In one of those strange moments when I was drinking vodka and Diet Pepsi, eating a late supper because I had been in class, and reminiscing about Buffy The Vampire Slayer, I went googling for images from the episode Superstar (the one where Jonathan casts a spell to become king of the world and [spoiler] it all goes wrong [not really a spoiler]). The search also produced some links with pictures of Barnabas Collins, and I followed one of them to a “reprint” of a Marvel Comics interview with Jonathan Frid from 1975. The interviewer was none other than Chris Claremont, whose name I learned in college a few years afterwards, back when I thought the X-Men were the coolest superheroes around.

So, I had to read the interview. (You can read it here: http://www.collinsporthistoricalsociety.com/2017/03/chris-claremont-interviews-jonathan.html)

The interview was done after Dark Shadows went off the air, and the initial thrust was Frid’s most recent film, Seizure. I liked the interview because it has the flavor of an actor talking to a fan who is also a story-teller in his own right. It gets technical sometimes, and is pleasantly different from the kind of interview you get from a talking head. Eventually, they started to talk about Dark Shadows, and Frid made the following observation:

That’s the fun about soap operas; that’s the reality of soap operas. There’s something about soap operas that’s much more close to life, in spite of the put-downs—and they are very trite very often—but they do have that relation to life, in that there’s no end, there’s no beginning. It will not end. As one trouble starts to get solved. there’s another one coming in there. It’s like politics…

As a kid, I had been taught to avoid the soaps. (Dark Shadows was still on then, and it gave me a three-decade case of the creeping willies whenever I went up a flight of stairs in the dark. Even in my 30s, I would run up the basement stairs if the basement light was out.) My grandmother would iron clothes while she watched the soaps and talked to the characters. (“John! Don’t start that drinking again.”)

But reading Frid’s comment puts a new perspective on soaps for me. I had thought of their never-ending-ness as tedium, but Frid is right. That is real life. Real families have issues, and those issues don’t change for decades. Run the lawnmower over a handful of unmarked seedlings in a scraggly part of the yard because you weren’t told to look out for them, and twenty-five years later someone still feels compelled to mention it yet again.

Maybe if I hunted hard enough, I could find elements of The Heroes Journey in soap opera plots, but I haven’t tried yet. Maybe they aren’t there, because after the resolution of the Hero’s arc, the story ends. People often don’t want a good book to end, but it has to, doesn’t it? And he lived happily ever after to the end of his days was how Bilbo wanted to end his story. As hard as it hurt when Sam said “Well, I’m back” and the story ended, I know that I wouldn’t want to read about the ongoing saga of life in The Shire. Yet that is somehow what the soaps are–ongoing sagas of life without end and without much in the way of arc (that I have observed). I can’t pretend to understand why they are so popular, but now I need to look at them in a new light and try.