As The World Turns
June 16, 2008
- Back in 1994, it might have been the 6th of June, I was in my bedroom deeply immersed in an episode of Guiding Light. Where I was watching mattered, because that television didn't have a VCR, so I can't go to the video. But even as I was watching, I realized that it was one of the best hours of soap opera I had seen in I don't know how long. And back in 1994, soaps weren't nearly as bad as they ...
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June 11, 2008
- After last week's inescapable explosion of gushing over the new and improved One Life to Live, I decided it was time to set aside my innate skepticism and have a look. So I programmed the DVR to record the Sunday afternoon block of episodes. But when I started to watch, what had recorded was two hours of a made-for-TV movie starring Shelly Long and Gabriel Byrne and three hours of General ...
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June 4, 2008
- In 1981, daytime soaps began a transformation that over the past twenty-five years has profoundly changed the genre. At first glance, the process was set in motion by the wedding of General Hospital’s Luke and Laura. But the real story began back in 1978 when General Hospital was on the verge of cancellation.The numbers back then tell only part of the story. As the World Turns was at the ...
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June 2, 2008
- Twenty-five years after Hill Street Blues led to "TV's second golden age" (Steven Stark: Glue to the Set), a new incarnation of primetime soaps were introduced in the fall of 2006. In addition to Brothers and Sisters, ABC had Ugly Betty; NBC, the critics' darling, Friday Night Lights; all will be returning for third seasons in fall 2008. In many ways, these 21st-century primetime ...
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May 15, 2008
- One of the better-know soap opera columnists refuses to call herself a fan, and takes issue when others refer to her publicly as a soap fan for fear that her words won’t been taken seriously. Yet her affection for and knowledge of soaps is implicit in every word she writes. So, why not a fan? And one of the television critics for this country’s newspaper of record (at least east of the ...
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May 4, 2008
- Tomorrow is May 5th, Cinco de Mayo, and I’m thinking of one of my favorite writers. His name was Douglas Marland. Now you might be scratching your head, thinking “That’s odd, I never heard of him. What books did he write?” He didn’t write books. Let me tell you what he wrote.Douglas Marland was born Marland Messner in 1935. He didn’t start out as a writer, but as an ...
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May 1, 2008
- In her essay, The Siren Call of the Super Couple: Soap Operas’ Destructive Slide Toward Closure, ( published in Contemporary Soap Opera Criticism, ed. Suzanne Frentz, 1992), Diana Reef talks about how the super couple phenomenon, beginning with General Hospital's Luke and Laura in the late 1970s, “create(s) serious storyline problems for producers and writers.” According to Reef, the love ...
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April 30, 2008
- The daytime Emmys are being announced today on The View, honoring the best of soap operas. This is the first time in a long while where I don’t care who is going to be nominated. I should explain. Ever since I was a kid, I watched the soaps. Yes, I know the PC term now is “Daytime Dramas” but to me, they are the soaps. My grandmother watched the CBS shows. Her cigarettes were right by her ...
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