Ok, it's silly really to be sad about a soap opera being cancelled, but this one has been around almost as long as I have! This show once again has made me face my own mortaility! This soap opera really defined my generation. I was about seven or eight years old when All My Children first aired. I remember my mom wanting to watch it to see what it was about, she liked the title of the show. She was hooked after that, and I remember in the summer times when it was warm out, and no one wanted to do anything, sitting there with my mom and my sister in front of the TV watching to see what Erica Kane was plotting on about. The best part of watching that show was watching my mother watch that show. She would get so animated talking to the TV to convince one of the characters of the evils of another character. Sometimes shaking her head in dismay or disgust. It was great and I learned a lot about my mom!
We owned a black and white TV, and unbeknownst to me the first season or so of the show was filmed in black and white. I remember wishing I could see all the elaborate sets and fashions in color, nice to know now all these years later, I wouldn't of had a choice. When I got into high school the whole of summer was devoted to the soaps. All My Children, One Life to LIve (also leaving the airwaves in January) and General Hospital. YES, I was one of those crazy people who watched the continuing saga and adventures of Luke and Laura even getting emotional when the Christopher Cross song, "Think of Laura" would come on the radio! I literally cried thinking of Laura losing Luke and Luke losing Laura. I get sad thinking about it even now. What a great love story! I didn't stop there, I also watched the NBC soap of Days of Our Lives, who can forget the title sequence, and McDonald Carry's voiceover saying, "Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives...." cue schmaltzy music! His voice is still there in the opener of that show. Ok, maybe my children's generation doesn't know it, or remember it, or where they've heard it, but they've definitely heard it. I even watched CBS's offerings of The Guiding Light and The Young and The Restless, also another one with a great soap opera opening theme here!
How can we forget all the wonderful, silly, gory, outrageous storylines. Does anyone remember the one where one of the characters dies and goes to heaven and meets all the other characters they killed off the show over the years? Wait, was that One Life to Live? Anyway, there is always that evil and good twin who reeks havoc on the unsuspecting citizens of Pine Valley! Anyone? The Chandler's!! I love the Chandler's cuz hey they are my name sake. My maiden name is Chandler, so anyone with the last name of Chandler ruled in my book. David Cannery was brilliant as Adam and Stuart Chandler, changing his persona on a dime. Not to mention he wasn't too bad to look at. Soap opera actors are truly the best in the business, learning all those pages of dialogue a day, and just keeping up with their own story lines, it's gotta be tough and takes a real pro to pull it off!
The glue of course that held it all together besides Agnes Nixon the creator, was Susan Lucci, she was the icing on the cake, the cream in the coffee, THE soap opera character of the century! Her antics, both good and evil, funny, serious, and her many marriages and last names will go on infamy. She was soap opera's version of Scarlet O'Hara. Hopefully she'll live on to fight another day, just not on ABC or network television.
I'm over soap operas now, they seem so silly and contrived to me at my age, but as a young girl they were the perfect escapism and fun. A wonderful and rich fantasy that came into our homes daily if we let them. It's sad that out of almost 10 soap operas airing a decade ago, only four are left. With Internet, the forum for TV show watching definitely has changed. Computers, NetFlix, Hulu have changed the way we watch TV. I, myself watch a lot of Hulu from my computer and iPhone to catch up on my favorite shows. Hopefully soap operas will find this new technology and venue lucrative to keep their dreams alive. I for one hope so. We just have to see how Erica will get out of this one!
