By Sara A. Bibel
Fancast.com
Stupid Network Move Of The Week
Memorial Day is one of those holidays where there’s not a heck of a lot to do. Of course we should all take time to honor our service men and women, but for the vast majority of people it’s a day of lounging and eating. A perfect day for catching up with your soaps. Unless, of course, you’re an ABC soap fan because ABC decided to air reruns. I know the thought process behind it: holiday episodes tend to be lower rated. Therefore it is not worth the expense of producing a new episode for those days. That’s true of religious holidays like Christmas. Not so much with secular days off. They’re a great way to regain lapsed or infrequent viewers. This year, with $4.00 a gallon gasoline making travel unaffordable for many, I suspect that plenty of people were at home in search of entertainment. ABC actually set up 3 cliffhangers last Friday. All My Children had the violent aftermath of Jesse and Angie’s wedding. One Life To Live ended with a Adriana crashing her car into Todd’s – and his toddler son was right next to him. On General Hospital , Sonny told Jason he was ready to leave the mob as Carly prepared to leave town. All are solid “tune in Monday and tell your friends to check it out” moments. Too bad anyone who decided to do just that caught year-old repeats.
On the other hand, those who flipped the channel to CBS got to see Nick regain his memory on an emotional new episode of The Young & The Restless. (Yeah, I know it seemed like he already had his memory back. Turns out he didn’t.) I was moved watching him relive the pain of losing his daughter. The rest of CBS’s line-up was new, too. (Though why As The World Turns missed the opportunity to feature Luke and Noah on a day when teens and college students were home is beyond me.)
NBC, in a rare moment of respect for its lone surviving soap, also scheduled a new episode of the increasingly interesting Days of Our Lives. Which brings me to my next topic…
If A Tree Falls In The Forest… On Daytime It Will Happen Off-Camera
Friday and Monday’s episodes of Days Of Our Lives were all about a drug bust on the docks – part of the battle between John Black and Phillip Kiriakis. Sounds exciting huh? Well, “sounds” is the operative word, because the entire scenario was dramatized via patrons at the Brady pub hearing sirens followed by characters describing what had happened off-camera.
It’s not the writers’ or the producers’ fault. DOOL’s executive producer, Ed Scott, formerly of Y&R, is fantastic. Someday a smart film executive will hire him to make a one million dollar indie movie look like a big-budget Jerry Bruckheimer extravaganza. The problem is that soap budgets are getting slashed to the point where it is becoming impossible to tell a story effectively. Fans joke about how soap characters always have sex on their living room couches. It’s because it’s too expensive to build a bedroom set. Not only are writers limited to a certain amount of sets per episode, they can only have a specified number of set moves a week. (Taking down one set and putting up another on a soundstage requires skilled labor. And skilled labor costs money.) The problem is most apparent on the particularly low-budgeted Guiding Light where for months every character seemed to live in the same hotel bedroom.
I bet that DOOL had to choose between letting Sami and E.J. have sex in an actual bedroom and the drug bust on the docks. The show definitely made the right choice. But it’s a shame that a show which once sent the entire cast to England for Hope & Bo’s wedding can no longer afford to use all the sets that it already owns.
Ask The (Unemployed) Soap Writer
pumpkinkcm: On a recent blog I read that the uneventful happenings on [Y&R] are most likely the result of the current staff tying up all of LML dangling plots. Say that's the case, how long does it take to turn writing around into a new direction?
There’s no easy answer to this question. It depends on what a headwriter inherits and how he or she chooses to handle the situation. The aftermath of the writers strike has had almost every show dealing with this issue with various degrees of success. Sometimes an unpopular thread can be wrapped up in an episode (Surprise! Antonio, Thalia and John were working together on One Life To Live.) Other times the new/returning writer is stuck with the results because trying to fix it would only make things worse. (Diego is the Text Message Killer on General Hospital even though he’d been dead for years.) Each writer has a different strategy and pace.
Keep your questions coming!
