Deep Soap: Yet Another World

The Birth of Exec-Fic

P&G/Televest may be losing Guiding Light, but it’s gaining a toehold in the fan-fic business.  In a sweet, surprising and not remotely profitable move, the production company is bringing back Another World as an interactive blog.  Picking up in the present, a decade after the show’s cancellation, the well written first chapter fills readers in on what has happened to the characters in the past ten years.  The website promises that a new chapter will be posted every week and fans will have the chance to vote on future plot points.  It’s a rare instance of a media company producing a professional version of an amateur phenomenon.

Fan fic has flourished since at least as far back as the original Star Trek.  Soaps lend themselves particularly well to fan fic because of their rich history and their numerous storylines that could have plausibly been resolved differently.  I’ve read some great fan authored stories over the years.   Many on-line fans feel that the best fan-fics are better than the shows in their current state.  Googling “Another World fan fiction” generated 604 hits, many of which are websites with multiple stories. What’s most interesting to me is how closely the “official” Another World sequel adheres to conventions of fan fiction, rather than those of a scripted television show.  The blog is written like a novel, not a script.  It is as much a commentary on the show as it is an original work.  Take this clearly tongue in cheek sentence:

“Rachel lived in Bay City. And had personally experienced four different husbands on four different occasions returning from their own presumed deaths.”

Ha!  This is the sort of line common in fan-fic but used sparingly in soaps because of a fear of breaking the fourth wall.  Or this admission that Carl and Rachel became parents at a ridiculously advanced age in a much maligned storyline:

“The twins’ father may have been gray-haired and admittedly older than the dad of almost everyone else they knew…”

The story adheres to P&G’s official canon: Vicky’s death on As The World Turns stands — at least so far.  I have a feeling that given the opportunity, fans will resurrect her.

P&G, at least on-line, is incredibly fan friendly.  When SoapNet stopped airing Another World reruns, they ultimately made the show available on-line, picking up at the precise moment that SoapNet left off. Through its “Classic Soaps” site on AOL video, P&G makes clips of long-gone shows like Edge of Night and Search for Tomorrow available.  They’ve also posted deleted Nuke scenes on-line and invited bloggers to Guiding Light.  A sequel to Another World seems like a natural extension of the brand. I’m amazed that P&G realizes that a show that was canceled a decade ago still has enough of an on-line following to merit the creation of new content.  In my dreams, P&G would have created a series of original webisodes, but I realize that even if the original cast members agreed to reprise their roles for the ultra-low web scale, hiring a crew and building sets would have been expensive.  This blog costs only whatever fee P&G is paying the so far anonymous author.

I can’t help wondering if this is an experiment that, if successful, may be applied to P&G’s current soaps.  If P&G fails to find a new broadcast home for GL, it may continue the show on-line in blog form.  Why not?  Perhaps the floundering, rumored to be marked for death, ATWT might attempt a radical change, and try a few “Choose Your Own Adventure” storylines.   Soaps have allowed fans to select characters’ baby names and wedding dresses.  Days of Our Lives even allowed fans to vote on whether John or Stefano would be the father of Hope’s baby, although the writers ultimately decided that Bo was the father.  (Arguably, that was the true “people’s choice”, even though it involved massive retconning.)   ATWT’s short story arcs lend themselves to “majority rules,” writing.  That said, as a writer, I think this would probably be a horrible idea.  It would make it impossible for the show’s writers to do any long term planning.  I suspect that the majority of viewers (who, remember, don’t post on message boards) would vote against conflict in favor of happily-ever-after, which would make for a more boring show in the longterm.  In my opinion, Hope having a child with John could have created interesting conflict that would have generated years of interesting storylines even though it’s not necessarily something Bope or Jarlena fans would have thought was a good idea.   Even if the AW Today blog remains a quirky standalone, I hope that whichever Televest employees are behind it end up becoming programming execs at either Televest or a network.  Their fresh ideas that are crafted to appeal to fans are just what the genre needs.

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