Soaps

Back in 1975 when our first son Rocky was born Anna quit work to be a full time mother.

While holding the baby feeding him and rocking him soap operas on TV caught Anna’s eyes. Me too. I started watching Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman which came on late at night.

Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman was produced by Norman Lear and starred one of Woody Allen’s ex-wives, Louise Lasser. It was very bizarre and unpredictable you never knew what would happen next. It dealt in many subjects in a salt-of-the-earth or profound approach. It lasted less than two years. I think they ran out of subjects to attack and also I don’t think there were enough people to appreciate it.

We also began keeping up with a certain daytime soap that still is on 30 years later. And we still keep up with it. We don’t make it the focal point of our lives or anything, but I tape it and on weekends the VCR rolls it while we do chores.

Being the genealogy nut I am, I find it very interesting the intertwined relations everybody has with each other. It would take a patient devoted genealogist to make a relationship chart that would graph the different relations. Genealogy soft-ware programs do that, but it might blow a circuit trying to sort it all out.

I noticed that time has little meaning as we know it in the soap we keep up with. I have seen the same two people in room conversation begin on Christmas Day, and off and on during the week they would cut to that room where the two people are still having the conversation, then at the end of the week of viewing, they mention going to someone’s New Years Eve party that evening. If a girl is age 8 or 9 one week you might see her character change next week to a teenager curious about sex and having a good time. Sometimes a character starts showing his or her age and suddenly they are replaced with a younger better looking actor.

Sometimes when a new actor replaces the old one a little wit in shown, a line may be something like, “Kirk you don’t seem to be yourself today.”

The women, even the most moral and innocent, are acceptable to having an affair – usually her environment is beyond her control – her and a male person will be stranded on a desert island or something, and neither of them would do such a thing – but they each come around. Infidelity is rampart on soaps, or at the least the one I know, but I bet they all go by the same formula.

Almost everybody has an identical twin and will have amnesia.

Many times somebody is killed or in an accident the body is not recovered, and more so for villains. So, sometimes they return.

There seems to be most of the time a good guy with a British accent and sometimes a bad guy with a accent in around the Romania part of Europe.

The men, or the young men at least, seem to naturally walk around with no shirt on. Either the scene takes place while they are working out, or just out of the shower with a towel wrapped around them, or maybe shaving.

The makers know their target audience.