soap operas

every day when i pass soap opera digest in the grocery store line-up, i'm struck with a feeling of awe! this is 2005...and in a world where society seems plagued by reality television, and the occasional shitty sitcom, we can always count on one thing...and that's the existence of soap operas in the daytime tv line-up!!

all my children, days of our lives, passions, general hospital, the young and the restless, the bold and the beautiful, coronation street (i had to)...did i miss any?? how long have these shows been on the air???? how is it that they're still on the air??? do they have honestly enough ratings to STAY on the air after all these years??? and what happened to another world?? remember that one?

i was telling blake the other day how one of my earliest memories of growing up is of being at my grandparents house (they used to babysit me after school in elementary), and every day at 3 pm we would sit down together and watch 'another world'. well i was hooked!! i used to go to school the next day and tell all my friends about the craziness that ensued the day before on my story. whether a child of that age should have been watching that smut in the first place, is another story...

anywhozle-bees, then they take it off the air!! what was i to do without vicky and cass to fill my days??? was i to simply find another one to obsess about?

ok, i'm getting off track. what i'm trying to say is that soaps have possibly the WORST plot themes of any type of show in existence!!!! how do they last so long? i'll tell you how they last so long, it's because they only employ the MOST GORGEOUS of the actors working today! actually, you probably don't even have to be an actor to work in soaps, all you have to do is have a pretty face and an 8' x 10" to be hired! i mean, tune in any day of the week and check out the high-caliber acting that goes on in these soaps. the only, and i mean, only reason they don't get cancelled (in my opinion) is due to the fact that they constantly hire/replace their characters with the hotty-of-the-hotts-make-me-wanna-drool-and-cum-in-my-pants style people!!

they're totally loopy!! sometimes the plots are so far outside of reality, you think they hire 5 year old toddlers to do their bidding and write the scripts! why just look at 'passions'!!! tell me that that entire show is anything but a giant acid trip and i'll smack you in the face!! how is it that this show is still on the air?? does it still have enough loyal viewers to keep it going? and if so, WHO are these people??

now, it is true that every now and then when i have a holiday during the week, i due (guiltily) tune in and try to catch up to one or two of these soaps...namely passions, cause it's retardidly easy to catch up with due to it's impossibly-simple story lines, and far-fetched ideas!!

have you ever noticed how long they can actually make ONE day last? you see this mostly around christmas time, where it will be christmas eve on the show for weeks!!!! then you turn around and the next week they're all celebrating valentine's day!! it's totally not true to time, and they end up cheating us as viewers. however, that's how they manage to allow us to catch up so easily. otherwise we'd have to actually tune in EVERY day, for fear we'd miss something!!

so are they simply trash tv? moreso than dawson's creek or felicity ever was? and would they ever survive in another time slot? like say, during must-see thursdays prime time line-up? and would they still be on if they weren't trashy?

i think not.

so enjoy your soaps while your home sick one of these days, relish every trashy minute, and try and appreciate the hard work those 5 year-olds have gone through while writing those silly little scripts!