Storytelling boiled down to the bare essentials.If you’ve never watched a soap opera, the first thing to know is that they have a way of drawing you in despite yourself. Before the age of streaming — when most households had one, maybe two TVs, a Windows PC and no smartphones to speak of — my mother would set a timer on our VCR to record her favorite soaps and play them back in the living room on weekends. During the week, my father, sister and I couldn’t care less about “General Hospital,” with its sax-heavy theme song and dramatic monologues. We weren’t interested in whether or not Nikolas Cassadine would help his mother, Laura Spencer, save Lucky, his kidnapped half brother, or allow his resentment over Laura’s abandoning him feed into his grandmother Elena’s increasingly implausible revenge schemes. But during those listless Saturday mornings and barren Sunday nights, when there was nowhere to go and nothing to do, we’d sit down and watch with her. Soon we’d be hooked. My hometown in West Tennessee, with its cow pastures, gravel roads and fields of corn and cotton, looked nothing like Port Charles, the fictional city in New York where “General Hospital” takes place. It was, however, small enough for everyone to be in everyone else’s business. Folks from around my way have long memories and can tell you a little something about what your parents and grandparents got up to back in the day. I come from a large extended family who has lived in the same town for several generations, and on the handful of occasions I overheard my grandmother on the phone with her sisters, it was hard to distinguish the town gossip from the dialogue of a soap opera. I couldn’t help comparing the show’s plots and characters to my real life. The tangled roots of my family tree, for example, bear a strong resemblance to the complicated Spencer family: My father has often told the story of a man who pulled into my grandparents’ driveway as he and his brothers played in the yard. The stranger knocked on the door and introduced himself to my grandfather as his son — my father’s half brother. How can I not compare that yarn to Lucky’s surprise at his half brother Nikolas’s abrupt appearance at their baby sister’s hospital bed after anonymously donating the bone marrow that saved her life? There is, of course, something inherently ridiculous about the plot. Still it manages to dramatize the essential emotions such a discovery evokes: surprise, betrayal, hurt.Soap operas have a reputation for over-the-top melodrama, but in truth, they taught me to think of such revelations in psychologically sophisticated fashion. Soap operas are where I first learned how morally dubious, unforgivable acts can become, to some degree, comprehensible. The revenge plots, falls from grace, redemption arcs, double-crosses, doomed romances, love triangles and reversals in fortune do more than entertain — they allow the audience to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of human psychology.In soap operas, as in life, there are no true heroes or villains. Every character occupies both positions at one point or another, as yearslong story arcs invite the audience to revise their opinions on characters they thought they had pegged. Lucky begins his life as a plucky boy-next-door before he enters a brief phase as a philandering cop who eventually becomes a Robin Hood figure whose heroism convinced audiences to forgive his morally questionable behavior. Audiences experienced this transformation over two decades of daily serial storytelling in which they watched him mature from an innocent child into a father struggling with drug abuse. Watching Lucky grow up, one day at a time, over the course of decades, allows for a type of narrative intimacy that few modes of storytelling can replicate. As a result, these characters can seem as dynamic as real people. In dramatizing the sort of growth and development that can rarely fit into a few seasons of prestige television, soaps allow viewers the opportunity to judge characters’ actions within the full context of their fictional lives. It’s because I grew up watching them that I can’t help being curious about people’s psychologies and personal histories.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
