Hello Again at Seventy; Goodbye at Five

And the last shall be first: why squander an historic, durable, unique, and valuable broadcast genre with a uniquely devoted—if also exacting and voluble—fan base? What self-respecting television executive does not eagerly embrace and celebrate slavishly devoted audiences? (Consider Star Trek in its many incarnations, which in this viewer’s opinion is soap opera as science fiction. Also Arrested Development, The X-Files, Veronica Mars, Gilmore Girls…the list is endless.) But most executives have not figured out what to do with the people they consider the “average” soap fans. Indeed, the networks seem embarrassed about this fan base. (Accordingly, this fan base is often sheepish about their own viewing habits.) It is, I think, the perceived profile of this fan base that has created considerable bias against it: older, female, relatively uneducated, not upwardly mobile, middle American. (In other words, not young and male or cool or hip.) While this is, no doubt, one component of the audience base, it is in no way its sum total. (And so what if it was? Who do you think watches Live with Regis and Kelly (as in Ripa, formerly of All My Children) and many, many other shows? But the viewer profile is also much broader.) Boys and men and girls and women of all ages and from every socio-economic segment of the population watch soaps or have watched them at some juncture or junctures in their lives. Even celebrities do it, though only the women seem willing to cop to the habit—Oprah, Julia Roberts, Rosie O’Donnell, to name a few. In the non-celebrity universe, many people, of all shapes and sizes, have confessed this to me. After all, if you cannot confess your soap viewing to a soap devotee with a PhD who studies popular culture, than to whom can you confess it? 

For many viewers, the “habit” began with a mother or a father or a grandmother who watched; and they watched right alongside them. Certainly that is how my lifelong habit began: tuning in with my mother—a habit and a kind of community we shared even as the miles stretched between us. Indeed, as she waged her battle with cancer, the soap “world” provided comfort, conversation, shelter, and continuity in the face of death. Others picked it up in college or somewhere else along the way. For some, soap viewing is sporadic; that is perhaps the greatest strength and weakness of the genre—it is quite easy to reacquire the habit given a brief rundown of intervening developments, since many of the same faces (or at least names, in the case of multiple recasts, as very few actors are indispensable and irreplaceable given the longevity of the genre) and new faces somehow connected to old faces and stories continue to be told.