Maybe it’s the idea of the soap opera that I’ll mourn more than the soap opera themselves. By design, the basest form of television escapism – poor production value, hammy acting, preposterous storylines. At one point in my teenage life I watched All My Children, I think because it took presumably took place on Philadelphia’s main line. The good folks of Pine Valley refer to their centre ville as “center city” – and only Philadelphians do that, right? – and the show’s creator Agnes Nixon is a Bryn Mawr denizen. The AMC world was lousy with scandal, naturally, but nothing too too terrible could happen in Pine Valley. The world was a representation of constants. Banal tradition was tantamount. I loved how their holidays mirrored our own, how at Christmas time, the characters would don Christmas sweaters and go a-visiting. Everyone’s living rooms were heavily decorated, coated in The Home Goods style. It was comforting to me for some insane reason that on Thanksgiving, it would be Thanksgiving in Pine Valley.
Today of course, there are much baser forms of tv escapism, that don’t require huge crews, writers or even actors. So, watching Erica Kane cheat on somebody with someone apparently does hold the same allure it once did. If the modern woman wants betrayal, lies, and melodrama, the Real Housewives of anywhere fit the bill. Erica Kane a super model at 35 and at 5 foot 1? How about Alex Van Kampen as a model is even more ridiculous. Soap operas are often scoffed at by critics and viewers because of the heightened melodrama, the repetitive clichés and stereotypes. But there is genius in the recipe – the enormous number of characters and the fact that there is usually “no single ‘hero’”, so viewers have a choice regarding with whom they might identify, and they are in an omniscient position, able to speculate about the possible turn of events. The storylines are written to ensure that any new viewer can join at any time and will be able to follow along thanks to the banal and unchanging landscape and the continual and symbolic references to the past. Soap operas are stories in the social realist tradition with an over-dramatized approach to contemporary social problems. The storylines are constant and potentially endless. There is a melange of elements at work – hyper realism, critical response, problem-solving, identification and involvement with characters, emotional experience, preoccupation with everyday concerns, undemanding. Then there are the melodramatic features of female oriented, moral polarization, the unlikely coincidences, incestuous mingling, heightened emotions, excess, literary romance, episodic narrative sans the “happy ending”. And, in a kind of parasite/host relationship, feeding off the shattered hopes and dreams of its audience, while simultaneously making them think their own lives are lesser, that they are missing something or are not worthy of more.
As the writer’s strike of 2007 dragged on, several of my female producers would gather in an office to watch a Korean Soap Opera called Winter Sonata, starring Korean heartthrob Bae Yong Joon. Having to hand out pink slips every Friday, the dwindling crew and the depression hanging over the offices was weighing heavily on everybody. Winter Sonata was their escape with it’s gentle melodrama, it’s soft focus falling snow, long melancholic music montages, lovely and chaste, star crossed lovers, themes of character duality and possessive love, and polaris necklaces.
The eternal pursuit of information and novelty has closed the chapter on heavily produced daytime serialized dramas. Instead, daytime television will be rife with so called “lifestyle” shows with names like, The View and The Chew, which require a few cameras, very little investment and zero loyalty. Yes, today’s homemakers aren’t looking for pure escape, they’d much rather be spending their days on personal betterment, you know like finding a new way to prepare chicken divan or working on those abs. So the American soap opera is dead. But in the rest of the world they rage on. And Bae Yoon Jung is hard at work producing a new television drama to air later this year called Dream High.