Hello. My name is John, and I’m a soap-opera addict. At this point, you’re supposed to shout, “Hello, John,” so that I will feel welcomed and safe while discussing my addiction. But I know that even in this culture of confession, there are some behaviors that go beyond the bounds of acceptable conduct. A grown man watching a soap opera? Society will not, cannot forgive. Real men don’t watch soap operas. Hell, men don’t watch soap operas at all. According to demographic research, the daytime soap-opera audience skews 90 percent–90 percent!–female. You only see numbers like that when you’re talking about Jews voting Democratic. Men constitute a minority population in America, but at least we’re close to par. Not so, clearly, when it comes to soap-opera-watching men. But even that number is enormous compared with my specific demographic category, which may be the smallest grouping in the entire, 281-million-strong U.S.A. I’m a straight, Jewish, soap-opera-watching man who votes Republican. I’d guess there are maybe four people like me in the whole country. Daytime network soap operas affect me the way rock cocaine affects a crackhead: The impact is immediate, the pleasure intense (though fleeting). Indeed, I am so addicted to soap operas that I will occasionally sample a Spanish-language soap from Mexico or Colombia on Univision or Telemundo, even though they speak far more quickly than my high-school Spanish-level ears can comprehend. There are nine daytime soap operas in English. The oldest, “Guiding Light,” has been broadcast continuously on radio and television for 61 years. The newest, “Passions,” is two years old. CBS, which has the most popular soaps, airs three. NBC, whose soaps are the least popular, airs two. ABC has four, including “General Hospital.” “General Hospital” briefly became a major pop-culture sensation 20 years ago when its storyline about a rapist named Luke falling in storybook love with his own victim, Laura, became a consuming national obsession. Luke and Laura remain on “General Hospital” to this day. Luke is pushing 50. They’ve been divorced, but now they’re about to get married again. They have a son named Lucky who was brainwashed by the same woman who tried to kill everybody in the town of Port Charles 20 years ago with a nefarious weather machine that caused it to snow in July. I got hooked on “General Hospital” during college, when I found myself home in the afternoon and wanted to see what all the fuss was about. But I became a soap devotee at the age of 6, thanks to my older sister Ruthie. We’d get home from school just in time to join our nanny, Imelda, in a daily viewing of a soap called “Another World.” I would have preferred a cartoon, but was outvoted. Eventually, we gave up on “Another World” and moved on to “One Life to Live.” The villainess was named Vicki Lord. She eventually became a heroine, but heroines are boring, so the producers came up with an inventive notion: Vicki could be both a good guy and a bad guy. They gave her a split personality, so that while Vicki remained wonderful, her alter ego, Nicki, was very bad indeed. Now I’m in my 40s, and I’m home in the afternoons again because I work at home. There’s a television on my desk so that I can monitor news events. Often, though, I find myself monitoring “One Life to Live,” where the evil Nicki is still popping up every so often. Now she’s trying to drive Vicki’s teenage daughter insane. “One Life to Live” is an ABC soap. I favor the ABC soaps. The CBS soaps are a little too frilly in set decoration for me. The NBC soaps are even more ridiculous and hysterical than the ABC plotlines I’ve told you about. But my criticisms of the other networks don’t really account for my ABC bias. Soaps are like sports teams. They change personnel and styles on a yearly basis. But once you’ve committed to them, you’ve chosen them above the competition. I watched “One Life to Live” 30 years ago, so I watch it and its ABC brethren now. Soap operas are never-ending dramas with daily cliffhangers and multiple storylines. They are heavily plotted, but the plots move slowly so people can keep track even if they only watch occasionally. They make little or no dramatic sense. Anything can happen. Characters change from good to evil in a few weeks’ time. Supernatural events occur and then are quickly forgotten. I love plot, and soap opera is plot run amok. Nothing is allowed to get in the way of a story, not even elementary logic. Soap operas are to drama what junk food is to real food. Their appeal is so obvious I can’t understand why others don’t share my passion. Or maybe you do, and you’re just unwilling to admit it. Coward. –John Podhoretz
