The Universal Soap Opera Storylines

Oh, they plan a lot and they fight about the plans a lot.  They try to kill off the bride or the groom.  They try to have the bride or groom seduced by the wicked woman or roguish man but, they never quite seem to make it to the altar.  Something always pops up to stop the marriage like the sudden discovery of a previously unknown wife in Bolivia or the fact that the groom at one time could have been a bride himself.  I actually read one synopsis where the bride and groom approached the altar and as the minister stepped forward to conduct the ceremony he suddenly realized the bride was his long lost daughter.  He stopped the ceremony creating quite an uproar by announcing that she couldn’t marry Christopher because she was already married to a Columbian drug lord but had forgotten due to amnesia.  I’ve also noticed there are an awful lot of younger folks populating the soap opera world for so few successful marriages.  Hmmmmmmmm.

At one time or another every character that’s ever been portrayed on any soap opera has suffered from amnesia.  The common thread running through the entire genre is amnesia.  These people can’t remember anything.  On his death bed my father told me exactly where the $40 million he’d swindled from Alan’s father was but I hit my head digging through the fridge looking for some leftover chicken and I can’t even remember my name.  How can you not remember me, I’ve been your wife for 30 years?  What do you mean we’re brothers?  I don’t have any brothers that I know of.  This type of storyline runs rampant in the soap opera world.  Losing viewers?  Lose someone’s memory.  No one gets killed off anymore.  If you want to get rid of a character don’t kill them, just have them get amnesia and become someone else.  Then, at a later date when things start getting boring again, you can have them regain their memory and start all over again.  Great stuff.

My wife loves ‘The Young and the Restless’.  That’s a soap opera to anyone but my wife.  To her, it’s ‘her story’ as if somehow her own existence was tied up in the plot.  Being the good husband I am and off work for the day and being 11 o’clock with nothing else on TV, I sat down to watch ‘her story’ with her.  After an hour I ask her, “This is what you’re so caught up in?  Aren’t all these soap operas just about the same?”  Surprisingly she actually replied that they were just about all the same.  At the super market checkout later on in the week I noticed one of these little TV Guide type magazines called something like the Soap Opera Journal.  While the groceries were being bagged I paged through the little booklet and discovered two things.  First, I never realized there were so many soap operas on TV and secondly, they’re all alike, plot and storyline.  They all contain similar characters.  Here’s what I’ve found to be consistent throughout:

Don’t misunderstand me on this one.  I can sort of see a storyline where two women go to the hospital at the same time and have their babies at about the same time and somehow the babies get switched.  I can see that happening though rarely.  Don’t you think a mother would kind of notice before her child was 33 years old and fixing to take over control of the perfume company as CEO only to discover through some sort of bizarre DNA mix up he’s not even a member of the family?  Additionally, would the same circumstances prevail on 15 different shows in 15 different cities?  Well, I guess it could happen.  Example, on the ‘Young and the Restless’, two characters, Katherine and a younger Jill, turn out to be mother and daughter.  In the words of Gomer Pyle, “Surprise, surprise”.

On any soap opera, any time characters develop sworn enemies, someone they hate with a passion, a hate that drives the show for a good 6 months, these enemies are gonna turn out to be kin to each other. Either long lost brothers or father and son or something. Same thing with the ladies of the soaps. No two women ever nurtured a long running feud that didn’t end with the realization that one was the mother and the other the daughter. These soap families don’t have family trees, they have a family bush that members seem to keep falling off of from time to time, only to jump back on at some later date. I fail to see why someone hasn’t smartened up and set the rule that before you can express your hatred you have to exchange birth certificates just to make sure you weren’t married to one another at some point before you developed amnesia. It’s all fun stuff though. I had several more points but these are all I can remember. I think I have amnesia.

No, seriously.  How many times in your life has someone you believed to have expired and been buried appeared on your door step three years later, looking better than they ever have, carrying that diary you thought had been destroyed when your ex-husband’s mansion, purchased with embezzled funds, burned to the ground?  Really?  How do people swallow this stuff?  In every soap opera the doorbell rings and when the Grand Dame of the show opens the door, usually at night without checking who it is first, there stands the hated daughter-in-law wearing a big smile and a push-up bra, ready, once again, to take her place among the living.   My wife claims this adds a sense of mystery to the show.  I have to agree.  It’s a mystery to me how these people can be such idiots.  How do you bury the wrong person or, conduct a funeral with no body at all.  I’ve been a pallbearer and those coffins are heavy, heavier with a body in them.