Rhonda Webb: May 2009 Archives
Long before the announced cancellation of Guiding Light, it had been commonplace in entertainment media to declare the death of televised daytime serial drama series, more simply known as soap operas. Ratings for the televised programs have been on a steady decline for years, and the budgets have tightened in tandem. With the impending last airdate of Guiding Light nearing with every broadcast, it is easy for those who have long criticized the genre of soap operas to rejoice, and for the remaining fans of these programs to stop watching.
Despite this, I will watch the soaps.
My soap opera viewing started when I was so young, I cannot remember young I was when I began to watch them, so it seems as if soap operas were always a part of my existence. When I was a little girl, I used to watch The Young and the Restless (henceforth abbreviated Y&R), although I don't think I quite understood what was going on on the television until the later part of the 1980s. I watched them because my grandmother watched them, although my grandfather watched what both he and my grandmother called the "stories" as well. Repetition led to affinity and soon I grew interested in the never-ending tales of the residents of Genoa City, although I pondered the lack of wisdom displayed by those characters. I never figured out why Ashley would keep sniffing the (unknown to her) poisoned flowers if she kept feeling sick after smelling them.
One of the many aspects of Y&R that did keep me interested in the program was the emergence of African-American characters that stabilized into a core unit. The characters of Mamie Johnson, Nathan Hastings, Olivia Barber, her sister Drucilla, then Neil Winters and his brother Malcolm were involved in memorable plots. Yet I was equally entranced by villains like David Kimble and Sheila Carter, as I eagerly waited for the comeuppance. Unlike the cartoons and films I watched, the bad guys weren't defeated at the end of the episode or movie, but continued to be evil and scheme to the point, where as a viewer, I rooted for them at times. It was the crossing over of Sheila Carter from Y&R to The Bold and the Beautiful (also known as B&B) that prompted me to begin watching that program.
Toward the end of the 1990s, I began to watch snippets of the show that aired after B&B, even though I didn't understand the reasoning behind a woman's rush to give birth to a baby before the new year. I slowly became addicted to that program, As the World Turns. I later added Passions at the end of 2000 to my daily platter, and from there Days of Our Lives. Although I have since stopped watching the latter three on a regular basis (although in the case of Passions, this was due to it being cancelled), with each soap opera I watched, I grew to appreciate the genre and the actors more rather than less. Despite the fact that soap operas do have staple plots, each show has a distinct flavor beyond the cast, the direction, the sets, and the wardrobe. There is an intangible consistency that becomes each program's fingerprint, which is often missing from primetime television shows today.
Soap operas have a history that is beyond their airdates. They are a link to times both past and present, and I can attest from personal experience that my soap opera viewing never existed in a vacuum. As I was a child when I began to watch the soap operas, I could only watch Y&R and B&B during summer vacation or when I did not have to go to school. As a result, soap operas represented leisure to me, and occupied a special place in my heart next to Saturday morning cartoons. They also proved to be a vital link of the daily conversations between me and my family, as part of the our daily conversations I would ask my mother and grandmother what happened on the soap operas. They marked the periods of my life, childhood, adolescence, to college, graduation and beyond. They provide the sole icebreaker topic of conversation in which I can participate. Soap operas, are a part of me.
Thus, if soap operas are truly on their last legs, then for me, there is no better time to watch them than the present. After all, one of the criticisms of the format is that no resolution can ever be brought to any plot. If all good things must come to an end, I am sure that the end that comes has to be at least as good as what came before it. In the case that my expectations are misplaced, at least I can criticize out of love rather than out of gleeful malice.
