So, I guess in conclusion I'm just trying to make the point that both soap opera writing and its cousin, professional wrestling writing, were better in the past. Better because of the simplicity of the wrestling and the complexity of the soap.
Nowadays wrestling has become too complicated. Arguments have been made that it's been for men only, but I have to wonder, what's wrong with that since women have had soap operas catering to them over the years? I'm in agreement that they probably needed to go to a family friendly format as they did in the 80's, but they've gotten a ways away from that now as well. The storylines involve corporate corruption, love affairs and good guys that are a little too realistically flawed as human beings. Compare that to the old days when the stories were quite simply good guy versus bad guy. It didn't need to be anything more than that.
Even when they added more flamboyant characters like Hulk Hogan and Sting to appeal to young kids in a good and healthy way, it was still just good guys being good and honorable and noble and bad guys being dirty cheaters who were mean to the good guys. And sometimes the bad guys won, which made it all the more sweet when the good guys would win. It was gladiators. It was warriors. It was saving the damsel in distress when a female valet was present. There's nothing wrong with these formulas which my husband's company try to stick to here and now and the biggest problem today is that the wrestling on television has no real competition anymore. The WWE took over WCW and have their hand in every other public promotion so that creative writing process is stifled and stagnant.
With soap operas the storylines have become too fast without as much detail work involved. Regarding the Aztec Treasure storyline again, it lasted for a year with many twists and turns. It began with a woman's family heirloom and ended up on a tram ride to Canada where the principle bad guy thought he killed a man that used to be his best friend by pushing him off the tram, and ended up getting arrested by him later as he took off a disguise to reveal he was still alive. Along the way and intertwined there was a wedding party on a train, a woman faking a scar as her own personal penance for the way she treated the man that was thought dead in the past, the burgeoning romance of the next great super couple after Luke and Laura as this adventure drew them together, the reuniting of three spies that used to work together for the same agency but now were on opposite sides of the law. And it was all carefully tied together with small details. There wasn't much time for the usual drama of surprise pregnancies and jealous spouses... they left those to the secondary stories for the year.
I'd say the way in which these two mediums meet is in the moving of the championship titles compared to the moving of the romances in soap operas. In the very old days Wrestlers used to hold a belt for more than a year steadily. The change in moving the belts around from wrestler to wrestler comes with the changing of the times and the shortening attention spans of fans as noted yesterday.
But still, there was a time in the recent past, like the 80's, when a wrestler could hold a belt for up to a year, perhaps losing it for a brief time to stir up some tension or an ongoing feud with one other wrestler in which case the title may change twice within the year from one to the other and back again. Now a title changes nearly at every monthly pay-per-view. The person who is vying for it doesn't have long to wait or too many opponents to face from the time he decides he wants the title to the time he gets it. And there's more drama and long backstage dialogue involved than there is match work as well.
Likewise the romances. Back in the day marriages lasted longer and this was taken into account. Specifically I'm recounting the story of a super couple, not from their marriage because that was a little before I started watching. They were happily married. They had issues that would make them fight, but they didn't divorce in order to remarry later. An ex wife of the husband was introduced. You got to see their love in flashbacks so that even though it made things difficult for the super couple, there wasn't any actual cheating. The wife of the super couple is written off the show as moving to another country to wait for the husband to join her and still the husband and ex don't get together even after it's revealed that they have a child. They just stay friends and have many adventures. It takes 5 years and the death (never definite in soaps though *wink*) of the wife and the divorce of the ex from the guy she married in the meantime before these two got together officially. Nowadays a couple gets together over the course of 3 months maybe and they're not even married a month before an ex shows up, sometimes with child in-tow, and because the temptations are too great divorce is imminent so we can move the couple onto other people in other fast romantic storylines.
What baffles me more than anything is that reality shows are considered better than either soaps or wrestling nowadays... as if that staged drama is more realistic even though it's so immature and simplistic that it's literally painful to watch. Good creative writing is something I value dearly and I've seen it horribly eroded over the last 30 years. This has just been on my mind this week.
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