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. 

• In the early 1990s, more than 50 percent of Brazilian 15-year-olds were functionally illiterate, but 81 percent of all households owned a television set.

• Brazil's total fertility dropped from 6.3 in 1960, to 5.8 in 1970, 4.4 in 1980, 2.9 in 1991, and to 2.3 in 2000. The only other large country to experience a similar decline is China, but Brazil's fertility decline occurred in the absence of any official population control policy.

• The vast majority of Brazilians regularly watch the 8 p.m. novela, or soap opera, produced by Brazil's dominant television network Rede Globo.

• "We find that the parents living in areas that are reached by Globo are significantly more likely to name their children after the name of the main characters of novelas aired in the year in which the children were born."

• "Over the full sample of 7 and 8 pm novelas aired between 1965 and 1999, in 62.2 percent of the novelas the main female character does not have any children" and "in 20.7 percent she has one child."

• All other things being equal, the penetration of Globo into a particular market during the years 1965-1999 is associated with a measureable decrease in fertility, especially among households characterized by lower education and wealth.

• Brazilian novelas are reported to be better than Mexican and other Latin American telenovelas, "because of the high quality of their plots and of their making."

To summarize: The prominence of childless women in Brazilian soap operas provided such potent role models to Brazilians that they contributed to a decline in the nation's fertility rate.

The authors conclude:

Our findings have important policy implications for today's developing countries. In societies where literacy is relatively low and newspaper circulation limited, television plays a crucial role in circulating ideas. Our work suggests that programs targeted to the culture of the local population have the potential of reaching an overwhelming amount of people at very low costs, and could thus be used by policymakers to convey important social and economic messages (e.g. about HIV/AIDS prevention, children's education, the rights of minorities, etc.). Recent work by social psychologists (e.g., Paluck, 2007) stresses the role of the media, and of radio soap operas in particular, as a tool for conflict prevention. Our paper suggests that this type of programmes may be usefully employed for a broader set of development policies.

In general, social engineering of the kind advocated by the authors raises How the World Works' shackles, but I'll readily concede that it is a less objectionable way to achieve the goal of population control than one-child-per-family laws or forced sterilization. Still, the irony here is that, supposing the authors' data-crunching holds up, the fertility decline was nevertheless largely unintentional. The childless female novela stars were the creation of writers who had no other outlet during the repressive years of Brazil's military dictatorship, and were doing their subversive best to critique society by sneaking in a whole raft of "modern ideas such as female emancipation in the work sphere, the female pursuit of pleasure and love even if through adultery, display of homosexuality, criticisms to machismo, and emphasis on individualism."

One suspects that if the government had purposefully gone about creating programming that aimed at presenting Brazilians with role models meant to be emulated, the shows would have been lousy and no one would have watched them.