LOVE ON THE WEB
Steamy soaps find new life online
ONLINE soaps? Who knew? While only four venerable network soaps cling to life — “The Bold and the Beautiful” and “The Young and the Restless” (CBS), “Days of Our Lives” (NBC) and “General Hospital” (ABC) — there’s a niche of Web-only soaps. And they’ve even won Daytime Emmys — or, in some cases, won and then lost. The TV Academy made headlines last spring when it rescinded Patrika Darbo’s 2018 Emmy for her gueststarring role on Amazon’s “The Bay,” (due to “submission errors”). The network soaps then threatened to boycott next year’s awards ceremony if rule changes were not made. That’s a big deal for a part of the TV industry that employs many actors and behind-the-scenes personnel — and also spotlighted Web-only soaps.
“We all believe [Web soaps] are where it’s heading,” says Jessica Hill, creator of the Emmy-nominated online soap “Beacon
Hill,” which has streamed one 12-episode season (some episodes are only eight minutes long). Returning for Season 2 in 2019, it counts among its stars well-known daytime faces including Alicia Minshew (“All My
Children”) and Sarah Brown (“General Hospital”) as ex-lovers swept up in Bostonbased family and political drama. Other online soaps include YouTube’s “Tough Love” and “Anacostia” and “Venice: The Series,” streaming on VenicetheSeries.com.
Hill was motivated to develop her series because her favorite soaps had been cancelled. “My partner [Linda Hill] and I run a publishing company [Bella Books]. Storytelling is something we’re very familiar with,” she says. “And we both grew up watching soaps and there were only a handful left. And we started thinking, ‘Why not come up with our own show?’ ”
Hill’s Florida-based publishing company provided a built-in fan base, but she knew she needed to snare traditional soap viewers, too, and courted actors from the genre.
“We purposefully went after actors who already had a fan base, who already knew how to film things — they can handle a lot of dialogue quickly with very few takes,” she says. “Beacon Hill” earned a Daytime Emmy nomination in 2015, two years after the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences began nominating Web series.
Although online soaps such as “Beacon Hill” don’t air daily, Hill says the series maintains the genre’s story-telling spirit. The downfall of having a Web soap, she says, is that audiences don’t know where to find them — and there’s no network support for the budget. (Which is why there’s a four-year gap between Seasons 1 and 2.)
“It was a learning curve at the beginning because you have to teach people where to watch the show,” says Hill. “A lot of them were like ‘Okay, what channel will it be on?’ You had to go to our website [Beaconhilltheseries.com].”
Hill and her partner produced Season 1 themselves and partly financed Season 2 with crowdfunding. They also had no quantifiable way to measure their ratings.
“We learned a lot,” she says. “Maybe [Season 1] should have been 6 episodes that were longer. But we weren’t sure what the attention span was going to be. Now, we’re thinking most people want something that’s 15 to 20 minutes. We got a good response. We ended up with an Emmy nomination.
“For our first attempt, that was cool.”