April 21, 2023: Soap Opera Studying: Aaron Spelling

[April 22nd will markthe 100th anniversary of the birth of the king of primetime soapoperas, . So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Spelling and other soap operacontexts, leading up to a crowd-sourced cliffhanger of a weekend post! So shareyour soapy responses and thoughts, you evil twins you!]

On a fineline that primetime soaps have to walk, and how the genre’s king perfected it.

As I hopethis week’s series has illustrated, there are various elements which helpdefine the cultural genre known as the daytime soap opera. But high on the listis a particularly unique and complex characteristic, a trait that is shared by justone other genre that I can think of, the syndicated daily comic strip: works inboth these genres have to be created in such a way that each individualepisode/strip tells some sort of story, has its own beginning and endpoint; andyet their creators recognize that audiences will often dip in and out, returnto the work after some time away and expect the familiar things they’ve come to(hopefully) love, and so not a lot can ultimately change across those multipleepisodes/strips. With the one exception of actors leaving soap operas and thustheir characters needing more of a definitive end (unless they’re just going to berecast, as frequently happens and as proves this point with particularclarity), daytime soaps feature seemingly huge events that quite often don’tend up changing a thing about the characters, relationships, overall dynamics,and so on.

There’sgood reason for that: daytime soaps are designed to air every day and to stayon the air for as long as possible, with the fourlongest-running all having long since surpassed fifty seasons! That’sobviously quite different from primetime TV dramas, most of which not only havea much shorter lifespan, but the creators of which also don’t necessarily knowwhether they’ll be renewed, and so need to tell distinct and definite storiesin their individual seasons. So what happens when these two distinct and evencontrasting TV genres come together, as they do in the form of theprimetime soap? The result is often a pretty delicate balancing act, showsthat feature season-long storylines a la the best dramas, yet that are designedwith some of the same layers of repetition and stasis that we find in daytimesoaps. When that balance goes awry, it can be quite frustrating for audiences,as illustrated by one of the most famously controversial TV plotlines/gimmicksof all time: the long-running primetime soap Dallas (1978-91) ending its third seasonon the “Who Shot J.R.?” cliffhanger and spending the entire offseason hyping upthat question, only to revealthe culprit relatively early in the fourth season and with no significant consequence(J.R. lived, no charges were pressed, basically everything went on as if therehad been no shooting).

Thatfourth-season Dallas episode drew oneof the largestTV audiences to that point (and remains in the conversation overall), somaybe the gimmick was a success. But I would argue that it’s the creator andexecutive producer of many of the other most famous primetime soaps, today’s birthday boy Aaron Spelling,who really figured out how to walk that particular genre’s fine line. Acrosscountless mega-popular shows, from TheLove Boat (1977-86) and Dynasty(1981-89) to Beverly Hills, 90210(1990-2000) and teenage Ben’s personal favorite Melrose Place (1992-1999; what can I say, like America itself I amlarge and contain multitudes), among many many others, Spelling brought therepetitive and thus pleasantly familiar rhythms of soap operas to the explosiveplotlines and seasons of nighttime dramas. A show like Melrose Place aired 226 totalepisodes in its seven seasons, which is not that far off from the number ofepisodes a daytimesoap might air in a single year. A great deal happened and changed acrossthose 226 episodes—and yet viewers could nonetheless tune in to pretty much anysingle one of those episodes and see Heather Locklear’s Amandaacting in precisely the high-powered, back-stabbing, irresistible ways shealways did. Few American artists have achieved greater success in their chosengenre and medium than did the king of such tightrope-walking primetime soaps,Aaron Spelling.

Crowd-sourcedpost this weekend,

Ben

PS. Soonce more: what do you think? Other soap opera contexts or stories you’d share?