Re: AMC and OLTL cancelled. A moment of silence for the soap opera gen
I will admit to having watched the ABC soaps in the past. My mom watched All My Children when I was young, and I remember watching it with her on occasion. So I was introduced to Susan Lucci and the daytime soap genre at a fairly young age, even though I didn't necessarily understand it or find elements of it appealing. Nevertheless, by the time I was in high school, I started to channel surf over to ABC during those dull summer afternoons. It started off with just All My Children (I guess out of nostalgia from my early childhood) and then eventually spread to the other soaps in the lineup at the time. General Hospital eventually won me over completely but I would still watch AMC, as well as One Life to Live and Port Charles.
Eventually, my interest began to slip and I started dropping the soaps one at a time. GH was the last to go, but I held onto it until I just couldn't stand to watch anymore. I learned something about the soap genre that really irritated me, and continues to confuse me to this day. The U.S. soap opera genre is a closed circle. It moves in cycles, repeating itself over a long period of time. The stories are the same. The characters, even when they change, are still the same basic types. The phase "the more things change, the more they stay the same" absolutely applies to soaps. The frustrating or sheer ridiculous storylines - the kidnappings, murder mysteries, evil twins, presumed dead characters returning from the grave, baby swaps, etc. - just repeat themselves. Watch any soap long enough and you'll see the trends. The players might change a bit but the basic story is the same. Not only that, but the stories move at a snails pace and often have a surprising lack of plot development. By the time the mystery is revealed or the bombshell is dropped, viewers have grown frustrated and restless and are just ready to move on.
I can't say that I am surprised to see the genre fade. The stories aren't fresh or interesting. The casts are massive (and likely expensive) and change constantly. Viewers shouldn't bother getting too attached to soap opera characters because their average life span is so short. I wonder if soaps would do better if they had smaller, more consistent casts of characters, stories that actually have a specific beginning, middle and end, and feature writing more in the vein of primetime drama. They could even produce fewer new episodes a year so that they could save money and improve the quality of the writing. But I guess that's just not the way the format works.
