Me and the Soaps...

I know I am late coming to the funeral but I wanted to put in my two cents worth anyway...

One of my memories of my high school years is how much my mother loved the ABC lineup of soap operas, All My Children (1970-2012), One Life to Live (1968-2012), and General Hospital (1963), and how religiously she watched them. Like so many others, I looked down, for some reason on soap operas. Then, thanks to my mother, I discovered how much I enjoyed their unfolding tales of love, deception, betrayal, revenge, family, intrigue, and the damage and joy that is living, their Erika Kane's, and the generally high quality of their acting. Little did I realise that they were simply the latest in a long line of popular melodramas that stretched back to Dickens.

I was never as devoted to watching AMC, OLtL, and GH daily as was my mum, but I did watch them fairly religiously in the early 1970s and the late 1980's. I also began to watch the most famous of the British soaps, Coronation Street (ITV, 1960-) and Eastenders (BBC, 1985-), in the late 1980s thanks to the local PBS station in Albany and liked them too. One of my most vivid soap memories of the late 1980s was when OLtL's Clint Buchanan time travelled back to the Old West of 1888 in 1988. 

I managed to catch most of the final month or so AMC and OLtL. It was bittersweet. And I have to say that I was happy that ABC's cheaper replacements for them both, The Chew and the now defunct The Revolution, were doing much worse in the ratings in their time slots than AMC and OLtL did. Nothing is as sweet as sweet revenge.

Unfortunately, you can never go home again. It is no use wishing that All My Children and One Life to Live will come back to ABC. Still, I really miss them both. Rest in peace. You are not forgotten.