Only once in my life have I watched a soap opera for more than a few minutes. I’m not a snob about it; they’re just never sordid enough for me. But I often wonder if I’m missing a key TV viewing experience, because that one extended soap spell proved to be the strangest TV I’ve ever seen.
But I tried to adjust. It even made a kind of spooky sense that this impostor claimed not to remember any of her swarming multitude of friends–after all, she’d never seen any of them before. I wasn’t even outraged when she fell in love with the cad (he made a supreme, albeit temporary, effort not to sneer in her presence) and became offended by the romantic advances of Dudley (he was slow to appreciate that her amnesia meant she didn’t remember him)–who knew what her taste in men might be, as opposed to the woman she’d replaced? But then came the final twist of the knife: just as I was reconciled to her new form, she hit her head on a hospital gurney and her memory returned–and the next day the original actress was back in the role.
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Certainly I prefer it to the way actors disappear on prime time. There’s no poetry at all there: the season premiere rolls around, and where’s the nosy neighbor, or the cop’s slick young partner? Gone; extinguished; retroactively infected with a fatal disease that killed him off during the summer hiatus (no matter how healthy, if sullen, he looked in the season finale). You could be the star of the show in one episode, and in the next, alas, there was “that plane crash.” This was actually the way the long-running McMillan and Wife abruptly became McMillan; Susan Saint James was excised from the show in a single brutal line of dialogue. On the 80s show Fame, when the lead actress quit, they loaded her character into a car with a drunk driver–thus trashing the character (who was supposed to have been the soul of snotty good sense) and conveniently providing a pretext for an hour-long sermon about drunk driving. I don’t think I’ve ever seen another show be as vindictive and sanctimonious simultaneously. But I have seen a few try. Every contract dispute on MAS*H resulted in yet another searingly powerful statement on the casualties of war.
At least with L.A. Law, you knew why it was happening–nobody’s watched the show for years. The only rogue element in the finale was the news that the patriarchal Leland had cancer. This was ostensibly a symbolic gesture, about how Leland was really the soul of L.A. Law–he dies, and the law firm and the show die with him. But the cancer was some kind of humiliating genital affliction: thus crowning a long string of covert insults they’d directed at him since the pilot episode. The kindly father had spent the entire run of the series hiring crooked lawyers, or blowing easy cases, or taking on racist clients only for the money; he was perpetually shown up as vain, dotty, hypocritical, and a bit of a dope. So the touching final scene, where the other characters raised a glass to toast their stricken leader and pledge their undying friendship, had an unmistakable edge of Oedipal glee–as though they had to get in one last, mean-spirited kick before the ship sank and they all drowned.
So what was the real point? There wasn’t one: the last episode wasn’t in fact a last episode but a holding action. Paramount is putting the show out of production only so they can move the whole outfit over to their feature-film division. They’re betting that they can revive their moribund Star Trek movie franchise (which used to star the withered crew of the original 60s series) by cashing in on the Next Generation’s popularity; and meanwhile they intend to replace the series with a brand-new spin-off called Star Trek: Voyager. The series couldn’t actually wrap itself up without interfering with the movie, so it didn’t wrap itself up at all–even though, the rumor goes, everybody involved in the movie thinks it’s a loser.
