Soap Operas

But Franco is far from the only celebrity to make a soap opera cameo. In fact, celebrities pop up like presumed dead evil twins in places like Pine Valley and Lanview. Sometimes the luminaries play themselves, sometimes they’re the proverbial troublemaking ciphers. But they almost always shake things up like a schizophrenic with a fake pregnancy interrupting a wedding in a tornado. Join us on a journey through time to some of our favorite special guest moments.

The B-52s on “Guiding Light” in 1982. The band was “riding the crest of the new wave” to Throw That Beat in the Garbage Can and terrorize daytime.

Lily Allen on “Neighbours.” The British pop singer dropped by the long-running Australian soap earlier this year to play a cheeky version of herself and sing a little ditty. Drama quotient: low. Charm factor: high.

Tom Arnold and Roseanne on “General Hospital” in 1994. The duo stretched their acting chops as an obnoxious pair who tangle with Luke and Laura in a casino. Remember the ’90s? Everything about this will make you so glad they’re over.

Speaking of gambling: Jerry Springer on “Days of Our Lives” in 2007. The talk show host won a few chips and hearts.

Carol Burnett on “All My Children” in the mid-’80s. The comedian appeared on her favorite soap to make a few surgical strikes as a long-lost member of the Wallingford family from the wrong side of the tracks. Though Verla’s mostly in locations elsewhere, she popped up again in Pine Valley in 2005. She’s trashy, she’s nutty, she’s everything a celebrity guest spot should be.

Betty White on “The Bold and the Beautiful.” Is there anything this woman isn’t up for tackling? Four years ago the beloved Golden Girl launched a semi-recurring role as the Douglas family matriarch with a history of dark secrets.

Snoop Dogg on “One Life to Live.” When the rapper crashed “OLTL” in 2008, he not only raised the roof, he also changed the theme song. Best thing to happen to Lanview since Tina Lord.

But the gold standard of celebrity soap moments remains Elizabeth Taylor on “General Hospital.” In 1981, she swooped in as the grand dame of the notorious Cassadine family to chew lavish amounts of scenery and curse Luke and Laura on their wedding day. We may not see a moment of such glorious, dramatic ta-da! again, but James Franco’s sly, badass turn reinvents the cameo for the 21st century, and proves Port Charles is still the best fictional town in America for stars to hide out and wreak havoc. 

Before slipping off to her soapishly premised new series “Ringer,” Sarah Michelle Gellar will doing a one-day guest spot on the show that earned her a daytime Emmy when she was just 18. This time around, however, she won’t be playing Erica Kane’s daughter Kendall — a role Alicia Minshew now plays. Instead, she’ll be a new woman, and says that she still has “no idea what I’ll be doing.”

Other stars set to pay respects include longtime “AMC” fanatic Carol Burnett, reprising her occasional role of Verla Grubbs. “Torchwood: Miracle Day” star Alexa Havins and her husband — former “AMC” costar Justin Bruening — are also pegged to return. The fact that Havins’ character, like Duhamel’s, is dead, shouldn’t be a problem. Soaps handle this kind of thing all the time. Former cast member Eva La Rue already dropped by in July.

The laundry list of stars who started on soaps is legendary — Julianne Moore, Kevin Bacon, John Stamos and Meg Ryan earned their stripes in daytime long before crossing over to prime time and movies. It’s no coincidence. Soaps are rigorous work for any actor, demanding a near-Herculean level of memorization, emoting and often stunt work, on a five-day-a-week basis. As Gellar says of her stint, “I made amazing friends. It was a great training ground and I said, you know, can I do something?” And now those training grounds are disappearing, which is unfortunate for both performers and viewers who don’t give a crap about cooking shows. It’s a loss even for people who don’t watch soaps, because the Kendall Harts become future Buffy the Vampire Slayers. And as Josh Duhamel told EW this week, “The diminishing landscape of daytime TV means it’s going to be harder for young talent to get discovered.”

There was a time when they were very exciting indeed. Back in the early ’70s, Miss Erica Kane and her crew of lovers and victims were part of the new guard of daytime drama, the generation that took the genre out of the staid and teary realm of nobly suffering good girls and gave the world heroines who were young, hot — and full-on bitches. Before Erica, soaps were already full of domestic drama and scandal, but Agnes Nixon’s brassy creation was the first to truly make them sexy. She was a new kind of woman, a petulant princess and reckless seducer, but also one of television’s first unself-consciously feminist characters.

Throughout the years, Erica Kane has endured prison, career setbacks, enough weddings — both real and fake — to single-handedly keep the rice industry in business, and chewed through more scenery than a week’s worth of TLC programming.  She’s also consistently proven herself an unlikely pioneer. In 1973, the same year as Roe v. Wade, she became the first major television character to have a legal abortion — and astonishingly, she’s still one of only a tiny handful of television characters who’ve done so. She was using birth control pills when the very idea of them was still novel on television. And 30 years later, when Erica’s daughter Bianca came out to her, Erica became the mother of one of daytime’s first openly gay characters.

Embodied in the diminutive frame of Susan Lucci, Erica has gone from vixenish teen to grande dame, and along the way the actress has gained notoriety as the losingest woman in awards history. She’s been nominated for a Daytime Emmy more than 20 times, with a sole win in 1999. If you’ve ever been called the Susan Lucci of anything, odds are good you’ve been passed over a lot in your life.

But Lucci’s character (and frankly, her acting) are rarely tailored to heart-tugging, award-garnering fare. Erica has always been about something else, the outsized and the bold. She was never especially political; she was simply as ambitious and as sexually aggressive as any male character to come down the pike, a lady who understood that femininity and success are not mutually exclusive. And for that, she was groundbreaking. Her brand of glamour, sex and swagger are all over generations of subsequent television icons, from “Dynasty’s” Alexis Carrington to “Sex and the City’s” Samantha Jones to “Desperate Housewives’” Gabby to every “Real Housewife,” ever. Is she silly and shallow and, well, pretty crazy? Yeah. Is she also a total hoot, a guilty pleasure who also happens to be a steel magnolia? Oh, totally.

It’s logical that the steam would run out of the soap opera format eventually, even if ABC is replacing its two new cancellations with just what the world needs — another cooking show and a makeover show. Though the sun will soon be setting over Pine Valley, Erica Kane will live on. It’s not that she became irrelevant, it’s that she’s become so dominant. And every time some scheming vixen throws a drink in another girl’s face on “The Bachelor,” every time some haughty little diva pitches a hissy on “Glee,” you’re not just seeing that wild-eyed she-devil, you’re catching a glimpse of the best bad girl daytime ever had.