[April 22nd will mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of the king of primetime soap operas, Aaron Spelling. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Spelling and other soap opera contexts, leading up to a crowd-sourced cliffhanger of a weekend post! So share your soapy responses and thoughts, you evil twins you!]
On a fine
line that primetime soaps have to walk, and how the genre’s king perfected it.
As I hope
this week’s series has illustrated, there are various elements which help
define the cultural genre known as the daytime soap opera. But high on the list
is a particularly unique and complex characteristic, a trait that is shared by just
one other genre that I can think of, the syndicated daily comic strip: works in
both these genres have to be created in such a way that each individual
episode/strip tells some sort of story, has its own beginning and endpoint; and
yet their creators recognize that audiences will often dip in and out, return
to the work after some time away and expect the familiar things they’ve come to
(hopefully) love, and so not a lot can ultimately change across those multiple
episodes/strips. With the one exception of actors leaving soap operas and thus
their characters needing more of a definitive end (unless they’re just going to be
recast, as frequently happens and as proves this point with particular
clarity), daytime soaps feature seemingly huge events that quite often don’t
end up changing a thing about the characters, relationships, overall dynamics,
and so on.
There’s
good reason for that: daytime soaps are designed to air every day and to stay
on the air for as long as possible, with the four
longest-running all having long since surpassed fifty seasons! That’s
obviously quite different from primetime TV dramas, most of which not only have
a much shorter lifespan, but the creators of which also don’t necessarily know
whether they’ll be renewed, and so need to tell distinct and definite stories
in their individual seasons. So what happens when these two distinct and even
contrasting TV genres come together, as they do in the form of the
primetime soap? The result is often a pretty delicate balancing act, shows
that feature season-long storylines a la the best dramas, yet that are designed
with some of the same layers of repetition and stasis that we find in daytime
soaps. When that balance goes awry, it can be quite frustrating for audiences,
as illustrated by one of the most famously controversial TV plotlines/gimmicks
of all time: the long-running primetime soap Dallas (1978-91) ending its third season
on the “Who Shot J.R.?” cliffhanger and spending the entire offseason hyping up
that question, only to reveal
the culprit relatively early in the fourth season and with no significant consequence
(J.R. lived, no charges were pressed, basically everything went on as if there
had been no shooting).
That
fourth-season Dallas episode drew one
of the largest
TV audiences to that point (and remains in the conversation overall), so
maybe the gimmick was a success. But I would argue that it’s the creator and
executive producer of many of the other most famous primetime soaps, today’s birthday boy Aaron Spelling,
who really figured out how to walk that particular genre’s fine line. Across
countless mega-popular shows, from The
Love Boat (1977-86) and Dynasty
(1981-89) to Beverly Hills, 90210
(1990-2000) and teenage Ben’s personal favorite Melrose Place (1992-1999; what can I say, like America itself I am
large and contain multitudes), among many many others, Spelling brought the
repetitive and thus pleasantly familiar rhythms of soap operas to the explosive
plotlines and seasons of nighttime dramas. A show like Melrose Place aired 226 total
episodes in its seven seasons, which is not that far off from the number of
episodes a daytime
soap might air in a single year. A great deal happened and changed across
those 226 episodes—and yet viewers could nonetheless tune in to pretty much any
single one of those episodes and see Heather Locklear’s Amanda
acting in precisely the high-powered, back-stabbing, irresistible ways she
always did. Few American artists have achieved greater success in their chosen
genre and medium than did the king of such tightrope-walking primetime soaps,
Aaron Spelling.
Crowd-sourced
post this weekend,
Ben
PS. So
once more: what do you think? Other soap opera contexts or stories you’d share?
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