Articles and Interviews: 2000-2003

Editor's Choice: Digest Salutes the Best in Daytime (Soap Opera Digest 6/18/02)

Live, From New York, It's One Life to Live

Yes, a week of live shows was an ambitious undertaking and yes, it must have been scary for the actors to perform live on national TV and yes, viewers probably tuned in to see if mistakes were made. But the reason OLTL is Editors' Choice for the week ending May 17 is because of its fabulous storytelling.

Bam! Blair finds out Todd lied that their baby died and that Jack is really her much-mourned little one. Thwack! Max wakes up with a hangover in Vegas married to Roxanne. Zoinks! Niki is Viki again. Yikes! Nora's in bed with Troy. Kaboom! Lindsay's new cellmate is...Allison Perkins.

So often, a soap will come up with a gimmick (which, let's face it, is what this was) to entice people to watch, but does not give them any reason to KEEP watching. But people who tuned in to OLTL saw great drama combined with condensed storytelling, a welcome relief from soaps' usual drag-it-out-as-long-as-possible format. When was the last time you saw two characters who have barely shared a scene together wake up married? OLTL zigged when we thought it was going to zag, and the unpredictability of it all was terrific.

The best part of Mr. and Mrs. "Maxi-MILLION" Holden's new storyline is the energy it brings to the actors. James DePaiva is positively reborn, going from a storyline that made Max a boring stiff shaking his finger at sudden son Al to playing his own little sitcom with Ilene Kristen, inspired as Llanview's funny white-trash newbie. This marriage also makes his son Al and her "daughters," Natalie and Jessica, some form of family, and nothing will be funnier than Thanksgiving in that house.

"I hate blondes," announced Allison as the door clanked behind her in Lindsay's cell. Each of these nutty broads has met her match in the other, and every scene they've shared since live week has been a riot. (One of their more memorable exchanges involved Allison musing that she thought about becoming a lesbian and Lindsay responding, "Yeah, I hate men, too. I mean, I love them, but I hate them.") Let's hope they'll bust out of jail and shake up Llanview but good. There's a hole in the action where Lindsay used to be.

The Todd and Blair story took the most drastic turn, however, when Blair learned that Todd lied about Jack being dead (when he thought Max was the father), lied again that he had "adopted" a baby who looked just like their "dead" baby (when he learned he was the father, after all) and then lied that Jack's biological mother wanted him back so they had to run away with the kids to "protect" him. OLTL's front-burner couple combusted in a handful of episodes, and now it's The War Of The Roses Goes To Hawaii.

Every plot took a turn. So, if you tuned in to see who was going to make a mistake, or trip, or get hit by a camera, or not make it back to the studio from Central Park in time, what you got was in-your-face drama that made you stick around Monday when the show was back to being a regular old taped soap opera.

Aside from the storytelling accomplishments, the behind-the-scenes achievements were a marvel. How did they cut from set to set to set live, with no boom shadows on the actors' faces? How did that baby get through all of those scenes without crying (or pooping)? How did Kamar de los Reyes (Antonio) make it back from Central Park to the studio without so much as a commercial break? Think about it!

The only thing we would have changed about live week is its timing. Because the episodes aired during Emmy week, what little mainstream press daytime gets was focused on that. So, OLTL may have missed out on the opportunity to lure lapsed viewers back to the show via local newspapers and news shows, whose focus was elsewhere. This was I-can't-believe-they-did-that TV, both artistically and technically, and it was a triumph on all fronts.

Good for them.