Monday, December 26, 2005
Soap Dish
So I'm going to have to take a few minutes to talk about Days of Our Lives. I realize this is unforgivable, but I got a little bit hooked on it during college, when I worked at an NBC affiliate one summer and had to watch it every day. This was back when they were still burying characters alive and getting them possessed by the devil and fun things like that. Now I don't really watch it any more (and I'm not just pretending that I don't watch it because I'm embarrassed, like I do with One Tree Hill), but every year at Christmas I catch a few episodes in between family singalongs and jigsaw puzzle contests with my dad. The great thing about it is that it moves so slowly that a few episodes a year is really enough to stay completely caught up.
This year's developments are fairly unremarkable. (Unlike last year, when they had a mass murderer who "killed" about half the characters on the show, only to have them turn up on a "mysterious" island.) It is kind of interesting that they've now brought back about every single character from the late 90s, who can be divided into two categories: those who look very much the worse for wear, and those who have had a lot of work done. This is another one of the fun things about soaps -- because actors are on them pretty much every day for periods of decades, you can detect each little brow lift and facial peel as it happens. There are some characters on Days whose faces must by now have an entirely different chemical composition than that with which they started. Which is how we know we live in a great nation.
And I must say a word or two about the amazing overacting. Everything is a shout or a whisper; there is nothing in between. All kinds of sobbing is fair game, although curiously it is seldom accompanied by actual tears of any kind, tear ducts no doubt being a necessary sacrifice to "the craft." Oh, and lots of hands. It's enough to make me think they're translating for the deaf as they go.
All right, let's hope I've got that out of my system.
So I'm going to have to take a few minutes to talk about Days of Our Lives. I realize this is unforgivable, but I got a little bit hooked on it during college, when I worked at an NBC affiliate one summer and had to watch it every day. This was back when they were still burying characters alive and getting them possessed by the devil and fun things like that. Now I don't really watch it any more (and I'm not just pretending that I don't watch it because I'm embarrassed, like I do with One Tree Hill), but every year at Christmas I catch a few episodes in between family singalongs and jigsaw puzzle contests with my dad. The great thing about it is that it moves so slowly that a few episodes a year is really enough to stay completely caught up.
This year's developments are fairly unremarkable. (Unlike last year, when they had a mass murderer who "killed" about half the characters on the show, only to have them turn up on a "mysterious" island.) It is kind of interesting that they've now brought back about every single character from the late 90s, who can be divided into two categories: those who look very much the worse for wear, and those who have had a lot of work done. This is another one of the fun things about soaps -- because actors are on them pretty much every day for periods of decades, you can detect each little brow lift and facial peel as it happens. There are some characters on Days whose faces must by now have an entirely different chemical composition than that with which they started. Which is how we know we live in a great nation.
And I must say a word or two about the amazing overacting. Everything is a shout or a whisper; there is nothing in between. All kinds of sobbing is fair game, although curiously it is seldom accompanied by actual tears of any kind, tear ducts no doubt being a necessary sacrifice to "the craft." Oh, and lots of hands. It's enough to make me think they're translating for the deaf as they go.
All right, let's hope I've got that out of my system.
