Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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There are no formal meals in soaps?everyone eats snacks. The main job of the characters is to repeat the plot. Sometimes time stops. One woman spent 17 days in a revolving door having flashbacks. Christmas means tragedy, the time when the soaps' already high body count rises. Women are interchangeable blondes who shuttle between two roles: Mother Mary and Lilith. The strongest, in fact the only motivation is love, and the dynamic is fate. Moral principles are enunciated only when they are about to be discarded...
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...
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...
...true, as is often rumored, that plots are lifted whole from old Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Crawford movies. "I get plots from my own life," says Falken-Smith, 50. "I've been married three times and been around. Most people I know are living soap operas." Falken-Smith got the idea for the Days of Our Lives artificial-insemination plot from an ad in the San Francisco Examiner offering $10,000 to a woman who would bear a child to a man married to a barren wife...
...each actor is guaranteed a minimum number of appearances a week) guide the writers as they work. It is an axiom among writers that leading characters' personalities change every two years ?that is to say, under their same name. The head writer breaks down the bible's dense plot into brief outlines, which are then turned into scripts by the writers. The dialogue must be virtually flub-proof. Actors move ceaselessly?with the equipment and with their colleagues ? so syllables are few and speeches short and clear...