How About an Old-Fashioned Soap?

Look, I know I’m still in my twenties and I shouldn’t be complaining about how things were ‘back in the old days’, but I’m still old enough to remember when soap operas were about real life. Mum used to LOVE Next Door People, back before their stories went way over the top, and I was at least in the same room while she was watching the daily episodes. It used to be about stuff like people opening new businesses, getting bullied at school, having relationship troubles, trying to decide whether to move to Canada for a new singing career…and sure, that’s unlikely, but not absolutely impossible.

I recently tuned into Week of Our Lives, just to see what I’d been missing. Apparently a lot, but…not in a good way. They have some crazy, wacked-out story with a guy who works with aluminium platforms and how he was killed in a freak forklift accident, and…something about buried treasure? It was impossible to determine from just the one episode. Nuts, I tell you. What do people in real life who make aluminium scaffolding actually think of this kind of thing?

No idea why anyone watches this stuff. It’s enough to make me want to pithc my very own soap opera, where things are just a tad more realistic. You know, go back to the OLD days, when soap operas were supposed to be about escaping from your regular life for half an hour by experiencing someone else’s life. I already know what characters I want to be in it as well. We’ll start off with Brendan and Fiona, a normal couple, with normal jobs, normal relationship ups and downs and normal friends. Brendan works in construction, Fiona works in a day surgery as a receptionist. The very first story has Fiona having to ask another girl nicely to not take her parking space, and Brendan trying to explain to his boss that the new guy set up the trestle ladders wrong.

Are people ready for such reality?

-Quinn