Growing up with soaps as a guide to holidays
Everything I know about Christmas, I learned from daytime soaps.
Growing up in the sticks of Toronto, the son of refugees to this country, my family wasn’t in on the Nativity, and nor were we the kind of clan who put up a tree and trimmings, anyway. We just weren’t.
Being a particular kind of child — one with a tooth for melodrama — I did, however, have a festive entrypoint: I loved to watch the families on daytime dramas celebrating the holidays. At the time, American soaps still had an outsized effect on the zeitgeist, with the families on those serials appearing on one’s box five days a week, 52 weeks a year.
Though every soap had its distinct hue — including the inevitable swirl of baby switches, evil twins, treacherous love matches and back-fromthe-deads — Christmastime always drove home a constant in all of them: family.
Ramping up the truisms of hearth and roasted chestnuts were the Corys on Another World, the Capwells on Santa Barbara, the Abbotts and the Newmans on The Young and the Restless, the Bauers and the Spaldings on Guiding Light . . . and so on. (That latter show, at the time of its demise in 2009, was firmly in world record territory, having run for a total of 71 years! Take that, ER.)
Every year, in particular, I got a kick out of the ritual tree-ornaments care of the Horton dynasty and various tagalongs on Days of Our Lives. A show going on 51 years now, theirs is a tradition that’s out- lasted the deaths, on and off the screen, of its matriarch and patriarch, Alice and Tom Horton — though, they, like many other characters here and gone, continue to persist with their personalized ornament. Like sands through the hourglass, as the classic Days intro booms, these are the Christmases of their (our?) lives.
As someone who felt like an outsider in what was a markedly more monochromatic culture, it’s remarkable the extent to which soaps provided a Yuletide muscle memory. Albeit a much parodied television form, it isn’t entirely unusual, though. I’ll never forget an ESL teacher once telling me how many immigrants improved their English watching soaps, soaps being a particularly dialogue-rich medium and, with their particular intimacy, providing much repetition with that use of dialogue.
December’s end is when I also can’t help reflect on the genre’s drift. The numbers tell the story: daytime dramas went from 15 series in 1981 to only four today. A major pop-culture pivot, it’s evidenced by the fact that All My Children’s Susan Lucci was so huge in 1990 that she even hosted Saturday Night Live. Zero odds that any soap star would be doing that now.
Fading to black in 2011 on ABC, All My Children kicked the bucket after four decades and with it Lucci’s femme fatale Erica Kane, a character so woven into American history that in 1973, hers was the first legal abortion to be depicted on television since the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling.
Likewise, on General Hospital (one of the quartet of shows still run- ning), “Luke and Laura” once rode their super coupledom to 30 million viewers for their cover-of-Newsweek wedding. Outside of Charles and Diana, who wed the same year, theirs were the biggest nuptials of 1981, with even Elizabeth Taylor making a cameo. It was a full-on cultural phenomenon — akin to, say, Kim and Kanye’s more recent wedding.
Indeed, when people ask me to explain the endurance of the Kardashians, generally, I often fall back to my analysis of them as a modern soap. The medium may have changed, but the allure remains steady, with their lives in the tabs providing a non-stop synergy and the whole disparate family being so convoluted that someone is always giving birth, someone is breaking up, someone is getting a gender reassignment, someone is being robbed at gunpoint, someone is having a mental breakdown and showing up at Trump Tower (hey, Kanye).
Likewise, what are the various Real Housewives if not a Bold and the Beautiful of their own making, what with their inter-psychological warfare, collapsing marriages and at least one incarceration (hey, Teresa in New Jersey)?
Though soaps like Y&R continue to reap some five million viewers an episode, the slide for the genre famously began in earnest when many of the shows were pre-empted during the non-stop O.J. Simpson trial in 1995, which was a soap in itself. Viewership never quite recovered.
Ironically, though, on prime time and on Netflix, the opera rings louder than ever. Think about it: shows such as Revenge, Nashville, The Affair, Homeland, Scandal and House of Cards are all soaps by another name, if you define the genre as a serialized “What next?” drama. Hot new show This Is Us definitely has old-school soap qualities, à la Ryan’s Hope or Britain’s enduring Coronation Street. What is Game of Thrones, I ask, if not a soap with people in funny costumes and dragons?
All the world’s a soap, if you think about the cliffhangers and histrionics of the recent American election and, now, Trump and his entire extended soapy family, complete with three wives, cool, cunning daughter Ivanka, his elephanthunting duo of sons, poor Tiffany Trump and eye-of-the-storm Barron.
The world turns, indeed. I’ll hang a stocking this Christmas for soapland.