More than Bold: on exploring the soaps cancelled in the 2000s

 

I.                Branching out

For years, I followed only one daytime soap: Bold and the Beautiful, which I began watching in 2010. For most of those years, I was aware that other soaps existed, and I did stay on top of news about them, but I never bothered to sit down and make a study. That all changed in 2021. After CBS announced that Krista Allen would be taking over the role of Taylor Hayes on Bold, I saw in one of the Bold forums that a poster had put up a YouTube link to some of Allen's scenes in the 1998 season of Days of Our Lives. The link led me to Days YouTube, and there I discovered the entire 1998 season, which I devoured. Remember, this was the period of 'working from home', when you could, free of supervision, let YouTube playlists go on for hours and hours, and witness the unfolding on YouTube of a soap season, 250 episodes long, in all its sprawling glory.

 

One favourite channel owner of mine had uploaded hundreds of episodes of Days from the eighties and nineties, and even though most of the selections were biased towards the Days supercouple John Black and Marlena Evans (the owner was a huge fan of John and Marlena), the voluminous playlists helped me gain a comprehension of the Days saga, which is massive. The trouble was that the poster became a little too enthusiastic; she uploaded too many episodes and then attracted the attention of NBC who put pressure on Google; and after checking my list of subscriptions one morning, I found that her channel had been deleted. The lesson is that if you want to run a pirate channel, you need to fly under the radar.

 

One good outcome was that I had discovered that there were other great soaps besides Bold, which had been going downhill by my estimation since around 2019. Following the trend of soaps of the 2010s, a trend that was one of decrepitude and decline, Bold had deteriorated to such an extent that I had nearly become disenchanted with the daytime genre itself. Fortunately, my discovery of Days restored my faith. And after that experience, I became curious to know if there were other good soaps. Looking through the message boards, I found many references to long-running soaps that had been cancelled, and these hints led me to research further.

 

What I discovered is that a hierarchy exists. On the A-list, we see four daytime soaps that have been running for thirty to sixty years, soaps that are still running today despite poor ratings: Bold, which began in 1987, and Bold's sister show Young and the Restless, in 1973, both broadcast by CBS; and Days (NBC), which began in 1965, and General Hospital (ABC), in 1963.                        

 

In the second tier we find what I call the AAAGO soaps: AAAGO is an acronym of All My Children (ABC), Another World (NBC), As the World Turns (CBS), Guiding Light (CBS), and One Life to Live (ABC). The five ran for a long time: Guiding Light began in 1952, As the World Turns in 1956, Another World in 1964, One Life to Live in 1968, and All My Children in 1970. These were broadcast all throughout the 1990s, which was the last boom time for soaps, and pulled off the air by the early 2010s. After the culling, the AAAGO actors who had elected to stay on in the business went over to the big four.

 

Showing their age, the writers at the soap news site SoapSheKnows remember the AAAGO soaps fondly, and every now and then the site will commemorate an AAAGO soap and give a brief account of some of the more notable storylines. When I first came across these trips down memory lane, my interest was piqued: the AAAGO soaps sounded as good as Bold or Days in their prime. Wanting to know more, I once again set out to hunt soap seasons down on YouTube.

 

Possibly, CBS, which owns As the World, could re-release all 54 years’ worth of As the World - and that would be a lot - on streaming or DVD, but that is highly unlikely. If you are a soap fan, you must depend upon other fans to upload bits and pieces of a season on YouTube; this is the only way you can ever sample an AAAGO soap. Besides which, for all we know, the networks could have lost many of the episodes from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. That would not be unprecedented: the BBC, which is the UK state broadcaster, has lost a hundred episodes of Doctor Who from the 1960s. It stands to reason, then, that the more recent an episode is, the more likely it is to have survived: someone out there must have recorded it.

 

These observations led me to conclude that the best decade for a tour of the AAAGO soaps is the 1990s, starting with the season of the year 1990, which was a good year for some soaps, a bad year for others.

 

II.           Tropes of the soap

 

Before we proceed any further, let us attempt to define what a daytime soap is and what are its 'tropes', that is, its essential attributes.

 

The daytime soap belongs to a theatre genre that is called the melodrama. As such, you expect in a soap plenty of what MBTI calls Extraverted Feeling (Fe), for a soap runs on pure emotion. The whole aim of watching a soap is to bring about what Aristotle calls catharsis, an upswell and expulsion of violent emotion, which is what, according to Aristotle, Greek theatre goers experienced when contemplating the tragedy. That makes a soap sound like a serious business, and so it is. The themes of the soap run deep. If you look at the titles, you see religious and philosophical connotations: Days of Our Lives, Guiding Light, As the World Turns, One Life to Live, Another World (the spirit world?) ... In that connection, it should be mentioned that Guiding Light began as a Christian show. I mention all this because Ron Carlavati, who became the head writer of Days in 2017, did his best to turn Days into what it was not, and that is a comedy show and one that dabbled in bedroom farce. In 2024, the last year of his run, Carlavati introduced a storyline that made use of plot device of a soap within a soap, and this story idea took over Days to such an extent that the Days executives were forced to take notice, and so Carlavati, to the joy of Days fans, got the boot.

 

The seriousness of the soap genre entails the following: when watching a soap, you must believe in what you see up there on the screen, at least at the time of watching. And that holds true of drama in general. Drama aims at making you care about what happens to the characters, because if you care, you believe; if you do not believe, you do not care.

 

You must suspend disbelief, then, and the need for the suspension of disbelief forces artists to treat art as a grave affair. This is why Larry Hama, the writer of GI Joe for Marvel in the 1980s, once said that the most important thing about writing a comic book is taking on a mantle of super-seriousness and super-drama. If you as a writer mock a genre by treating it ironically and going 'meta' (that is, breaking down the fourth wall), then you run adrift. The cult soap Passions, which ran from 1999 to 2008, veered dangerously close to parody: all the actors seem to have been instructed to act at the level of actors in a B-grade 1950s movie. In Passions a tone of quirkiness, jokiness, irony, pervades, a tone that is appropriate for a David Lynch series but not for a daytime soap. Having said that, Passions did work, but that was despite the makers of the show - among them writer James E. Reilly, who was most famous for his work on Days - pushing against the limits. With his art, Reilly took chances; he liked to live on the edge.

 

Passions aside, the formula for making a daytime soap is: write a crazy story and play it straight, and trust that po-faced performances by your cast will help the audience believe any plot, no matter how absurd.

 

This does not mean that the soap should forgo realism: quite the opposite. Money, clothes, extras, sets, all must be employed to make a TV police station look like a real police station, a courtroom like a real courtroom, a hospital like a real hospital, a church like a real church. The first sign of the waning of the daytime genre can traced back to when it was that the shows began to cut budgets and cut corners. This new thrift was illustrated by the change in the treatment of infant and child characters. The use of baby and child actors in soaps makes up one of the mainstays, because children play an important part in typical storylines: the soap audience likes seeing babies and their antics, and to exploit every mother's fear, soaps often utilise plots in which a baby is kidnapped. But because of budgetary reasons, soaps in the 2010s stopped using child actors, and so, instead of seeing a real live baby, we would see a doll wrapped up in a blanket, the actors pretending it were a real infant that cries and gurgles.

 

The recent parsimony led to the disappearance of that other soap staple, the church wedding. In the 2010s and then the 2020s, characters married not in churches but in living rooms, and because of budget cuts, the living room sets became smaller and smaller. And absurdly, for these ceremonies the services of a priest are not used; instead, a lawyer officiates. Or perhaps a character will obtain from the Internet a temporary licence to perform a wedding ceremony (this actually can be done in America).

 

Frugality and an aversion to the use of child labour helped accelerate the decline of the daytime genre because soap storylines revolve around women, marriage, and babies; that is, the soap relies on the same themes as the romance genre. Soaps borrow from many genres: action-adventure, spy, medical, police-procedural, horror, and science-fiction; a soap can even borrow from the musical - quite a few cabaret performances can be found in the soaps of the 1980s and 1990s. But if a daytime soap were to be a comic book, it would be a romance comic book, a genre that saw its heyday in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.

 

One important difference between the soap and romance genres does exist, however. Romance stories end after the uniting and pairing off of the happy couple; but the daytime genre does not stop there. The soap will follow the heroine past her wedding day and accompany her throughout the remainder of her life. The heroine starts off young and innocent, meets an attractive man, has a romance, marries him, has children, and then must overcome any obstacles to happiness that a young wife and mother may encounter. Afterwards, her children grow into teens and then adults quickly (this is what soap fans call SORAS, Soap Opera Rapid Ageing Syndrome); and then, her children have romances and children of their own. Gradually, the soap heroine ages into a grandmother like Alice Horton on Days, a supporting character whose main duty is to dispense wisdom and counsel.

 

A number of incidents can derail the character on her hero's journey, incidents that are usually related to reproduction and childbirth. The heroine can commit adultery - one of the favourite subjects of the genre - or she could suffer a miscarriage or choose to undergo an abortion. Perhaps she will lose a child because of an accident or illness or worse - her son or daughter might be murdered.

 

Another frequent misfortune that a heroine may endure, and usually one that she must endure at least once, is violation. Soaps are obsessed by sex and sex crime. Characters, either male or female, may be coerced or drugged or hypnotised into having sex, and they may even be raped outright. In such unpleasant storylines, the dark side of the genre rears its ugly head. A few months ago, when watching the 1998 season of General, I was shocked to see the sudden, gratuitous, and brutally explicit rape of a 15-year-old girl. It came out of nowhere, blindsiding me, and after seeing it, I vowed that I would be taking an extended leave of absence from the show. Something that rankles is that writers, producers, and directors seem to believe that such outrages serve to 'improve', 'ennoble' a heroine.

 

The dark and grotesque obsession of soap writers with sex crime often leads a soap to send itself up - that is, to stoop to self-parody. For an example, I will quote here an entry from the Days Wiki that summarises the career of a minor villain of the early 1990s, Alan Harris. Even though I am tempted, I will not be inserting sarcastic comments, for the simple reason that there is no need: you cannot parody soaps, they parody themselves.

 

Alan Harris

 

History

 

Alan Harris was played by Paul Kersey from 1993-95. Alan came to Salem as Lucas' old buddy from West Point. Alan became infatuated with Carrie and even tried to rape her at Green Mountain Lodge. However, once Alan learned that Carrie had lost her virginity to Austin, Alan decided to go after Carrie's sister Sami. Alan dated Sami and eventually raped her. When Sami finally came forward, with this fact, Lucas and Carrie came up with a plan to trap Alan. Carrie attempted to trick Alan into admitting that he raped Sami. Carrie went to his apartment, but was shocked when she found a shrine to her in Alan's bathroom. Carrie saw a ski mask and realized that Alan was the person of attempted to rape her at Green Mountain Lodge. Sami learned what her sister was attempting to do and she raced to Alan's apartment. Alan took both Sami and Carrie hostage, but Austin and the police managed to save them.

 

A rape trial followed, and in an attempt to make Sami look like a liar, the defence made Carrie admit that her sister had lied about many things in the past. Alan was found not guilty and Sami vowed to destroy Carrie's relationship with Austin. After a good amount of time had past, Alan showed back up to get his revenge on Sami. Alan had a gun and intended to rape Sami again. Alan and Sami fought on the docks and Sami managed to get the gun from Alan. Sami shot Alan in the crotch, which maimed him for life. Lucas managed to get Alan drunk in the hospital and got Alan to admit to raping Sami and many other woman. Alan was sent to prison.

 

The ordeal does not 'improve' Sami - one of the female villains of Days - and turn her to the side of good. A few years later, she drugs Austin and rapes him. Pregnant by another man, Sami wants to fool Austin into thinking that he is the father of her child; she predicts that once Austin comes to believe that he is the father, he will feel compelled to marry her.

 

III.          The mascot

 

Returning to the subject of AAGO soaps, I will state from the outset that all of them deserve their reputation. They are all greats, and you can see the greatness in the opening credits of each episode, which is when we hear the theme. Every soap worth its salt boasts a catchy and hummable title song, and the AAAGO soaps are no exception: at odd moments during the day, I catch myself singing the theme of 1990 Another World, One Life, Guiding.

 

Having said that, I did not enjoy all of them. In contrast to the other soaps, Guiding and As the World were dark and dull, and I mean that literally: they look as though they were filmed in a cave. And that is even though the budget of the two matched, I am sure, that of Bold. But in comparison, Bold has an air of sleekness and prosperity, and every episode looks a million dollars.

 

Because of the reputation of the two shows, I was surprised by what I saw in Guiding and As the World, especially given that the latter was written by Douglas Marland, who is widely regarded as being one of the best writers in the business. After viewing the entire season, I grew to like Guiding a little more than As the World, mainly because of the presence of the two beautiful young actresses Beth Ehlers (who plays Harley Cooper) and Kassie Wesley DePaiva (who plays Chelsea Reardon). In addition, some of the male actors do stand out visually, and that makes them memorable. There is Michael Zaslow (who plays villain Roger Thorpe), Grant Aleksander (hero Phillip Spaulding), Rick Hearst (his younger brother Alan Michael Spaulding), and Robert Newman (hero Josh Lewis). All four men look odd, but odd is good: we in the audience remember odd. But all in all, I rank Guiding and As the World below the other AAAGO soaps; they lack the fun, colour, spontaneity, and excitement of the other three.

 

It should be remembered that even the best soaps go through bad patches. I am unable to watch the 1990 season of General Hospital for long, and I find the 1990 season of Days dark, gloomy, and depressing (two beloved veteran characters are killed off and another is raped). Both Days and General got off to a bad start at the beginning of the decade, but after a few years, both found their footing: General had improved by 1992, Days by 1993.

 

So, what went wrong with Guiding and As the World in the year 1990? The answer is that both were wanting for what I call the mascot.

 

A good soap should be distinctive; the principle is that the casual viewer, who is always pressed for time, should be able to tell one soap from another. Many TV shows compete for his time, and in 1990, he could choose between a dozen daytime soaps. These were the big four soaps, the five AAAGO soaps, and the three soaps that started life in the eighties - Loving (ABC), Generations (NBC), and Santa Barbara (NBC). If the viewer in 1990 were to watch the dozen, he would be using up his entire day, considering that the length of one episode is 30 minutes to an hour when it includes ads.

 

A daytime soap in the eighties and nineties faced stiff competition, and in order to stand out from the crowd, the soap needed a trademark character.

 

Soap operas, like superhero team comic books, are ensemble pieces, and as such, one character must stand out visually. In the case of Marvel's Avengers comic book, the mascot was the Vision, who like all mascot characters would be put in the box in the top left corner of the cover:

 

Eventually, though, in the early 1970s, Marvel decided to stick with just one prominent character for their corner boxes. For the Fantastic Four, that was the Thing. The Avengers had a trickier decision and ultimately decided to go with one of their more prominent members who didn't have a solo title of his own, the Vision. For many years, then, the Avengers' corner box was devoted solely to the Vision.

 

In the eighties, the mascot of Days was Steve 'Patch' Johnson; the mascot of Bold was Ridge Forrester; the mascot of General was the couple Luke and Laura Spencer (whose wedding in 1981 drew 30 million viewers). In 1990, the twins Vicky and Marley Hudson (played by Anne Heche) were the mascot of Another World; Victoria Lord (played by Erika Slezak) of One Life; Erica Kane (played by Susan Lucci) of All My Children. All stand out. You would have been hard pressed to ignore Steve 'Patch' Johnson, who appeared on Days from 1985 to 1990; such was his notoriety, 'Patch' was parodied in a big screen movie (Delirious, a 1991 John Candy comedy). The actor portraying the mascot is usually so striking that even non-soap TV viewers remember him; think of Ronn Moss (who played Ridge Forrester from 1987 to 2012) or Anne Heche. This specialness is all that matters: Moss acts as stiff as a board and Heche annoys, but what counts is that the two stick in your mind.

 

You will notice that 1990 Guiding and As the World are bereft of mascotd, although Guiding does boast a charismatic and extraverted heroine in the person of Reva Shayne (Kim Zimmer), who returns to the show in the 1990 season after a long absence and then kills herself by driving her car off a pier. 

(I hasten to add that Reva's death is temporary. In the best soap tradition, her body is never found, and her grief-stricken family believe that she is dead; but she returns years later. This is the fate that befalls many a soap heroine. In 1990, Days' Hope Williams died at the climax of the Cruise of Deception storyline but came back to life and returned to the show (suffering from amnesia, of course) in 1994).

 

In 1990, As the World lacks a charismatic master villain as well as a mascot. It is the big-league villain that makes a soap stand out, and usually that villain is in the terms of MBTI an Extravert, an Intuitive, and a Judger: think of Days' Stefano DiMera (ENTJ) and Victor Kiriakis (ENTJ), One Life to Live's Mitch Laurence (ENFJ), and Guiding Light's Roger Thorpe (ENTJ). 

These characters possess a great deal of charm and charisma, and while they are irredeemably wicked, repeated exposure gives the audience an insight into their thoughts and schemes. We come to know them. And a miracle is achieved. Despite the awfulness of the master villain, we associate his presence with stability, comfort, warmth, reassurance - in other words, all that is what MBTI calls Introverted Sensing (Si). And this is exactly what producers aim at: they dangle a pleasant and likeable actor before the viewers, hook them, and reel them in. The actor who portrays the show's signature villain winds up becoming an old friend and one who is most welcome when he returns after having spent a few years away; for example, the Days audience is cheered when Joe Mascolo reprises the role of Stefano in the late 2000s. Instances such as these demonstrate that a producer can enjoy a real stroke of luck when casting, and when he hits upon an actor who is perfect for a role, he stands the chance of making his soap a national institution.

 

IV.          Soap villains and heroes

 

I should mention that a good soap will allow shades of grey in a depiction of a villain, and as the Wiki entry on soap operas observes, the sheer length of a soap season allows the actor to illuminate all sides of a character. The entry quotes from a 2012 Los Angeles Times article:

 

Although melodramatically eventful, soap operas such as this also have a luxury of space that makes them seem more naturalistic; indeed, the economics of the form demand long scenes, and conversations that a 22-episodes-per-season weekly series might dispense with in half a dozen lines of dialogue may be drawn out, as here, for pages. You spend more time even with the minor characters; the apparent villains grow less apparently villainous.

 

Even so, subtlety, nuance, shading, all fail to break down the distinction, so clearly drawn in soaps, between good and evil. In other words, heroes and villains continue to exist as separate categories of character despite any fine and subtle shadings, which is to say that the soap genre follows the same rules as the melodrama. And as to what the conventions of the melodrama were, you can read about them here in an amusing account of what was perhaps the prototypical American soap opera, The Drunkard, a wildly popular temperance play that debuted in 1844. 

 

The daytime genre, then, needs heroes, and at the center of a good daytime soap stands the indomitable, two-fisted, courageous, tall and handsome male who strives to be morally upright but who, like the hero of the temperance play, frequently lapses. The personality type of this hero is usually ESTJ: think of Ridge Forrester (Bold), Holden Snyder (As the World), and John Black (Days), who are played by Ronn Moss, Jon Hensley, and Drake Hogestyn respectively. (Coincidentally, the three actors - who are tall, lanky, and gangly - share the same body type as Abraham Lincoln, and I type them and Lincoln as NTs, that is, Intuitives and Thinkers). By accident or design, these men serve as an anchor; they tether the show. The 1990 season of As the World suffers from Hensley's absence, because we need a lynchpin ESTJ hero to help guide us as we make our way through the story, which is quite complex, and without such a guide we are lost.

 

These comments imply that I have seen the seasons of As the World after 1990, and so I have; I will explain how this came about.

 

The daytime genre entered its autumn in the late 2000s. In that decade, all the daytime soaps feel and look the same. Being middle-aged, they are a little faded, and like those of autumn leaves, the colours of the sets are bronze, copper, and gold. The shows appeal to the eye, and they seem prosperous and healthy: there is plenty of money, all the actors dress well, and the production is slick. But after autumn winter must come, and so, a slew of soaps was cancelled around the end of the decade: Guiding went off-air in 2009, As the World in 2010, All My Children in 2011, and One Life in 2012. Soap viewers were left with the big four: Days, Young, Bold, and General.

 

Days lumbered on into the 2010s, and sometime in that decade, Days' quality turned south. This is why I regard the years of the 2000s as the last good years of Days, or at least the last fat years, that is, the last monied years. In 2000, we are treated to a spectacular plane crash, one that is so realistic that we almost are led to believe that a real jet airliner crashed, and in 2008, the stunt is repeated and is just as convincing. 

 

Having said that, the 2000s receive little love from Days fans, and admittedly, the show begins to tire at the start of the decade; after Mascolo's abrupt departure, which takes place in the middle of 2001, the show experiences a blow-out. But the pace quickens with the beginning of the Salem Slasher arc in 2003, when Reilly decided to shake Days up, and by 2008, Days is firing on all cylinders.

 

While watching the 2008 season, which is one of the best of the decade, I wondered idly how the other soaps were doing at that time. On a whim, I sampled the 2008 season of As the World, and was taken aback by how much it had improved since 1990: at some point in the previous 18 years As the World had turned the corner and become a good show. I decided to start over, beginning with the 2000 season, and again, I was impressed.

 

What explains the strides that As the World had made in ten years: why is the 2000 season so much better than the 1990?

 

Firstly, Holden Snyder had returned; and secondly, in 1995, As the World had found its mascot in the person of Carly Tenney, who is played by Maura West. Most would agree that she does look distinctive:

 

 

The third reason is that in the 2000s the writers of As the World demonstrated a mastery of the basics of the soap opera craft, which consists of answers to these four questions:

 

- Who is the character? We want to know how to distinguish one character from another, in appearance, behaviour, personality type, and morals.

 

- What are his relations with other characters? Every character is related to another as a brother, sister, father, mother, son, daughter, uncle, aunt, cousin; and if there is no blood relation, he is related as a friend, enemy, colleague, employer, casual acquaintance. Because soaps revolve around families, blood is thicker than water, and therefore familial relationships are the most important.

 

- What is the character's predicament? A soap character frequently finds himself in hot water, and the story assigns him the job of solving a particular problem. In the 2008 season of As the World, Holden must deflect police suspicion away from his wife Lily Walsh, who may or may not have committed murder while sleepwalking. Carly is befriended by a felon, Sam Hutchins (played by Wally Kurth of General and Days fame), who is a Country and Western singer and a ventriloquist who performs with a dummy that seems to possess a life of its own. At this point, Carly is vulnerable - she is a single mother who is tasked with the responsibility of running a bar - and so oddball creep Hutchins worms his way into her life and makes romantic advances.

 

- Why should we care? The character will struggle to extricate himself from his difficulty, and even if we do not like particularly like him, good writing means that we are interested in tuning into the next episode and seeing what happens. Off-putting as he is, we want to see how far Sam Hutchins gets with Carly, and of course we want to see if Holden will protect Lily. But this desire - to see what happens next - cannot be called into being easily, and there is no formula for stimulating curiosity. Often the producers, writers, directors, and actors must keep their fingers crossed and hope that the x-factor - really, magic - will put in an appearance and attract an audience.

 

VI.          Other changes in the 2000s

 

Watching the 2000 and 1990 seasons of As the World was a strange experience, one that was jarring to me mainly because of the sudden wrenches that occur when you pass from one period to the other. Journeying from 1990 to 2000, I travelled in a time machine across the span of ten years, and in 1990 and then in 2000 I encountered As the World's Andy Dixon, played by Scott DeFreitas, who is a pretty boy actor that wears mascara and that bears a passing resemblance to Aidan Gillam, who was Petry 'Littlefinger' Baelish in Game of Thrones (2011-2019). After viewing the 1990 season, I failed to remember any of the characters with the sole exception of Andy, because soaps use this stock temperance play character - the chronic drunk who needs to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in order to be saved - again and again, and so Andy seemed familiar to me. On the list of soap opera alcoholic sybarites we find Billy Lewis (Guiding), A.J. Quartermaine (General), Lucas Roberts (Days), and Andy. These drunkards, all of whom are ESFPs, are hard to forget, and the actors who play them usually deliver memorable performances, DeFreitas being no exception: he is a warm, expressive, natural actor.

 

As equally memorable are Dr John Dixon, Andy's father, and Lucinda Walsh, Lily's mother. These are two of the elderly characters on the show, and whereas most elderly characters on soaps are given a saintly portrayal, John Dixon and Lucinda Walsh are not; they are nasty curmudgeons. But they have money and power, and that is the only reason why others have anything to do with them. That injects a rare note of realism into the proceedings.

 

The passage of time seemed not to have affected the older characters that much; they look more or less the same in 2000 as they did in 1990. But some of the younger actors have changed a great deal. Throughout the nineties, Kelley Menighan played Emily Stewart, who is a poisonous, obnoxious, and dislikeable character that is forever coming up with harebrained schemes; the equivalent of South Park's Eric Cartman, she is, like Cartman, an ENTJ. What confused me was that throughout the 2008 season, Emily was not wearing her trademark nineties pixie haircut, and it took me some time to realise that 2000s Emily and 1990s Emily were the one and the same.

 

I was even more addled by the look of Tom Eplin, who had become famous in soapland as Jake McKinnon in Another World. In the 2000 season of As the World, the Eplin character is called 'Jake' - could it be the same Jake? Yes, it was. After Another World was cancelled in 1999, a few characters crossed over to As the World, even though Another World was broadcast on NBC and As the World on CBS. I learned that Procter and Gamble - a company that sells soap, appropriately enough - owned the two shows and so had the right to transfer Another World characters to As the World. And so, the crossover happened. But the Jake of 1990 Another World and 2000 As the World may as well have been two different people; in the space of ten years, Eplin, who in 1990 played a handsome, svelte, lady-killer, had become seriously overweight and unhealthy-looking; it is no exaggeration to say that he had swelled up like a balloon. This was surprising because most soap male actors keep to the same build throughout their careers. Some of them even lose weight: see, for instance, the actor Sean Kanan, who played AJ on General, Deacon Sharpe on Bold, and Mike Barnes on Cobra Kai.

 

Once I adjusted to the new look of the actors and the show, I came to understand that the stories of As the World, like those of Days and General, rely on action and adventure. It is true that the stories of a soap will always chiefly concern romance, but the viewer needs non-romantic stories to balance a soap out. As the World in 2000 provides a few of these. We get the following: a story in which a stolen racehorse is acquired by an unwitting Holden; a story in which a dead woman returns as a ghost; and a story in which a young man is duped into committing a crime by a father and daughter pair of confidence tricksters. And the soap would not be a real soap without a doppelganger storyline. Martha Byrne, who plays the heroine Lily, also plays Lily's long-lost identical twin sister Rose D'Angelo, a crass showgirl who works in Atlantic City. Rose impersonates Lily, who is stranded on a desert island, and takes over Lily's life, usurping Lily's role as mother and luring Holden into - well, you can guess what. And so, As the World has something for everyone.

 

As the World became lighter in the 2000s, One Life darker. Many of the 1990 characters have stayed on, but the tone of One Life has changed. 1990 One Life is light and frothy, 2000 One Life is dark, gothic, and intense - perhaps overly so. In keeping with the new atmosphere, most of the One Life seems to be filmed at nighttime. One of the biggest departures can be found in the soundtrack: in 1990, the incidental music is the usual soap fare, and in 2000, it is mainly rock and blues. The soundtrack, which is one of the finest in the history of daytime, features brooding and sinuous guitarwork reminiscent of Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck.

 

I rank One Life as one of the best soaps of 2000, and the only thing that can be said against it is that it suffers from what other soaps such as Bold suffer from, and that is a limited gene pool: nearly every man has had sexual relations with every woman. Two of the heroines - or rather anti-heroines, because they behave like villains a great deal of the time - Lindsay Rappaport and Nora Hanen, marry and allow themselves to be impregnated by the same two men, and Lindsay and her sister Dr Melanie Farrell MacIver have had affairs with the same three men. And four other female characters are involved in love triangles. One needs a bingo card to keep up with these wife-swapping shenanigans, which are (as you can tell by now) de rigueur in soaps. Because it is his duty, the soap writer will serve up the mandatory storylines about wife-swaps and love triangles, but if he is talented, he will throw in a few storylines about more interesting subjects - stolen racehorses, for instance.

 

Before I finish my report on 2000 One Life, I will point out something curious. On the run from the law, young heroine Jessica Buchanan goes on a road trip with two young heroes, Will Rappaport and Cristian Vega; both men are in love with her and share her (to what extent, is left to the imagination). The three get into all sorts of scrapes, and at one point, perform on stage with a rock band. It struck me, when making my way through this lengthy arc, that the exact same plot is used in the video for one of the smash hits of 2000, Lady (Heart Me Tonight) by the French duo Modjo, a song that has garnered nearly 300 million views on YouTube. Was the resemblance coincidental?

 

VIII.        Good soap writing versus bad

 

The reader will notice that I have not spent much time here examining All My Children. This is because All does not attract many fans, at least not of the sort that upload entire seasons to the Internet, and the result is that the complete 1990 and 2000 seasons are hard to come by. I have seen a handful of episodes from 2000, but a small sample does not do All justice.

 

So, my account of AAAGO soaps in the year 2000 excludes All, but as part of my research, I have digested a fair chunk of the others. And when summing up the year, I would like to laud all the soaps, but I cannot, because one of them is bad indeed - and that is Guiding, which is the runt of the litter.

 

Guiding went from bad to worse over the period of ten years, so much so that it is the worst soap of 2000. Why? It had everything going for it: a good cast that includes Paul Anthony Stewart from Loving, which had been cancelled in 1995; a devoted fan base; a generous patron; and producers who lavished on it care and attention. One cannot fault the clothes, the sets, the special effects. The soap lacks for nothing - except emotional investment. Over the course of many hours, I have played one episode after the other, and at the end of each one, I could not have told you what happened - what was the story, what were the emotions, what was the hook. Soap Opera Digest must have had a hard time of it when summarising for its readers what exactly happened each week. Granted, there are times when any soap story will get bogged down and spin its wheels, but in the main, writers always seek to move a story forward; every incident is carefully chosen and laid down brick by brick. In craftsmanship, soap writers follow in the same footsteps as the writers of the great operas; every step in the narrative of Wagner's Ring trilogy is a rung on a ladder that the audience climbs up. But we see none of that craft in Guiding.

 

To give an example, take one episode in which Stewart's Danny Santos accidentally shoots Jim LeMay, the husband of one of the show's heroines Beth Raines, who is a lovely blonde. Danny and his wife Michelle Bauer Santos are cowering in fear in a hotel room, expecting a South American mafia assassin to break in and murder them. For whatever reason, Jim, who is a harmless good guy and not an assassin, stands outside the door, and he pounds it and then dismantles it, tearing one plank off at a time. Understandably, Danny and Michelle, not knowing who is outside, are terrified. One character in the room is packing a pistol, and in the hubbub that ensues after Jim breaks through, the pistol flies into the air and falls into Danny's hand. Acting on reflex, Danny squeezes the trigger, a shot rings out, and Jim is struck. But never fear, it is only a flesh wound, and Jim is up and running two or three episodes later: there are no consequences in this show. One incident or story beat (as scriptwriters call it) flows into the next without leaving a mark, and the plot becomes a meaningless blur, 'Sound and Fury / Signifying Nothing'.

 

This is how Guiding treats gunplay; how does One Life treat it? By the 2000 season, Asa Buchanan, played by Philip Carey since 1980, has turned evil. The patriarch of the Buchanan family, Stetson-wearing Asa, who is modelled on Jock Ewing, oil tycoon and Ewing patriarch in Dallas, has always been bad or at least neutral; but by 2000, he has become a man possessed and one who has turned to the dark side. He has made destroying the Rappaport family his life's mission; Dr Ben Davison, a member of that family, is swept up in the tide of Asa's vengeance, and thanks to Asa, his licence to practise medicine has been revoked. Naturally, he hates Asa, and taking a handgun out of a drawer, he resolves to kill Asa with it, or at the least, use it to threaten Asa and force him to confess to his crimes. Other characters, including his brother and his girlfriend, rush to Dr Ben’s side and beg him to stand down. This story, an arc in itself, is drawn out over four or five episodes, and the drama in it is exploited to the utmost. Dr Ben is played by Mark Derwin, an actor who is as histrionic as Stephen Nichols, and Derwin milks every scene for all it is worth, extracting the most from every line, every gesture, every facial expression. Davison suffers from an excess of feeling that he is unable to control. Soap audiences love this intensity in an actor, and watching Davison's story spread out and expand, we are transfixed. These episodes teach a master class in how to write.

 

How, then, are we to improve Guiding Light? Examining the defects of the 'Danny shoots Jim' sequence, we can tentatively offer this fix. The remedy lies in giving the actors and the audience more time to digest the implications of the shooting. In my rewritten story, comatose Jim, hanging on to life by a thread, is confined to a hospital bed for five episodes, and Danny is overcome by remorse. He rends himself psychologically, and feeling suicidal, he walks to the edge of a cliff, intending to jump. Showing up at the last minute, his wife pleads with him. At this point, the show writes itself, and even though the rewritten storyline consists of nothing but clichés, by using my storyline the show would be staying true to form. The good soap writer will never pass up an opportunity to work his audience up into a lather, and likewise, soap actors, who naturally gravitate towards melodrama, will seize upon any chance to make an exhibition of themselves. The audience expects histrionics in a soap in the same way that the ancient Greeks expected them in a tragedy. This is common sense; I am offering no pearls of wisdom, and I am telling no secrets; every soap writer in the year 2000 understood these basic principles - with the exception of the writers of Guiding. 

 

I shall persist with Guiding and continue to watch it after 2000, but I am not confident that it will improve. I fully understand why it is that Guiding was the first of the AAAGO soaps of the 2000s to be cancelled - the first of the gang to die, to paraphrase the title of Morrisey's 2004 single.

 

IX.          In conclusion: Soaps, MBTI, and the Mirror type

 

Above I listed four important questions that every soap writer must answer, and the first of these was 'Who is the character?’ and ‘How is one character to be distinguished from another, in appearance, behaviour, personality type, and morals'. By personality type I mean here MBTI or Socionics personality type.

 

One of the side effects of watching so many different soaps back-to-back is that your understanding of MBTI types is improved; lessons in MBTI typing are given when you encounter an instance of one type, say, the ISFP, in the one soap and then another. When you see an ENTJ character in the setting of Bold and then Guiding, you begin to perceive the outlines of the ENTJ more sharply and clearly. And remember, the genre gives an actor a chance to strut his stuff; performing in hundreds of episodes a year, each episode running for 40 minutes, is hard work, but an advantage enjoyed by an actor in the soaps over an actor in the movies is time. The average movie runs to 120 minutes; the average soap season runs to 10,000. For a movie, an actor's work can consist of only ten- or twenty-minutes worth of screentime (see for example Michael Keaton's ten minutes in Beetlejuice (1988)), and for a soap season, hundreds. The soap actor is allotted enough time to deliver a rich, textured, many-sided portrayal. The character is gradually built up. In much the same way, the comic book character first appears as a vague and unreal image in the mind's eye of the writer who describes him in a script, and the penciller, the inker, and the colourist bring the character to life, fleshing him out, giving him sharp lines and contours.

 

After digesting a great many movies, TV shows, comic books, novels, plays, we come to understand the truth that the characters that last the longest are the ones whose MBTI personality type is the most well-defined. And using this as a starting point, we see that a real mastery and subtlety is shown when a soap writer illuminates what it is that one type shares with its brother type. By brother type, I mean for example the ESFJ's brother type, which is ISFJ; the ENTJ's brother type, which is INTJ; and so forth. You see the pattern: take the 'I' (Introversion) out of the four MBTI letters and replace it with an 'E' (Extraversion), and you arrive at what Socionics calls a type’s Mirror. The ENTP is the Mirror of the INTP, the ENFP is the Mirror of the INFP, the ISTJ is the Mirror of the ESTJ... The relation matters because a display of shared personality traits becomes important. When surveying popular culture, we see that a great many villains in movies, TV shows, comic books are NTJs, that is, ENTJs and INTJs; and we see that the NTJ plays the role of master villain more than any other. In the NTJs, we find two types that are different and alike, and in a soap, it behoves the writers, directors, producers, actors to illustrate the differences and commonalities.

 

One example of the Mirror relation is to be found in eighties-era Days, which features two NTJ supervillains: Stefano DiMera (ENTJ) and André DiMera (INTJ). We are presented with two types, both of which are NTJ, both of which crop up in many soaps, and both of which exhibit a strain of ruthlessness, cruelty, and obsessiveness. But this is a portrayal of the NTJ villain that comes about only if the writers and actors know what they are doing. Luckily for us, for many years, the writers and actors on Days did know what they were doing, which is why they made Stefano and André so typically NTJ.

One of the great villains of All My Children, Billy Clyde Tuggle (played by Matthew Cowles), is a stock type: he is a pimp, a nightclub owner, a cheap and sleazy scoundrel, a hoodlum, and a type that is the very opposite of the NTJ villain, who is grandiose, megalomaniacal, epic.What makes Tuggle unique is that he delivers great lines - his dialogue is florid, bombastic, over the top - and in doing so he steals every scene. 

Even now I feel the urge to rewatch Tuggle’s scenes and once again hear him pronounce words that are little-heard in soaps - words such as 'fussbudgetry'. The trick of the writers lies in the juxtaposing of Tuggle's high-blown and flowery rhetoric against his vicious nature; when you put the two together, you get a colourful monster. Considering his personality traits, I type him as an Extravert (E), a Sensor (S), a Thinker (T), and summing him up, I say he is an ESTP.

 

The 'brother' or Mirror type of the ESTP is of course the ISTP. Do STPs share certain characteristics? The most famous ISTP leading character in soaps is Days' Steve 'Patch' Johnson, and after viewing Tuggle and then Nichols, we see what it is that the two hold in common. In their interactions with other types, it is as though the two wear a series of masks, and one mask is one of affability and jocularity. But we know what is behind it: we sense an underlying sarcasm, and malice, and aggression. And other qualities manifest themselves. Both men possess a theatrical streak - Johnson is an aspiring blues performer - and both are exhibitionists who often play the fool. Actors and born deceivers, they share a 'sketchiness', 'skeeviness'. The New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael once wrote of Bill Murray in one role that he 'oozes untrustworthiness from every pore'; the same can be said of Tuggle and Johnson. When we first meet them, they are villains and nasty ones at that, both showing an aptitude for terrorising women. That makes them sound scary, and that is the goal: Tuggle and Johnson would be delighted to hear that they make others afraid: they aim to intimidate and frighten. To the STP villain, life is one long power-play.

 

It would be fruitful to examine the traits of other paired types, especially the ESFJ and ISFJ pair and the ISTJ and ESTJ pair, the four types – ISFJ, ESFJ, and ISTJ, ESTJ - being what Keirsey calls the 'Guardians', a group that crops up in soaps again and again. Analysing soap characters using MBTI allows you to unlock the secrets of the soap and indeed all drama, but to analyse effectively, you must spread your wings, and that means taking in the AAAGO soaps as well as the big four.