Soap Operas

There are two things I've noticed people think about soaps.

1. They are absurd and terrible.

2. They are incredibly addictive.

So I have to ask...why? Why are soap operas almost always used as the butt of jokes? if a person wants to insult a show they liken it to a soap opera.

Now I'm not a constant soap watcher. I fell prey to them a few times in my life (mainly One Life to Live and General Hospital) and I guess they tended towards the ridiculous and repetitive. But these are shows that air every day for decades at a time. I can't really blame them for reaching to find new plot lines and then having to use old ones once they've used all the new ones.

So yeah. Why are soaps held in such contempt?

Yes, soaps are low-quality entertainment. Most of the time the acting sucks, the writing sucks, and the production sucks. To be fair, though, these people have to create a half-hour or full-hour show every weekday of the year. In prime time you have chances to rehearse, rewrite, reshoot even, and then edit. In daytime you often don't. They shoot scenes in one take. The crew is on call every single week, which doesn't leave much time for other projects.

So what's the appeal? Some tropers may remember a time when housewives would gossip over the back fence about their neighbors. People want to hear dirt about other people, even if they're fictional. Viewers identify with characters, become attached to them over a period of months or years, and share in their small victories. As in real life, they see people come and go, love and hate, age and die. If nothing else, a soap is an event to build your day around when you don't have an office job.

Soaps are held in contempt? They just evolved and moved to prime time.

I did used to like Sunset Beach as a kid when it was on. That was my first exposure to the genre. I only watched it for Leslie Anne Down. That woman is a mynx. Rowr.

Actually, it was pretty inventive as soaps go. It had a dark undertone, such as the long arc about Clive Robinson's character drowning his wife (or did he) and whether his young new flame would be next.

Toward the end it degenerated into the typical soap insanity — the wife wasn't really dead, ripoffs of slasher films (a whole month-long arc on a tropical island with a slasher killing people with a fishhook), Clive's evil twin brother...eegh.

There was another one, Another World (best known for necessitating the renaming of Another World to Out of This World) which was pretty low-key — except for the end when they had this mustache-twirling crime lord villain with a Russian name despite being clearly non-Russian. Meanwhile, the "John Black" character (i.e. the unflappable main hero), a guy called Carl, had a low scary voice and looked like Satan◊, so it seemed weird whenever he faced off with the villain. It felt like role reversal.

edited 3rd Mar '11 10:29:23 PM by johnnyfog

Is the main difference between daytime soaps (General Hospital) and prime time soaps (Dallas) just the budget and and film quality?

edited 23rd Jan '14 8:06:51 PM by DS9guy