Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, March 2, 1990 TAG: 9003022850
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By Beth Macy Staff Writer
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Why is it that no one in a soap opera ever does dishes, or works in a factory, or stays in a marriage?
And why is it that Robert C. Allen - media scholar and one of the country's foremost experts on the soaps - doesn't even watch daytime dramas anymore?
These and other nagging questions were put to rest Tuesday, when Allen addressed a group of about 60 Hollins College students, chronicling his own love-hate relationship with the sudsers and ending such cliffhangers as:
the longest story ever told?
"Guiding Light." It premiered Jan. 7, 1937 - on radio.
Does a soap opera ever really end?
No. For example, in the last episode of "Search for Tomorrow" a few years ago, one character asked another what was troubling her at a time when so many things were going so swell (the story's writers had scrambled to resolve all the mini-plot dilemmas). Her reply:
"I don't know. I'm just searching for tomorrow."
But there's a beginning to this story.
For Allen, the author of a book called "Speaking of Soap Operas," the genesis of his daytime affair can be capsulized in two words: Vick's Vap-O-Rub.
Like many baby boomers, his first memory of a soap opera is of staying home sick from elementary school, listening from his bedroom to the themes of "The Edge of Night" and company.
Before supper, his mother would get on the phone to his aunt Helen and engage in conversations like: "Well, Donna's left him, and it looks like it's all over. And Hal is in the hospital, and he's dying . . . "
"And I'm thinking, `Jesus, who are these people? Are they relatives?' "
No, silly, they're people in mom's stories. People who would continue to rear their heads in Allen's life.
As an undergraduate, Allen spent a year at Hollins College on an exchange program from Davidson College - one of nine male students on the campus. It was a time, he says, that "gave me a different perspective on gender, to say the least."
"It gave me a long-lasting interest and concern about issues of gender, which really influenced the things I decided to research."
In the mid-70s, when he taught a film-criticism course at the University of Iowa, he began noticing he had a tough time reaching an intellectual writer-friend of his on the phone between 1 and 2 p.m. weekdays.
The reason? "As the World Turns."
A bell rang in Allen's head, and Allen he turned to the soaps as an area that would both satisfy his concern for gender issues and his research requirements.
Now a professor of radio, television and motion pictures at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Allen has his share of theories about why people hate the soaps - or at least why they say they do.
Not the least of which is the fact that soaps have gotten a bad rap from the very beginning, when Chicago's "Painted Dreams" radio program first went on the air in 1929 - to fill up dead afternoon airtime. By 1940, soaps constituted 90 percent of daytime programming on the radio and had an enormously loyal audience.
And yet critics groaned even then. One called soap operas "serialized drool." In 1954, when soaps came to television, another critic said they were full of "sustained morbidity and dread."
This, despite the fact soaps were and always have been broadcasters' "cash cow," Allen says. Soaps now represent $1 billion in revenue each year to the three networks - 40 percent of network profits in some years.
"Soaps help support the very high-risk venture of prime-time television," Allen says. "I'd argue that prime-time TV wouldn't look the way it does now if not for soap operas."
And soaps are cheap to produce, comparatively speaking, which makes them a boon to both broadcasters and advertisers. Demographically, they offer a loyal audience of "quality viewers" - women between the ages of 18 and 49, the people who make 80 percent of all consumer purchasing decisions in the United States.
And still critics groan.
"It's difficult to think of a form of popular culture - with the possible exception of hard-core pornography - that's been more disdained and held in contempt than soap operas," Allen says.
How is it that soaps are so economically important to industry and so emotionally important to many viewers, and at the same time so despised?
Allen turned to social scientists for an answer and found . . . sex discrimination.
In the late '30s, one researcher claimed that soaps cause anxiety, high blood pressure and gastrointestinal upsets. What he didn't report, though, is how he formulated his claim:
He sat in front of the radio with a blood-pressure cup attached to his arm, and listened to the soaps. As he watched, he groaned. His blood pressure climbed, he grew anxious and his stomach churned.
"So he figured that if an educated male suffers from soap operas' effects, think of all the poor women out there who are incapable of defending themselves against the pernicious influence of soap operas, who have soap operas work on them day after day."
Later researchers - males, presumably - determined that viewers watch soaps because the shows fulfill needs that aren't fulfilled in their lives. So a woman who can't discipline her daughter learns subconsciously how to handle the problem by watching a similar scenario on the soaps.
"There's a deficit assumed about soap-opera viewers that's not assumed about other kinds of viewers," Allen says. "And this history has led to the stereotyped image of the soap viewer as a working-class housewife sitting around in hair curlers, munching bonbons, watching characters that are so real to her that she can't distinguish them from people in her own life."
Tell that to today's viewers: two-thirds of all American women who live in households with televisions; one-half of all college students; NFL football teams, many of which have adopted a particular soap they watch each day between practices.
Tell that to Refrigerator Perry and see where it gets you.
But back to those other nagging questions we promised we'd answer at the onset:
Soap characters don't do real-life activities because soap operas are all about changing relationships - and talking about it. If you were a lathe operator or a tractor driver, it'd be pretty tough to turn to the person next to you and ask, "Will Donna ever marry Jeff?"
And soap characters don't stay married because soaps strive to expand rather than compress the story plot. That's why marriages are only happy for a moment before they lead to dissent and divorce, and why every character over age 12 has been divorced at least once.
After years of tuning in religiously to "As the World Turns" and "General Hospital," Allen watches only a British soap opera these days - "East Enders," which he gets on North Carolina public television. He says American broadcasters are catering to the burgeoning crowd of younger viewers and are offering little for the baby-boomer crowd. That's why every killed-off character over the age of 30 gets replaced by a teen-ager.
"And I'm not interested in the love life of a 14-year-old," he says.
by CNB