Word: soaping
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Thrice kidnapped and once kept drugged on a remote island for five years, Dr. Marlena Evans has suffered her share of improbable bad luck over her long soap- opera career. These days, though, her troubles have become increasingly unmanageable. Since last winter the virtuous psychiatrist, portrayed by Deidre Hall, on nbc's Days of Our Lives, has been possessed not by run-of-the-mill lust but rather by the devil himself. With eyes that turn a yield-sign yellow and a voice that sinks deep and demonic, Dr. Evans has misbehaved all over the fictional town of Salem...
Well, you won't find that on Montel Williams or the Ricki Lake show. Over the top even by the standards of daytime TV, Days of Our Lives' satanic plot line is just one example of the frenzied effort soap operas are making to maintain viewers and desperately lure new ones in the face of dwindling ratings. Currently 10 daytime soap operas are on network TV, just more than half the number that were airing in 1970. One reason for the falloff is the profusion of Oprah-style talk shows, which are able to serve up story lines about real...
...Thanks to the O.J. travesty (Will we ever be rid of this national embarrassment?), all the soaps have suffered a ratings decline," bemoaned Mimi Torchin, editor in chief of Soap Opera Weekly, in a recent editorial. Last summer, in early July, the serials lost an entire week of programming when they were pre-empted for the Simpson trial's preliminary hearings, and they have never really recovered. "It's been a battle all along," says Susan Banks, director of on-air promotion for cbs Daytime. "We thought the viewers would come back, but they didn't." Since the beginning...
...tools and whatever shows they have at hand, they are busily reinventing the old media on the new medium, offering up music, pictures, video clips and now a comedy series. Much of the new material is drawn from the golden days of radio and TV--quiz shows, talk shows, soap operas and cartoons--but with a difference: since the programs are stored on computers linked to the global Internet, viewers can retrieve them when they want them from virtually anywhere...
...kingdom over the resistance of the sheep people, or "sheeple." The Militia of Montana offers a similar vision: those who will rescue the Constitution are an underground army of men who have semiautomatics cached in barrels in the woods and who know you can catch catfish with Ivory soap as bait, men whom society now views as "outcast," "strange" or "erratic primitives" (in highlighted descriptions from clippings in Trochmann's mailings...