Passions, the wildest soap opera on television and at eight years old also the youngest, will have its final telecast on NBC tomorrow. And then it will open a brand new chapter in television history as the first series to migrate from broadcast to satellite when it reappears on DirecTV on September 17.
Beginning September 17, new episodes of Passions will debut Monday-Thursday at 2 p.m. ET (with a daily replay at 7 p.m. ET) on DirecTV's original entertainment channel, The 101. DirecTV will run four-hour marathons of each week's episodes every Saturday at 10 a.m. ET.
All I can say is, I hope Passions kicks ass on its new platform, because that might encourage DirecTV to pick up other daytime and primetime shows with intensely loyal core audiences when they are cancelled. If nothing else, it will be interesting to see what the writers of this envelope-pushing show can get away with on satellite television, free from the content restrictions of broadcast standards and practices. Show-runners throughout Hollywood should be paying close attention.
Few things in the television business bother me more than the death of a soap opera, not simply because I have always appreciated them (even when they are off their game), but because up until this month they have been the only remaining program format that is totally unique to broadcast television. One would think in this era of increased media diversification and competition that the broadcasters would focus more intently on the one and only genre they can still call their own. Cable may be all the rage these days, but it has never been able to deliver a daily one-hour or half-hour soap opera. And while there are serials of various lengths on many Web sites, none of them have come close to offering five hours of original scripted drama 52 weeks a year (with infrequent preemptions). Only the four serials on CBS, the three on ABC and the lone remaining soap on NBC (Days of Our Lives) accomplish this extraordinary feat.
The networks should be fortifying their daytime dramas as promotional platforms for their primetime programs, as talent laboratories for rising young writers and actors, and as a means through which to attract young people to broadcast television, as virtually every soap was able to do in the happy days of the '70s and '80s. Happily, CBS is now re-purposing most of its serials on its Web site, and ABC can maximize the potential of its soaps (and Days) every day on SOAPnet. But NBC continues to kill them off. In recent years the network bungled and then canned the beloved veteran sudser Another World and the experimental Aaron Spelling effort Sunset Beach. And now, it is dumping Passions.
I have had a like-dislike relationship with Passions since its debut in July 1999. It started off on the wrong foot, establishing one of its characters -- the perpetually put-upon young heiress Sheridan Crane -- as a beloved friend of the late Princess Diana. In fact, Sheridan was pursued by the paparazzi through the same tunnel in Paris in which Diana lost her life, suffered a similar car crash and was whisked to the very same hospital Diana was taken to after her tragic accident, where she was seemingly visited by the Princess' spirit. (I'm not making this up.) Meanwhile, in the small town of Harmony, Maine, where most of the action on the show takes place, witches, demons and psychopaths ran wild, victimizing one babe and hunk after another.
Writing in The Myers Programming Report in July 1999, I declared, "The whole production, which is overstuffed with pretty but wooden young unknowns, looks cheap and cheesy. It started out weird, which would be okay, if it were also sexy, emotionally charged and/or mysterious. No such luck."
Despite my complaints, I have always admired Passions for one crucial reason: Right from the start the cast and characters on this show have comprised the most diverse canvas on daytime television. No other soap opera comes close. Day after day, Caucasian, African American and Hispanic characters have mixed it up in a totally colorblind manner. There have been star-crossed lovers, dashing heroes, desperate women and vile villains of differing racial, ethnic and sexual backgrounds. (Recently, the murderous bastard son of a nasty white businessman and compassionate black doctor has been terrorizing the people of Harmony while carrying on a down-low affair with a married and doomed African American hunk. And he isn't even the most twisted character on the show. That would be the hunk's father, who just murdered his own son.)
Also to its credit, throughout much of its run Passions was one of the top-rated soap operas among young teenagers on television -- a great accomplishment these days, but one that NBC never found the means to exploit. Perhaps DirecTV will fare better, and if it succeeds at doing so, maybe it will become the new home of other soap operas if they meet the same fate.