only love can be stranger than fiction
posted at 3:03 pm by brandon in in a lather“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.)
