It’s hard to believe that today’s high school seniors might not have any idea of what I’m talking about.
They would have been six or seven when ABC’s classic soap opera All My Children went off the air in September of 2011. (It’s possible – but unlikely – that they heard of the blink-and-you-missed-it 2013 online version.)
I was 9 going on 10 in the summer of ’73 when a babysitter got me hooked on “AMC.” I stayed with it on and off through the demise of the online version not long after I turned 50.
For a generation of high school and college students, not to mention adults of all ages, races and genders, the series, set in a mythical East Coast town, was Must-See TV. Creator Agnes Nixon believed in setting her vision of daytime drama in a contemporary small town where she could tell emotionally resonant stories, through larger-than-life characters.
In the pre-VCR years, college students would try to build their schedules around watching it.
Oprah was a major fan:
Everyone from Stevie Wonder…
to Boomer Esiason… to Elizabeth Taylor…
…to RuPaul did guest appearances.
Carol Burnett even played a recurring character, the previously unknown stepdaughter of series grande dame Phoebe Tyler Wallingford (Ruth Warrick).
By the early ’80s, people who knew nothing about soaps could tell you that Susan Lucci’s Erica Kane was a quintessential diva. (Lucci herself has become a go-to metaphor for the perennially nominated. Often, it’s forgotten that she indeed won a Daytime Emmy, though 19 nominations preceded that moment.) Still, as heretical as it may sound, Lucci was just one ingredient in the success of All My Children, the hot fudge on a sundae of engaging storytelling delivered by a good-looking multigenerational, diverse cast.
More than a decade after the show’s cancellation, I’ve yet to find the ideal replacement. Most TV series don’t provide the daily familiarity of a pilgrimage to Pine Valley. And the few remaining network soaps seem stuck in recycling storylines from decades prior, unwilling to acknowledge contemporary concerns (Aside from its coming-out tale of Erica’s younger daughter Bianca, “AMC” itself struggled with this in its final years.)
It seems to me that All My Children and other daytime dramas fill a need that few other forms of entertainment can match. We enjoy catching up on the latest in people’s lives. The more heightened the drama, the better. If there’s a chance to laugh, great. It’s fine, too, to shed a tear or two. We like being involved even as we understand: it’s just a story.
Picking up various show-related memorabilia was a fun way to keep connected to the goings-on of the Martins, Kanes, Tylers, Hubbards, Cortlandts, Chandlers and Santoses:
This card trivia game, circa 1990, resembled Trivial Pursuit in the way its categories were arranged. Roll the die and answer the question that matches the icon. Questions were very “old-school” AMC: the 1970s and ’80s. 
Superheroes and sports stars weren’t the only subjects for collectible cards in the 1990s. A set of 72 “All My Children” cards included the Kanes, Wallingford/Tylers, Martins, Chandlers and Cortlandts in the family trees. 
This is more fun to look at than to listen to. Though many of the actors (such as AMC’s Palmer — James Mitchell) have legitimate musical credits, the arrangements are elevator music dreck. But oh, how fun to picture folks from the mid-80s ABC soaps testing their pipes. 
Once upon a time, ABC found ways to make money from its soaps. Case in point: The videotape collections of weddings, behind-the-scenes interviews and …ahem… it’s not porn, though it is eye candy. 
This AMC scrapbook, which was sold in bookstores at the 25th anniversary, became a companion when I met actors visiting Raleigh on promotional trips. It was fun to get the autographs from James Kiberd (Trevor) and John Callahan (Edmund). 
Here’s a match of two favorite pastimes: soaps and comic books. Actor Walt Willey (“All My Children’s” Jackson Montgomery) lent his likeness to Valiant Comics in the mid-’90s for an issue of the superhero title Doctor Mirage. The book was only so-so. 
In the late ’90s I belonged to an Internet newsgroup, rec-arts-tv-soaps-abc. The AMC folks on the newsgroup participated in an annual yearbook, complete with bios. I took part in the 1996 edition and got to meet several folks in North Carolina and elsewhere. 
And: My favorite bit of AMC kitsch: an autographed script I bought at an auction in the early 2000s. Autographs include Cameron Mathison (Ryan), David Canary (Adam), Jill Larson (Opal), Walt Willey (Jackson), Terri Ivens (Simone), Eden Riegel (Bianca), Alexa Havins (Babe) and Michael B. Jordan (Reggie).
Decades before connecting with TNOCS, I became involved in the late ’90s in the Usenet newsgroup rec- arts-tv-soaps-abc (RATSA, for short). Threads about our friends in Pine Valley were as engaging a TNOCS’ takes on Tom Breihan’s Billboard charttopper ratings. The RATSA-AMC community even produced its own yearbook for a few years, and I met several folks when our paths crossed regionally or I visited their neck of the woods.
Maybe that’s just what my nostalgia for All My Children boils down to – that sense of community.
Whether it’s the fictional one that inspired us viewers or the real one we created in response, Pine Valley became our second home.
And, as that wise Kansas girl said, there’s no place like it.
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I thought Boomer Esiason was just being a good employee, reaching out to people who don’t normally watch football. But I found this item that suggests Esiason had real acting aspirations.
“Cincinnati Bengal quarterback Boomer Esiason is to make his debut as a television character actor in January on the HBO series First and Ten: In Your Face.”
Esiason’s costars were O.J. Simpson and Shannon Tweed.
I think Cameron Diaz helped the NFL grow when in There’s Something About Mary, she delivers this immortal line: “Hey, you wanna go upstairs and watch Sportscenter?” to Ben Stiller.
It was an odd comfort, to be able to pop in an check on these people every day, wasn’t it?
My mom watched the NBC soaps, so that’s how I got hooked. It was a Big Deal in college to keep up with Days of Our Lives; I will never forget watching it one afternoon in my dorm room, there was some big reveal and I audibly heard 3 different gasps down the hall at the same time with a few “oh no she didn’t!” That was more amusing to me than the episode.
I stopped on Days out of curiosity last year. I had to shake my head – Stefano is still kinda alive and is in Patch now?! Marlena’s possessed, AGAIN? She needs to fire her exorcist. How old are the Brady kids now?!
Some things never change. 🙂
My older sister was a huge fan of soap operas: All My Children, Days of Our Lives, The Bold and the Beautiful, General Hospital. I must have caught some random scenes here and there, but I’ve never seen a full episode.
The closest shows to soaps that I’ve watched are Twin Peaks (soap on acid) and Game of Thrones (soap with “tits and dragons,” as Ian McShane so colorfully put it).
What about Tele-novelas? I hear that they’re quite dramatic and entertaining. Someone at my gym recently mentioned Turkish soap operas being quite good.
I forgot about the Telenovelas!! That was usually on the must see TV list while at my friend’s place watching Iron Chef; we go over to Telemundo and come up with our own dialog for the scenes in their various soaps, because honestly, if it wasn’t Sabado Gigante, it was a telenovela, that’s all Telemundo every showed!
I’ve heard telenovelas are a good way to strengthen Spanish listening skills because of context and the universality of soap opera tropes.
Surrealism is, as you know, an overused term. Fire Walk with Me is the real deal. I suspect you know this, too. The surrealists used to walk in the middle of a film and leave before it ends. That’s what the Twin Peaks movie is like for me. Repeated viewings doesn’t help me understand certain plot points. I might as well start at any random chapter. It’s dream logic-extreme.
FWWM was my first exposure to any David Lynch work, and suffice it to say that it had a powerful effect on me. In high school all of the hippest kids were into his films, and a few of the brattier types would try to out-hip others once they discovered one of Lynch’s influences, as if that invalidated his own work. “Lynch is just copying Fellini Satyricon,” or “Check out El Topo if you want to see where Lynch got all of his ideas.”
Of course, if there is a correct answer in this game of origins, it would be Surrealism, most specifically Dali and Bunuel’s film Un Chien Andalou. No one in high school was quite hip enough to go back to the 1920s.
(But let’s not discount the influence of Ed Wood’s Glen or Glenda or Ingmar Bergman’s Persona on Lynch’s particular style)
Incidentally, I wrote about Surrealism on my blog, trying to tap into its roots in later transgressive art such as industrial music. It can be clunky at times, but probably one of my better early entries:
https://phylogenicrecords.wordpress.com/2021/02/21/cry-from-the-sanatorium/
Telenovelas are a guilty pleasure, but those that were filmed in Miami (broadcasted by Univision or Telemundo) are campy and ridiculous, worthy of a good laugh.
The Turkish soap operas are the leaders now, but back in the 80’s, still in the 90’s, Mexican and Venezuelan telenovelas were the best.
I saw bits of AMC around 1995 when it would be on the breakroom TV at work, that’s when pre-Buffy Sarah Michelle Gellar was on the show as Erica’s daughter. Caught bits of General Hospital around 1980 during its heyday, since it happened to be on after school, but I was only nine so I was more than anxious to switch over to TBS to get my daily fix of Space Giants and Bugs Bunny. My folks were into the CBS soaps, taping them daily, so that’s what I was most familiar with during the ’80s. What I always found exciting was seeing an actor make it big and thinking, “Hey, I remember way back when they were on As The World Turns” or whatever, ala Meg Ryan or the aforementioned SMG.
Yeah, I got the script with Michael B. Jordan’s autograph years before his breakthroughs with Fruitvale Station, Black Panther and Just Mercy.
I remember that usenet group! I used to read it also, but I never commented much. Small world.