Stop It! Excessive Spoilers Are Ruining Our Soaps

Stop It!  Excessive Spoilers Are Ruining Our Soaps!

By Marlena De Lacroix, a.k.a. Connie Passalacqua Hayman

Last Friday, I experienced something as a soap viewer that I had not felt in decades: a genuine surprise. No, correct that, a shock. At the close of Friday’s “General Hospital,” Nina (played by the divine Cynthia Watros) shoved her paralyzed and wheel-chair-bound son-in-law, Drew — into the water, where his daughter, Scout, had just demonstrated her swimming skills.

“Oh my God!” I screamed. “Finally, a soap opera in this day and age that’s smart enough to keep a great dramatic climax on the screen where it belongs instead of giving away the story to multiple websites.”

Of course, soap spoilers, which in my estimation comprise 65-75 percent of what passes for soap journalism by these days, have been around a long time. But Marlena, who remembers the days before spoilers, when you had to run home from school (in my case junior high, age 13) to experience the sublime surprise of the totally unexpected.

I’ll never forget the afternoon on “Another World” in 1967 when seedy Wayne Addison (played by Robert Milli) was murdered. Lenore Curtin (played by Judith Barcroft,) was made to stand trail. One Friday, it was revealed that the real murderer was Lenore’s husband, Walter (played by a wonderfully melodramatic actor named Val Dufour). What a creep!

Since then, there have been thousands of Friday cliffhangers on soaps. And why, my children, are Friday soap episodes so important? Because they make you tune in on Monday, after the weekend, to see what happens. In the early soap days, many of us became regular viewers because we loved the suspense. Today, most of the suspense is gone. Want to know what’s going to happen next? Turn on your computer, Google the name of your show, and chances are you will find spoilers for today’s and this week’s episodes on various soap sites.

Whose fault is this? Well, the spoilers are appearing on big websites, which are supposedly giving viewers what they want. And where do the websites get their information? From the networks, of course, which give out the info to publicize the shows.
This is so counterproductive. Going back decades and decades, head writers have spent a good deal of time and and exercised a good deal of skill coming up with Friday cliffhangers, which used to be kept as strict secrets. Those headwriters were true artists.

Irna Phillips understood that keeping soap opera viewers in suspense was what kept viewers tuning in. Agnes Nixon, Doug Marland, Claire Labine, Michael Malone — they all lived it. If you loved the crime soap “Edge of Night” as I did, no one did surprises and cliffhangers better than that show’s headwriter, the great Henry Slesar.

Oh, those great surprises! Remember when Reva (played by Kim Zimmer) drove off the bridge on “Guiding Light,” not to be seen for five years? Or “Days,” when John Black (Drake Hogestyn) was sent to the electric chair? All these years later, I still think about them and their enormous impact. These events were not given away by spoilers.

Now, I surrender, mes chers. I know endless spoilers (and opinions, of course) are what passes for soap journalism these days. In fact, you no longer have to sit down and watch the shows every day. Why bother? All you have to do is Google soap sites.

As for me, I still love soaps — even though the sites and networks are ruining all our fun by giving nearly everything away in advance.
P.S. Of course, the “GH” Drew plot surprise was a fake out. Gio found Drew miraculously alive in the water ¬— and no longer mute. How did that happen? That was yet another gigantic surprise — or would have been if a soap site hadn’t totally spoiled it by giving it away online some three hours earlier.