It is December 1985, and I’m climbing the steps to my eldest brother’s bedroom, where he has a big-screen TV and VCR. I may have just gotten out of high school and raced home one block away, though this part of my memory is fuzzy. But I do remember closing the bedroom door shut, kneeling in front of and clicking on the TV with the remote, and changing the channel to CBS’s daytime drama Guiding Light. It is the last ten or so minutes of the program, which is why I think I may have raced home to catch my favorite soap (though, truthfully, as I have learned many years ago from an online conversation with a fellow Guiding Light fan, the episode in question aired during the holiday school break). But the memory of the drama unfolding on screen is strong.
The scene is wistful and heart-wrenching. Wealthy tycoon Kyle Sampson is marrying his former love who is now pregnant with his child, while his present lover, Reva Shayne, stands on a bridge on a cold, snowy night. She is wearing a fur coat, her face and hair heavily made-up in eighties excess, but her expression is numb. She has had her heart broken many times, and now she has reached a breaking point. Slowly, she peels off her fur coat, lets it fall in the snow, revealing the lingerie she is wearing underneath, and exposes herself to the elements. Scenes between Reva and the wedding are juxtaposed with Barbara Streisand’s stunning version of “Somewhere,” from the Broadway musical West Side Story, contrasting Reva’s anguish with the couple’s “happiness” as they pledge their vows. As Streisand sings reassuring lines of a place where two doomed lovers can find happiness, her voice soaring majestically on the soundtrack, Reva climbs over the railing and plunges into the frigid water below. The screen goes black. Seconds later, it flickers back to life with ads selling cake mixes and laundry detergent.
The abrupt commercial break, which was followed by the show’s end credits, would have been shockingly dissatisfying to viewers who weren’t used to soap storytelling, though cliffhangers have become old hat to any fan of modern TV. But for a seventeen-year-old daytime fan of five years who had wandered over to Guiding Light from General Hospital, her first soap love, that ending, and its abrupt interruption packed an emotional wallop. It was a Friday afternoon, and the fate of Reva Shayne Lewis, who will survive her attempt by pulling herself out of the water after she hears the voice of her future child urging her to live, left millions of Guiding Light fans literally hanging by the cliff until the following episode next Monday. At that moment, in front of my brother’s TV, I am staggered. The scene is larger-than-life, campy even (Reva in her fur coat and lingerie), and yet so incredibly intimate that I am pulled inside Reva’s anguish and heartbreak. That scene is one of the many pivotal moments in my history of watching Guiding Light that drew me deeper into the fictional lives and loves of the people of Springfield, Anywhere, USA, and formed some of my fondest soap viewing memories.
I started watching soaps in 1980 with General Hospital when it was at its height of popularity with the infamous Luke and Laura. The story of two young lovers on the run from the mob and their subsequent adventures had my twelve-year-old self enthralled, feeding into my budding interest in romance, adventure, and fantasy (I didn’t find out until years later that this love story began with rape). Their 1981 wedding garnered over 31 million viewers, making General Hospital a zeitgeist in ’80s pop culture. Not long after discovering General Hospital, I became a fan of All My Children, with the young love stories of Greg and Jenny, and Jesse and Angie, who were one of the few black couples gracing daytime in the eighties that achieved popularity; and of course, the incomparable Erica Kane, being my favorites. NBC’s Another World followed (which for me distinguished itself with one of the most multilayered Black families in television proper), and then, without a doubt, the singular most popular soap in all Black households, The Young and the Restless. Who in my neighborhood didn’t get caught up in the soapy romantic quadrangle of Victor, Nikki, Jack, and Ashley? Young folks on Black Twitter noted this phenomenon when they tweeted about the “thing” their “aunties” and “grandmamas” had for Victor Newman (Eric Braeden), which earned a like from the actor himself (in confession, I too am one of those aunties who had a “thing” for Victor, one of my earliest screen crushes). I discovered Guiding Light in the summer of 1984 when I switched the channel from General Hospital, whose stories I had outgrown, to CBS and caught the aforementioned Reva baptizing herself in a public fountain as the “Slut of Springfield.” For seven years, Guiding Light would become my only soap, and daytime viewing would never be as good or tantalizing again.
I’m brought back in mind to those old soap memories because a minor miracle happened recently when CBS Studios, in partnership with Proctor & Gamble and the NAACP, green-lit a new daytime soap opera, the first in twenty-five years. The Gates, as it is ostensibly titled, will also bear the distinction of being the first all-black soap opera since Generations debuted on NBC over thirty years ago. The Gates, whose showrunner will be respected daytime vet Michele Van Jean (The Bold and the Beautiful, General Hospital, and Santa Barbara), features the lives and loves of a wealthy black family in a gated community. It will begin airing in the winter of 2025.
The soap world and black soap opera fans in particular greeted the news with shock and elation. With only three soaps presently airing on broadcast networks, General Hospital, The Young and the Restless, and The Bold and the Beautiful (Days of Our Lives now airs on Peacock, NBC’s streaming service), it goes without saying that we have been in the twilight era of the daytime soap. Whether the announcement of a new sudser will pull daytime out of this twilight remains to be seen, but even the arrival of a new soap does not dispel the fact that daytime dramas have been on shaky ground for years. Personally, the era of the soap opera’s decline began decades earlier in 1993 when I stopped watching Guiding Light. At the time, I sensed that its Golden Era between 1989-1993, which all fans agree was the pinnacle of excellence (Entertainment Weekly had even nominated it as one of the best shows on the air in ’92), was slowly coming to an end. My instincts proved right. When I began hanging at soap opera fan forums, the fans I spoke to agreed that the show’s Golden Era was over a year later. The various episodes or clips I watched on Youtube revealed that the soap had tumbled in quality and began to mimic the worst of the tropes and characterizations that had already seeped into daytime, though there were some bright moments, such as Cynthia Watros’ electrifying, Emmy-winning performance as Annie Dutton, a troubled nurse who came between the show’s erstwhile super-couple, Josh and Reva.
Many critics blamed the fact that women were now working in greater numbers than before, the O.J. Simpson trial in 1994, and the rise of reality TV, with its far more outlandish human behavior now displayed for young audiences, for the soap’s decline. As changes in viewing demographics rocked the daytime landscape, producers sought more outlandish ways to pull fans back into their shows, including, in the case of Days of Our Lives, demon possession or, with Guiding Light, cloning and time travel. But the dye was already cast. When word dropped that CBS had canceled Guiding Light in 2009 (on April Fool’s Day, no less), I made the effort to watch every episode until its end. It felt like I was watching the last breaths of a dying friend. The show, whose budget was cut to near extinction, was barely professionally produced. Most of its “sets” were shot in the small New Jersey town of Peapack (by “sets” I mean that characters wandered through empty fields while laughably conducting business deals on cell phones). When the last episode aired in September, it was with bittersweetness that the show which had been a huge part of my life was now gone, and I was okay with it. The suffering was over.
While daytime soaps may or may not be a dying breed, the genre they helped develop is more popular than ever on nighttime, cable, and streaming services. Long live soaps.
Though there is a long history of serialization outside of daytime television, their roots nonetheless extend back to the soap opera. Dating back to the 1960s with the premiere of the nighttime soap Peyton’s Place, prime-time serials like Dallas, Knots Landing, Dynasty, and David Lynch’s surrealistic take on the genre, Twin Peaks, had their niche on TV. Hour-long dramas and sitcoms as diverse as Cheers, Hill Street Blues, The X-Files, E.R., and N.Y.P.D. Blue also began utilizing aspects of serialization in their storytelling arcs, greatly expanding the definitions of episodic television. Yet when HBO aired original programming during its Sunday night schedule the connection between the Golden Era of Television and the lineage of serialized storytelling solidified. Whereas previous non-soap dramas maintained their episodic conceit, shows like Oz and The Sopranos embraced serialization, with each episode moving forward linearly toward the character’s narrative denouement. They also helped change the face of nighttime television, proving that audiences could embrace complex narratives about anti-heroes (the first anti-hero[ine] that audiences embraced however was As the World Turns’ Lisa Hughes Grimaldi, a character so loved to be hated that a fan once slapped actress Eileen Fulton as she walked out of a Manhattan department store).
After The Sopranos’ critical and commercial success, HBO ordered more serialized dramas like The Wire, Deadwood, Six Feet Under, Big Love, Boardwalk Empire, Tremé, Luck, and others. While the subject matter of HBO’s dramas are as disparate from one another as they are from soaps (with the possible exception of Big Love, which would truly have made an arresting daytime sudser with its tales of marital bed hopping and corporate and familial intrigues), their glacial-moving plot lines and multiple character story arcs are a direct influence from soaps. Other cable and broadcast networks followed HBO’s lead with shows like Six Feet Under, Mad Men, Homeland, Downton Abbey, and Breaking Bad, along with teen dramas The Vampire Diaries, Euphoria, and Riverdale. That influence continues with NBC’s This Is Us, Fox’s Empire, HBO’s Succession, and many of Shonda Rhimes produced dramas Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, and Bridgerton, which, like Empire, center their soapy tales of love and sex on a more diverse cast of characters, making them direct descendants of NBC’s Generations. Even SF, horror, and fantasy series like True Blood, Stranger Things, Game of Thrones, its spinoff House of Dragon, and The Walking Dead owe a great deal to serial storytelling. The Walking Dead, in fact, was directly inspired by comic book creator Robert Kirkland’s childhood love of the daytime genre. But this isn’t an example of HBO influencing a genre as it is of the cable network’s borrowing from daytime and successfully broadening its critical appeal.
To demonstrate the direct link between modern dramas and soaps, I offer this example. The main plotline in Mad Men, featuring Don Draper (Jon Hamm), an ad executive who takes on the identity of a dead Korean War vet and settles into upper-middle-class WASP society, is a well-worn trope on soaps. In the 1960s, Days of Our Lives used a similar story with Tommy Horton, also a Korean War vet, who was MIA. Unbeknownst to his family, Tommy was badly injured in battle, which resulted in amnesia. With a new identity and extensive plastic surgery, Tommy returned to his hometown of Salem and unwittingly fell in love and became engaged with his sister before the shocking truth of his identity came to light. Another story with a more direct through-line to Mad Men was used in 1980 on Edge of Night when con artist Jeff Brown [Larkin Malloy] stole the identity of a wealthy scion, Skye Whitney. Identity was and continues to be a major preoccupation of the soap opera. Characters disguise their identities for malicious or investigative purposes or, in the case of Carla Gray (Ellen Holly), a light-skinned black woman on One Life to Live, passed for white; they suffer amnesia, disassociative personalities (common medical afflictions in soap land), or identity crises after discovering they were given up for adoption or switched-at-birth. Don Draper’s desire to fit into WASP society was common fodder for many a soap tale. Erica Kane, for instance, whose desire to move up into the elite world was all-encompassing, is simply a female version of that archetype. Mad Men was by all intents a soap opera.
And yet, when the Golden Era of Television (always capitalized) is discussed and written about outside of niche academic enclaves, particularly with the rise and recent fall of streaming platforms like Netflix or Paramount+, the acknowledgments of this influence are few and far between. Rather most tend to downplay or overlook soaps altogether and draw a direct link to Victorian novels, many of which were serialized in magazine installments. The headline for a 2014 New York Times article perfectly encapsulated this train of thought: “Are the New ‘Golden Age’ TV Shows the New Novels?” During the pinnacle of this era in TV excellence, critics pointed out the lineage between Charles Dickens, whose serialized novels were wildly successful in both Britain and the U.S, to the HBO series The Wire, though ironically David Simon, the series showrunner, felt it had more in common with the novels of Tolstoy or Balzac. Critics argue that serialized television has become as complex and richly layered as the greatest novel.
In answering the question of why modern television has become more complex, Jason Mittell, a professor of Film & Media Culture and American Studies at Middlebury College, singles out the rise of cable television dramas in the 1990s for this shift in storytelling: “[But] with the advent of cable television channels in the 1980s and 1990s, audiences became more diffuse. Suddenly, it was more feasible to craft a successful program by appealing to a smaller, more demographically uniform subset of viewers – a trend that accelerated into the 2000s.” He goes on further to write that “[L]ike 19th century serial literature, 21st century serial television releases its episodes in separate installments…Giving viewers the technology to easily watch and rewatch a series at their own pace has freed television storytellers to craft complex narratives that are not dependent on being understood by erratic or distracted viewers. Today’s television assumes that viewers can pay close attention because the technology allows them to easily do so.” Here again, the link between the nineteenth-century serialization of novels with contemporary drama is set in a typical analysis of television, with Mittell identifying cable TV and technology as the sole drivers. However, the daytime soap is a more direct heir to these nineteenth-century models, particularly the melodramas of Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Wilkie Collins, but was capable of churning out complex serialized stories week after week without the benefit of modern-day technology.
In Mittell’s defense, he does not discount the influence soap operas have had on TV serialization, but also believes the differences between them are enough to view each as separate analytical subjects. “…[T]he different scheduling format of the daily soap with no hiatus or reruns vs. the 13 to 24 weekly primetime episodes transforms everything. It’s like the difference between newspapers and magazines, a totally different mode of presentation and creation, and completely changes our notions of the function of an episode, or what a regular viewer is. So while soap operas innovated many things that primetime shows now do, the way they do them are quite different and thus it makes sense that we study them as distinct models, not just viewing today’s primetime serials as just like soaps in the evening.” While that may be true, the subject at hand is the evolution of serialized storytelling, and that soap operas have a far more direct link to those nineteenth-century melodramas than modern TV, and that modern TV has a more direct link to daytime television. It also downplays the role tropes and storytelling techniques within the medium have directly or indirectly influenced modern storytelling (i.e., cliffhangers, questions of identity, anti-heroes and -heroines, or multiple storylines among a large cast of characters). The influence of soaps should be more than a footnote, but an entire chapter in the evolution of TV.
Yet while modern dramas brought respectability to serialization, the actual serials that developed the genre still, like Rodney Dangerfield, get little respect. Might it have something to do with the stories––the multiple marriages, evil twin siblings, outlandish plots, the melodrama? Perhaps. The fact that they air fifty-two weeks a year, are difficult to curate and profit in DVDs or on streaming services, are only meant to be aired once, or that few episodes from the longest-running soaps are preserved and archived to rerun due to the fact that many production studios either re-recorded over early tapes or were destroyed altogether to make room for storage might play roles in that as well. But the most likely reason is that, unlike most television dramas during the Golden Era, soaps allowed space for women’s stories to flourish. Soaps addressed the problems women faced in the latter half of the twentieth century with far more finesse and detail. Stories that dealt with love and sex, the position women faced in choosing between work and family, and their ambitions, fears, and joys were the grist of many a soap story. While soaps were female-centric, they were not always, or not entirely, feminist, and often focused singularly on white heterosexual desires and fantasies, with marriage and middle-class aspirations being the ultimate fairy tale endings. But because soaps were also continuing dramas, they did not fall into the trap of those endings and revealed the inner workings of marriages, often at the detriment of those female dreamers. Rape, infidelity, career ambitions, familial disapproval, sexual dysfunction, widowhood, divorce, and other such topics formed the tension that either tore apart popular soap couples or brought them closer together. Since conflict and tension are the necessary ingredients in storytelling, there are no “happy endings” in continual dramas, but the weddings are often spectacular.
Themes of female agency were a mainstay in the early days of radio dramas too. Irna Phillips, the godmother of daytime soaps, got her start writing female-centric serials on Chicago’s WGN radio. As a child of Polish immigrants, Phillips wrote stories based on her own experiences, which included failed romances, abortion, and adoption. Though she never married, she wrote believably about marriage, love, romance, and the thwarted dreams of her heroines in such popular dramas as “Painted Dreams,” “The Guiding Light,” “Woman in White,” and “The Brighter Day.” Other popular soaps “Just Plain Bill,” “The Romance of Helen Trent,” and “Ma Perkins,” written by Frank and Anne Hummert, featured the type of fantastic stories that could only be told on the radio. In one example from the soap “Stella Dallas,” the titular heroine traveled across the world to rescue her daughter from a Saudi Arabian harem (Barbara Stanwyck would star in a far-less fantastical, melodramatic version of the soap on the big screen).
Fantasy storytelling fell out of favor once television became the dominant soap opera medium. Soaps became more sedentary, less action-oriented, trapped within fake sets, limited to characters chatting expository dialogue while sipping cups of coffee in their kitchens. Stories revolved around domestic problems and the emotional lives of their characters. Television was more suitable to Phillips’ storytelling, which featured a professional class of doctors and lawyers and tended to be more grounded in realism. But the core of her stories always centered on women and their pursuit of love and happiness. Her soaps (Guiding Light, As the World Turns, Days of Our Lives, which she co-created, Another World) would have very long shelf lives, with Guiding Light lasting seventy-two consecutive years on television, the longest-running television drama in history.
The female-centricity of soaps also delivered listeners to advertisers, since most radio listeners, as with the case of TV viewers, tended to be women, the primary household buyers. By the 1970s, college students and men also became huge soap fans, though the focus on female viewers remained throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s. The rise in viewership allowed advertisers to shill the latest brands by companies like Proctor & Gamble, which owned and produced many soaps (the name soap opera derived from the soap products the company advertised during the programs). For many years, soaps, even after they were transported to television, were reliable advertising generators. According to lithub.com, “ABC Daytime was so lucrative as to be generating 50 percent of the full network’s profits,” with General Hospital alone, at the height of its popularity in 1984, generating nearly $1.25 billion in revenue. In a New York Times article published in 1984, Robert C. Butler, the then group executive vice president at NBC, confirmed that “[T]here is far more money in daytime than any other part of the schedule. The difference between our ratings and the other networks could easily account for a $100 million difference in pretax profits.”
Despite their commercial intent and the move toward action/adventure, sci-fi, horror, and other sub-genres in the 1980s to attract wider audiences, it was the tortured and delayed-gratifying romantic stories that kept fans enthralled. Luke and Laura’s Ice Princess adventures during the early 80s were steeped in SF, but their love story, the real draw for female viewers, was still the root of these high-conceptual tales. Housewives stuck at home caring for babies and washing the dishes were able to escape their mundane drudgery through the fantasy of romantic longing from their radios and TVs. Young lovers torn apart by class differences, vixens clawing their way to the top of high society and finding love, businessmen and women tightening their hold on power, often stepping over people beneath them on their way up the corporate ladder, and tent pole families headed by caring matriarchs who offered sage advice to the young and restless were common tales and characters in daytime television, and following the progression of their often complicated lives formed the basis for what drew audiences to their tales. Soap heroes and heroines moved from one traumatic event to the next, suffering from all manner of near-fatal illnesses, blindness, paralysis, multiple personalities, fake deaths, kidnappings, and the ever-popular amnesia on the road toward happiness. In these characters, fans saw their dreams and desires played out on the campy stage of daytime television, which made them heirs to their 19th-century counterparts.
Some of the more popular storylines and characters also borrowed heavily from familiar tropes in 19th-century Gothic and Victorian novels. On All My Children, for instance, the show’s writers took a page out of the plot from Jane Eyre when Erica Kane married Adam Chandler, a mysterious, white-haired business tycoon, and became embroiled in a mystery that concerned her husband’s secret twin brother, a mentally disabled man he had stashed away in his attic. Phillip Spaulding on Guiding Light, the young, handsome scion of a wealthy family, had more in common with Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights than he did with any of the teen idols found on primetime, especially when, after suffering a near breakdown, he dug up the grave of his true love whom he correctly believed was still alive. On Another World, young Blaine Ewing was driven insane by her crazed stalker, a story obviously inspired by the classic 1940s melodrama Gaslight. Guiding Light showrunner Pam Long borrowed heavily from Southern Gothic, namely Tennessee Williams’ Cat on the Hot Tin Roof, for Josh and Reva. Guiding Light had another love story between the mysterious archeologist Quint McCord and reformed bad girl Nola Reardon, which evoked the Brontës, Wilkie Collins, and other gothic storytellers with its emphasis on spooky mansions, secret pasts, and mustache-twirling villains.
But not all stories or characters were driven by melodrama completely. The social changes in the 1970s led soaps toward grittier and more character-driven stories that were grounded in naturalism while existing comfortably within the genre’s melodramatic roots. The stereotypical looks of handsome chiseled men and dewy-eyed ingenues that populated daytime gave way to actors like George Rheinhardt (Steve Frame, Another World), Michael Zaslow (Guiding Light, One Life to Live), Beverlee McKinsey (Another World, Guiding Light), Victoria Wyndham (Rachel Cory, Another World), Justin Deas (Ryan’s Hope, Santa Barbara, Guiding Light), and Anthony Geary (Luke Spencer, General Hospital), all of whom were unconventional in both looks and acting styles. With this new generation of actors, soap writers addressed topical issues like the Vietnam War, drug addiction, racism, rape, women’s liberation, and other social issues that primetime television rarely touched upon. What soap productions lacked in style or expenses (though during the 1980s, when soaps were at their pique, remote location shoots in Hong Kong or St. Croix were not uncommon), they made up for with characters and stories that were both entertaining and enlightening.
No soap fan I know didn’t recognize the medium’s limitations. If you’ve ever visited any of the soap opera forums that populated the Internet during the early days of social media then you probably witnessed some of the worst vitriol ever directed toward soap producers and actors. But the joy of watching soaps is as much about the programs themselves as they are about connecting with fellow fans to hail or commiserate over their favorite shows. On forums like Soap Opera Network, fans discuss and critique past and present acting or storyline choices, write episode synopses, argue and debate the latest news or insider tidbits, mourn the passing of longtime vets, or share gossip. Ironically Mittell writes in his 2007 blog post that the rise of social media enabled the golden era of TV, particularly chat groups and message boards, which allowed viewers to discuss their favorite shows, deconstruct or speculate narrative turns, and share their love with fellow fans. But such meetings of mind occurred among soap fans long before the Internet roared onto the scene. Fans started their own fan clubs, published zines, or wrote letters to soap mags about their favorite shows. Soap conventions were also a popular way for fans to connect with one another and get autographs from their favorite actors. But the Internet no doubt allowed these communities to flourish in ways that weren’t previously available to soap fans. I began frequenting soap forums in the early oughts, long after I had stopped watching daytime, and found a tight-knit community of fans who shared my passion for daytime, Guiding Light in particular. I also found zealous cliques for characters or supercouples, or specific long-gone eras of their favorites shows, which inevitably invited a lot of conflict and dissension. But that is to be expected when a large group of people from different backgrounds and interests converge in the same space, even if ostensibly over their shared love for a soap.
Many fans were weaned on their favorite dramas, usually at the knees of their mothers, aunts, or grandmothers, and developed strong emotional attachments. Ironically my Mom and I developed our interests in soaps about the same time in the late seventies and early eighties. We both got into them by the same eldest brother whose TV set I watched Guiding Light on in his empty bedroom. He was turned on to soaps by his now-deceased girlfriend, who was a fan of One Life to Live. Though Mom and I didn’t watch the same shows at the same time, or for that matter discuss them outside an occasional question about who was still on what show or might be leaving, we were nonetheless connected by that interest in ways that went beyond the growing distance between us.
Though I eventually lost all interest in soaps outside of the fan forums I frequented in the early oughts to trade videos and commiserate with other fans, Mom continued to watch all her favorite ABC soaps, plus Young and the Restless, and, later Days of Our Lives, after her ABC shows left the air. Parkinson’s would eventually rob her of any interest in her stories (and, sadly, of her life). Indeed, during that year before she was diagnosed, one of the last things we shared was the sadness we felt over the loss of actor Kristof St. John, who played Neil Winters on The Young and the Restless. His unexpected death seemed to herald the changes that occurred not only in our lives but in daytime television as a whole (many actors that I grew up loving were dying, and no one seemed to be taking their places). When the serial paid tribute to the actor by devoting an entire episode to his character’s funeral, my mom urged me to watch it too. “Cindy, turn it on, they’re showing the funeral now,” she said, her voice urgent and almost demanding. Share this with me.
Word-of-mouth may be a sharper marketing tool, but in the end, soap-watching is a communal affair, shared among fellow soap fans, friends, family.
This sense of community extends to the cast and characters themselves. Fans are and were fiercely loyal to veteran characters and/or actors, many of whom by the 1990s were tossed aside for the flashier, the younger, the less talented. Most fans claimed they knew their favorite characters better than their families. As outrageous as this might sound, it does speak to the level of depth and complexity found in soaps. I knew my favorite characters a lot better than the revolving door of headwriters who penned their shows. I knew what they would or wouldn’t do and screamed bloody murder if my favorites became the victims of character assassination. This was true of all fans. The nature of serialization demands a consistency that does not go unnoticed by the most observant. With their laser-sharp memories, fans often remember almost every detail about characters or plotlines. This was true even before the days of Youtube, DVRs, or even VHS cassettes, which enabled fans to curate and trade their favorite shows on tape. Thirty years on I can still recall that Harley Cooper, a character on Guiding Light, named her firstborn, whom she would give up for adoption, after the daisies she loved. I might not remember the specifics of some major stories, but I remember that. Writers have had the difficult task to service fans such as myself, building a believable world that was consistently and realistically like our own.
History also serves as a marker––fans take pride in how long they’ve watched their soaps. Online communities, websites, and Youtube, which now hosts videotaped episodes uploaded by fans, often serve as curators for younger fans who are curious about past stories, characters, writers, or actors and for longtime fans to revisit their favorite shows. With the older soaps, fans were able to pass down the daytime ritual through generations of family. A long-time character who has seen more than one actor portray him can serve as a way to mark eras, for fans to say that this was “their soap,” before new actors and writers took over and ruined it. They make comparisons with cast and writing staffs over the years––who was better, who was worst, who ruined everything––zealously archive old articles from soap magazines, ratings, photographs, or any other daytime paraphernalia, and develop deep attachments to characters, loving some and loving to hate others. When you spend five days a week, fifty-two weeks a year with that many characters then attachments can’t help but form.
Yet fan attachments go beyond a simple matter of how much time is spent viewing soaps. Writing played a huge role and during the late 1970s to the early 1990s, the period when my attachments developed and flourished, the writing could be as equal in quality as anything found in literature and film. Despite the genre’s faults then and now, given their factory-like production, I’m less inclined to use the general argument soap journalists make about how their quality is validated in the social-oriented stories they’ve tackled. I’m more interested in examining how soaps deserve credit for their role in expanding television’s artistic growth. A thorough dismissal of the medium, because it has surrendered itself to self-parody and irrelevance, isn’t any more appropriate because it blots out honest appraisals of their value and why their slow obsolescence should be seen as a great loss to entertainment.
One way to show what I mean is to simply offer an example of what soaps did at their best. As always, the greatness of soaps was in the little, private moments where characters exposed their inner lives. Soaps, like Guiding Light, told compelling, tightly drawn dramas around the rot that can build up in dysfunctional marriages. But few were equal to the story of Roger and Holly Thorpe.
In the winter of 1979, Roger Thorpe raped his wife Holly. The story which led to this shocking set of events is, like most soap stories, elaborately woven. Holly Norris was obsessed with Roger Thorpe, the show’s resident anti-hero, but he had designs on other women, namely Peggy Scott, who would become his wife. Holly instead married good guy Ed Bauer, the trusted doctor and son of the town’s most respected family, but Holly couldn’t put Roger entirely out of her mind. The two had an affair which resulted in the birth of their daughter, Christina, whom Holly passed off for a short time as Ed’s. When the truth of Christina’s paternity came to light, Ed divorced Holly and Holly married Roger. But theirs was not a happy union. Roger’s insecurity, in both his place in Springfield, career, and marriage, led him down a treacherous path that included an affair with Ed’s kid sister and another rape, also involving Ed’s new wife, with whom Roger shared a past. The walls began to close in on Roger as Holly, fed up with his infidelities, prepared to take their daughter and leave.
The rape scene is difficult to watch. Unlike a similar rape on General Hospital involving Luke and Laura, which the show’s writers would later revise as a seduction when the actors’ on-screen chemistry proved too hot to ignore (they’d revise it again as rape years later), Guiding Light left no doubt that what occurred between husband and wife was a horrific violation. The scene begins with Roger arriving home just as Holly is about to leave him. After quickly surmising the situation, Roger grabs the suitcase from her, throws it across the room, and physically threatens her as she tries to get away. The scene ends with Roger assaulting Holly. The shot lingers only long enough to show him pinning her down on the bed while she pleads for him to stop before the scene fades.
Two things come to mind whenever I watch this scene on Youtube. First, the acting between Michael Zaslow and Maureen Garrett was superb. Garrett began the scene with a confident and assertive Holly determined to take control of her life, but as the threat of violence asserted itself, her confidence withered until she was reduced to a frightened child. Throughout the scene, Garrett moved back and forth between both dichotomies. As she desperately attempted to reason with Roger, she lowered her voice and spoke in a slow, deliberate manner to calm him down, a tactic many women employ to defuse violent men. But her demeanor changes after Roger strikes her and throws her down on the couch. Her body stiffens and appears to fold inward as though she is anticipating more blows and her voice becomes a high-pitched whine as she begs Roger to leave her alone. The scene is all the more compelling and difficult to watch because we are witnessing more than just Holly’s physical violation but a spiritual and psychological one as well. Rarely, has rape ever been portrayed in a painfully truthful way.
Likewise, Zaslow did a terrific job. His Roger Thorpe was more than a one-note monster. While his behavior was monstrous, he was also a damaged soul, a man whose ambitions and talents could never overcome the societal constrictions that denied him personal and professional success. As Roger berates his wife and callously asks her to compare him to his nemesis Ed Bauer in bed––”You probably wouldn’t be in such a hurry to cut out from him like you’re cutting out from my miserable life”––he comes across less as a two-dimensional villain and more of a man who knows he has reached the point of no return. His ambitions and insecurities have created a fatal mix that crushed whatever good was in him. At one point, Zaslow is barely able to get his lines out, his voice breathless and huffy. Whether this was done by design or because Zaslow got caught up in the scene, I can’t tell, but it does lend Roger a vulnerability on the level of a tragic, Shakespearean character. Because of Zaslow, Roger became a character fans both hated and pitied.
The second thing that comes to mind is how impressive the production values are. By 1970s standards, videography was fairly minimal, with camera angles limited to close-ups and master shots. But the rape scene set new standards for daytime. A hand-held was used for some of the scenes, the first ever for soaps, and was utilized in such a way that allowed viewers to step into the scene and Holly’s point of view. In one shot, where Roger asked Holly why she never looks at him the same way she looks at Ed, the audio was somewhat distorted and the image softened, disrupting the fluidity of the unobtrusive set-ups. It’s disorienting and almost surreal, capturing the surge of adrenaline people often experience during violence. Along with the score, which is both menacing and understated, the scene puts viewers in a frightening and uncompromising position, pretty daring for daytime TV. Women watching this at home didn’t have to imagine their worst fear (if they had not already gone through it before) but were experiencing it vicariously through Holly.
The scene made such a huge impact on fans that by the time Holly had Roger charged with marital rape, another first in television history, Garrett received tons of fan mail in support.
The rape storyline was before my time, but when Garrett and Zaslow returned to the show ten years later, their strange and tragically painful relationship became one of my favorite storylines. While the show’s gender politics was questionable at times (the show danced around a true-love story that didn’t exist the first time around or treated Holly’s unresolved anger toward Roger more as a neurosis than a justifiable response to sexual assault), there was no denying the chemistry of both actors and their ability to breathe life into some of the most complex characters to ever hit television. And this, over twenty years before David Chase would write a similarly explosive marital break-down on his hit mob series The Sopranos.
Soap operas are by no means perfect and, at times, have told stories that are questionable when it comes to gender, race, and class. They’ve had their fair share of stinkers, both story- and acting-wise. And yet, there were times, more than I can relate here, in which they were delightfully subversive, broke the rules and reset them again, and reached for moments of transcendence that television would not fully embrace until both primetime and cable TV began churning out more challenging fare. And, while we await the first new soap drama to air in twenty-five long years and answer the question of whether there’s still life in daytime, let’s send our flowers to the soap opera, its contributions to television, and the debt we owe to these quiet giants.
