Like Soap Through an Hourglass

I had made many comments on this blog about my love of comic books.  However, there is a similar form of entertainment that I have frequently enjoyed--soap operas.  To be honest, the history of these two literary forms are quite intwined.  Both started as forms of advertising detergents to the masses based around the New York World's Fair back in the 1930s.  Comic books started as collections of newspaper strips bound together with advertisements form detergents included.  Remember, these books were originally intended for an adult audience.  Later, the books would be filled with original material, ultimately focusing on the superhero genre.  Kids would become the presumed audience, and, as such, the detergent ads faded away.  On a different front, another company decided to go with the new radio audience,  Here, the advertisement would be blended into a conversation a woman had with news (okay, gossip) about her neighbors.  Soon, the dramatics would overshadow the ads, and the serial began.  Some of these early shows would wind up moving to television, where detergent companies would still be the primary sponsor.  Hence, "soap" opera.  Both comic books and soap operas feature many of the same traits.  They both feature ongoing plotlines, with stories building up to dramatic finales.  Revisionist histories are explored, as new information on past events are revealed, or even changed to better suit the needs of current stories.  New characters are brought in, or old ones return, sometimes from impossible events.  They really are pretty much the same type of form, just based in different formats and with different primary audiences.  I was forced to watch my first soaps when I was a very young boy and didn't have any choice in the matter.  Fortunately, I wasn't forced to watch them anymore once I entered school.  During summer vacation, I began to take over the television, and no one else really watched them anymore either.  Then, the summer after my freshman year in high school, I somehow started watching Santa Barbara.  It was still fairly new then so it was fairly easy to get into, although I must admit to never finding out about every single back story.  I was bored at that time in the afternoon, so I started watching it.  I continued once school started back, sometimes setting the VCR to record it so I wouldn't miss even the first few minutes.  Santa Barbara was a great show that didn't go too far over the top.  Over its run, it had won multiple Daytime Emmys in almost all of the major categories.  Unfortunately, once the actors playing the main super couple left, the show went quickly downhill.  It was cancelled during my third year of college.  However, all wasn't lost.  I had started watching Days of Our Lives during the summer before my senior year of high school.  Yeah, I got bored a lot during the summer.  I would go on recording and watching it to this day.  Many things have changed since I started watching soaps, though.  Back then, the three networks of the day had a combined twelve soaps on, three one hour ones and one half hour show per network.  The cancellation of Santa Barbara marked the beginning of the end.  While each network tried to bring new shows about and get viewers, nothing seemed to work.  Longtime shows would be cancelled and some new shows brought in, to mixed reviews.  On NBC, for example, there was Sunset Beach and Passions.  I watched the former for the last two or three seasons of its run, possibly a tad longer.  I could never figure everything out about it; too much backstory wasn't unclear.  It kept doing fantasy sequences, even suggesting on its last episode that the entire show had been one long dream sequence of the main female character who never left her small town.  Or something.  Passions I watched from the start.  It was supposedly about this small New England town that was suffering under the curse of a morally ambiguous witch who had been punished for her ways.  That show was known for its very strange plots, which I won't go into because they were that weird.  It was mostly known for having a character, a doll who became real, die to give his heart to one of the show's purest characters on the same day that the actor died in real life.  The angel of that doll would later push the witch into redeeming her ways and asking forgiveness to save the town from a volcano that was threatening to destroy it during its final episodes. By the end of its run, which included being cancelled by NBC and moving to a cable service, only one super couple featured during it first week remained together.  All others had been broken up for one reason or another, even when both actors wore still on the show.  A real downer.  Today, only for soaps remain.  Two on CBS, and one each on ABC and NBC, including my Days of Our Lives.  Unfortunately, the outback have hit shows hard.  Most have been in repeats or classic episodes for weeks now as they had short follow through times.  Days, however, shoots months of episodes well in advance, meaning they have a month or so of new episodes left before they too will be forced into reruns.  Production might start back soon, in some form, but I might have to wait awhile before the sands run through the hourglass again.