I have a Confession

Okay, so most of my life, I have had an intense-passionate affair, bordering on obsession, with Daytime Television. I say "Daytime Television" because I think it sounds more sophisticated than "Soap Operas," but it is to indeed to that genre that I refer.

I blame my mother. It all started when I was four and she 
was pregnant with my sister. We were home alone near the end of the pregnancy and for the first part of my sister's life. My mom would let me watch soaps so long as I closed my eyes during the sex scenes. (Might I add that during this time she also got me hooked on peanut butter, marshmallow cream, and banana sandwiches!

When I was seven, my Air-Force family moved to Okinawa, Japan. We only had ONE American tv station : FEN, the Far East Network, on which only two Soap Operas aired : General Hospital and Guiding Light. My mom had watched all ABC soaps since their first episodes, but never Guiding Light. She embraced GL (which would later cause her to have to make an agonizing decision).

However, she was not able to let go of the other two ABC soaps: All My Children and One Life to Live and being ever-resourceful found a solution; the local japanese video store rented American Soap Operas, in volumes. It took her weeks of trial and error to get somewhere in the ballpark of where she had left her stories across the Pacific Ocean. Finally, we were back on track. I loved that she rented them because I could watch them after school and on the weekends, as there weren't too many tv options with the one channel and all. Then came another devastating blow : for legal-copyright-law-kind-of-reasons, the japanese stores were no longer able to rent the soaps. Again, my ever-resourceful mother found a solution. She allied with her sister who taped every show on VHS, every day for months at a time, and then mailed them to my mother, who would watch them, and then return the tapes to be re-recorded. (They had two sets of tapes) My mother and her sister continued this for the entire five-year period we lived in Okinawa.

I would get up 2 hours before the bus left so I could watch AMC and OLTL. I only got to see GH and GL when I was home from school and during the summer. (I still don't know if my mother ever realized that I would always get sick on the Monday after a Friday-night dinner when she would tell me how exciting one of the shows was getting.)

My obsession was not limited to Daytime Soap Operas, I also LOVED Dynasty and Dallas. My father was not as understanding of my love for soaps as my mother and would never let me stay up to watch them. Little did he know, there was no stopping me! My older brother is the soundest sleeper of all time. Being the oldest, he also inherited my parents old-turn-dial-black-and-white tv. After I knew he was asleep, I used to sneak into his room, turn on his tv, with the volume down, and listen to the tv from downstairs. I always had plenty of time to rush back to my room while my parents locked up. It was a flawless system and I was never caught.

When we returned to the US, I was entering the seventh grade. I only had one friend, Ricki Sparrow. He was a soap watcher too, also because of his mother, except he watched NBC shows. I had never had any exposure to that network, so it was fun going to his house after school and learning all about Salem and how Jack raped Jennifer in the 80's but now they were lovers.

It was also at this time that my mother made a difficult choice that greatly impacted both of us. GH and GL both air at 3pm. She had to decide which show was going to be recorded. She chose GL. I still think it was a mistake.

As I entered high school, I was often too busy to dedicate hours to soap viewing, but I would race through them, catching all of the plot points and twists. I worked at a grocery store during college and while it was slow, I read every line of every Soap Opera Magazine. I studied. I learned all of the executive producers, all of the head writers, all of the moves and shake ups.

Near the end of my Sophomore year of college, I began to freak the flip out about what I was going to do with my life. I went to my adviser and began to express my anxiety.

"Kid," she said, "if you could do anything, what would you do?" "Well, if I had enough money--"

"--no," she interrupted me, "There's no money in dreams; if you could do anything, what would it be." 

"I'd move to NYC and write for AMC"

"You write?!"

"No, but I think I could."

"You're taking my playwriting class in the Fall."

And I did. I excelled in the class. The play I wrote was ultimately produced my senior year. With that play and another that I wrote for an independent study, I applied to grad school.

Throughout grad school, I maintained that I'd like to start my career in daytime. When people would scoff, I was ready :

"Daytime is the only genre on television that truly takes risks : the first lesbian, the first interracial couple, the first character with AIDS, etc etc etc."

"Daytime is all about Aristotle's Reasonable Suspension of Disbelief; you have to enter the world to truly understand."

"Change the minds of housewives across America and you change America."

For a class, I had to adapt Oedipus to a Modern story; I worked it into the framework of AMC, with Erica Cane as my Oedipus.

Near the end of my time three-year stint in grad school, it seemed kismet that I stumbled upon an internship program that would place me directly in the offices of NBC daytime. I was sure the fates had swooped down and were hand-delivering my dream on a silver platter.

The delusion quickly lifted. My first day as intern was unbearably boring. I was just answering phones and reading old scripts. I couldn't take it. I went to Fran, the office manager, and begged her for something real to do. She set me up with a meeting with the Senior VP of Daytime Television at NBC. I explained to him my passion, my drive, my talent, and begged him to use me.

Well, use me he did. 

This was the time that NBC had acquired Telemundo, and they were thinking of producing their own Soap Operas, as opposed to importing them from Spanish-speaking countries. Only problem was that the Daytime machine had been so lubricated that no one really knew how it worked anymore. That was my job : to trace and document the journey of daytime, from start to finish. I went above and beyond the call of duty. I set up interviews all of the the lot, to find out, in detail, what exactly each person's role in the process was.

I did not like what I found out. I discovered that there was little to no collaborative creativity. Each show has one head writer, who decides the direction of the story (based on what executives want to see) and then gives story progressions to five (one for each day of the week) outline writers who then give their outlines to the five script writers, who then give their scripts to a continuity writer who edits them to make it seem like one voice. All of this is done over email.

In one summer of realization, my entire dream of daytime fizzled. I accepted what everyone had always told me : that soaps are bad television with bad writing and bad actors. I quit. Cold turkey.

In the last five years, I've maybe seen ten episodes of any give Soap.

But, last week I accidentally discovered that ABC is putting full episodes of GH online. I watched one. I was hooked. They are doing an Arc story line, where they start with a huge drama that clearly affects the entire canvas (that's what you call the clusters of characters in daytime) and then flash, "8 hours before."  So, now I have seen the "eight hours" that led up to the drama and the last episode I watched, we had reached the drama.

So, I'm once again watching a soap. I will actually, seriously, watch today's episode when I'm done with this blog, even though I should go to sleep. A sure sign that addictions truly never go away; they just rest beneath the surface.