No Soap

ABC Television is canceling two of its remaining soap operas, All My Children and One Life to Live. Although I haven't really seen either of them in years, except for glimpses on the gym TVs, I did watch both shows in college. And before you think that's weird, the TV room in my all-male dorm filled each weekday at the noon hour to catch the latest episode of AMC, or "Kids," as we called it when I was there. And not all of the viewers were from the nearby all-women's building coming over because we had a better TV, although we did.

The young gentlemen with whom I lived watched the show for some very specific reasons. Namely, Susan Lucci, the Original Cougar who, though nearing 40 at the time, would have lacked for no escort at any time or place she wanted to show up on campus. Also Marcy Walker, who was just a couple of years older than some of us and whose "bad girl" Liza Colby character provoked significant interest amongst the fellows. Also, Kim Delaney, Carmen Thomas and a a number of other actresses whose talents we greatly admired. I once used an old press pass from the paper at which I interned to wrangle a quick interview with one of those actresses when she and a co-star made an appearance at a Chicagoland mall, and got my notebook signed. My GPA wishes I had applied the same kind of creativity towards my classwork.

Seeing that my dorm held a large number of Northwestern's football players, the different commercial breaks gained football-themed names. The long ad break in about the middle of the show was, of course, "halftime." The quick break just before setting up that day's cliffhanger scene was the "two-minute warning." Any bedroom scene with any of our preferred characters mentioned above was a "touchdown."

Fewer watched One Life to Live which came on later, although the consensus was that Mitch Laurence was a bad dude in both senses of the word and his sweet-talking of a prison nurse in a scene before he left the show for a bit, accompanied by Sade's "Smooth Operator," was quite apropos. From time to time OLTL featured plots centering on time travel, underground cities, out-of-body experiences and all sorts of other weird stuff.

Almost anyone watching either of these shows could see them for the silly stories that they were. Although some of the actors involved really were talented and sometimes had scenes here and there that really let them display that, much much more of their work showed why soap operas are so easily mocked. Most of the storylines are stale and stabs at making them fresh were usually even sillier. Even so, they were fun for us at the time.

ABC's plans are to replace them with Revolution, a "health and lifestyle" series that will document one woman's weight loss and lifestyle change over the course of five months. Each week will finish with a reveal of what has changed for her over the previous few days. Yeah, that sounds a lot more exciting than wondering whether or not Mitch will succeed in his latest attempt to get hold of Victor Lord's fortune.

Also taking the time slot will be The Chew, a food-oriented lifestyle series that immediately soars towards the top in the "Worst Show Name Ever" sweepstakes. Of its four hosts, only Dorm Room Diet author Daphne Oz is not a veteran of some other lifestyle show, and she is the daughter of Dr. Mehmet Oz, one of the chatter-heads Oprah Winfrey has inflicted on the world. Ms. Oz, a Near Eastern studies graduate of Princeton, will help cover nutrition issues.