Brandon's Buzz

“I believe that daytime is failing because the people who create it, run it, own it have forgotten what soap opera is. Soaps were originally developed to bring in family, love, infidelity, pain, joy, but family, across the board. Not just young people, not just old people, everybody! I think the mistake has been — I mean, who sees aliens in their lifetime? When you do a story about that, who relates to that? I don’t! It’s just silly! Erika Slezak with twins that, one is from one guy [and the other is…] — wha?! I remember when they did it, I went, ‘Wha…?!’ There’s enough in life, real life — real joys and traumas and difficulties and infidelities and love — there’s enough of that to write stories about…. And when I think that it’s gonna be all over, ‘cause it doesn’t have to be! It’s not some old-fashioned thing; no one just ever brought it into 2012. They didn’t respect
[the form of soap opera]…. they didn’t honor it. And they ruined it.”

— the peerless Linda Dano — an Emmy-winning veteran of the soap grind for nearly three decades — offering her thoughts on the continuing decline of the art of the soap opera, which took another paralyzing hit last week with the tragic cancellations of All My Children and One Life to Live, on
Brandon’s Buzz Radio. (My full fifty-minute conversation with Dano, during which she was quite candid with her opinions on the current state of daytime, in addition to previewing her imminent return to QVC and waxing wistfully on the upcoming royal wedding, will be available for download later this weekend, and trust me: it’s a doozy.)

Glen Hansard & Marketa Irglova —
“Broken Hearted Hoover Fixer Sucker Guy”
(from Once [Music from the Motion Picture]) —

I’m still in the process of processing my thoughts on ABC’s cavalier cancellation last week of their classic soaps All My Children and my old fave One Life to Live (which I’ve watched, practically uninterrupted, for twenty-three years now, so watch this space), but, in the meantime, an interesting sliver of a silver lining from this awful, awful news: multi-billion-dollar conglomerates are not exactly known for siding against their own, but in a rare show of solidarity with literally millions of heart-wrenched soap fans — a sizable number of whom, it should be noted, purchase (and utilize) his company’s products — a brilliant gentleman name of Brian Kirkendall, the vice president of marketing for The Hoover Company — whose vacuum cleaners have been hot sellers for over a century — announced on the company’s Facebook page that, exclusively because his wife and mother are fans of the ABC soaps, his company is pulling all advertising from the network, effective immediately. (Imagine that: a top-level executive putting his own personal integrity and conviction above the almighty dollar. Contrast that with the doofy dolts at ABC, who are, come fall, flushing a combined eighty years of television history down the drain in favor of a Mario Batali-starring reality show about food entitled The Chew, whose existence ABC Daytime president Brian Frons helpfully justified by explaining that the show will be easy to promote with The View, his network’s smash morning gabfest.) I’m not sure that anything will ultimately come of Hoover’s ballsy move (although mobilized fans are now bombarding other soap advertisers with requests for similar action, and I understand that Hershey is paying keen attention to the brouhaha), but it does my heart good to see anyone — even someone without a real dog in this particular hunt — standing up for the soaps. (A recently bought a vacuum cleaner for our household, and I’m sad to report that he chose a Bissell upright, but let it suffice to say that our next machine will be a Hoover. As for this seemingly odd song choice: it was the only vacuum-related song I could conjure up, but given how crushed I remain about this news a week after the fact, I find its content and subject matter to be not at all inapropos.)