Love in the Afternoon, and Evening

When I was in college. some of my favorite shows were Knots Landing and Falcon Crest,  If I were home for the weekend, I would watch both shows with my mom, and if I were still at the dorm I’d watch there. Either way, I liked both shows so much that I’d rather be staying in than going out. So, I nodded very hard when I recently read this passage from the new book Love In the Afternoon, and Evening: 

Before I discovered those shows I watched daytime soap The Young and the Restless with the passion of a teen only watching because her favorite 80s teen idol at the time, Michael Damian, played a rock singer named Danny Romalotti. There has often been a long-time joke that you could go weeks, months, even years, without watching Y&R and still recognize many of the characters (I’m looking at you Victor and Nikki, forty five years later!) Charlotte Druckman and Mayukh Sen have written a whole book about soap operas that is a love letter to a genre that most people dismiss as “guilty pleasure” television. They celebrate them with the kind of serious, joyful attention that fans like I am have always known they deserved. 

The authors are lifelong soap obsessives themselves. Druckman got hooked watching daytime dramas with her caretaker as a child, then graduated to nighttime soaps on Friday nights when her parents went out. Sen was also a kid when he started watching, and together they’ve created something that feels like the best possible conversation between two friends who just really get it. The essays range from the serious (race, reproductive rights, queerness) to the gloriously fun (fashion, long-lost daughters, evil twins). There are interviews with genuine icons: Susan Lucci (Erica Kane on All My Children) and Erika Slezak (Victoria Lord on One Life to Live). And for those of us who spent our formative years in Napa Valley wine country watching Angela Channing scheme, there’s even “a Who’s Who of the best-of-the-best actors on Falcon Crest.”  

Soaps (both daytime and nighttime) taught us how to live with ongoing stories, how to invest in characters for years, how to sit with the messiness of human relationships without needing everything tied up in a neat little bow. The authors trace a connecting theme from classic soaps to reality TV and the serialized storytelling that is on streaming today. (It may not be one officially, but HBO’s new show War sure feels soapy to me). They point out that technically speaking, all TV shows are soaps now, we just don’t call them that anymore. 

Reading Love in the Afternoon, and Evening felt like someone finally understood why I still get emotional thinking about the Knots Landing episode where Karen delivers her famous “Pollyanna” speech to Gary Ewing (played by Ted Shackelford): I want people to be nice. People should be nice. Nice should be the norm…I liked being a Pollyanna. I want to be a Pollyanna.  As with so many books I discover by chance on the new bookshelves at Central Branch, I sure am glad I found this! I now feel a little less shy admitting my love for daytime and nighttime drama so bring on the suds! 

Love in the Afternoon, and Evening: Essays and Conversations on Soap Operas by Charlotte Druckman  and Mayukh Sen is available in print.

Angie is an Instructor & Research Specialist at Central Branch and is a co-facilitator for Reads of Acceptance, HCLS’ first LGBTQ-focused book club. Her ideal day is reading in her cozy armchair, with her cat Henry next to her.