Forced to Watch Guiding Light as a Baby!

Yes, I was forced to watch soap operas. Sort of. When I was a little babe just days from being pushed out of my mother’s womb, the strains of The Guiding Light’s opening theme fell on my pre-natal ears and left their mark. A similar destiny belonged also to my mother, although hers happened near a radio. My kids met the same dramatic fate. But the way things are going, my grandkids probably won’t.

Actually, soap operas almost never made it to the small screen at all. When they debuted on the radio in the early part of the 20th century, they lasted just 15 minutes and were chiefly a way to sell housewives soap, detergent and other household cleansers. Washboard weepers, their other moniker, were the beginning of our daily dose of women’s domestic fiction. But network executives were unsure about the transition to television because…wait for it…they weren’t sure if women would actually sit down, take a load off their feet during the day, take a break from their housework and watch a show. Yep, you heard it right. Poor saps. Obviously, they’d never done a day’s housework in their lives or spent the day chasing children around a house. Needless to say, ever since, women around the country have been telling children to, “Shush! It’s time for my stories!”


The Guiding Light was the first to make the transition to that glowing box in the corner of your living room on January 30,1952 on CBS Television. Based on a family of lower middle class German immigrants, it was created by a Irna Philips, a woman who is widely regarded as the mother of the daytime drama. She is credited with the circular, casual pace with which these stories are told. Philips knew women would want to run and stir something on the stove or check on a sleeping baby and not have missed so much story that they’d be completely lost by the time they got back to their sofa. Smart lady, right? Also a shrewd businesswoman, she would tailor her stories to better fit the products of her sponsors, writing in a wedding to suit a dressmaker, for example. The daughter of German immigrants herself, the framework of Guiding Light was partially based on Irna Philips’own life.


My mom’s mom had listened to Guiding Light on the radio with her Scottish-born mother. Later, she watched it on television with her 3 daughters. The middle of those daughters grew up to be the mother to whom my younger sister and I would run home, down the hill after school every day. We’d sit next to her on the couch with her cup of tea and watch the last half of Guiding, as we called it. Tired from our long days, we didn’t talk until the ending credits rolled. During my teen years, I fell in love with Phillip Spaulding, the oh-so-sensitive-would-be writer/adopted son of a millionaire who was devoted to his troubled girlfriend, Beth. My sister and I would sigh and gnash our teeth over how Springfield (Guiding Light’s Anytown, USA) was so cruel and unfair to those two. It was easy for us to tell who to root for..a clarity I appreciated in my increasingly confusing pubescent world. I vividly remember a prom scene gone awry that left me in tears. My mom soothed me, saying we all can use a good cry sometimes. As an adult with kids of my own, I’d call my mom after a particularly good episode of Guiding and we’d soothe ourselves through a rough patch cackling, “Well, things might be bad but at least we’re not as crazy as those people!”


I also wiled away many cozy afternoons watching with my father’s mother, Grammy, in her carefully china-filled home in a small factory town about an hour away. This was an entirely different experience. A devout Irish Catholic, every once in a while Grammy’s mouth would form a grim line during some scenes that my mom seemed to have no problem with. I’d sit in the nubby orange chair in front of her tv, on the alert but unsure what I was meant to do. I’d cross my legs and try to look innocent. Yet, she’d always turn it on every day at 3 o’clock on the dot. Grammy was clear about one thing. She loved the Bauers -this big family that was often featured in their kitchen and whose entire lives revolved around their mother. Bert Bauer's sons were always surrounding her and everyone was always asking her for advice. “She,” Grammy would tell me,”is a such a lady.” I dutifully filed this information away from my chair and kept watching.

I still felt connected to my Grammy and my mom’s mom and my sister and that adolescent self whenever I watched Guiding Light as an adult. I thought about my Scottish born great-grandmother who never learned to drive listening to it on the radio at home. It all feels part of the same story. That’s the thing about soap operas. They’re a continuing story being beamed into your home. Every day. No repeats. And Guiding Light had been going on, starting from its radio days, for 72 years. That’s the longest running show in broadcast history. In some ways, it’s the longest continuous story ever told. A new twist added every day for 72 years. It was like an heirloom passed down from mother to daughter. Slightly tarnished maybe but one you wanted to keep in the family anyway. And on Friday, September 18th after over 15,000 episodes, that heirloom got tossed out. Why?

Well, it's complicated.

• It’s partially because there are 300 channels on television when there used to be three. (A fact my kids think I am making up.)
• Also, the soaps rely heavily on the automobile industry for sponsorship and we all know how well they’re doing.
• Women's lives have changed and not as many of us are home during the day to watch.  Although many of us record our favorites soaps to watch later, ratings don’t count those viewers because sponsors know good and well that we zip right through their commercials. (Where’s Irna Philips when you need her? What ever happened to good old product placement? When have the soaps ever been above that? )
• Also, the women who became soap opera fans with their mothers have grown older and their kids haven’t gotten hooked. And you and I both know how advertisers feel about older women.
• Mostly though, I think the networks that produce the soaps haven’t found a way to keep up with women’s changing lives or to fully explore new media for the soaps so we can keep up with them.

And why haven’t they bothered?

That’s simple. Soap operas are primarily made up of women’s stories and they’re told mostly to women. Those stories don't matter to the larger television culture and women as a group don't matter to advertisers. Soap operas are the most parodied of all broadcast art forms. We’re constantly told they’re inane, right? Ridiculous? Mind-numbing? Trash? But the stuff of daytime drama is the stuff of women’s lives...with better hair and make-up, of course. Not to mention a much better wardrobe budget. Daily domestic drama: who loves who, who’s hurting.,who needs help. No wonder women are so drawn to them! That’s what we traditionally do: we look after people, care for them and talk about it in the meantime. Whether we work inside or outside of the home, that hasn't changed.

And soap operas are told, in many ways, the way women tell stories. Generously. With repetition. So that anyone can join in and catch up. With a lot of sympathy. With an eye for detail and scene. Their narratives are complex, can go back decades. Yes, they can require complete suspension of disbelief at times but more often a memory passed down through generations. This is why when a woman meets another woman who watches her same soap, she feels as though she’s found long lost kin.

Soap operas are also an escape from life. There’s their duality: they’re about domestic life but they also act as an escape from domestic life. God help you if you come in between a woman and her soap at the designated time. She may have taken care of you all day, kissed your scrapes when you fell down, gotten up early to work at a factory to pay your school tuition, have your dinner cooking in the oven or worked in a office all day to buy your clothes but don’t interrupt her show!

The stereotype of the soap opera fan is an unintelligent, lazy, inarticulate, bored woman who has nothing better to do with her time. No wonder the genre is dying. We're afraid to come out of the closet! Fans of daytime drama are among the most degraded and ridiculed, despite the fact that most people have a mom or grandmother or aunt or wife who watches. On the contrary, the more I come out as a soap opera watcher , the more I find women of all walks of life who watch too, women who cut across all demographic lines, even women new to this country who use soaps as a way to improve their English. But one fact is indisputable, we are getting older.

So the same kind of wise television executives that weren’t sure if women would take a break from housework to sit down and actually watch a soap opera, don’t think the aging women who watch Guiding Light are worth much. And so on Friday, September 18th, Guiding Light ran the words across the screen that no soap opera is ever supposed to say: The End. I thought of my grandmothers long gone, my mother’s cups of tea, Phillip who was supposed to be mine, the nubby orange chair, my sister and I had a good cry.


Yeah, Guiding Light had it’s fair share of melodrama: babies switched at birth, cars driven off of cliffs, and even a cloning or two. But that’s not what drew me. It was the more regular stuff. The tough decisions, losses, friendships, the love.

In 1965, Irna Philips was quoted as saying, “None of us is different, except in degree. None of us is a stranger to success and failure, life and death, the need to be loved, the struggle to communicate.”

 

 Love between the laundry cycles. And, god, I’ll miss it.