‘Story of Soaps’ recalls rich history
Equal parts history, celebration and eulogy, “The Story of Soaps” (9 p.m., ABC, TV-14) enjoys the participation of dozens of current and former soap stars. Actors Alec Baldwin, Jon Hamm and Bryan Cranston describe their work on daytime melodrama as a kind of boot camp and rite of passage that changed them from aspiring actors to experienced performers.
The first segment of “Soaps” emphasizes the breakneck pace and exhausting amount of work involved in producing a series that airs five times per week, every week. Hamm recalls that working on “Mad Men,” where it might take 10 days to shoot a single episode, was heaven compared to soap operas, where they can shoot dozens of scenes in a single day.
Actors and producers extol the remarkable emotional connection between soaps and their fans. No audience is more faithful, watching every weekday for years and decades, spending more time thinking about odd characters than they do their actual friends and loved ones. And no genre is as free to carve out wild stories, bizarre arrivals and departures and mind-boggling twists and coincidences.
Carol Burnett recalls going on a European vacation in the 1970s and asking a friend to send her a weekly telegram digesting the plotlines of “All My Children,” their favorite soap. In her hotel, she received a frantic visit from a dumbfounded manager who had read her telegram and did not know that the strange and calamitous events it contained were merely make-believe.
Finally, “Soaps” describes the genre’s decline, making way for the wall-to-wall coverage of events like the O.J. Simpson trial in the 1990s and eclipsed by “reality” shows like “Real Housewives,” that used the techniques of melodrama to hook audiences with larger-than-life characters while dispensing with professional actors and scriptwriters.
It’s very rare for network television to talk about itself and its history with such affection, authority and professional detail. Truth be told, this seems more like a documentary
you’d find on PBS.
› Proof that real life is often stranger than fiction, “Mr. Tornado” on “American Experience” (9 p.m., PBS, TV-PG, check local listings) offers a biography of a truly unique character.
A storm chaser from the youngest age, Japanese-born Tetsuya Theodore Fujita used to climb on the roof of his father’s house to measure winds during violent typhoons.
Educated as an engineer, he was sent to the ruins of Nagasaki only days after that city was destroyed by the second atomic bomb dropped in August 1945. Like a detective, he assembled forensic evidence to study the blast, its impact and effects. He treated the tragedy like a “crime scene.”
He would use similar
methods to study the calamitous impact of extreme weather events. Soon he gained the attention of American scientists at the University of Chicago and was offered a job. Over the decades, his single-minded focus on gathering evidence about destructive weather events earned him the name “Mr. Tornado.” His findings revolutionized the study of tornadoes as well as the severe downdrafts that caused seemingly random plane crashes.
Fujita coined many of the phrases used to describe monster storms and developed the measurement of tornado strength from F-1 to F-5. The F in the scale is short for Fujita.