The Refiner’s Fire: Television

Life’S Sudsy Situations

Soap operas customarily maintain a low profile, bubbling up only as the butt of jokes. This summer, though, they have been notable for their absence, and soap fans clearly have not appreciated the replacement serial that asks the questions: Will Sam Ervin and Howard Baker find out when Richard Nixon really knew about the Watergate break-in? Will Richard Nixon tell his side of the story? Will John Dean find happiness with Maureen now that he has told the truth? Judging by their outcry, viewers are more interested in the stories that ask, Will Tess Prentiss be convicted of murdering Bobby Mackey? Will Rod Harrington learn that the baby recently born to his wife is actually Steven Cord’s son? Will Virgil Paris be apprehended for his assault of Ginger Cooper? Will aspiring reporter Belle Kincaid discover that race car driver Robert Landers is the son of her husband deserted years earlier?

Of course, soap operas don’t ask questions any more; nor does an announcer recap yesterday’s events or indicate scene changes by intoning, “Meanwhile.…” Those features, along with two-hour dinners and two-year pregnancies, died with radio. In those halcyon radio days, the constant listener could hear as many as twenty-eight stories a day; television has nearly halved that number but doubled the length of each from fifteen to thirty minutes.

Whatever other changes television has wrought, content remains remarkably constant. And a more improbable cluster of crises is hard to conceive. Where else but in soap land could there exist for every dozen people at least one murderer and one victim, one adulterer and one innocent spouse, one person causing and one suffering some other kind of sexual crisis, and one person with a physical handicap or disease. The current ubiquitous crisis is one of fatherhood. Given assaults, affairs, and artificial insemination, hardly a baby born or expected lives or will live with both biological parents.

But the subject matter is not totally unlike that of prime-time TV—or, for that matter, that of Shakespeare’s plays: murder, blackmail, kidnapping, illness, love and marriage, birth and death. One difference is a matter of emphasis. Daytime stories focus on male-female relationships and include matters like rape, adultery, unwed mothers, abortion, and frigidity. Although they are often described as titillating, dialogue is rarely explicit. One day on “As the World Turns,” Tom Hughes said of his wife, “Carol doesn’t want to be alone with me.” Responded his father, “You’re putting that delicately.” Similarly, to see much passion in soap-opera love scenes requires considerable imagination.

The saddest element of the sudsy subjects is their lack of humor. Only once in recent months has a sequence been intentionally amusing. Al and Lucille Weeks of “General Hospital” each plotted to give the other a surprise birthday party on the same day. Al decided to surprise his wife further by redecorating their apartment and he became, to the glee of fellow hospital employees, the caricature of a man stumbling out of his element—sincerely but ineptly doing the living room in green, purple, red-white-blue, and brown.

One obvious difference between daytime and prime-time TV is the daytime lack of action. Fires, car accidents, fights, and the like generally are heard about rather than seen for the same reason such events rarely appear in the theater. The result is that the soaps are talky—passive rather than active, telling rather than showing.

Another glaring difference between daytime TV and prime-time TV and Shakespeare (besides, in the case of Shakespeare, greatness) is the length of time necessary to resolve a crisis; what takes one or two hours in the evening or on the stage may take thirty daytime hours. Each half-hour soap opera includes nearly a dozen commercials and about that many inter-related story lines in various stages of development. After enough of the past is related to make the present meaningful to new viewers, only enough time remains to inch each story along to a peak—or at least a high foothill—that will keep viewers coming back.

And that, after all, is what makes television run: a dramatic story leads viewers to the fountain of commercials where they imbibe, perhaps subconsciously, the importance of mirror-like dishes and floors, white, bright clothes, flaky pie crusts, and soft, shiny, manageable hair with not a streak of gray. Viewers buy the products—thus paying for the TV time that sold them—because they know, subconsciously perhaps, that these products work: the beautiful homes and people exist before their eyes.

Indeed, decor and fashions are about the most artistic elements of soap operas. Despite the titular claim to kinship with, say, Aida, “The Edge of Night” and “Secret Storm” (and the rest of television, for that matter) have no intrinsic claim to similar stature. The soaps are, however, the form of drama most readily available during the day. As drama, their glaring weakness is characterization. If the residents of Peyton Place, Somerset, Centerville, Woodbridge, and the rest have more facets than their radio ancestors, they still demonstrate little depth or development. And, since people remain subordinate to plot, almost any sort of character can be plugged into any role. For example, the role of police Lieutenant Ed Hall on “One Life to Live” could be played by a woman or a white person without any substantive change in the story. Likewise the part of Ben Grant or Somerset’s Delaney Brands could be played by a black actor. But it isn’t, nor is the role of any other professional likely to be. With only a couple of black men and, recently, one Asian woman, minority groups are less represented on the soaps than anywhere else in videoland. Women typically appear in service roles—nurse, secretary—only occasionally as professional people, and rarely in administrative or management positions.

The serials’ small towns apparently exist without sanitation workers, sales clerks, and teachers, but breathes there a soap with folks so well it has no doctor? Or lawyer? Hardly. Yet with rare exceptions, clergymen appear only for weddings. When Adam Drake and Nicole Travis were married in August on “The Edge of Night,” a local Protestant minister was summoned to the home of the lawyer where the ceremony was to take place. Comments about his “new church on the edge of town” and his questions about plans of the couple made it clear that the wedding party and guests knew little about him and he knew less about them. Nevertheless, the couple and the wedding guests joined to repeat the Lord’s Prayer; somewhere, the viewer must assume, these people acquired at least the rudiments of a Christian background.

One of the exceptions to this concept of the clergy is a doctor on “As the World Turns.” Until a few months ago he was a minister who apparently had originally practiced medicine. (A viewer with longer experience than I will have to recap the early details of this character’s life.) His recent turn to medicine, he avowed at the time, was not to be construed as the church’s loss: it seemed to him the physical and spiritual ministries were compatible. However, a spiritual ministry is not a very noticeable part of the story.

The other exception is Father Mark Reddin of “Secret Storm,” whose exodus from the priesthood to marry widow Laurie Stevens last spring got news-magazine notice. It was the closest the soaps have come to spiritual crisis. Death, disease, and disaster strike daily, but nary a priest, minister, or rabbi calls to counsel or console. No matter of life or death seems to conjure thoughts of eternity. Indeed, death often seems only the means of writing a character out of the story, and life is primarily the process of exorcising villains.

The soaps are a sort of modern morality play. That is, they are at the core a dramatic conflict between good and evil, with characters almost exclusively one or the other. In medieval morality plays, however, good was eternal salvation; in soap-opera morality, good is this-worldly happiness, resulting from honesty. Thus the conflict Diana Taylor feels for letting her husband believe he is the father of the baby she is expecting will almost certainly be resolved with a revelation of the truth. Thus Amy Kincaid experienced vast relief when she admitted to husband Kevin that her baby was conceived by artificial insemination. Thus the marriage of doctors Joe and Sarah will very likely survive his revelation of a fleeting attraction for another woman. Thus innocent Adam Drake will surely not be convicted of the murder of Jake Berman. In each of these instances, and many others, the good achieved will be a smooth, unruffled married life—at least until another crisis arises. And in the course of the ups and downs there is enough hardship for the viewer to feel that her (or his) life is not so bad after all and enough pleasantness to keep the viewer dissatisfied with that life.

The woman who works at home caring for her children rarely has a lunch hour or coffee break free of her responsibilities and routine; nor is her work confined to an eight-hour shift. If she can salvage the time, by all means let her find a diversion that works—tennis, daydreaming, soap operas. But if she is a Christian, her diversion must by all means be an activity done to the glory of God. That is, she must approach her entertainment with a mind saturated with the Truth and Beauty of God and come away from it with those qualities heightened. That is not to say that her activity must be solemn but to insist that her intellect, itself a gift of God, not cease to function. A discerning mind may or may not have room for soaps, but in any case it must not suspend judgment informed by the Word of God.

JANET ROHLER GREISCH

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