Tens of thousands of hours of daytime drama have been telecast on the broadcast networks since the inception of television soaps in the ‘50s, and with all that storytelling in the rearview mirror it’s rather rare to see anything on the four remaining modern genre staples – CBS’ “The Young and the Restless” and “The Bold and the Beautiful,” ABC’s “General Hospital” and NBC’s “Days” – that viewers haven’t seen before (or that their ancestors saw back in the day). So it’s always surprising when something absolutely new pops up on any of them.
And when one of them does something truly distinctive it’s worth calling attention to – even if the content at hand isn’t traditionally associated with love in the afternoon, long the driving creative direction of the best broadcast serials.
Is a scenario as hellish as the one described above (and pictured throughout this column) the kind of thing people want from daytime drama? Is it representative of the environment in which daytime advertisers (mostly of consumer goods) want to showcase their products? Are blood, guts, terror, torment and the like welcome there?
Did I mention that – in strict adherence of the soap opera tenet that the best stories are those that revolve around family and the history of a show’s core characters -- the fiendish old man overseeing the horror of it all (Tobin Bell, pictured above right, and better known as the “Saw” franchise’s menacing Jigsaw) was the father of the middle aged man (“Days” veteran Drake Hogestyn, above left, the heroic John Black) and grandfather to the younger fellow (“Hawaii 5-O” recurring cast member Christopher Sean, below, here playing John’s long-lost son Paul, an openly gay professional baseball star)?
This is hardly traditional stuff when it comes to broadcast soap operas, and it certainly speaks to the dilemma the remaining soaps must face every day: When they try something new and outrageous (like this storyline) older viewers tend to push back. The hope is that younger viewers might be motivated to stick around and, at a time when Shonda Rhimes’ special brand of crazy has made ABC the must-see network on Thursday nights, that potential new viewers might take note. It doesn’t always work that way, but the broadcasters that telecast them and the studios that produce them must be given credit when they create something so far out of the ordinary.
In my many years of soap opera viewing I don’t recall watching anything exactly like the scenes I have seen in recent days on “Days.” I think it was the set -- a creepy, cavernous room much larger than rooms normally seen on soaps – that first caught my attention, along with the lighting that made everything seem surreal at times (especially the ghastly makeup worn by Tobin Bell, below). Hogestyn and Sean did a fine job with material a bit beyond the norm for daytime, as did other cast members whose characters came to their rescue. I’ll include a special shout out here to Deidre Hall (pictured at top), a daytime veteran of many decades whose character, stately Dr. Marlena Evans, looked great in black leather and kicked bad-guy butt.
Lord knows this story isn’t the first dramatic departure from standard daytime drama. Long cancelled soaps including “Guiding Light,” “All My Children” and “One Life to Live” periodically presented some pretty wacky material, including clones, time-travel, visits to heaven and to underground cities and more. Back in 1981 “General Hospital” famously married soap opera and science-fiction with a now legendary story about a weather machine that caused a massive blizzard in the upstate New York city of Port Charles during the dog days of August, putting all of its citizens in peril.