In the last column I wrote for Flow, I talked about the many developments in today’s U.S. daytime soap operas and the rich material these neglected texts offer for television scholarship. In this column, I want to consider a variant on the conventional soap opera, a contemporary television genre that may offer similar, serialized pleasures but that also has significant differences from daytime soaps. Reality soaps, also known as docu-soaps, are best represented by MTV’s Laguna Beach and The Hills. These programs have proven appealing to MTV’s young viewers, unlike the daytime soap operas on the U.S. broadcast networks, which have seen drop-offs in youth audiences in recent years. In this column, I explore some of the similarities and differences between these two genres, including their gendered politics and pleasures.

The premise of Laguna Beach is simple. The show captures the lives and loves of high school students in the affluent eponymous town. The first two seasons have relatively clear narrative arcs–most of the cast are seniors and they are enjoying their last months together before graduating and moving on to new lives. The Hills is a sequel to Laguna. It follows one of the earlier program’s original “characters,” Lauren “LC” Conrad, as she moves to L.A. to attend fashion school and intern at Teen Vogue. This gives The Hills a fundamentally different premise than Laguna, more akin to The Mary Tyler Moore Show or Sex and the City than to The O.C. (the subtitle for Laguna is “The Real Orange County”–the parallels to The O.C. are a deliberate marketing point).

Both series employ a similar structure. Much like daytime soaps, the “plot” may not really advance in any given episode. Instead, each episode revolves around “drama” (the kids’ favorite word, with the exception, perhaps, of “random”), which has the vague meaning of some kind of conflict or emotional upheaval. Although there are specific occurrences in the characters’ lives–high school graduation, Lauren’s internship–the “drama” primarily revolves around romantic relationships. This is a key difference between these series and reality shows such as The Amazing Race or Big Brother, which certainly represent interpersonal relationships but make them the context, the background, for the contests that move the narratives forward. In any given episode of Laguna and The Hills, the cast discusses the “drama,” much as multiple members of fictional daytime soap communities talk about each other’s lives.

In the soaps, these conversations are meant to reveal the implications of plot developments for a host of complexly intertwined characters. On Laguna and The Hills, these conversations conversely work to force a plot around a sequence of somewhat disconnected events and characters. On the first season of Laguna, for instance, passing mentions of the time Lauren spends with Stephen during the gang’s trip to Cabo function to develop the not-entirely-there triangle of Lauren, Stephen, and Stephen’s sort-of girlfriend, Kristin. We get that there is a rivalry between the girls over Stephen because we are privy to every catty remark the girls make about each other, because others talk about Lauren and Stephen or Kristin and Stephen, and because we see a shots of Lauren looking off-screen, followed by shots of Stephen (the Kuleshov effect at work!). In this sort of storytelling, the show follows soap opera conventions without the narrative content or character development to flesh them out.

Although the appeal of these programs is rooted in part in their “reality,” they forego many of the conventions of reality programs. First, there is no justification for the cameras’ attention to these characters, no transformations of home décor, self-display, or lifestyle and no monetary prize for victory. Even these programs’ most likely progenitor in “observational” reality, MTV’s The Real World, offers a reality manufactured around its “seven strangers picked to live in a house” set-up. This makes Laguna and The Hills (as well as ABC’s blink-and-you-missed-it One Ocean View) more like fictional, scripted television than reality TV and more like soaps than like most prime-time fare.¹ After all, soaps present the “trials and tribulations of the Bauer, Lewis and Spaulding families,” as my TiVo describes Guiding Light, much as Laguna Beach presents the trials and tribulations of Lauren, Stephen, Kristin, and their classmates (and much unlike the higher-concept situations facing Jack Bauer or even Meredith Grey). MTV’s reality soaps also emphasize the ongoing existence of their worlds, their independence from a manufactured premise, by eliminating the direct-address interviews, the “confessionals,” that are standard to so much reality TV. As a result, the fourth wall is never broken, making the shows more soap-like but also enhancing their reality claims–these events are just happening, we are encouraged to believe, they are not being set-up by producers.

Of course, these shows are meticulously crafted by producers; their choices literally create conflict, “drama,” narrative out of the thinness of the shows’ premises. In one such choice, the producers use musical montages to tell stories; the frequency of these montages makes the series more akin to MTV’s original bread and butter–music videos–than to most reality programming. On Laguna, the luxurious homes, pristine beaches, vivid sunsets, and swimsuit-clad bodies of the high school cast make these montages delicious eye candy. These montages may well be the show’s primary pleasure.

Another key trick the producers use is their liberal inclusion of long close-ups of the characters’ relatively blank faces, much like the “egg”–the shot at the end of many daytime soap scenes in which an actor holds an expression for several beats until the scene fades out. The egg is an effective technique in soaps because viewers spend so much time with the characters that they learn to read into their faces, to understand that Sonny’s blank look actually displays his fear of hurting his children or his anger at his mafia rival. On the reality soaps, however, viewers spend much less time with the characters, the characters are not nearly as clearly drawn or as complexly represented. We know that Lauren has led a sheltered, privileged life, that she wants to work in fashion, that she cares about her boyfriend even though he has hurt her in the past, that she’s generally a nice person (we know this chiefly because her Laguna rival, Kristin, is constructed as LC’s opposite–a somewhat bitchy tramp). But we don’t really understand what motivates her, what she fears or what she hopes. Most soap viewers could write a 10,000-word essay on what any given soap character wants, hopes, fears, etc. This in-depth knowledge of character history is essential to making meaning of a soap, as anyone who attempts to watch one without such background knowledge will attest. But MTV’s reality soaps can be meaningful without this sort of backstory, as they draw so heavily–in their musical montages and soap-like “eggs”–on pop culture clichés. We get that Lauren is unsure about getting back together with Jason, her philandering ex-boyfriend, because the music and her smile-free face communicate it. But we understand this not so much because we understand who Lauren is but because we’ve seen enough music videos and soap-like scripted drama to read the codes.

This meaning-without-meaning spills over into these shows’ gender politics, particularly when it comes to the politics of heterosexuality. On The Hills, Lauren and Jason reunite when he declares that he misses her and wants her back. In the succeeding episodes, however, Jason repeatedly treats Lauren like crap, clearly disappointing her. This is communicated by her somber expressions and the music that accompanies her scenes. Yet she also continues to take him back, usually in response to his patented apologies, always accompanied by flowers for her. Daytime soaps tell stories about men who treat women poorly, too. Such stories tend to develop in one of two ways: either the woman breaks free of the jerk and establishes a new sense of self (and, eventually, a new romance with someone who treats her better) or the man undergoes a substantial transformation, realizing the error of his ways and truly changing–at least in his behavior toward the woman he loves. But the first season of The Hills did not conclude with either of these potential outcomes. Instead, Lauren turns down a summer internship in Paris to stay with Jason at the Malibu beach house they are renting. Although we are urged to think that Lauren has agonized over her decision, we are also encouraged to believe that she has made the right choice. The season ends with Lauren in Jason’s arms, the Malibu sunset affirming the happily-ever-afterness of her choice. She has not left him and found herself; he is not about to change.

Here is where the differing gender and sexual politics of the reality soaps and the daytime soaps are most clear. With its ongoing storytelling and consequent need for character developments, a daytime soap would have to introduce one of the above turns of events in a story such as Lauren’s and Jason’s. Sure, we’d have watched a multitude of instances just like those on The Hills, in which the man behaves badly and the woman takes him back anyway, but these events would be building toward something that would ultimately generate a substantive change. On The Hills, because it purports to be “real,” and because it has a limited amount of time to tell its story (it’s a half-hour weekly series with an eleven-episode season), Lauren and Jason’s relationship gets a happy ending. They may face lots of “drama” along the way, but that “drama” is offered as a given of heterosexual romance, not as a problematic situation that should change, not only for the sake of storytelling but also for the well-being of those involved. On The Hills, this means Lauren’s well-being, as she is treated disrespectfully, even abusively, and yet seems resigned to a life in which this kind of “drama” is the only reality that counts. Are these the gendered pleasures to which a new generation of viewers are being drawn?

Note
¹CBS has just contracted Laguna’s producers to create reality TV-like scripted programming, the logic being that they have already successfully produced scripted programming-like reality TV.

Image Credits:

1. The Hills

2. Laguna Beach

Please feel free to comment.

O'Neil's dismissive pronouncement expresses a sentiment that I think is quite widespread in contemporary U.S. culture, and perhaps in television studies, as well. Perspectives like this not only reek of a kind of gendered cultural elitism that I believe is fundamentally antithetical to the study of television, but they are inaccurate, besides. Eager, perhaps even desperate, to retain viewers and to attract new–and younger–ones, the U.S. broadcast networks have been quite active in their efforts to give daytime soaps a central place in convergent media culture. In fact, the soaps' industry-sponsored on-line presence has preceded that of prime-time programming in multiple ways. In early 2003, Sony's SoapCity.com began to offer downloadable episodes of Sony-owned Days and Y&R, as well as Procter & Gamble-owned ATWT. The downloads, available at $1.99 per episode, presaged the iTunes Music Store's inclusion of TV shows by two and a half years. ABC started its first daytime drama “character blog,” Robin's Daily Dose, by General Hospital character Dr. Robin Scorpio, in October 2005, preceding even ABC's prime-time show blogs (such as those written by two of Grey's Anatomy’s peripheral characters). And despite the recent flurry of podcasts with actor interviews and behind-the-scenes scoop on offer from many prime-time programs, Guiding Light and As the World Turns are the only U.S. series of which I'm aware that make audio versions of their episodes available as free downloads (commercial-free and tightly edited, you can consume one hour-long episode in half that time). Those media scholars interested in convergence as an industrial and cultural practice would do well to consider the soaps' on-line presence.

Of course, these new media innovations alone are only part of what’s interesting about the soaps these days. More intriguing is the intersection of these industry-hosted on-line efforts and soap fans' already vibrant on-line culture. Fans' interpretations of the changes in the soaps both on-screen and on-line point out the mismatch between the television industry's conceptions of its audience and that audience's own interests and concerns. ABC thinks it is giving viewers “added value” content by offering them access to Robin's thoughts on her blog. Yet the fans see the blog as a poorly-written substitute for the screen time and meaty story they want Robin to have.

There is much to consider in the soaps' stories, as well. For example, General Hospital's tale of mobster Sonny Corinthos has been airing since 1993. Sonny's dark childhood, mental instability, violent outbursts, and marital woes not only bring to mind another tortured television mobster (albeit one somewhat lacking Sonny's chiseled features and disarming dimples), but also point to a rather startling change in soap storytelling in recent years. On General Hospital, Sonny is the main character; viewers are invited to see the world through his eyes, to sympathize with him as he protects his “business,” alternately seduces and rejects the show's supposed “heroines” (whose stories revolve wholly around him), and monopolizes screen time (hence the fans' anger at not seeing more of Robin Scorpio). Sonny Corinthos is certainly in keeping with a tradition of anti-heroes on soaps (begun on GH in the late 1970s with Luke Spencer). But today's GH, featuring a brooding mob boss and his “magic penis” (so dubbed by viewers for its ability to attract–and often impregnate–any woman character who comes near it), is telling a very different kind of story, with different appeals to viewers and different ideological stakes than the soap of the villainess and ideal mother theorized by Tania Modleski in the 1980s. This soap ain't your mother's soap, for better or worse. For me, that makes it all the more significant to ask what's happening on and around a television genre that still fills forty-two and a half hours of national broadcast network airtime per week, 52 weeks a year. Perhaps we should not ask why we should care but instead wonder why more of us do not.

¹John Consoli, “Sun Setting on Net's Key Daytime Demos,” Mediaweek, 14 November 2005, Mediaweek.com.
²Quoted in Mark Davidziak, “As the Bubble Bursts: With one busy life to live, is today's restless viewer willing to tune in tomorrow?” The Plain Dealer, 20 August 2002, E1.

Image Credits:

1. Passions

2. Days of Our Lives

3. Guiding Light

Please feel free to comment.

Hoping for some insight into my two-year-old son’s increasingly willful and wily ways, I recently attended a group discussion at his daycare center on dealing with the challenges of the toddler years. During this meeting, one woman tentatively raised the issue of television viewing, wondering if it was ok to let her toddler watch, given everything she has read about TV’s deleterious effects. Eager to alleviate this woman’s anxieties, the teacher-facilitators quickly validated her choice, assuring her that toddler TV watching was an effective way to occupy kids and to give parents a chance to get dressed, make dinner, or simply retain their sanity. Other parents echoed the teacher’s assurances and volunteered their own stories about the essential role of TV in their home lives. Shortly thereafter, however, one of the discussion leaders mentioned research claiming that young kids purportedly spend an average of 30 hours a week watching television. “Thirty hours!” gasped the previously TV-loving adults, seemingly horrified at the thought of children logging that many hours in front of the tube. In that instant, the love/hate relationship between Americans and television came to light, and the anxieties with which middle-class American adults conceive of children’s relationships to TV became especially clear. Television could have a valued purpose in one instant (albeit a necessarily practical purpose) but could be a dangerous corrupter the next.

As much as I might react to such a conversation with a degree of critical distance, I’m subject to many of the same anxieties about kids and TV. As a parent, and a feminist, and a television scholar, and a television lover, my own relationship to television, and to my son’s relationship to television, is perpetually fraught. Given who I am and what I do, I would have thought that my attitudes toward my child’s TV viewing would have been clearer, less conflicted, and less anxiety-prone than those of parents who are not part of the .0000000001% of the population who happen to study television for a living. No such luck. If anything, who I am and what I do have made my experiences thus far with parenting and television especially conflicted. Had I spoken up on the subject in the group discussion, I would likely have been more overtly contradictory in my attitudes than anyone else in the room.

I certainly know better than to buy into the prescriptive discourses in American culture about kids and television. I don’t believe that TV rots kids’ brains, makes them fat, or reduces their attention spans to the length of a Chuck E. Cheese commercial. I do believe that television and other popular cultural forms are part of the culture that binds children to each other, that children use television to shape their senses of themselves and others, and that children’s readings of television can occupy a broad ideological range. Thanks to the work of such scholars as Ellen Seiter, David Buckingham, and Heather Hendershot, I have a strong grasp of the place of television in children’s everyday lives and of the stakes of children’s relationship to television for adults. Yet I can’t escape a little voice popping into my head that questions whether I should really be letting my child watch TV. Does he watch too much? How much is too much? Is he surpassing the dreaded 30-hours-a-week mark?

On top of the anxieties I face as a middle-class parent, a mother in particular, in a culture excessively anxious about childrearing practices, are the concerns I bring to my son’s viewing as a TV scholar and a feminist. So far, he has been relatively unexposed to commercials, thanks to TiVo (see Jason Mittell’s recent piece), PBS, and Noggin, the Viacom-owned digital cable and satellite channel offering commercial-free programming for pre-schoolers. I’d like to believe that my son’s commercial-free world removes some of the medium’s chief, junior-capitalists-in-training ills. I can believe that, until I admit what I know to be true– that all U.S. television is shaped by consumer capitalism, commercials present or not; that keeping my kid blissfully unaware of McDonald’s can last about as long as his language and social development keep him from having substantive conversations with his peers; and that my child’s early allegiance to Noggin is just what the Viacom execs have planned. (Upon reading this, said execs would surely rub together their hands in glee: “Another one hooked! The little one can be transported effortlessly from Noggin to Nick Jr. to Nickelodeon to MTV to the CW to CBS !!! A life well-lived in the Viacom family!”)

Then there are the anxieties about what he is watching. I regularly wonder how logging time as a two-year-old in front of Little Bear (developed from the Maurice Sendak and Else Holmelund Minarik books) or Max & Ruby (from Rosemary Wells’ stories) or Teletubbies (originally produced for the BBC) is shaping my son’s senses of himself and others. I’m pretty sure that 3-year-old Max, the little brother bunny on Max & Ruby, is my child’s ego ideal. I’m fond of Max and his show myself, not least for its circa 1940s setting, complete with wooden radio console on which Max listens to his favorite program, a children’s adventure serial called Superbunny! My fondness for the show’s retro tone is matched by my pleasure in its attempts to upset conventional power relations. All of the Max & Ruby stories feature young Max mischievously following his own desire and interests, defying the more adult demands placed upon him by his 7-going-on-40-year-old-sister, Ruby. Ruby’s a bit bossy, but she means well. (Can you tell that I identify with her?) Although she tries to get Max to do things like take a bath and clean up his toys, she can be equally adamant that he help her set up a tea party for her dollies or not mess up her makeshift “beach” in the backyard sandbox. Ruby is the authority figure Max seeks to circumvent, but ultimately she’s a kid, too, and often the stories end with Max’s antics creating more fun than aggravation for his sister. I like the show–and I’m pretty sure my Max-worshipping child does, too–for its recognition of age-based power differentials and its celebration of youthful transgression. Toddlers are natural anarchists, and Max is a toddler-anarchist par excellence.

As with most television, however, Max & Ruby’s attention to subordinate interests comes bound up with reassertions of dominant ideologies, in this case in terms of gender roles. Although Ruby’s responsible attitude and Max’s devil-may-care response do fall into certain gender-specific traps, what is most troubling about the program’s representation of gender is that it is offered as the secondary–and maybe even underlying–cause for the fundamental difference between Max and Ruby. It is in Ruby’s gendered difference from Max, more so than her age difference, that she becomes the less appealing, less fun-loving, and less admirable character. For example, in one episode, Ruby and her friend Louise wait eagerly for an older, boy bunny, 8-year-old Roger, to come over to play with them. They dither about, trying to find the perfect activity to share with Roger, emphasizing all the while his age and the difficulty of finding a suitably mature way to make sure he has fun. When Roger arrives, he is visibly bored with Ruby and Louise. However, Roger’s attention is captured by Max, who is zipping around in his toy car, the same toy car he had been riding as Ruby and Louise prepared for Roger’s arrival, the same toy car that Ruby deemed too childish for Roger’s interest. Roger eagerly joins the 3-year-old and it quickly becomes clear that the difference that matters between Ruby, Louise, and Roger is not that of age, for Roger and Max, at ages 8 and 3, get along famously. Instead, the difference that matters here is gender. Roger “naturally” bonds with Max over Ruby and Louise because they share something the girls do not, their masculinity. In the end, Ruby and Louise are left feeling rejected while Roger and Max have all the fun. The boys’ play is made to seem preferable to the girls’ (even though their activities are not especially “girly”) and a gendered hierarchy is reinforced.

I don’t know that my own quite young son can read these messages of gender differentiation and hierarchization in the show. For now, I think he is more into the age-based identifications the program offers. But I also know that it is only a matter of time before our gender-differentiated culture sinks in for him. I don’t want to keep him from Max & Ruby, or from any television, for I have both scholarly and personal reasons to believe in the pleasures and rewards that television can provide. But within a culture of anxiety over childrearing in general, and children’s TV viewing in particular, and within a television system in which even sweet little bunnies can be a site of hegemonic struggle, I am pretty much fated to have a perpetually conflicted relationship to my child’s encounters with TV. As a scholar, television’s contradictory impulses make for a rich object of study; as a parent, they make for a worrying presence, one I both welcome and fear.

Image Credits:

1. Teletubbies

2. Max & Ruby

3. Little Bear

Please feel free to comment.