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How to star in a soap opera. There are probably many ways to break into soap operas, but one way, we discover, is just stand there. As everyone lose their minds, their sense and their money, you will be the star. The one whom all the action pivots. This will be a show you cannot quit. A script you cannot rewrite. You will be stuck on the set, surrounded by bad lines and bad actors. Every morning, you will say, "No more episodes! End this!" But in a soap opera, there is always another episode. By the time you realize that you are a star in your own soap, the action has been going on for some time. You just hadn't had the TV on. Or you'd been watching some other channel. It's as if someone walks in, grabs the remote and turns up the volume.
On soap operas, time stretches and molds itself. A sence that takes only moments in real time last Monday through Friday in soap opera time. Conversations and glances go on for days. There are no grown-ups in a soap opera. If people behaved like grown-ups, there would be no action. There are no grown-ups in our world.
A soap opera has lots of yelling. A soap opera has to have dense people who never catch on. A soap opera has to have lots of selfish people. A soap does not need anybody nice. That would be me. Opinion not needed.
Eventually every soap ends up in the emergency room. You are more like the invalid in the hospital bed whose remote had dropped to the floor and who was stuck helplessly watching a channel you hate. You can't even mute the sound or turn your head.
Eventually, on a soap opera, somebody is bound to run away and vanish. The cast could go on without me. They could have all the episodes they wanted. People could tune in anytime and wouldn't have lost the thread of the story. Every now and then somebody would say, 'Wasn't there this adorablt young daughter at one point. What happened to her, anyway.' But want I want was to go home and have it be home, and have the soap opera vanish instead.
It is only right that a soap opera should have should destruction. Building is fine in its place, but demolition was better. What a character to introduce. A bulldozer. For the first time, you have the power to write the script.
There aren't many childrem in soap operas. People don't want to watch children get hurt, and hurting people is part of soap operas.
A doctor. He can't be a postal clerk or a water-meter checker. He couldn't sell insurance or manage a Pizza Hut. No. This is a soap opera He HAS to be a doctor. And when do I get an episode? Kill that thought. All the episodes are mine, even though I was in the audience, or backstage, or supplying props.
Soap operas are not about responsibility. They are about irresponsibility. I'll have a spinoff. My show will have only nice people and happy endings. Of course it wouldn't get very good ratings. And it wouldn't stay on for long. In soap operas, nice is boring.
Soap operas do not have long sweeping views of horizon and cloud, of incoming thunderstorms or sunsets curling over moutain ridges. That's the Weather Channel. The weather is so safe. Weather solves itself, blowing away and turning into another day. But family! They are blizard and storm, drought and flood. And they don't blow away.
In soap operas people race in and out of affairs, trials, journeys, murders. and stolen babies and never reach a pleasant spot to stay for a decade or two. They don't need true love. They just need love on a tuesday afternoon so they can kill it on wednesday.
And so the soap opera will leave the air. But I am not a character in my own soap opera. We have survived, and survival was the act of reaching the last episode.
 Poison Fed with a Spoon · Sat Apr 29, 2006 @ 06:14pm · 0 Comments |
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