Talk About a Soap Opera!

I was introduced to the soap opera by TV's most recent rival for a popular audience, the internet.  Leisurely surfing had tossed up the info-bite that the American soap Guiding Light held a Guinness Record, for being the longest-running fictional show in television history, having then been continuously on air since 1952.  As it happened, I'd learned about GL just in time; the soap was destined for cancellation in a couple years' time, and ended in September 2009.

II.

Since its growth into a massively popular medium, television has proved an easy target for intellectuals. The criticisms focus on the medium's passivity as encouraging a lazy disengagement, or even, being a softening agent for all kinds of purposed messages.  But these critiques are often raised as if all communication media did not present through a freighted discourse.  To be an informed audience of media depends on what the audience is bringing to the experience, and this is equally true of high and popular art forms. Now television is a popular art form that I happen to like, so that when GL's record came up on the net, I was eager to see for myself a show with such longevity, and hence, such staying power.

III.

My first few weeks with Guiding Light mostly served to underline the derisive characteristics associated with the soap opera.  Here indeed was the bold acting: the bald plot-twists: all of that bold melodrama. <1>  After a time I began to consider a soap title of my own.  The Bold & The Bald.

But after a time, I also began to notice that I had developed a curious attachment to GL.  First, there was the appeal of the romantic passages that began with the linear energy of new love, but then didn't end in a linear way, shown to be cyclical instead. The sharp edges of romantic endings were reconciled by a coping acceptance, and the possibility of many second chances. Secondly, this viewpoint that relied on acceptance, on second chances, was also extended in Light's universe to the issues of daily life, quite apart from romantic relationships.

Taken together, Light presented the dramas of a tranquilized romanticism, embedded in the detail of a continuous story.  The charm of this storytelling could be described as negligent, but the negligence went beyond its immediate pleasures, informed by a consoling generosity of vision. Like all good art, Light revealed layers to its meaning imperceptible on a first, or single encounter.

IV.

Guiding Light is several years gone now, and television soap operas in general have seen hard times. Less than a handful remain on the major American networks where they began, and once flourished.  This diminishment of the soap opera, a narrative form unique to the development of the medium, makes television the lesser for it.
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<1>But melodrama can be more than just sentimentality. David Cook, for example, has suggested that melodrama can also be a type of "heightened realism". (David A. Cook, A History of Narrative Film (1990).