ridiculous. A lot of the time it was good fun. Her 1991-95 Janet Green stories were excellent. The stories were ridiculous and Janet was absolutely insane, but they worked. The audience could suspend their disbelief and enjoy the campy nonsense onscreen because it was within the realm of (vague) possibility. Laurel Montgomery may have been a bit of a self-righteous pain in the ass, but she worked hard to expose Janet at every turn. Of course, McTavish reportedly wanted to have Janet disrupt Laurel and Trevor's 1995 wedding in an...er...explosive way. Bombing the church in the hopes of killing meddling Laurel. Of course, that would've been a bit untimely seeing as The Oklahoma City Bombing occurred weeks before the wedding was to occur, forcing McTavish to change course at the last minute. Apparently she does have SOME decency after all.

This brings me to my next point:

Sarah Michelle Gellar as Kendall Hart

YOU'RE RUINING THE SHOW'S HISTORY

When your show is as old as the mountains, you have to respect history. Megan McTavish thinks that history is this fun thing you wink at when it's funny to do so, and completely disregard otherwise...or completely change. See Kendall Hart, as played by Sarah Michelle Gellar. How one forgets giving birth is beyond me, particularly at age 14. How one forgets that her father wasn't the nice guy that she'd spent decades upon decades trying to track down and spent decades upon decades trying to fill the void in her life left by, finally having tracked him down in 1990 (where he was working as a clown at a circus), is beyond me. But McTavish made it work, having Kendall tear Pine Valley to shreds in the most excellent way possible. Unfortunately upon Kendall's 2002 return through today, the show's revolved around her in an increasingly nauseating way. Which reminds me...

THE SHOW IS NOT ONE-HOUR LONG PER DAY SO AS TO FOCUS ENTIRELY ON ONE CHARACTER

Note to Steve Burton (Jason, GH), steroids are NOT your friend

McTavish simply LOVED Babe Carey. She also loved Greenlee Smythe and Ryan Lavery. Too bad no one else does. I mean, they tolerate Greenlee if she's in the right pairing (Josh Duhamel's Leo, for instance), but Ryan is about as loved by AMC fans as a married gay couple promoting gun control in Sarah Palin's living room.

Another lovely case of this can be found on the last ABC soap standing (for now), General Hospital. Remember when the show's title had some vague significance to the subject matter in the program? Remember a week going by without seeing Sonny Corinthos or Carly Benson's faces for half the program? Well that would mean you've either been watching reruns on YouTube, or haven't watched the show since 1998, because not a day goes by without one of them grumbling about something (Brenda or Michael, usually), shooting something (each other?), being shot by someone (each other?), or listening to the entire cast praise Jason Morgan Our Lord & Saviour.
Notice none of these people are in any way associated with the medical profession? That's because you never see the hospital. In fact, I see more hospital on every other soap combined than I do on General Hospital. Feck, I see more hospital on talk shows most days! Which reminds me:

JUST BECAUSE THEY'RE YOUNG AND PRETTY, DOESN'T MEAN US YOUNG FOLKS WANT TO SEE THEM MORE, NOR DOES IT MEAN THEY'RE ACTORS

Charity Rahmer (Ex-Belle, DAYS) should not act

This has been an issue for a VERY long time. I blame The Young & The Restless for this in part (since they're the ones who initiated the whole 'young and pretty' cast thing), but it's really got out of hand the last few years. The desperation for 'young and pretty' to attract young viewers with disposable income is rank and impractical. Mostly because soap viewership is generational (grandmothers and some grandfathers pass it down to mothers and some fathers who pass it down to daughters and some sons, etc.) and good soap story is mostly generated from intergenerational conflict. 

General Hospital's comeback in 1978 would not have happened had it not been for young Laura Spencer falling for her parents' skeezy friend David Hamilton. Nor would it have happened without her pushing David down the stairs when he told her that the feeling wasn't reciprocal and that it was all a ruse to hurt her mother Lesley for rejecting his advances on her. Nor would it have happened without Lesley protecting her daughter and turning herself in for the crime.

So faced with a similar uphill battle against cancellation some 20 years later, and seeing Days of Our Lives' youth success being built off the success of a series of stories focused around the middle-aged Dr. Marlena Evans, what do basically every other soap do? Replace virtually every actor over 50 and replace them with 24 year old models playing 16 year old characters (I use that term loosely) badly. Even DAYS falls into this trap a few years later, with all sub-20 year old characters being aged all at once, regardless of any timeline issues or common logic regarding the fact that a kid born in 1987 was now dating one born in 1993, nor the fact that one character born in 1995 was now a senior in high school, while the other baby born in 1995 was still in pre-school. And that brings me to today's next-to-final point:

TIMELINES ARE IMPORTANT, DESPITE WHAT YOU THINK

World's oldest-looking 14-year-old, EJ DiMera

You can tell me it's alright to do this until you're blue in the face, but I still have a hard time believing that Days of Our Lives' EJ DiMera is actually Susan Banks' child. Never mind the fact that this supposedly suave rageaholic is meant to be running an international corporation with a name like Elvis, but the fact that he was born on-camera in 1997, while the woman he eventually marries, Sami Brady, has a teenage son who born two years BEFORE HE WAS. ALSO on-camera. This changes a whole whack of timelines, and renders a whole lot of history completely void.

This is the same show that had a landmark storyline in the 70s about Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. The same show that dealt earnestly Mickey Horton's mental illness.

Wait, I forgot.

This is also the same show that had a woman levitating above a bed due to possession by the Devil. Never mind. As you were.

FINALLY....

WRITE A BACKSTORY SO THAT YOUR CHARACTERS HAVE OPINIONS, PERSONALITY, AND SOMETHING TO DRAW UPON FOR LATER STORIES

BONUS: This means you won't ret-con the history later and piss off your (dwindling number of) viewers.

There is, in the last ten years, only a handful of cases where a show has delved into what a character thinks and feels and how it affects their decision-making process. One would be during the all-too-brief tenure of Peter Brash & Paula Cwikly at Days of our Lives in 2003, when Shawn(-Douglas) Brady pretended to be Jan Spears' babydaddy so that she wouldn't have an abortion. Abortion going against his and his family's Catholic beliefs, something he felt strongly about. This bunged up his relationship with Belle Black, and was generally well-done from a character perspective. It also meant we got to see deeper into Shawn, and it made him a much more well-rounded character.

DAYS' Chloe, sings opera, is also slutty, I know nothing else about her.

The only other time we get to see how anyone feels on soaps today is when it has to do with infidelity. Notice that absolutely nobody on any soap (bar DAYS' Chloe, despite what she says) seems to be alright with what is clearly the only viable solution to the rampant promiscuity problems in these towns: Open Relationships.

Also, condoms.

I recognize this would stop a lot of the storylines that happen on soaps, but let's face it, these storylines are as tired as Joan Rivers' plastic surgeon. There is a lot more to life than extra-marital sex. I know, it's shocking, but when a marriage can't last more than 6 months because you can't keep your pants on, then maybe it's time to reconsider marriage for the moment until you sort out why this is a problem. Not that we ever know why you're all so eager to get married all the time either. No one explained that when drawing out your character. You're not meant to. In an interview, Bill Bell once said that when pitching The Young & The Restless to CBS, he wrote out each character's history going back twenty years. This not only gave each character a rich history to draw upon in later stories, it also prevented later ret-cons (not that that stopped later writing regimes) and gave the audience more of a connection to everyone on the screen. He continued this for years afterwards when creating the Abbotts and Costellos Newmans. It's just good storytelling people. It's also horrendously out of vogue, it seems.

Apparently, it's to the point now where you can't even specify how many brothers and sisters you have, lest a new writer gets bored and wants to write in another appendage to your emerging family Redwood. Thus why DAYS' Hernandez family is slowly eating the show (because to introduce other Hortons would be completely out of the question, they're only the show's founding family, after all).

Frankly if this is how soaps are going nowadays, it's almost a good thing they're dying out. I hope that some of them can be salvaged in some form or fashion. Agnes Nixon is desperate to keep All My Children and One Life To Live going. And I can see how it could work (15 minute episodes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays online perhaps?), but the casts would have to be majorly whittled down. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing. I could do without all that Ryan Lavery douchery on my screen, thank you very much.