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Back in grade school, I could be off the bus and at my front door by 2:50 p.m., leaving just enough time to change out of my uniform, grab a Little Debbie snack cake, and take a seat in front of the television for that day’s episode of Guiding Light.
During the years I watched it, Guiding Light felt like the perfect escape. Like any good fantasy, the show transported me to a world populated by larger-than-life people (and their long-lost twins, played by the same actress!) doing larger-than-life things (like coming back from the dead, this time being played by a different actress!).
But Guiding Light also taught me plenty, in an after school special kind of way. Watching with my mom, we’d chuckle at the outrageous and ease our way into topics that were far afield from the predictable suburban existence we knew: rape, teenage pregnancy, AIDS. Guiding Light got us talking about these weighty topics and about love and commitment, irresponsibility and consequences.
That was – gasp! – almost thirty years ago, during the twilight of the soap genre. Guiding Light aired its final episode on CBS on September 18, 2009, 72 years after its debut as an NBC radio serial, making it one of five soap operas cancelled in the last three years.
Last spring, ABC axed both All My Children and One Life to Live. AMC, long committed to tackling social issues, signed off in September after a 41 year run. OLTL, which earned acclaim for a groundbreaking homophobia storyline, aired its last episode on January 13th after 42 years on the air.
Only four daytime dramas remain.
So what burst the soaps’ bubble? The numbers. Ratings fell precipitously as “women 18-49” turned their backs. But it’s not as though we’ve suddenly lost our appetite for love triangles, alien abductions, and surprise pregnancies. Heck no! If anything, we’ve become hungrier for the schlocky content soaps were long derided for.
And we’re finding plenty of it: in reality TV.
A glance at the Nielsen ratings for the past decade demonstrates the explosive growth of reality television. 56% of the primetime audience is watching reality TV, as compared to 22% in the 2001-02 season. During the day, aggressive, in-your-face options like Judge Judy and The View dominate.
As if the victory of reality over scripted drama wasn’t clear enough, ABC emphasized the point by replacing its venerable soaps with fare dished out by a veritable Who’s-Who of contemporary reality television. The Chew, a talk show about food and entertaining starring Mario Batali and Michael Symon (of Iron Chef America fame), Carla Hall (Top Chef), and Clinton Kelly (What Not to Wear) replaced All My Children this fall. The Revolution – a health and “lifestyle” talk show hosted by Project Runway’s Tim Gunn and Extreme Makeover: Home Edition’s Ty Pennington – debuted this month.
The demise of the soap opera underscores a deep shift in our cultural preferences away from the narrative form that has shaped art and entertainment since prehistory and toward quick fixes, cheap thrills, and narcissism. Sure, daytime dramas made their names with outrageous storylines, but they also asked their viewers for a commitment that most reality TV eschews.
Ultimately, soap operas gave us 40-year story arcs about families. The multi-generational clans made messes and had to deal with them. Declaring bankruptcy landed characters in more hot water than a cookbook deal could lift them out of. Being 16 and pregnant had consequences beyond giving them a chance at a TV contract. And watching these soap characters deal with the costs of their mistakes came with lessons for viewers.
Now I’m not trying to say that I learned all my values from watching soaps as a kid. And there were certainly plenty of badly behaved soap characters who were unrealistically redeemed or rehabilitated. But I am arguing that the values soaps taught me are a whole lot better than the ones reality TV is instilling in kids today.
The swan song of the soap opera makes me wonder about the type of television that my young children will eventually watch – and that we will watch and talk about together. It also makes me think about a recent UCLA study that found that fame was the top value conveyed by TV shows – many of them reality shows – popular among pre-teens. (Benevolence ranked 13th out of 16, tradition 15th.)
These are the values reality TV is teaching?
Maybe I’ll see if I can find some old VHS tapes of Guiding Light on eBay.
Did you ever watch soap operas? Do you watch reality TV? What, if any, TV do you like to watch with your kids?
{ 38 comments… read them below or add one }
It’s so funny–I felt kind of sad reading this, even though I never watched Guiding Light or All My Children (I did spend the summer between 8th and 9th grade watching The Young and the Restless, The Bold and the Beautiful and General Hospital), but soap operas seem like such a cultural staple–it’s hard to imagine them not out there somewhere. We don’t watch much TV in our house (who has time?)–occasional Muppet Show or Superfriends episodes on DVD for the kids, and Masterpiece Theater if I’m not too tired Sunday night. If fame is the number one value kids are learning, there are going to be lots and lots of dissatisfied people when they grow up.
“If fame is the number one value kids are learning, there are going to be lots and lots of dissatisfied people when they grow up.”
I heard about that UCLA study on an NPR segment where the interviewee concluded just what you did. It’s pretty disheartening, actually, to think about. My hapless hope is that reality TV dies off before my kids are old enough to be interested in it. Wishful thinking, huh?
Onto a less depressing topic: have you been watching Downton Abbey on Masterpiece? My husband and I usually watch one show together and that has become our latest staple.
I LOVE Downton Abbey it’s our lastest staple too—and a sobering contrast in time-period to our current age of facile self-involvement.
What really strikes me about Downton Abbey is the sense of service that the upper class elites seem to have. (MILD SPOILER ALERT: Take, for instance, the Dowager Countess’s enthusiasm for having Lady Sybil work as a nurse during the war.) I suppose one could point to the immense generosity of billionaires like Bill Gates, but in general I don’t see as much noblesse oblige among the higher ups in American society.
My older daughter loves to watch Project Runway with me–she’s actually got quite the eye for fashion! She also loves Chopped on the Food Network.
I was a General Hospital girl myself. :)
I watched General Hospital for about a year with my roommate in college. That was during the Sonny and Brenda years. Totally over-the-top and totally entertaining.
Yeah, times change and the soaps are dinosaurs now.
This is where I wish I would have commented anonymously, but during the summers when I was in hs, I confess to watching The Young and the Restless between sports stuff. Glad no one found out back then.
Don’t worry, Slam. Your secret is safe with us. :)
I think that people ended up getting inured to the drama on the soaps – instead of just watching, they wanted to live vicariously through their entertainment, and it’s easier to do that through reality tv than it is through scripted dramas. Not that I’m a fan of reality tv, but I think it is kind of a natural progression (or maybe REGRESSION would be a better way of putting it) – just as soap operas themselves replaced dime novels and magazine serials, so reality tv is replacing the soaps. And after this? Who knows! From an anthropological viewpoint, I find this sort of thing fascinating. (Um yes, I’m a nerd.)
Nerds of the world unite!
I’m fascinated by this kind of thing too. It’s also interesting to think about the ways in which soaps – which absolutely pick up on the serial phenomenon you mentioned – may have actually done themselves in. Scripted dramas in general have started to move toward the serial model (even shows like CSI and Law and Order, which used to be self-contained, string us along with inter-personal drama from show to show). And now, just as the soap model has become nearly ubiquitous, they’ve been cancelled.
What worries me, though, is this departure from story-telling. I don’t watch reality TV anymore (oh, except for Top Chef), but the emphasis usually seems to be on dramatic events that aren’t necessarily tied together with a narrative arc of any type.
Maybe I’m wrong, though. And maybe nostalgia is just getting to me in my old age. :)
I was an All My Children addict from the time I was 12 years old. (No surprise, right?) And along with many other girls-to-women at college, I crowded around the common room television at 1pm to catch the daily episode.
I managed to watch, more or less, one way or another (thank you, VCR!), for about 30 years! And then, “real life” was simply so overwhelming, I was lucky if I knew what month it was.
I also watch some reality tv (as you know), and find it has the quality of watching a train wreck, but also reflecting cultural values which, sadly, seem to be going in a dreadful direction.
You are right – from the “classic soaps” we learned plenty, and some of it – genuinely valuable lessons. From Reality TV? I shudder to think what standards we are reinforcing, or worse, creating.
I had no idea this shift was taking place. Who knew that soap operas were a relatively valuable cultural commodity? I avoid reality tv like the plague, so I really don’t know the answer to this question: Do people come to care about the folks on the reality tv shows like they cared about their favorite soap characters? In the end, as unwholesome as I do think soaps were, they are unquestionably more wholesome than reality shows that hold people up for us to mock or envy. Think about it: you KNEW you were watching actors who were pretending to be alcoholics with amnesia who had multiple affairs with the same person with MULTIPLE PERSONALITIES (couldn’t resist cracking a joke). They were most likely normal people who were doing it because they enjoyed acting and needed a paycheck. When I do get a bit of a reality show, it’s often like, “Hey, getta load of this guy? Isn’t he stupid/crazy/awful?” I mean, there are reality shows out there that are not like that and I have no problem with those. But I really am bothered by all of the shows that tell us it’s OK to look down on people who are different from ourselves.
Your comment underscores an interesting point about the demise of soaps. Soap actors are kind of like the Hollywood equivalent of baseball’s minor league. Some of them have gone on to be very successful (Julianne Moore and Meg Ryan come to mind), but many of them work hard in these very demanding jobs with little prospect of “making it big.” I wonder what types of jobs those folks are getting now.
This post really surprised me, Kristen. You might have been the last person I’d have expected to defend daytime soaps! :) But you make some good points here, especially about how your time in front of “Guiding Light” opened the door into more substantive conversations with your mother.
I never watched soaps and I don’t really watch reality TV either. This is somewhat due to time constraints, but also to interest level. You have to look long and hard to find good writing on television these days, but I think the same value can be delivered by better-written programming. That said, I think there’s something about mindless television that better facilitates conversation than the stuff that really requires your attention.
Just trying to keep you guessing, Gale! :)
I certainly hear you about the quality of writing on scripted shows in general. We’ve cut way back on the amount of television we watch. A lot of the TV we do watch these days is sports, and that definitely falls into the category of background noise.
I hated soap operas as a kid and that distaste has carried straight through to today. It irritated me to be forced to watch them because they bored me. Maybe it was because of being a boy, I am not really sure.
I just know that I could write their scripts with my eyes shut and my brain turned off. Now excuse me I need to go watch Survivor. ;)
Oh dear, I’m guilty of so very much here – I used to swoon for All My Children and watched it for many, many years.
But.
I also love reality TV and watch a lot of it. ::ducking for cover::
{I love what you wrote and agree with you and -sigh- will probably continue to watch my shows. Love me anyway?}
You know I do!
I have watched plenty of reality TV over the years – from the Housewives to the assorted denizens of New Jersey. In general I’m watching less TV these days and, when I do, I’m usually trying to compromise with my husband. So I guess he gets the credit for breaking my reality TV habit. :)
An alternate explanation could be that more women between 18-49 are working and not able to watch soap operas. Most reality shows air in the evening, after the average worker returns home and is trying to veg.
I suppose that reality shows and soap operas have never appealed to me because I enjoy getting lost in the world of fiction. That’s where I’ve learned all my moral values. (But I’m the type of person who finds war documentaries more appealing than romantic comedies. Give me some heavy drama and/or history and I’m a happy person. Give me romantic comedies or reality tv or soap operas and I feel like I’m being tortured.)
I think you’re absolutely right that overall viewership among women is down since so many work outside the home, but I was surprised to see that reality offerings like Judge Judy and The View are more popular these days among our demographic than the soaps. What can I say? I guess I’m behind the times. :)
I need a super duper dose of suggestions for shows my 15 year old son and I can watch together. We love Modern Family. Now I need more…because we watch more than 30 minutes a week. But the hunting channel is not doing it for me.
I was a snobby mom about TV for a long time. Now I am pleased to announce to anyone who will listen that my kids and I gather around the TV the way we used to huddle around books. We’re still snuggling. I’m still rubbing backs. We’re still experiencing stories as they unfold. I’m here to say I was so wrong and such a snob. TV is great. Give me more.
My son rolls his eyes at Dancing With the Stars. I’ll stay tuned for suggestions.
Hmm…my current favorites are The Good Wife and Downtown Abbey – maybe the latter for you and your son?
I don’t watch any sitcoms, but my mother-in-law swears by The Middle and my brother really likes The Big Bang Theory. I can’t attest, though, since I’ve only ever seen about five minutes of either. My husband and I used to watch Community, but I think that’s on hiatus.
Ooh, or how about DVD reruns of Friday Night Lights? One of my all-time favorites.
I don’t watch enough TV to speak very well to any particular soap or reality show — we haven’t hooked up cable or rabbit ears at our house. I do find that when I stream shows from the Internet, I tend to seek out the ones that have scripted plot lines. Maybe it’s an extension of loving to read books that tell stories well? A witty script, too, will always attract me, even if the subject matter doesn’t immediately draw me in :).
Now you have me intrigued. My husband and I also like to watch series together via Netflix or the Interwebs. What are your favorites?
I’m not a fan of daytime soap but I can’t stand reality TV. It is everything that’s wrong about “entertainment” these days. I shudder to think what my girls will grow up watching once they outgrow PBS cartoons.
Btw, I love the title of your post. Very clever :)
That’s easy: Firefly. (An edited version…no reavers.)
xo
This fascinated me. I had no idea reality tv had such a stronghold and was a key reason soaps went off the air. I was never really into them except for my junior year of high school when I watched General Hospital. LOVED it.
Now I watch most things on Hulu so I am out of the TV culture. But I do love Biggest Loser … I may be hooked.
This was a great essay and so compelling. You have really made me think about where our society is going based on what we watch! It’s not something I really considered as I don’t have the TV on very much. (That sounds really virtuous but it’s not. I only have it off because of the kids. If I had my druthers, I would watch hours of TV daily!!)
I certainly remember my mom and her friends needing to catch this show, or whichever one had waves crashing and a lighthouse (that must have been the guiding light—but I was forever in the dark, I did however, find Dark Shadows compelling, again, not actually understanding it.) and I love the idea that you and your mom bonded and explored real topic through this portal that does seem almost deep by comparison to the mirrored surface of our rather thin media puddle.
When I was a kid, I watched “Days of Our Lives” with my babysitter. That is until my mom found out and put the kibosh on that (though I would hide behind the couch when I could to catch a few moments). When I went to college, it became kind of a dorm hall bonding experience.
I am almost embarrassed to admit that what once was limited to my catching parts of “Y&R” episodes on SoapNet has now turned in to my recording Y&R daily. It is a good escape from reality, and, IMO, far better than most of the reality TV that is out there. At least soaps don’t pretend to be real.
I have caught glimpses of some reality TV, but find most people too mean or lacking morals, although I did watch Bret Michael’s Rock of Love, but “only because he is from the Pittsburgh area” (cough-cough). I like some shows on HGTV and a few on the Food Network.
About the only thing I watch with my eight-year-old is Phineas and Ferb. Now THAT is a great show!
I think you really put your finger on it, facie: “At least soaps don’t pretend to be real.”
I think the best example of the misuse of the term “real” comes in the “Real Housewives” franchise. Those ladies sure don’t seem like any housewives I’ve ever met…
One of my very first memories is watching Ryan’s Hope with my Grandma. I think you’re on to something here…
Oh my gosh, I totally watched Ryan’s Hope with my mom when I was little!
I was a huge AMC and OLTL fan until the day they ended. I also watch a lot of “reality” TV, but the talk shows fall under a different category for me. And really, the soap operas were such a better escape during the afternoon hours. Who really wants to watch another talk? Not me. I think the network did a terrible disservice by taking away shows full of characters that many of us have grown up and taken into our lives. Yes it was fluff, yes most of it was sensational and ridiculous, but it was fun. I see nothing fun or even the slightest bit interesting about The Chew or The Revolution.
A product of the MTV generation (impatience being the motivator for our channel flipping), my sisters and I would toggle between General Hospital and Guiding Light. I don’t watch daytime soaps anymore. And when I heard about OLTL ending, I realized that if I had replaced my soaps with reality TV or evening dramas that I had on my DVR. Sure they were silly, but it’s still sad to see that genre fizzle.
I’ve never really watched either, and don’t feel I missed out on much! But I certainly think a scripted and well-thought-out storyline is likely to be more instructive than just watching wannabe-celebrities fighting for their moment in the spotlight….
Interesting! Since I don’t watch reality tv (or any tv except for the French news), I assumed you were going to see the tv series. Those I do watch, ordering complete seasons of all my favorites from amazon.
It’s sad though that reality tv replaces soaps (which I was never a fan of). When you knew that it was outrageous it was never so bad, but knowing what people will really and truly stoop to can be quite depressing.
I was a die-hard Guiding Light viewer and dismayed when it went off the air. I don’t watch reality TV so I cannot offer any good commentary about them – except that maybe the fact that I don’t watch them speaks volumes alone?
We still have our share of unrealistic drama though – think Nip Tuck, Grey’s Anatomy and CSI. Or Dexter, Sons of Anarchy (my #1 fav!) and the Walking Dead.
Call me a curmudgeon but the world seems to have been going to hell for the past 5,000 years, and probably long before that. Besides, what’s not to like about watching a good train wreck?