It only took them 45 years, but there's a possibility now. The internet is all abuzz about the possibility that bottom-rated Days of Our Lives is spicing things up by possibly being the only soap left on US television with a gay romance on-screen.
Will DAYS have the guts to take it the whole nine yards and treat the couple as any other? Or will they go the uber-chaste route of As The World Turns' Luke & Noah, an eventual train-crash death finale for Luke & Reid? How about unceremoniously vanquishing them from the canvas after they "fail to resonate with the mainstream audience" as Kyle & Fish did on One Life To Live last year? Or will they just be like every other DAYS couple and spend 90% of the time saving the town from some maniacal super-villain (spelt DiMera) while otherwise combating their irrepressible libidos that get them into all kinds of babymamma drama?
Freddie Smith is the new gay @ DAYS?
I'm hoping for none of the above. I'm hoping for an intense, emotional tale with long-term planning, development, twists and turns, and a huge payoff at the end. Dena Higley has proved that she IS capable of it...just....not very often.
Regardless, the actor has been cast. Apparently former 90210 star Freddie Smith will do the honours. Smith is rumoured to be one of Justin & Adrienne Kiriakis' sons, and may finally be a proper love interest for Sami Brady's sensitive-but-ultimately-unconvincing-in-any-heteronormative-coupling son Will. His first airdate is said to be in mid-Summer.
For the life of me I've never understood how an entire industry could get it all so wrong so completely so quickly. Since 1996, one by one, every single one of the US soaps has gone down the toilet. Some holding on longer than others, but eventually they have all succumbed to a sort of mass panic and reactive approach to writing and producing that has seen us go through almost an entire decade with no new soaps (the last new soap to debut in the US was Passions in 1999, and the UK's Doctors in 2000), and the cancellation of another eight. Today's post will be part one of what'll likely be a 2-or-3 part post about the soaps we've lost between 1999-2010. I would've rounded it off to 2000-2010 but sine we lost two in 1999 and none in 2000, it seems somewhat more significant, really.
PART ONE: The Casualties
ANOTHER WORLD (1964-1999)
NBC's longest-running soap when cancelled in 1999, the end was in sight when repeat offender Jill Farren Phelps was hired as Executive Producer in 1995. In a bid to "youth up" the show, killed off fan favourite Frankie Frame so she could hire Days of our Lives favourite Robert Kelker Kelly, redesigned the sets, redesigned the show's opening, and got DAYS' head writer James E. Reilly to write a ridiculous evil twin storyline for show maitriarch Rachel Cory (Victoria Wyndham). Result? The ratings rose in 1996 then collapsed in 1997. AW was gone a year and a half later.
SUNSET BEACH (1997-1999)
Not quite as long-running as Another World but equally as troubled, Sunset Beach was the other soap NBC unceremoniously ditched in 1999. Considering NBC's youth-obsession in the late 90s, SUN's cancellation was about as puzzling as the show's 12:00PM Eastern timeslot. A word of advice to the networks: Don't make your new soaps an hour in length until they get a solid footing in the ratings, and don't have your characters impregnate their rivals with turkey basters....EVER.
SUN was a huge success in the UK, with ratings so strong that UK network Five even offering to fund its continuation, but NBC declined, and SUN was cancelled after 751 episodes.
PORT CHARLES (1997-2003)
2003 was a shit year for soaps. These things seem to come in batches. 1999 saw two cancelled, and 2003 saw another two cancelled, though this time not on the same continent. In the US, ABC finally gave up its attempts to beat CBS' The Young & The Restless in 2003 after this General Hospital spin-off failed to attract even 1/5 of the audience Y&R had.
Their approach to beat the competition? Telenova-esque tales about sympathetic vampires, of course! This show was doomed the moment Passions beat them in the ratings. Just goes to show you what desperation can do in the face of bad storytelling.
BROOKSIDE (1982-2003)
UK's Channel 4 was also getting a bit desperate for the young ratings, and after 17 years on C4, Brookside was in trouble. Though producer Paul Marquess managed to lift ratings with his well-received storyline where young Anthony Murray accidentally kills his school bully, the show slowly declined again.
By 2002, the show was lucky to net ratings over a million viewers, and then came the final strike: Big Brother. Because, dear readers, why pay people to carefully craft storylines about well-written complex characters when you can have a group of shallow attention whores behave badly five days a week for virtually no money at all! Brookside's final episode aired in November 2003 and netted 2.3 Million viewers, easily bested by its lead-in that night: Wife Swap, viewed by 5.9 Million viewers.
FAMILY AFFAIRS (1997-2005)
The end of 2005 brought with it the end of Channel Five's attempt a UK-based soap, with their low-rated Family Affairs ending after an 8-year run. Never the ratings winner the channel anticipated, hovering between 1-2 Million viewers weekly for most of its run. Initially this was fine for the fledgling Five, but by 2005, when the top-rated shows on Five were now watched by 3-4 Million viewers, 1 million wasn't gonna cut it. The constant revamping and influx of new characters near the series end in hopes of evading cancellation didn't help in the slightest, and the finale was watched by a mediocre 1.35 Million viewers.
PASSIONS (1999-2008)
It was time. In fact, I don't think Passions would've lasted much longer even if NBC had decided to keep it on the air. Head writer James E. Reilly died shortly after Passions' final episode aired on DirecTV's The 101 in 2008 while recovering from surgery. The fact of the matter was that the show's brand of ridiculous over-the-top storytelling (a girl whose dialogue was uttered only in thought bubbles, and a talking doll were among the cast members) had gone out of vogue by 2008, and had taken all of daytime, desperate to keep up, with it. The problem wasn't Passions', it had consistently won huge ratings in the 18-34 demographic for years, often beating or tying lead-in series Days of our Lives for #1 in that demo, but with the rest of daytime's increasingly desperate and contrived plotlines which tried in vain to emulate Reilly's success at crafting completely unbelievable and completely entertaining storylines. Reilly was equal parts an unendingly frustrating and an insanely talented writer, and his presence in daytime will be missed...kind of.
GUIDING LIGHT (1937-2009)
Here's where things get really sad. Guiding Light was my first soap love. The most enduring dramatic story of all-time, Guiding Light began life on NBC radio in 1937 and ran concurrently on CBS radio and TV between 1952 and 1956.
The show was almost always a major hit, running consistently within the Top Five of the US daytime ratings from the 1950s thru the mid-1980s. By 1990, the show was back in top form, thanks mostly to the incredible writing of Nancy Curlee & James E Reilly, but once EP Jill Farren Phelps got her hands into the pot, things got messy, and by the late 90s, stories like Amish Reva, Princess Reva, Clone Reva (I kid you not), and Maureen Bauer's focus-group-determined death (Phelps' favoruite excuse for an ultimately unpopular decision: point to the focus group), ultimately drove the show into a gutter, and by 2008, the show could no longer afford to be shot in its NYC studios. The series was moved into Peapack, NJ, in an attempt to emulate the success of soap/reality shows like The Hills (I WISH I was joking), and the show became the butt of every joke in the industry. The show ended in September 2009 in a flurry of publicity, yet the finale only watched by 3 Million viewers, a number they'd bested only a year and a half before.
AS THE WORLD TURNS (1956-2010)
Our most recent casualty was the victim not exclusively of bad writing and desperation on the part of execs or writers, but moreso by the network. Tales of frustration from Executive Producer Chris Goutman at what he claims was severe interference from not just CBS, but even P&G caused huge problems for As The World Turns in its final years. When the show turned to the groundbreaking Luke/Noah love story in 2007, actress Cady McClain claimed that someone high up at P&G was resistant even to the idea of a gay storyline on the show due to "religious reasons". This resulted in the soap world's chastest storyline in recent memory, with Luke & Noah not even allowed to kiss on-camera for well over a year. Once the audience's frustration over the storyline heated up, viewership dropped, and the show sank almost overnight from 3.2 Million in March 2008 to 2.5 Million by June, a level the show would keep until it's September 2010 cancellation.
And there you have it. The shows we've lost and the reasons it (probably) happened. Next time: The shows that are left, the good, the bad, and what can be done to fix it (as well as what will/won't be done about it).
Having Tonja Walker's Alex Olanov return to Llanview (the fictional setting of ABC's One Life To Live) is almost enough to get me back watching the show for a few episodes to see if I'm interested. However, it may not be enough. As SoapCentral's Best & Worst of 2010 pointed out, OLTL has changed pretty much overnight this year. It's gone from a multi-racial show about complex characters who've overcome intense issues and fighting their way from the fringes of society, to a show featuring an assembly line of plastic bimboes and Ken dolls with zero personality or background.
The first strike against the show came at the beginning of the year, when whiny manipulator Stacy Morasco drowned in an icy pond after having given birth to a baby of questionable paternity in a snowstorm. It was a stupid way to deal with the reveal, for one. Soaps of old would've taken pains to make sure Stacy got her just desserts in an emotional context, playing out her sister GiGi's (yes, I know) sense of betrayal and anger, and having a major wedge placed between the two of them, as well as Stacy's efforts to win back her beau Rex, and how it affected everyone involved. The custody case for Stacy's baby (whatever her name was...I think it was Serendipity Orchid or something equally stupid) could have easily played out as a high-drama case where the secrets and lies Stacy kept over the coursed of 2009 could have played out. Instead, she drowns. And everyone blames Schuyler, the gay couple get the baby...and then everyone but GiGi and Rex leave town. I should also point out that GiGi and Rex are about as exciting a couple as watching grass grow in real time on a comfy bed. Next came the Great Minorities Purge of 2010. I took simultaneous delight and disgust upon hearing the mass firings make their way into the headlines one by one, as ABC systematically destroyed everything that wasn't white, rich or heterosexual on their affiliates between the hours of 2:00pm and 3:00pm.
The ball first dropped in early March, just as OLTL, Brett Claywell and Scott Evans (Kyle Lewis & Oliver Fish) were announced as the winners of the GLAAD Media Award for Daytime Drama. Simultaneously, ABC announces the pair had been fired, as they had "failed to resonate with the mainstream audience," because ratings were "particularly dismal" when Fish came out of the closet. The "blame the gays" attitude set in motion a media firestorm, and garnered OLTL and ABC some very unpleasant media attention after months of positive feedback from the press. Particularly from the gay press, who'd grown weary of As The World Turns' irritatingly chaste gay storyline, which due to what Cady McClain claimed was "someone with very strong religious points of view way way high up at Procter & Gamble...[who] didn’t want to have a gay storyline at all and if they were going to have it then it was a fight every step of the way to have that", spent close to a year not even kissing on camera.
Once ABC had rid OLTL of the pesky gays, they then set their sights on all the black people. A quick side note: One Life To Live is historically one of the highest-rated soaps in America with African-Americans. They actively market themselves to black markets, with Snoop Dogg, Mary J. Blige, and Wendy Williams having made frequent guest appearances on the program. So of course, one would imagine that having a healthy roster of Black, Hispanic, Asian and Jewish characters would be advisable. Right? Well, you'd be wrong. What do you think this is? 1968??
In the span of 6 months we lost the characters of Rachel Gannon, Layla Williamson, Evangeline Williamson, and Greg Evans, as well as Schuyler Joplin, Kim Andrews, and of course, Kyle & Fish. It seemed almost every week as news of another actor's firing or quitting the series. It became a running joke in my house. The whole situation seemed so fishy the show couldn't get the press' seagulls to bugger off for the life of them. The show's ratings collapsed, falling from 4th place of seven soaps and 2.7 Million viewers in early November 2009 to dead last and 2.2 Million by April 2010.
By summertime, things had calmed down, but were still incredibly painful to watch, as the result of the wintertime kidnapping of pretty blonde Jessica Buchanan by her psycho cult leader father Mitch Laurence (I wish I were joking about that) and subsequent brainwashing at his hands left Jessica the world's most irritating amnesiac. Jess' memories after 1997 were wiped clean, and while I appreciate the sentiment, as 1998 saw Llanview eaten by the gaping maw of the Rappaport family plague, watching a late 20-something Jessica cavort about Llanview High pining after her ex-boyfriend Cristian Vega (one of the few remaining minorities on the show), was horrifying. It also introduced the worst thing that happened to One Life To Live in this already-vile year: The Ford/Salinger Family, also known as "The House That Abs Built".
I give the show some credit for casting, at the very least, they're believable as brothers. But taking a heavily-disliked recurring character and centering the entire show around him is probably one of the stupidest moves any television show can do. Robert Ford came to town as a videographer working for the sexy-and-hilarious David Vickers (and I don't usually like older men, but Tuc Watkins is just great). But while David was a sleazy manipulator in a refreshingly humourous way, Ford was sleazy in a pompous, "wish he fell through the ice instead" kind of way. After tearing the oh-so-femininely-named Langston away from her realistic relationship with normal-looking-yet-adorable Markko, he proceeded to slimeball his way into multiple other girls' beds, before bedding a despondent Jessica after the excellent High School Musical-inspired episodes (which briefly lifted the show's ratings back up around 2.5 Million).
Of course it was at this moment that Jessica realised how old she was and who she was in love with etc., and ran out in a panic. Simultaneously, Langston discovers Ford's been screwin' the pizza girl; Markko discovers Langston thinks monogamy is kind of tree, yells a lot, dances around the school gym after the prom (see the video for that), and proceeds to wash blood off his hands. Oops! Ford's taken a candlestick to the head. Obviously Markko didn't do it, since it's too obvious.
And thus the saga of the Ford family begins. Suddenly Ford brothers appear from out of the woodwork, kidnapping female characters, stealing them from their boyfriends, and walking around without shirts (or body hair) most of the time. Matthew Buchanan, who had been dating Danielle Delgado-Manning-Rayburn-whateverthehell, was brushed aside (presumably for looking like someone of the age he was portraying, heaven forbid) in favour of the third Ford brother, who has no discernible personality other than liking movies a lot and having abs.
About this point, I gave up on OLTL for awhile...only to tune back in a few weeks and discover that in my absence, the show had become a manic breakneck-paced onslaught of craziness. Presumably because the show's ratings hadn't improved despite ditching every new character the show had created since 2006 (except Rex & GiGi, of course), the show's pace was sped up to the point where in one 2-minute period at the beginning of a September episode, five different scenes averaging about 6 lines were blown through. How in the hell is anyone supposed to keep up/feel any tension/care about what's going on at that pace?
The summer was positively unwatchable, in spite of a fantastic cancer storyline that saw fan favourite Téa Delgado battle a brain tumour, and confiding in her longtime rival Blair Kramer. In the end, the brain tumour killed her...except it didn't. It turned out that she had been kidnapped by yet another evil supervillain who just happened to be the first non-asshole boyfriend Blair had ever had. And then it got weird and the guy's brother showed up and yeaistoppedcaringaboutitetcetc. Blair goes to Tahiti with this guy, kills him, is rescued by the World's douchiest cop, and everyone comes home to Llanview (Téa included), and carries on as though nothing had happened. Surprise, surprise. Ratings remained stagnant at around 2.3 Million (again in dead last).
So of course, everyone panicks, and the show brings in their secret weapon. What could it be? MORE Mitch Laurence? A return of some of the hastily written-out minority characters of old? heaven forbid no!
Kim Zimmer, of course. Playing an obscure character who was on the show for 6 months in 1983. Surely that will fix everything!
Except that it did, to some extent anyway. No one foresaw it, but Zimmer's awkwardly named Echo DiSavoy created story for the veteran characters on the show in a way that hadn't happened in a long time. Through most of the past while, long-time characters Victoria & Dorian Lord had been relegated to stewing over the well-being of their respective children with nary a peep of story to call their own. Enter Echo, who was a former lover of Viki's husband Charlie, and voila! Echo claims to have conceived Rex Balsom (whose parentage has been in question for so long that the only person on the planet who still seems to care is Ron Carlivati, OLTL's head writer) with Charlie. Except that she didn't. Rex's father is actually Viki's ex-husband Clint, whom Echo coerced into an affair in 1983. Clint doesn't want anything to do with Rex or Echo, and threatens Echo into not exposing him as Rex's true father. It's not a great story, but Zimmer's personality and her brash nature when compared to Erica Slezak (Viki)'s ice queen nature has made for good television at the very least. And although it's still somehow managed to involve the Ford family (Inez is currently being courted by Rex's father Clint), at least we don't have Inez's vapid Ken doll offspring sticking their noses into it. Always a silver lining with me, innit?
So really, 2010 on One Life To Live has been a bit of a roller-coaster ride. But in the end, it really came down to a show on the right path being systematically dismantled to showcase a hastily-thrown-together new family that nobody cared about, history and character development be damned. I don't even know who bopped Ford over the head with the candlestick, as some random heretofore unheard of character began stalking everyone in town and probably did it (which really is a lazy way to write a mystery), he may as well have smacked himself with the damn candlestick. At the very least it would've been more intriguing than what ended up ACTUALLY happening. I don't know how much damage to the Afro-American audience was done by the mass firings early in the year, but I can tell you, with Wendy Williams' upcoming appearance on the show, the black audience still matters to them in some form or fashion. Which makes the Diversity Purge all the more confusing. But I'll leave that up to OLTL's Executive Producer Frank Valentini to explain. He won't, but a boy can dream.
