Deep Soap: Notes On Camp (With Apologies to Susan Sontag)

By Sara A. Bibel
Fancast.com

This Camp Doesn’t Rock

Maybe it’s summer escapism. Maybe it’s an attempt to lure former Passions viewers. Maybe a bunch of daytime writers attended a John Waters film festival. Whatever the cause, daytime has suddenly gone campy. One Life To Live’s silly and seemingly endless time travel and Mendorra storylines served to embarrass all us critic-types who had spent the past few months singing the show’s praises. My fondness for General Hospital’s Spinelli (Bradford Anderson) was tested when he spent half an episode last week fantasizing that his nurses were kung fu fighting over him. Friday on The Bold & The Beautiful Pam (Alley Mills) tied up her nemesis Donna (Jennifer Gareis), covered her in honey and sicced a bear on her.

Camp is tricky. When it’s done well, I enjoy it in small doses. When it isn’t, I cringe. OLTL’s Mendorra story tanked from day one. Featuring a combination of the show’s least popular characters and returning favorites who were unfamiliar to much of the current audience, the show failed to give viewers a reason to care what happened. Worst of all, it wasn’t funny. Mendorra was a monarchy where citizens dressed like 19th century peasants, and shirtless executioners beheaded people. Where was the joke? The time travel story outstayed its welcome. It was a fun nod to the show’s past that worked well with OLTL’s 40th anniversary. I assumed it would end within a week, with Bo and Rex waking up after being struck by lightening, a la Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. But it kept going. And going. The novelty of seeing actors play different roles in the past and present soon wore off. Viewers ended up focusing on how bad much of the acting in 1968 was. Then the show, to me, violated the rules of its fictional universe by having Gigi (Farrah Fath) travel back in time to rescue Rex. Usually, when soaps introduce supernatural elements, they take pains to give themselves an out such as making ghosts the figments of a character’s imagination. Not this time. It bothers me more than it should, especially because it messed with the show‘s timeline. Since Rex slept with Emma, does this retroactively mean that Bo is Spencer’s father? Aaaugh! I love The Terminator and I love OLTL, but they don’t lend themselves to a mash-up.

Several readers have disagreed with my pro-Maxie-Spinelli stance. Spinelli’s fantasy sequence started making me question it. And I’m pro-fantasies. They’re a way for soaps to do something unusual without disrupting the fabric of the show. Fantasies at their best are a way of getting inside a character’s head. That’s where this one went wrong. In creating a what they thought would be a funny scene, the writers made Spinelli look like an immature horndog who lusts after every attractive woman who crosses his path, instead of a guy who has fallen hard for his dream girl. Two beautiful women in tight clothes fighting is a scenario more appropriate to a beer commercial than a soap opera. Once again, GH seems written to appeal to men instead of women. Yes, Spinelli was on medication at the time. But GH could have had him fantasize about Maxie seeing him as more than a friend. In this case, camp undercut the long-term story.

When I saw Pam pour honey all over Donna on B&B, my first thought was that I was hallucinating. My second was that the clip should be the next bear-related item on The Colbert Report’s threat down. It was ridiculous, implausible and made me laugh with glee. Unlike the other shows campy stories, it fit in with the plot. Pam has been weird from day one. Her pro-lemon bar, anti-Donna stance was well established. Donna’s flashbacks laid out how and why Pam poisoned Eric with her deceptive desserts before planning her murder-by-bear… in Big Bear. The whole thing was over in one half-hour episode, so viewers didn’t have time to over think it. (Still, how did Owen get that police car? Oh, never mind.) B&B mined the subtle difference between bad and awesomely bad.

I think that part of the reason that I found B&B’s camp turn more entertaining than the others is that I’m less emotionally invested in the show. I tend to watch it to see what happens next rather than to spend time with my favorite characters. Perhaps campiness appeals more to casual viewers than to core fans. That could explain why OLTL’s numbers have fallen since it went camping. Days of Our Lives has made camp its staple since the 90s. For the past year and a half, it has lingered near the bottom of the ratings. It seems the current century soap audience — what little of it there is — prefers shows that take themselves a little more seriously.

Ask the (Currently Unemployed) Soap Opera Writer

Deborah Parish: Could you write about the writing process involved in the two soap operas you worked on - AMC and Y&R? How did they differ? And were you a scriptwriter on both staffs?

I wrote both breakdowns and scripts for Y&R. I just wrote breakdowns for AMC. The overall process was similar for both shows, but the schedule was different. AMC blocked a whole week’s worth of shows in one day and everyone’s breakdowns were due the same day. Each of the script writers got their revised breakdowns at about the same time. All the scriptwriters turned in their scripts on the same day — usually they had close to a week. Y&R had a staggered schedule. We’d usually block two shows a day. Breakdowns were due two to three days later — although sometimes we got behind and we’d have 24 hour turnarounds. The scripts also came in on a staggered schedule, with one or two arriving at the studio each day. Scriptwriters had about a 4 ay turnaround. Both shows have changed regimes since I left. AMC eliminated the breakdown position after the strike. Now writers have about six days to go from raw notes to completed scripts. That’s really difficult, but I have heard that new headwriter Chuck Pratt is attempting to make the schedule more workable. Y&R has gone in the opposite direction. The show has adapted a more structured system and everyone has sufficient time to complete their work.