Red Room Where the Writers Are

This Friday, 1 May, will mark a month since CBS announced it was canceling Guiding Light (and, for what it’s worth, Friday also marks the first anniversary of my first post here at Red Room). When Jennifer Gibbons asked me to be a part of RR’s Guiding Light Project, I wasn’t sure where I would begin. I was in diapers when GL premiered (on television:). And while it was my mother’s show until she died in 1991, there long periods when I didn’t watch. But it’s always been a part of my life, not to mention this blog; I’ve posted over a dozen times on GL

Looking over GL’s 72-year history is to see soap opera in its entirety – Proctor & Gamble; Irna Phillips; radio-to-television; 15 minutes-to-30-minutes-to-an-hour; black-and-white-to-color; live-to-tape-to-edited-video-to-digital; network-to-You-Tube and beyond – a book begging to be written.

As I pondered where to begin, a little procrastination seemed in order; it really is an integral part of writing. So I took a look through Red Room founder, Ivory Madison’s new graphic novel, The Huntress. The first sentence of Paul Levitz’s introduction seemed apropos:

Comics often demonstrate one of the magical characteristics of folk tales: the ability to tell and retell a story, changing with the times and circumstances of the listeners, and of the storyteller, until only the essential kernel remains intact.

I got to wondering, what would GL's creator Irna Phillips think about the show's current incarnation? Would she understand that what’s true for comics is equally true for soaps and recognize the essential kernel that remains, or is she, as others have suggested, spinning in her grave at what GL has become. I’d love to be able to turn to an episode of PBS’s American Masters to find the answers, but I’m not holding my breath that anyone will ever make that film.; a 2008 PBS series, Pioneers of Broadcasting, included sitcoms, talk shows, variety shows and game shows, but not soaps, so alas…

Eccentric doesn’t even begin to describe all of Irna Phillips’ tics and contradictions, so I know I’m climbing out on a limb here (although I think I can say with some certainly that Irna would be absolutely beside herself at the current state of her baby, As the World Turns). But there are some facts from which to speculate. Reportedly reluctant to move GL from radio to television, Phillips clearly grew to appreciate what the visuals added to her storytelling -- those long, lingering close-ups that became a hallmark of soaps began on  ATWT. So, I’d bet that Phillips would have ultimately come to embrace GL's new production model.

And she wasn’t afraid to innovate. In the wake of the success of primetime’s first soap opera, Peyton Place (for which she had been a consultant), Phillips did not hesitate to create an ATWT primetime spin-off, Our Private World in 1965. It only lasted a few episodes, but given the success of future primetime soaps, OPW may well have been ahead of its time. So, I’d like to think that Irna would be doing everything possible to keep GL on the air in some way, shape or form. On the other hand, this is the same woman who in a fit of pique back in the 1950s killed off Jim Lowell on ATWT because TPTB wouldn’t allow her to create a happy ending for adulterers.

Prickly as Phillips clearly was, I’m not sure she’d be all that unhappy about what’s changed over GL’s 72-year run. The GL canvas certainly changed a lot on her watch. The locale began in Five Corners outside Chicago, then moved to Selby Flats near Los Angeles before settling in Springfield. And while longtime viewers (myself included) lament the waning of the Bauers as GL’s core family, the Bauers weren’t even introduced until 1948 – 11 years after GL debuted.

As for the storytelling, I expect she would find fault with a lot, as have many of us who love the show. But given Phillips’ penchant for insisting that her stories challenge society’s mores, I’d like to hope that Irna would be able to see in the emerging love story between Olivia and Natalie, and in how that story’s being told, that the storyteller’s essential kernel has indeed remained intact. So while GL Headwriter Jill Lorie Hurst’s version of GL in 2009 is far from what Irna Phillips imagined in Chicago during the 1930s, that is, as Paul Levitz concluded in his introduction to The Huntress, “as it should be.”

 © 2009 Lynn Liccardo Limited Licensing: I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby publish it under the Creative Commons Attribution license, granting distribution of my copyrighted work without making changes, with mandatory attribution to Lynn Liccardo and for non-commercial purposes only. Lynn Liccardo