In recent years, some critics have begun to notice "improvements" in daytime drama. Faces are younger, sets more varied, and sex more explicit. Moreover, storylines are "relevant"—at least on some shows. All My Children with its adventures in Viet Nam, The Young and the Restless with its depiction of breast cancer, are among the shows and episodes singled out for praise. Soaps like As the World Turns, meanwhile, are criticized for being too traditional, unadventurous, and unrealistic.
Fans, however, don't seem to care. For years millions have watched soaps without regard to critical opinions. As the World Turns is a case in point. It is one of the leaders of the daytime Nielsens and has been since the 1950s. Even on the so-called "improved" soaps, producers seldom get letters from fans complaining about traditional turns in the story. In fact, it's fair to say that people like and want the old soap operatic elements: the amnesia, the mysterious babies, and all that. These elements are in part what distinguish soap opera from other forms, and therefore they must relate strongly to its appeal. Yet the old soap opera conventions are said to be laughably unrealistic, and grounds for dismissing the genre altogether.
Now no art form is wholly realistic; each is unrealistic in its own way—in ways that meet the needs or express the feelings of the audience. It follows that no art form can be condemned simply for being "unrealistic." To look at an abstract painting and criticize it because it does not resemble a tree or house or any concrete object would not be intelligent, or fair. Nor would it be fair to criticize a Nineteenth Century novel for not investigating sexual intercourse or bodily eliminations, both of which must certainly go on in the lives of its characters.
If we accept soap opera as a form of art, however minor or "popular," then we cannot criticize it for not showing us life as it is. It is thoroughly surprising that critics fall into the trap of doing so— that they go on and on about the preponderance of doctors, the peculiarity of pregnancies, the naiveté of small town white Anglo Saxon settings, etc., etc. It would be more fair, and more enlightening, to look at the unrealistic elements in soap opera as we do the abstraction in a modern painting, or the prudery in an oldfashioned novel. What, we might ask, does the presence of these unrealistic elements say about us, and to us? Or, to be broader than that: How does the material of soap opera, both realistic and unrealistic, satisfy the inner needs of those who watch?
Soap operas are primarily fantasies of romance. They are set not in Medieval days, or colonial days, or Civil War days, but within the context of the most ordinary, everyday life. In the kitchen, even. The soap fulfills the viewer's need to feel (if not believe) that the business of life is romantic courtship—never anything too grand or heroic (never anything that approaches Nineteenth Century Romanticism) but courtship nonetheless. Such courtship hardly ends with marriage. It doesn't end at all, except insofar as life itself ends, at the hands of Fate.
What attracts us to soap opera characters is the luxurious way in which they manage their relationships. Soap characters don't simply have romances; they live romances. Unrealistically they shove aside the common details of life ("milkmen, laundrymen and exterminators never intrude into the immaculate living rooms of the Brookses or Grants or Chancellors," writes one critic). Doctors spend more time operating on their love lives than operating. Child care is no trouble at all. Successful and presumably hardworking business men and women have unlimited time to discuss interpersonal relationships. It seems that romance-related activities overwhelm everyone except a few wise old patriarchs and matriarchs. And if this isn't fantasy enough—it all happens within what appear to be perfectly ordinary middle-class homes.
The soap opera omits the common business of life for the same reason the Nineteenth Century novel omitted sex: it doesn't relate to the fantasy needs of the audience, and it is not acceptable material in the genre anyhow. Like other romantic fiction, the soaps are written not to be realistic but to impart a fantasy. In the soaps, the fantasy is that there is no such thing as getting in a rut; lives are, to use actor John Reilly's phrase, always "hotting up." No one is ever settled or put away. Some of the more obvious conventions of soap opera are really only proof of this
Critics have noted, for example, that widowhood is a short-term phenomenon. Usually a widow has a suitor even before her unfortunate husband is run over or crashes into something fatally. If by any chance she doesn't, some suitor will emerge almost at once. Similarly, women married for years suddenly find new love affairs. Maybe their husbands have wandered off—amnesia's the usual reason—just in time for suitors from the past to reappear. Or maybe it's just some simple infidelity. No matter the circumstance. Nothing precludes the re-entry of romance. For people in the audience who are in a rut, or fear falling into one (and that includes most everyone), the soap opera formula is reassuring. If your life is now routine-respectable, where nothing ever "hots up" except the stove or the iron, don't worry. It's just temporary.
Return to "Media"
