Salon.com > Soap Operas

Famous alums say goodbye to “All My Children”

Fri, 05 Aug 2011 19:50:00 +0000

It's a given that soap fans are among the most loyal in the world. But isn't it sweet to see how loyal soapdom's former stars are as well? In the buildup to "All My Children's" television swan song next month, two of its most famous alumni are popping back into Pine Valley.

On Thursday, nearly a decade after Leo du Pres' epic death via waterfall, Josh Duhamel stepped into the character again and fluttered open his eyes. Greenlee, the now-married love of his life, delivers the classic line, "Oh my God, it can't be." Greenlee and the fans, at long last, had closure. Awwww, Leo and Greenlee 4EVAH! Duhamel said to Entertainment Weekly, "I guess in a way it was just my way of saying thank you to go back and do an episode." And he's not the only star with one last thank you to give before the show moves over to a yet-to-be-revealed online format.

Goodbye, Erica Kane, feminist pioneer

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 15:29:00 +0000

Goodbye, Erica Kane. By far the greatest casualty of Thursday's not-so-surprising announcement that ABC is pulling the plug this year on its venerable soap operas "All My Children" and "One Life to Live" is the naughty queen of Pine Valley.

Soaps have been a dying breed for years now, and the days of Betty Drapers ironing while "the stories" droned in the background are long a thing of the past. "Guiding Light" and "As the World Turns" were canceled -- or possibly faked their own deaths -- last year. Could it be that our appetite for scandal, deception and a little PG-13-level groping on television has died out? Quite the opposite. It's just that when we have the Internet, hundreds of cable networks, and DVRs to provide a steady stream of chair throwing, hair pulling and crap hoarding, the fictional goings-on in a pair of little Pennsylvania towns just don't seem that exciting.

Everything I learned from “As the World Turns”

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 11:01:00 +0000

I've watched "As the World Turns" for nearly three decades, which in soap opera years means I could have gotten married six times, had four children (one while in a coma and one in captivity, no less), become a lounge singer and businesswoman, discovered a skanky twin sister with a Jersey accent, gotten hooked on diet pills, had husband #1 try to blow me up and mother-in-law #3 drug and gaslight me, been falsely convicted for murdering husband #4, been kidnapped a few times, become a castaway after jumping out of a plane, and, through it all, remained a pillar of the community.

Like the men in my life, other soaps have come and gone. But Oakdale and its residents -- like Lily Walsh Mason Snyder Grimaldi Santana Snyder Grimaldi -- have remained a constant, wacky presence.

Daytime soap’s best celebrity cameos

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 15:24:00 +0000

Salon's sexiest man, James Franco, began his meaty, 10-episode stint on "General Hospital" on Friday as a mysterious stranger known only as "Franco." The move prompted a wave of “What was he thinking?” speculation: Is it part of a larger film project? Was he hankering for an acting challenge? Is he addicted to the lively goings-on of Port Charles? Is he just totally freaking weird?

Whatever the reason, all we know about his character so far is that his hobbies include painting, lurking, skulking … and murder.

Soap opera social engineering

Thu, 29 May 2008 11:00:00 +0000

Interesting facts I learned about Brazil from the paper "Soap Operas and Fertility: Evidence From Brazil," by Eliana La Ferrara, Alberto Chong and Suzanne Duryea. (Thanks to Chris Blattman's consistently interesting blog on "economic development, political change and conflict in the developing world" for the link.)

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.