(4 of 8)
Years ago, when radio serials were somewhat thin, actors were told to speak in "soap count," a half-step tempo. Thus many characters slur their speech, which suggests a speech impediment or drunkenness. The latter should never be discounted; social drinking seems moderate, but alcoholism now rates as soapland's top personal problem.
Bold analysts of the genre like to call soaps "the people's Iliad" a reference to the gloomy outcome of every story.
Characters suffer fates that would challenge a classical god. Poor Elizabeth Stewart died a couple of days after her marriage on As the World Turns when she fell upstairs and ruptured her liver. On The Doctors, the sinister Dr. Allison killed himself in order to throw the blame on a successful rival. Later in the same show, an urbane psychiatrist, Dr. Morrison, drove his nurse to suicide so that she would not report his criminal behavior.
There is reason, other than art, for these fates. If a camel is a horse designed by a committee, then soaps are contrived in a public meeting—writers, producers and the public all pitching in. At a hint of disapproval from the audience, the snappiest soap plot can collapse.
A few years ago, Search for Tomorrow introduced a story involving a predominantly black youth center. The audience did not like it, and it was quickly dropped.
This is understandable. Soaps were originally intended to be nothing more than subliminal salesmen. Back in 1933, when their first successful soap, Oxydol's Own Ma Perkins, was aired in Chicago, Procter & Gamble's commercials were skillfully buried in the plot. Writers prided themselves on a seamless blend of message and drama. Irna Phillips, the seminal soap writer who dominated the genre for 40 years, even thought she should forgo her credit to enhance the shows' realism. It was Phillips who anchored the soap to the family and peopled it with professionals. The youngest of an Iowa grocer's ten children, she used her grasp of the powerful mythologies that fill family life to enliven even the most banal script. Four of her shows—Days of Our Lives, As the World Turns, Another World, and The Guiding Light—are still running, though she died, at 70, in 1973.
The latter three soaps are owned by Procter & Gamble, which remains convinced that Phillips' homely style requires no updating. The last big-time soap sponsor, P&G runs the shows from Cincinnati with Kremlin-like authority. P & G's six serials (which also include Edge of Night, Somerset and Search for Tomorrow) are reworkings of conventional material and have little of the dash of the newer dramas. "I guess we're awfully dull," admits Joe Willmore, who directs the writers of As the World Turns. "I hate to say it, but I don't want to preach to people about social mores. I want to be largely accepted."