I must confess that I’ve never been much of a soapie fan.
As a ‘left-brained cerebral’ animal, I lean towards more sophisticated entertainment as I value fact over fiction.
That does not make me any better, or smarter, than those who watch Neighbours; just different. Soap fans tend to be right-brained limbic types; my very antithesis.
What confuses me is the ever-narrowing line between drama and soap. Is there an industry standard definition out there?
Two extreme examples may hold some clues, e.g.
Underbelly is obviously drama. Independent of any ‘comfort zone’ set, it lives on the street, inside cars, pubs and restaurants. From seedy strip clubs to luxury mansions and apartments, it employs broad-based dynamics and trying to second guess the next scene is futile unless you have already read Leadbelly.
Conversely, Home and Away is a soap. The shoot is mostly studio based with outdoors shots at Palm Beach (sorry, I meant Summer Bay). A single location reduces production costs, but surely that is not the defining thing? A minor sub-plot, that might warrant sixty seconds in a drama production, could stretch out for a week or longer on this show.
The UK based series, The Bill, demonstrates the blurring between soap and drama.
When The Bill first launched it was more of an ‘observational drama’ style. Fiction based on the reality that local cops see on every beat. It stayed with this format for a year or two before the writers decided it needed to be 'spiked up' to hold audience numbers. Before long, there was more crime and immorality within the police station than in the rest of Sun Hill shire. More fraternization and horizontal aerobics between the constabulary than in the local ‘knock shop’. Every second D.I. was on the make, or take. Their crimes ranged up to little short of international drug deals or murder incorporated. By comparison, the good burghers of Sun Hill came across as paragons of virtue.
Having serialized the show, and taken it towards pure soap, they then 'morphed' the series back to street crime. From drama to soap, and return, it has covered all bases.
The show started off as a ‘fly on the wall’ drama with storylines propelled by highly-visual criminal events. At its lowest ebb, it was driven by interpersonal relationships and conflicts between characters; a dialogue-driven format where street crime and outdoor scenes were side-lined.
This may highlight a defining point between drama and soap. Drama is visually portrayed, while soap is dialogue based.
Try this test for yourself. Tune in to Neighbours one night and turn down the brightness so the picture disappears (congratulations, you have just invented radio! ;-)
Listen to the sound track alone and see if you can’t follow the storyline. Next try doing the same with Underbelly and see how well you follow the story there.
The difference is remarkable. The soap scripts seem to anticipate that you are visually impaired and they paint a word picture for you. Without the visual imagery, Underbelly is severely hobbled; and so it should be. Soaps tend to be visually augmented versions of radio serials like Dad and Dave or Blue Hills.
If one picture is worth a thousand words, it seems a pity that the visual image does not always carry the story. I guess scriptwriters get paid by the page.
If you have ever watched Eastwood’s Dirty Harry character, you may have noticed his economical use of words. The longest line Harry ever delivered was:
I know what you're thinking — "Did he fire six shots or only five?" Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement, I've kinda lost track myself. But, being this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world and would blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: "Do I feel lucky?" Well, do ya, punk?
That twenty seconds is an interminable lifetime when the visual image is an upshot of a snarly-faced cop pointing a .44 magnum at a squirming scumbag.
Write exactly the same scene into a soap and Harry’s line would be expanded into a dissertation on the perils of criminal activity, a psychological analysis of the offender, a sociological treatise on how juveniles are let down by institutionalized structures. Then mum and dad would step forward to adopt him into their family and rear him into a highly valued member of society who is later rewarded with a record deal and invitations onto UK reality shows.
Far be it for me to indulge in superfluous circumlocutions or esoteric cogitations, but would the following not elegantly suffice as a defining statement?
Real drama uses imagery, visual or aural, to carry the load. Soaps substitute dialogue for content.
You can shoot an entire feature length movie without one word of script. Baraka for example. Stunning visual images and soundscapes without testing one scriptwriter’s grey matter. The film says more than a year of soap does. If you haven’t seen it, your education is incomplete. Silence can indeed be deafening.
A more current example is Warwick Thornton’s Sampson and Delilah. Very few words, but powerful imagery that hits your emotions like a bus.
The ABC productions, Fireflies and Something in the Air, were both launched as dramas. Is this true?
Certainly not by my definition. Both were intensely dialogue-driven and focused on interpersonal relationships and conflicts over matters so trivial they make Bill and Ben look like serious punters from The Sopranos. The plotlines of community radio or fire fighting were loose vehicles for binding together mindlessly boring characters with mundane dialogue.
I think Hunter S Thompson got it right when he wrote:
The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason.