In one of those strange moments, when I was drinking vodka and Diet Pepsi, eating a late supper because I had been in an evening 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). My search also produced links with pictures of Barnabas Collins, which made me curious. I followed one of them to a “reprint” of a 1975 Monsters of the Movies interview with Jonathan Frid. The interviewer was none other than Chris Claremont, whose name I had learned in 1978, back when I thought the X-Men were the coolest superheroes around.

So I had to read the interview. [Edit: I used to have a link to it, but as of 2025 the Collinsport Historical Society domain (or webpage) has been taken over by some creepy crypto casino scam operation. Bits and pieces of the Collinsport website are still there, but not the interview.]

The interview was done after Dark Shadows went off the air, and the initial topic was Frid’s then most recent film, Seizure. I liked the interview because it had the flavor of an actor talking to a fan who is also a story-teller in his own right. It got technical sometimes, and was pleasantly different from the kind of interview you get from a talking head. Eventually, they started talking 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. My grandmother would iron clothes while she watched them and talked to the characters. (“John! Don’t start that drinking again.”) 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. Who knew what was coming up from behind? Even in my 30s, I would run up the basement stairs if the basement light was out.

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. If you run the lawnmower over a handful of unmarked seedlings in a scraggly part of the yard (because no one told you to look out for them), twenty-five years later someone will still be complaining about it at family get-togethers.

Maybe I could find elements of The Heroes Journey in soap opera plots if I looked really hard, but I don’t see them now. Maybe they aren’t there, because after the resolution of the Hero’s arc, the story ends. People don’t want a good yarn to end, but it has to, doesn’t it? Bilbo wanted to end his story with And he lived happily ever after to the end of his days. And as bad as it hurt when Sam said, “Well, I’m back” and the book ended, I wouldn’t want to read the ongoing saga of life in The Shire. That would just be Peyton Place. As The Shire Turns. The Many Loves Of Elanor Gamgee. And people love that stuff.