Why Soaps Deserve More Respect

Time Magazine

Naturally if anyone wants to be taken seriously today the last thing she’d claim is a love of soap operas. Even in this day and age, when TV critics and fans are praising their favorite cable drama as Dickensian (an adjective based around that most melodramatic of English writers), soaps, which are arguably the missing link between Dickens and cable TV, continue to be the red-headed stepchildren of pop culture. They’re a dying breed (only four air now on broadcast networks; All My Children and One Life to Live, cancelled only a few years ago, have now been reborn as webisodes on Hulu and iTunes), but the style they helped develop––serialization––is more popular than ever. 

Dating back to the 1960s since the premiere of the night time soap Peyton’s Place, prime time serials have always had a niche on TV. Throughout the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s programs like Dallas, Knots Landing, Dynasty, and David Lynch’s whacked out take on the genre, Twin Peaks (which itself hails roots from the daytime serial Dark Shadows) followed in the footsteps of their daytime counterparts. But starting in the 1980s, hour-long dramas and sitcoms as diverse as Cheers, Hill Street Blues, Wise Guy, The X-Files, and Homicide: Life on the Street began utilizing aspects of serialization in their storytelling arcs, greatly expanding the definitions of episodic television. Yet serialized dramas didn’t really take off until HBO began airing original programming during its Sunday night schedule. Shows like Oz and The Sopranos helped change the face of night time television, proving that audiences could embrace complex narratives about anti-heroic characters (though ironically the first anti-hero[ine] that audiences really embraced was As the World Turns’ Lisa Hughes Grimaldi, a character so loved to be hated that a fan once slapped actress Eileen Fulton as she walked out of a Manhattan department store). After the critical and commercial success of The Sopranos, HBO ordered more serialized dramas like The Wire, Deadwood, Six Feet Under, Big Love, Boardwalk Empire, Treme, Luck and others. While the subject matter of HBO’s dramas are as disparate from one another as they are from soaps (with the possible exception of Big Love, which would truly have made an arresting daytime sudser with its tales of marital bed hopping and corporate and familial intrigues), their glacial-moving plot lines and multiple character story arcs are a direct influence from soaps.

Other cable and broadcast networks followed HBO’s lead with shows like Mad Men, Homeland, Downton Abbey, The Walking Dead (based on the graphic novel, a medium that has a lot in common with soaps), and Breaking Bad. But this isn’t an example of HBO influencing a genre as it is of the cable network’s borrowing from daytime and successfully broadening its critical appeal.

Yet while cable has brought respectability to serialization, the actual serials which developed the genre from the 1930s to the present, gets, like Rodney Dangerfield, no respect at all. Does it have to do with the stories---the multiple marriages, outlandish plots, the melodrama? Perhaps. But unlike most television dramas, soaps allowed a space for women’s stories to flourish. Even today, on cable dramas like Mad Men, Big Love, Boardwalk Empire and The Sopranos, where women characters are as complex as their male counterparts, the conflicts are still largely male-centered and -oriented. Not so on daytime where women and their issues were front and center. Soaps addressed the problems women faced in the latter half of the twentieth century with far more finesse and detail. Stories that dealt with love and sex, the position women faced in choosing between work and family, their ambitions, fears, and joys were the grist of many a soap story in the 1970s and 1980s. And while soaps can be accused rightfully at times of slipping in quality (soaps churn out five episodes a day for fifty-two weeks a year as compared to cable dramas’ thirteen-week yearly cycle), I can honestly say that in all the years I’ve watched them and seen their highs and lows, they’ve produced quality programming that were equal, even––dare I say it?––superior to night time dramas.

I’m not interested in dredging up the usual arguments of soaps’ artistic quality by how they have tackled social oriented stories. While true (even when night time television avoided them, soaps dared to bring up topics like rape, STDs, drug abuse, abortion, etc.), I’m less interested in that than I am in looking at how soaps deserve credit for their role in expanding television’s artistic growth. I will concede that currently soaps have surrendered to self-parody and irrelevance, but that does not diminish their historical and artistic value. 

Guiding Light, CBS, Proctor & Gamble 

In the 1970s soaps were as inspired by changing tastes as much of popular culture. Like film, daytime became grittier, more character-oriented. Soaps, like the now defunct Guiding Light, told compelling, tightly-drawn dramas around the rot that can build up in dysfunctional marriages. Few of these stories were equal to the Roger and Holly Thorpe saga.

In the winter of 1979, Roger Thorpe raped his wife Holly. The story which led to this tragic set of events is, like most soap stories, elaborately woven. Teenaged Holly Norris was obsessed with Roger Thorpe, the show’s resident anti-hero, but he had designs on other women, namely Peggy Scott, who would become his wife. Holly instead married good guy Ed Bauer, trusted doctor and son of the town’s most respected family, but Holly couldn’t put Roger entirely out of her mind. The two had an affair which resulted in the birth of their daughter, Christina, whom Holly passed off for a short time as Ed’s. When the truth of Christina’s paternity came to light, Ed divorced Holly and Holly married Roger. But their’s was not a happy union. Roger’s insecurity, in both his place in Springfield and in his marriage, led him down a treacherous path which included an affair with Ed’s kid sister and another rape, also involving Ed’s new wife, with whom Roger had shared a past. The walls began to close in on Roger as Holly, fed up with his infidelities, prepared to take their daughter and leave.

The rape scene is difficult to watch. Unlike a similar rape on General Hospital involving Luke and Laura, which the show’s writers would later revise as a seduction when the actors’ on-screen chemistry proved too hot to ignore (they’d revise it again as rape years later), Guiding Light left no doubt that what occurred between husband and wife was a horrific violation. The scene begins with Roger arriving home just as Holly was about to leave him. Surmising the situation, Roger prevents her from leaving, taking her suitcase from her and throwing it across the room, then physically threatening her as she tries to get away. The scene ends with Roger assaulting Holly. The shot lingers only long enough to show him pinning her down on the bed while she pleaded for him to stop before the scene fades.

Two things come to mind whenever I watch this scene on YouTube. First, the acting between actors Michael Zaslow and Maureen Garrett was superb. As Holly, Garrett was confident and assertive, determined to take control of her life, but as the threat of violence asserted itself, her confidence withered away until she was reduced to a frightened child. Throughout the scene, Garrett moved back and forth between both dichotomies. As she desperately attempted to reason with Roger, she lowered her voice and spoke in a slow, deliberate manner. But after Roger slapped her and threw her down on the couch, her demeanor changed. Her body stiffens and appears to fold inward as though she is anticipating more blows and her voice becomes a high-pitched whine as she begs Roger to leave her alone. The scene is all the more compelling and difficult to watch because we are watching more than just Holly’s physical violation but a spiritual and psychological one as well. Rarely, has rape ever been portrayed in a painfully truthful way. 

Zaslow, likewise, did a terrific job. His Roger Thorpe was more than a one-note monster. While his behavior was monstrous, he was also a damaged soul, a man whose ambitions and talents could never match the societal constrictions that denied him personal and professional success. As Roger berates his wife and callously asks her to compare him to his nemesis Ed Bauer in bed---“You probably wouldn’t be in such a hurry to cut out from him like you’re cutting out from my miserable life”---he comes across less as a two-dimensional villain and more of a man who knows he has reached the point of no return. His ambitions and insecurities have created a fatal mix that crushed whatever good was in him. Zaslow’s masterful performance makes it easy to sympathize with Roger. At one point, he’s barely able to get his lines out, his voice breathless and huffy. Whether this was done by design or because Zaslow himself got caught up in the scene, I can’t tell, but it does lend Roger a poignant vulnerability on the level of a tragic, Shakespearean character. Because of Zaslow, Roger became a character fans both hated and pitied.

Roger and Holly Thorpe

The production values are impressive too. Videography, by 1970s standards, were fairly minimal, with camera angles limited to close-ups and master-shots. But the rape scene set new standards for daytime. A hand-held was used for some of the scenes, the first ever for soaps, and was utilized in such a way that allowed viewers to not only step into the scene but into Holly’s point of view. In one shot, where Roger slapped his chest and asked Holly why she never looks at him the same way she looks at Ed, the audio was somewhat distorted, the image softened, disrupting the fluidity of the unobtrusive set-ups. It’s disorienting and almost surreal, capturing the surge of adrenaline people often experience during violence. Along with the score, which is both menacing and understated, the scene puts viewers in a frightening and uncompromising position, pretty daring for daytime TV. Women watching this at home didn’t have to imagine their worst fear (if they had not already gone through it before) but were experiencing it vicariously through Holly.

The scene made such a huge impact that by the time Holly had Roger charged for marital rape, another first in television history, Garrett received tons of fan mail in support. 

The rape story line was before I started watching the series, but when both Garrett and Zaslow returned to the show ten years later, their strange, neurotic and tragically painful relationship became one of my favorite story lines. While the show’s gender politics was questionable at times (the writers danced around a romantic relationship that didn’t really exist the first time around), there was no denying the chemistry of both actors and their ability to breathe life into some of the most complex characters to ever hit television.

   

Soap operas are by no means perfect and, at times, have told stories that are questionable when it comes to gender, race, and class. They’ve had their fare share of stinkers, both story- and acting-wise. And yet, there were times, more than I can relate here, in which they were delightfully subversive, broke the rules and reset them again, and reached for moments of transcendence that television would not fully embrace until both primetime and cable began churning out more challenging fare. And, while most contemporary viewers and critics turn their noses up at a medium that is sadly going the way of TV westerns, shows like Mad Men, Boardwalk Empire, and Breaking Bad owe a great deal of debt to the daytime serials of the past.  

America in Primetime: A Review

Last November, PBS aired a series called America in Primetime, which looked at television over the years and how it reflected the changing times. Broken down into four categories---Independent Woman, Man of the House, the Misfit, and The Crusader---the series, in which a number of TV stars, writers, and producers were interviewed, offered some unique perspectives about the power of television to address contemporary issues such as feminism, the changing roles of men in society, racism and so on. But while the series is pretty strong in arguing the significant role television has played in the arts, it nonetheless only scratches at the surface and fails to dig a little deeper in what television can and does say about America today.

Shondra Rhimes, Grey's Anatomy, Private Practice

This is all the more apparent in one of the weaker episodes Independent Woman. Independent Woman addresses the changing roles of women in primetime television, drawing a distinct line between 1950s family sitcoms, when homemakers Donna Reed and Mrs. Cleaver were the epitome of feminine perfection, to the more complex and realistic portrayals of women in shows like Nurse Jackie, the Good Wife, Roseanne, and Grey’s Anatomy. The episode makes the argument that these sitcoms set up unrealistic expectations of women as housewives and mothers. Actresses such as Roseanne Barr and Julianna Margulies and producer Shondra Rhimes hammer this point home ad nauseum. This is an argument we’ve heard before. What the episode ignores however is how the depictions of women of color has had its own trajectory. While the show argues that sitcoms like Leave it the Beaver, Father Knows Best, and The Dick Van Dyke Show praised stay-at-home moms, it leaves out the fact that some of the first depictions of working women in television were in fact black. The 1950s sitcom Beulah, starring Louise Beavers, which was undoubtably stereotypical in the worst way, nonetheless featured a woman who had to earn her own keep as a maid (the show played up the mammy stereotype where Beulah’s only concern was helping the befuddled white family through their daily problems, ignoring the fact that women such Beulah had to work to support their families). In the 1960s, both Nichelle Nichols and Diahann Carroll helped elevate the presence of black women in primetime on Star Trek and Julia respectively. While these portrayals were complicated in their own right (Nichols had threatened to leave the show because she was given very little to do until Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. convinced her that staying on would be a cultural blow for civil rights), they nonetheless showed black women as intelligent, competent, and independent.

Given the time constraints, it might be understandable that these groundbreaking roles would be ignored, but it’s completely bizarre that it would skip over Clair Huxtable, played by Phylicia Rashad, on the Cosby Show. Rashad’s portrayal of the competent and intelligent Clair was as important as Roseanne Connor on Roseanne in their diverse representation of independent women on television. Roseanne Barr, likewise, who was the only commentator to bring up the issue of class, correctly points out the lack of working class people in television and how her show was meant to address that omission. The episode fails to pick up this thread as it moves forward into the 1990s and the oughts, as cable television began to dominate quality television production. From Father Knows Best to Sex and the City to The Sopranos to Desperate Housewives, the lives of women have always been portrayed within the confines of the professional middle class. And while the series makes the point that cable television freed up writers and producers to pursue topics that aren’t advertiser-friendly, it fails to bring up the fact that even cable television continues to portray a decidedly narrow vision of the world through a middle class lens (the only notable exceptions of course are the HBO dramas The Wire, Treme, and True Blood).

Norman Lear, All In the Family

The second episode, Man of the House, fairs a little better in terms of diversity. Here, The Cosby Show and The Bernie Mac Show are shown alongside such series as Mad Men, Big Love, Breaking Bad, and Men of A Certain Age in their depiction of the modern day man. As with Independent Women, Man of the House compares the portrayals of men in the 1950s with contemporary depictions, revealing how the feminist movement have left men adrift in their effort to redefine their role in society. The argument is largely a sympathetic one with writers/producers like Shondra Rhimes and Diablo Cody offering their own empathies about the difficulty men have had in finding a balance in a world where the rules have become more ambiguous. Whereas men like Ward Cleaver on Leave it to Beaver were the kings of their castles, today’s men are either bumbling buffoons like Homer Simpson or complicated and self-doubting as the characters on Men of A Certain Age. While this episode does a good job of covering its subject, I still wish it could have gone even deeper. For instance, when The Simpsons writer, Al Jean, says “I’ve always had this theory that people want the mother in the family to be stable and not a buffoon, and the father you can really get away with a lot,” I wanted to know more about what other writers and showrunners, particularly those who are attempting to create a more complex portrayal of men, might think or feel about that. And how does the AMC drama Breaking Bad touch on the affect of socio-economics on men in these changing times? It would also have been nice if they’d given a shout-out to John Goodman’s character on Roseanne. While not as showy as Roseanne’s character, his Dan Connor also set new standards in the depiction of blue collar, working-class men.

Michael K. Williams, The Wire, Boardwalk Emp

The next two episodes do far better jobs of covering the groundwork in their subjects. The Misfit addresses the way in which outsiders, nonconformists, and loners have become significant archetypes in TV, particularly in sitcoms, though dramas and dramedies such as Twin Peaks, Six Feet Under, and Freaks and Geeks are also explored. The final episode The Crusader is the only one that offers a glimpse of what the three previous episodes could have become. The Crusader addresses another popular television archetype, the (anti)heroic crusader who seeks justice. Here, the episode covers everything from M*A*S*H to The X-Files to The Wire and goes over the typical comments you’d expect from such a topic, but where it dovetails from the previous episodes is how it allows the principal players themselves to argue and counter argue on various points. When some commentators remark on how television is able to go into far greater character depth than film, David Chase, who executive produced The Sopranos, counters that film can be every bit as complex as television. During a segment on the Showtime series Dexter, executive producers David Simon and Tom Fontana (both of whom worked on Homicide: Life on The Street, as well as The Wire, Treme, and Oz respectively) weigh in with their abhorrence over a show that glorifies a serial killer. I wanted more of this back and forth because it elevated the conversation beyond the usual comments. 

Needless to say, with only four hour-long episodes to cover each topic, America in Primetime wasn’t able to cover everything. What it does cover offers a primer on the direction television has taken in the last fifty years. Still, it had the opportunity to take a much bolder approach by asking serious questions about how America is depicted in television, both positive and negative. Does a show like Sex and the City conform to old stereotypes about women in new packages? Has cable television become just as formulaic as broadcast networks? Does television do an adequate job on issues of class and race? And what about sexuality and the role cable has had in breaking down those barriers? Considering how important television has become in the last fifteen years, I think the medium deserves a deeper analysis.

All episodes of the series can be viewed on the PBS.org site.

Fontana and Levinson Team Up Again for New A&E Series

Last week, A&E announced a development deal with producers Tom Fontana and Barry Levinson to produce a new half-hour cop drama called The Box. According to Digital Spy, episodes of the series, if picked up, “will focus on a small ensemble of detectives and their interactions with a key suspect or witness.”

This is great news for fans of the 1990s series Homicide: Life on the Street, which was also produced by Fontana and Levinson. Anyone who’s seen that show knows that its greatest dramatic pinnacles occurred in the interrogation room, otherwise referred to as “the Box.” That show dealt with the legal, moral, and ethical ramifications that arose out of techniques detectives use in getting confessions from suspects.

1996-1997 Cast of Homicide: Life on the Street

Nobody on Homicide could get a more thrilling confession both in the box and on TV than Andre Braugher’s Det. Frank Pembleton, who bar none set the standard for TV cops in the years since the series debuted in 1993. To watch Braugher putting the squeeze on suspects in the interrogation room was a good half of what made this NBC drama so unbelievably great. Needless to say, I’m a fan, so I’ll be looking forward to Levinson and Fontana’s latest collaboration.