soapoperas

You would think that with higher unemployment and more people spending more time at home during business hours that networks would be throwing money at their daytime TV divisions. (insert ominous organ music that implies trouble is ahead here)

You would be wrong. Networks are starting to scale back on their daytime soaps including some stars' salaries, according to USA Today.

ABC has been doing the most axe-chopping to their daytime lineup. Long running favorites like General Hospital and One Life to Live have been ordered to make some serious cutbacks and All My Children stars Susan Lucci, Michael E. Knight and Ray MacDonnell are seeing paychecks with George Costanza-like shrinkage.

For the first time in a long time, something was different about the Daytime Emmys. No, it's not that they're on in primetime; that happened years ago. What was different was the 35th Daytime Emmys opted to forgo the theater setting and seat the stars at round tables. As co-host (with All My Children's Cameron Mathison) Sherri Shepherd told the AP days before the AP, "Usually everyone is sitting in a row. This year, it'll be like a wedding. We're also going to do something so that fans will be able to get a view of what's going on at the different tables." That would be web video created by the actors at every table - table cam. Perfect for hams. The vids are at SOAPnet. For details about the show from the winners backstage, check out AOL.

So did the seating arrangements make a difference? Well, it depends. Those who were there probably had a better time because there was an open bar, just like the Golden Globes. For viewers, it still looked like the Daytime Emmys, including many familiar faces winning. After a strained attempt at comedy for the opening -- blending All My Children fictional characters with The View's real hosts -- the show commenced.
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Evil clones, friendly vampires, secret islands and much, much more.

When something's overly dramatic, we call it a soap opera.

And no wonder -- only in daytime serials do we find such plot twists as people we thought were dead being held captive on islands (that's actually happened more than once), characters coming back from heaven, comatose patients astrally projecting themselves.

We're not making any of these up -- these are our favorite crazy, wacko soap opera story lines.

Did you know that baseball players are big-time soap opera fans? It's true. All that time they spend hanging out in the clubhouse during the day, they have the soaps playing in the background. Not all, but a lot. That said, it'll be interesting to see if the same things that sell soaps -- the drama, the relationships, the never-ending stories -- work for ESPN in selling their Fantasy Baseball League. They're calling the series of commercials "Endless Drama."

I haven't seen a minute of General Hospital in over 10 years. In the 80s when everyone was talking about how great this soap was, I was busy watching Guiding Light, which I guarantee you was a better show (even though I only saw a few episodes of General Hospital). But Stuart Damon is a fairly well-known actor, and it's interesting to see he's being let go from the show in February (click here if you want to see how his Alan Quartermaine character will vanish from the show).

Damon has been with the show since 1977 (!) but he's been acting in TV and movies for a really long time, way back to the mid-60s. He's been in episodes of The Saint, UFO, Thriller, Space: 1999, Mike Hammer, Fantasy Island, Diagnosis Murder, and Strong Medicine, as well as movies like Star 80, so I'm sure he won't be looking for work for long. I bet he shows up on another soap.

I have been watching Guiding Light for 26 years.

Now, I know that I'm a guy, but you really have to blame my mother for all this. When I was around 14 or 15, I would come home from school and want to watch television. My mom would be watching her "stories," which were All My Children, One Life To Live, and Guiding Light (it used to be on in the afternoon). She wouldn't let me watch anything, so I was stuck watching Guiding Light when I got out of school...and I became hooked. I became addicted to the show, and watched it all for years, through the Philip/Beth/Rick/Mindy saga, the devious schemes of Alan Spaulding and Roger Thorpe, that bizarre story with the infected mouse that killed a bunch of characters off, Quint and Nola, Ross and Josh turning from bad to heroes, and the more recent storylines like that whole Richard and Jeffrey island kingdom stuff and Harley and Gus and Jonathan.