Stories on soap operas flop all the freaking time. Not every story is going to be a winner when you have to produce over 200 episodes a year. Since it is so common, the reasons why soap stories failed can be found on this list for the most part.
10. Actor Demands
Soap actors have opinions. Some of them have big egos. An actor could refuse to have their character lose to the detriment of the show. An actor could sink a pairing because they’ve deemed their co-star to be unattractive and not good enough for them. Sometimes a head writer can have a whole story planned out only for it to get derailed by an actor being a diva. There are times when an actor is right to complain like on All My Children when Eden Riegel allegedly refused to play Bianca having sex with Zach because Chuck Pratt didn’t understand the concept of lesbians. However, a lot of the time it is just them throwing their weight around to feel important.
9. Casting Went Awry
Casting is one of the most important things on a soap opera. You can have beautiful sets and well-written scripts, but if an actor sucks or there isn’t chemistry in the big pairing they planned, it can tank a story. Casting Alex Alegria as Tomas on Beyond the Gates doomed the character and the pairing with Kat. You can tell he’s trying to be less stiff and more animated recently, but it doesn’t feel like a big enough improvement to justify keeping him.
Casting isn’t just a problem when they hire weak actors. It can happen with very talented actors as well when they get miscast. Maura West is fantastic, but she never should have been Diane Jenkins on The Young and the Restless. She was too young to be Jack’s peer. Eileen Davidson as Kelly Capwell on Santa Barbara is another example of a big-name actress being miscast. I’ve never heard someone reminiscing about Santa Barbara and saying things like “Oh, boy, Eileen was just so good as Kelly! She wasn’t too old and didn’t have the wrong vibe for Kelly.”
8. Botched Introduction of a New Character
This can overlap with casting went awry, but a lot of the blame for this can be placed on the writing and positioning of the new character. One of the biggest examples of this was the Rappaport family on One Life to Live. Jill Farren Phelps bringing on her buddy Kale Browne as Sam Rappaport was not a popular choice. What made it worse was when she added an ex-wife, a son and a daughter and the Rappaports took over the show. Add in Nora cheating on her husband Bo with Sam to get pregnant and you had a very unpopular mess.
Soap operas today still struggle with introducing new characters. General Hospital just introduced three new characters who all clearly auditioned for the same role given how much they look alike. No one said, “Gee, maybe Josslyn’s new love interest shouldn’t look like he could be her uncle’s new love interest’s brother.” A really big unforced error.
The people who work at these shows know how much fans are resistant to new characters, so they need to set them up for success. Have a plan. What is this character’s purpose? Does it overlap with any other characters making them redundant? What is their personality? What do they want out of life? Don’t figure it out as you go along.
7. Network Interference
Head writers and executive producers have bosses. They are network executives and studio heads. Some of them know jackshit about soap operas but will mandate something stupid. It could be that they got it in their heads that being soapy is bad so suddenly the drama will be flattened. Two characters who should have a catfight, but they won’t. That “big” reveal of a character being alive is about as dramatic as your husband coming home with nachos. And since the average soap fan doesn’t think about network executives, the head writer gets the majority of the heat for someone else’s idiocy.
6. Bad Retread of a Past Story
Nostalgia is big on TV and movies. There are reboots every year. Soap operas aren’t any different in that they are also eager to jerk off the past. It is how Josh Griffith lasted on The Young and the Restless. He’d trot out a psycho from the past that would probably terrorize Sharon, and his job would be safe for another year. He flew too close to the sun by bringing Matt Clark with Roger Howarth taking over the role. A story that should have been about Sharon confronting her rapist ended up being about Nick becoming a drug addict and Matt getting amnesia so he could bang Phyllis who is a rape victim. Really gross stuff.
Soap operas should use their history from time to time, but if they are constantly looking to the past for stories, they forget about the future. Days of Our Lives in particular is bad about this. They’ll do retreads of Marlena’s possession and the Queen of the Night story. They’ll do stories about Stefano when he’s been dead for a decade. They could be trying to tell stories that aren’t based on things that already happened, but they want to do the soap opera equivalent of jangling keys over a baby’s head.
5. Bad Pacing
Because soap operas are on five days a week, they have to be particular about the pace of stories. Which stories are just short arcs? Which stories will take a year or even more? So, when a story that should be six months tops gets written as a story lasting more than a year, it can rankle the fanbase. A recent example of this is the Hayley poisoning Bill story on Beyond the Gates. It has been going on for a year with a lot of repeated beats. Hayley on the phone with her cousin Randy talking about the poison, Bill collapsing and medical tests that go nowhere. Even if the climax ends up being fantastic, that won’t negate that it was a tedious journey.
4. Stupid Retcons
If you made a list of the most unpopular soap opera stories of all time, stories that featured dumb retcons would make for several entries on that list. Stories like undoing Erica’s abortion on All My Children or the Maryanne Carruthers story on Guiding Light which had five characters retroactively involved in some I Know What You Did Last Summer shit that insulted the show’s history and the intelligence of fans. The primary purpose of retcons should be to undo past fuckups. If you are doing it to rewrite history to create a new character or drive new story, it had better not be dumb as fuck.
Bringing Lexie back from the dead on Days of Our Lives just to kill her again is one of the worst retcon stories I’ve ever seen. Her first death was poignant and a highlight of a fairly rocky era. Her second death felt like a huge waste of time. It didn’t help that they had a new actress in the role for this pointless story. Nikki Crawford did a good job, but the writing and the nature of this story didn’t help her at all. Was this a kind of idiotic way to get fans to stop asking for return from the dead stories? If so, it might have worked.
3. Out of Character Writing
Douglas Marland famously talked about not changing core characters in his Rules for Not Ruining a Soap. He said you can give them new edges or reasons for new behavior, but if the audience said they would never do that, the writer failed. It is unfortunate that most soap writers don’t follow this. There are famous examples like Holly on Guiding Light kidnapping kids or Elizabeth keeping the truth about Jake Doe a secret.
A recent example of this fuckery would be Josh Griffith trashing Teriah on The Young and the Restless. Mariah randomly almost killed some old guy, and kidnapped Dominic and Tessa became a pod person who dated Daniel, which was maddening considering she described herself as a lesbian. Camryn Grimes even admitted to not understanding the story to Michael Fairman! Do you know how bad something has to be for someone on Y&R (that isn’t even Eric Braeden) to even mildly trash it? Sharon Case has been handed a lot of shitty stories, but she really only publicly complained about the Sharon marrying Victor story.
2. The Story is Offensive
Sometimes stories air that make you wonder how it got approved. A lot of eyes see something before it airs on national television. A famous example of this past decade would be an old white man ordering his Black employee to bang his white wife on The Bold and the Beautiful. No one saw the long story and thought “Hmm. Maybe we should change this, Brad Bell?” Then it got through the script phase, and it was taped and it aired. At some point they must have realized the racial optics of the story with how fast they ran away from it, but by that point it was too late. They had already shit the bed and no one stopped it from happening.
1. Short Term Thinking
This is number one because in the long run it is what hurts soap operas the most. They want to give a few actors Daytime Emmy reels so they kill off an important character so they can squeeze out tears for two months. They don’t think about the long-term implications of the death. Jill Farren Phelps and Bob Guza weren’t thinking about the negative impact of killing Emily off on General Hospital. Nikolas never fully recovered from that choice and the Quartermaine family lost someone who was considered the heart of the family. They brought on Emily’s long lost twin Rebecca, but since Emily was adopted, that did nothing. They were too cowardly to just undo the death.
This isn’t just about killing off important characters. Short-term thinking also happens when shows decide which characters have children. If a bunch of people who are related are the ones having kids, that means the future teen scene will be related which is just creating a problem for them down the line. That means either those teens won’t have love interests or they have to create new characters for them to date.
The final factor in short term thinking is which characters get focused on. If you only focus on the middle-aged and the elderly, that means the young characters aren’t developed when the actors who play the veterans start dying. The Young and the Restless is especially guilty of this. They’ll treat Nick like he’s still a 30-year-old stud while his son Noah gets to be on for a little while until they fire the latest actor that plays him. It is incredibly short-sighted and idiotic. Soap operas are supposed to be on for years on end. They have to think long term.
Dispatches from Soap Land
*Brad Bell clearly went back to the Tawny/Shauna/Poppy archetype with Darcy on B&B. He loves creating a trashy mother.
*We probably have about a month left of Josh Griffith’s writing on Y&R before the writing transition starts. I can’t wait to see Jamey Giddens and Dan O’Connor handle Josh’s bullshit and put it in the trash where it belongs.
*If Michael on GH took Willow to family court, he would probably be fucked as well. “Here are these affidavits from two people who claim to have heard Willow shoot Congressman Cain. They heard a ringtone! Yes, they didn’t go to the police. And I didn’t either. Yes, I moved Willow onto the family property. Yes, my hooker ex-girlfriend drugged Willow when she had the kids. What do you mean you’re taking the kids away from both of us?!”
