This thread was inspired by reading (a few days ago) the cafe society thread about the ongoing serial killer storyline on “Days of Our Lives.” Several people pointed out that “Days” also ran the infamous “Marlena is possessed by the devil” storyline. It got me to wondering what storyline takes the prize for the stupidest, most contrived, most implausible, and most pointless storyline ever ran on a soap opera.
Definitely, the possesssion storyline is way up there on the idiotic list, but it sure isn’t the only contender. I made a short list of some candidates:
on “General Hospital” -
Laura falls in love with Luke - the man who raped her.
the “Ice Princess” - evil mobsters intend to take over the world with a device that will freeze the tiny, northeastern city Port Charles (like the northeast isn’t frozen over half the year anyway!)
on “One Life to Live” -
Heroine Viki remembers (25 after the fact) that she had a baby girl, and the father was an escapee from a secret underworld city called “Eterna” that is conveniently situated below Viki’s mountain cabin.
Viki’s husband Clint goes blind, gets lost in the Arizona desert, regains his sight, but somehow winds up 100 years in the past in a wild west town with ancestors of his friends & family who look conspicuously like his loved ones in the present day.
on “Dynasty”
The wedding massacre (didn’t watch it myself, just heard about it).
on “Dallas”
Pamela dreams an entire year’s worth of storylines, including events that occur to other people and that she has no connection with. (Again, didn’t actually watch this myself, but heard about it.)
on “Ryan’s Hope”
Before my time, but apparently the heroine of this show was at one point kidnapped by a giant ape - a la “King Kong.”
But since I haven’t been watching any soap regularly for years, there might be even worse storylines I don’t know of. What’s your opinion?
[ul]
[li]Reva drives off a bridge in a fit of post partum depression, loses her memory and wanders on foot from Florida to Amish country, where she lives for many years[/li][li] before appearing as a “ghost” to her husband who is about to marry another woman, all while having “visions” of her own.[/li][li]Reva gets cloned, then rapid-aged[/li][li]Reva discovers yet another unknown “life” she had that happend sometime between Florida and Amish country, where she was Queen of an island nation and bore a child she’s forgotten she had.[/ul][/li]And that’s just scratching the surface of the idocy they tried to pull off on the audience with that character. I finally gave up in disgust during the “San Criscoball” disaster. I grew to loathe that character.
The story line of Reva being cloned was the last straw with me on soap operas. It wasn’t even my favorite soap opera. I just couldn’t take it any more.
Not a soap fan here, but one day a few years ago, my friend calls me and says, “You have got to turn on channel 2 this instant! It’s a soap opera, but it’s not a soap like any I’ve ever seen before.” So, I trot into the other room and turn on the TV. What I see is a scene played between an old woman and a “little” person. As the scene progresses, we discover that the old woman is a witch and the little person is a doll or something that she brought to life à la Pinocchio. Not really my cup of tea, so I turned it off. Years later, I found out that I had been watching Passions. Apparently, it was supposed to be outlandish and bizarre, but I didn’t know that at the time. Good God, that was freaky.
Years back a former girlfriend watched soaps and in one episode I caught a few minutes of there was a woman possesed by the Devil. When no one was around the character spoke in a demonic voice and her eyes turned red. This was the same girlfriend who didn’t want to watch sci-fi shows with me because she thought they were stupid.
A while back I happened to catch a few minutes of a soap (might have been Port Charles) that featured a male vampire slayer facing off against some bad guy named Caleb… this was at the exact same time as Buffy (the original Vampire Slayer) was wrapping up the 7th season… with a bad guy named Caleb. I have no idea what the soap was trying to achieve but they were ripping Buffy off something fierce.
When did that take place? The only reason I ask is because Dark Shadows did this a few times. They had storylines in the 1960s, 1790s, 1890s, and 1840s (as well as a parallell world) that had the same actors playing different characters. (Of course, part of the fun of that show was they could do the most bizarre stuff and it was completely acceptable)
I watched OLTL for several years - and while I missed Viki having a daughter that she didn’t know about (she has dissociative identity disorder and one of her alters gave birth), and I missed the lost underground city of Eterna…
I did see Irish terrorists invade Llanview, Pennsylvania. You’d think they go somewhere politically significant, or perhaps somewhere that had someone Irish, but no. They chose Llanview.
Actually, I remember when we got the casting sides of Caleb (for BtVS) and thinking “WTF?! Isn’t there a vampire named Caleb on Port Charles? Wouldn’t it be funny if were the same vampire?” I thought it would be. Though what amuses me even more is that apparently in the General Hospital and All My Childrenverse (and One Life to Live…I think they’re all in the same verse…) vampires exist, but they only terrorize a small subset of citizens in Port Charles…weird.
Oh, man, I don’t know how I wandered in here, but…
We’d gone to someone’s house to eat food and watch TV and there was this completely BIZARRE story line on some daytime soap. It involved demonic possession, giant nuns flying around…it was the weirdest thing I’d ever seen. And then we watched Top Secret, so things made even less sense.
I stopped watching The Young and the Restless after I graduated college, but at least they never did alien abductions or demon possessions. Oh, they had their fair share of switching babies at birth, people who steal the main character’s jewelry and die in a car wreck, so everyone on the show thinks the main character died, but at least it wasn’t too :rolleyes:
The sad thing about most dumb soap opera storyline is that they are rarely unique. People get amnesia, go blind, fall in love with their rapists, have unknown children and relatives, and return from the dead on EVERY soap. The only unique dumb thing I can remember is Marlena’s demonic possession. That has to top the list.
Whilel the ABC soap vampire story was silly, they brought back Michael Essen as Caleb. I fell in love with him as Tanner Scofield on Days of our Lives, and he did great things with the storyline.
It seems to me that the writers of these shows would end up killing themselves if they only wrote the same melodramatic love/betrayal over and over again with the same characters. I mean, imagine you’re a writer, you’ve been doing the same garbage for years and then it hits you, you have this great big cast of people who can barely act, a fairly low budget, why not pull an Ed Wood and then laugh your ass off at the results.
Harding LeMay actually wrote a book “My Eight Years on Another World.” He was the head writer during the Alice/Steve/Rachel years. It’s an incredibly good read, and he does discuss the problems with actors who can’t act; including the fact that he killed off the actress that played Mary Matthews rather than write for her (and killed off the young, unknown actor who played Ted Bancroft because he couldn’t act: Eric Stoltz).
While not a story line, I watched Days of our Lives for over 10 years and not ONCE did anyone mention a Brady family. Then Police Captain Roman Brady was chosen to guard Marlena when the Salem Serial Killer (first one) was stalking her. Within six months, there were about 50 Bradys running around, all with histories and past interactions and everything. WHERE WERE THEY HIDING FOR THE PAST TEN YEARS?
Let me preface this by saying that even though I watch a soap opera, I am aware of soaps (many) limitations and stupidities. This post is not meant as a defense of my soap as “good” tv. That said:
I can’t speak for OLTL or GH, however, I’ve watched AMC for over 30 years and not once have they ever mentioned vampires as existing anywhere. No demonic possessions either, or cloning.
That’s not to say that they haven’t had their share of stupid stories though.
As for all the ABC soaps being in the same “verse”, they aren’t. Not technically. Two of them are in the same state. Penn. I think - for OLTL and AMC, not sure about GH and PC, so it might actually be all four.
