Young people are the lifeblood of a soap. They are the ones who keep things fresh when things are stagnant. They can be a legacy character or a brand new character. However, not all soaps treat this resource the same way. Let’s go over how each soap is doing with characters under 40.
The Bold and the Beautiful
B&B is an odd case. The three characters you can objectively say are the leads of the show are all under 40. They have other supporting characters also in the under-40 age range. Yet the writing for them is horrid. One lead Hope just exists to reunite with other lead Liam every few months like he’s just returned from war when the reality is that he did stupid things like cheat and not tell anyone he ran a guy over for over a month. Third lead Steffy just invited a woman, Paris, who she barely knows to live in her house with her new man Finn and her children.
Paris living in her car doesn’t really make sense. She has a job at Forrester Creations. She is dating boring Zende who is wealthy. She is not like the woman in Crystal Waters’ “Gypsy Woman (She’s Homeless).” She has resources that should prevent her from being a charity case from a couple she’s never interacted with. This just seems like a setup for an obvious Lifetime movie-style plot.
If the intention is to make Paris into a crazy woman who is suddenly obsessed with Finn, that’s problematic. Paris is the only Black woman left in the series. If they randomly make her psycho, her stint will have an expiration date. Sacrificing your one Black woman for the sake of drama for a white couple is not a good look. And why would Paris go crazy? She’s been a nice girl since her debut. Finn’s washboard abs are great, but I don’t think they are great enough to cause a mental breakdown.
Speaking of mental breakdowns that didn’t make any sense, Thomas is still being used to prop up Hope and Liam. Every Thomas scene is basically the same spiel about having changed and supporting Hope. Matthew Atkinson must not have to work too hard to learn his lines because they all feel like they could just be copied and pasted from one script to another. It is just tragic because he has the talent and the looks to be the future of this show. If they must include Thomas in stories with that boring pairing, they could have taken it in a different direction, like have Hope and Thomas have sex while Liam is in prison. That could have sparked years worth of drama. Instead, we get stagnant stories. Nothing ever changes with them.
B&B has so much talent and almost all of the actors under 40 can act. They just need material to work with, but Brad Bell insists on giving them the writing equivalent of belly button lint.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIupdi4_WwU
Days of Our Lives
Days has been capitalizing on the under-40 group since around 2015 with Chad and Abigail. The strategy was to have a young it-couple as the center of the drama of the show and it paid off. The drama with Ben becoming a serial killer and terrorizing the couple was must-see TV. The process of having a young it-couple as the center of the drama started again in 2018 with the show bringing Ben back reformed and putting him with ingenue Ciara. That decision remains controversial to this day, but the pairing dubbed Cin gained fans young and old who are very vocal about their admiration for the couple.
Ben and Ciara remain the center of the under-40 crowd. Ciara currently has amnesia and wants nothing to do with her serial killer hubby to the point that she got an annulment and was going to marry childhood bestie Theo. In a scene that felt like a tribute to Stan kidnapping Dorothy on her wedding day in the series finale of The Golden Girls, Ben replaced the limo driver and kidnapped her. It would be an understatement to say that this caused social media to explode. My timeline on Twitter was in shambles.
If you are on the pro-Cin side, you saw a man fighting for the woman he loves and taking inspiration from dead father-in-law Bo kidnapping Hope from her wedding to Larry Welch. If you are anti-Cin, you saw a serial killer abduct a woman and not respect her wishes to be done with him forever. I think the debate was a bit ridiculous. Is any man abducting a woman on her wedding day problematic? Of course. Though this is Days. The show that had Stefano artificially inseminate Susan while he was dressed like Elvis and the show that is littered with rapists, male and female. A man abducting his amnesiac wife is not the hill I’m going to die on. It is a pretty standard “Stop the wedding!” trope.
The show has been building up other young characters like Allie and Chanel. The two friends just keep on kissing despite Allie dating poor Tripp, who is filling the role of the boring choice just like he did with Ben and Ciara in 2018. For some reason, Ron Carlivati just looks at Tripp and thinks “You know what he’s good for? Being a rape victim’s first boink after getting raped before they just move onto someone more exciting. That’s his purpose in life!” Tripp is the Good Luck Chuck of Salem. If your life can be compared to a Dane Cook film, things have gone wrong.
Though, at least Tripp has a story. Former-girlfriend-who-tried-
I am worried about Johnny DiMera, the son of Sami and EJ, coming to town next month. Allie is his twin sister and his half-sister and she keeps making out with the only woman in Johnny’s age range that he can date. Unless the show is going to have the twins fighting over a woman, they need to bring on another twenty-something girl for him to date. The show needs to be less reliant on Cin as the central young pairing when one half of that couple is just recurring. Allie/Chanel and Johnny with any twenty-something girl he isn’t related to would be a good start.
General Hospital
GH is a mixed bag with the under 40 aged characters. You have the teens played by Eden McCoy, William Lipton, Sydney Mikayla, and newcomer Nicholas Chavez, who can all act although a lot of the time the writing for them is underwhelming. Josslyn and Cameron spent months not acting on their feelings because of a diary stunt by a teen who got blown up in a bar. That’s just very tepid writing. Big misunderstandings are for the third act of a romance novel that needs another 50 pages. Not as an obstacle for a young couple where nothing really happens with the misunderstanding. No one ran into the arms of another or started doing crack. It just meandered for months and then they learned the truth and kissed and it was over. That’s boring.
I will say the revelation that Spencer is the stalker plotting to separate his father Nikolas from his wife Ava is promising. The show has positioned him as being villainous while also still being likable when flirting with Trina. The possibility of Spencer and Trina as a couple has fans excited. Trina is friends with Ava and if she found out Spencer used a teddy bear with the voice of the serial killer that terrorized Ava to torment her, Trina would slap the taste out of his mouth. That’s a better conflict than a skeez making a fake diary entry and then croaking.
The show needs to settle on which pairings they are going for and stick with them for at least eight months. Let these pairings build a following before you start swapping them around. One of the problems with the writing for the teens has been how noncommittal they’ve been. One minute, it looked like Cameron and Trina were on the horizon then it was Cameron and Joss. They need to pick a lane and stick to it for a while. I’m tired of the scattershot writing.
The twenty-something and thirty-something age groups are in worse shape. At the center of it, you have Willow only marrying Chase because she thought he was dying and staying with him because he’s paralyzed when she really wants Michael. This story is terrible for multiple reasons. The first one being that Michael and Willow have the chemistry of aliens who are trying to learn what human sexuality is, but they just don’t understand it or what goes where. The second being that it makes Michael and Willow the villains of the show and I don’t think that was the show’s intention. Willow actually looked disappointed Chase didn’t die. How am I supposed to root for this woman? The third being that it makes sex god Chase into the Raisin Bran of the triangle with Michael being the desired Captain Crunch. If you don’t know what Josh Swickard looks like, Google him right now. Does he look like he should be the Raisin Bran in a triangle? He does not. I hope he finds out soon and starts crying into Brook Lynn’s bosom.
The other characters in that age range are Molly and TJ, who are written like a 70-year-old couple you see taking a leisurely stroll at the park. That would be fine if they were 70, but they are about 25. They should be having drama and maybe breaking up since they’ve been together since they were teens, but we can’t have that. They have to be the youngest senior citizens in a cast full of middle-aged people.
Brando and Sasha are somehow more boring than Molly and TJ. He randomly got horny for her when she was a druggie, they boinked when she got clean, and now she’s a million months pregnant despite the sex happening like 4 months ago. They could fall into a sinkhole and it wouldn’t impact the show at all. The show has actual legacy characters they could use instead of these two seat fillers.
GH’s under 40 crowd could be great if they just tightened up the writing and slotted in other characters. Maybe if the show could stop collecting middle-aged men like Pokemon it would help.
(Walt Disney Television/ Valerie Durant)
EDEN MCCOY, ASHTON ARBAB
The Young and the Restless
The problems with the younger crowd on Y&R started over a decade ago with then-head writer and executive producer Maria Arena Bell. She was more interested in casting sitcom stars and former All My Children actors than writing for young people. So we got stories like young Lily marrying older man Cane and having kids at 20. Maria took teen Abby and made her into a grown woman who rode into restaurants naked on a horse like a pervert. Devon had to date a woman named Roxanne who only appeared for a few episodes a year, but despite this won NAACP Image Awards for those uneventful episodes she appeared in. It set the tone for the next decade, and things are pretty much at the same level now.
The show is losing Michael Mealor and Hunter King despite Kyle and Summer being the only young couple that they use and is actually popular. I was told by a source that the show wouldn’t give them the outs to work on other projects, so they walked. This is really unfortunate when you consider the state of the canvas and the general lack of popular couples on that show. Summer and Kyle was one of the reasons some people were still watching despite the show being dull.
What other young characters do they have? There’s the couple Mariah and Tessa. The show isn’t that interested in writing for them because they don’t want Meemaws in Arkansas to throw a hissy fit on Facebook about lesbians. So Tessa and Mariah are used to prop up other characters to the point that Mariah’s uterus was outsourced to carry the spawn of former exhibitionist Abby. When fans asked for a story for that pairing, they weren’t really expecting Mariah to be assisting a straight woman in her journey to motherhood. Y&R must have heard the fan complaints because now Mariah has been kidnapped, but they won’t be fully happy until a miscarriage happens and that baby is gone.
The show also has B&B transplant Sally Spectra. I had some hopes for her when she arrived, but they were dashed when it became obvious this show had zero plan in place to integrate her onto the canvas. She just has dumb schemes about giving Summer a job in Italy that she could have taken herself and trying to get back with Vietnam War vet Jack. One of the benefits of social distancing is it blocked Sally and Jack from getting busy. I don’t want to see someone my age swapping spit with someone who is eligible for Medicare. Call me ageist all you want. I don’t care.
Devon and Amanda have chemistry, but they’ve never adequately addressed the fact he’s dating his dead wife’s twin. That is a whole source of drama that the show just decided to ignore in favor of a story about Amanda’s father who we never knew who died 30 years ago. There’s just so much pathos Y&R could use in Devon dating Amanda, but they pretend it is just totally normal to be boinking the twin of your dead wife. The untapped potential makes me sad. And they might be over if Mishael Morgan and Y&R don’t come to terms on a contract.
The show does have potential in Nate and Imani if they just get sad-sack Elena away from them. Imani is just so vibrant and Nate sparkles with her. Elena just cries after cheating on people and I’m tired of it. I prefer promiscuous people to be more like Brooke Logan in the ‘90s. Unapologetically slutty. Not Brooke Logan now who just cries a lot when the hoe in her is unleashed.
The only teens are Faith and Moses. They are cute, but there’s no real story. Why do they have this boy obsessed with being a doctor in high school? This isn’t Doogie Howser. There needs to be an actual conflict between them and there’s none. Right now they are getting the same level of investment as the last teens on Y&R which was Reed, Charlie, and Mattie which is to say very little. The show is called The Young and the Restless. The young people should not be getting the most tepid writing on the show. The show needs to change desperately so they can stop making the same mistakes over and over again.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-oAq0XEx2k
Dispatches from Soap Land:
*I’m very excited for the limited series Days of Our Lives: Beyond Salem coming to Peacock. Though, I am wondering what Chad is doing visiting Arizona where Will and Sonny live. Freddie Smith recently declared he’d never return to the show, so are we getting a Sonny recast?
*Quinn and Carter continue to be the reason to keep watching B&B. They are hot and I love them.
*This is probably going to be an unpopular opinion with my GH readers, but I hope Jason and Carly bang before they learn Sonny is alive. It is the maximum drama this story needs and stops Sonny and Carly from reuniting for at least a year.
“Sad sack Elena” has been showing a lot more spark! Just needed to be allowed to escape from “sad sack writing.” At least when sad, she could actually cry and portray vulnerability.