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So, Anna Devane is alive and living on All My Children. If ABC executives
assume this old Anna/GH fan is happy about this development, they could
not be more wrong. I was unhappy with the big tease we poor GH fans got
when Finola first signed on at AMC: "Is she Anna or is she ain't? Watch
and see." Eventually, after suffering through a rather silly story involving amnesia,
secret agents, and twins, we learned that the character we had known as Alex Devane
was not Anna, as it appeared she might be, but the secret twin Anna never
knew she had, who had been trained earlier in her life to impersonate Anna. Confused?
Imagine the poor AMCers who never watched GH. They had to put up
with all that claptrap without the potential payoff of learning more about a beloved
GH character, which arguably could make the story tolerable for hard-core
Anna fans.
I did not want Alex to turn out to be Anna. I wanted Anna to stay dead,
so that if she ever did return from the dead (and let's face it, we're
talking GH, where nobody ever stays dead permanently, except maybe Lily
Corinthos), she could return in the GH universe, to the town and the characters
with whom she was associated and with whom she belonged. So I was relieved when
the "mystery" of Alex's identity was revealed and Anna remained, to all appearances,
safely dead.
And then Finola Hughes went on maternity leave, and AMC needed a story
to explain her character's absence and eventual return. They decided upon resurrecting
Anna, and having her twin Alex find her. Yuck. Now the AMC fans who never
watched GH must suffer yet again through a sea of references to the GH
past. And GHers who have no interest in AMC must decide if they
want to invest a few hours a week in watching another soap in order to find out
about a character they once watched on GH. That is cruel to fans of both
shows, and not, as ABC seems to think it is, a good way to convince soap
fans to add another program to their viewing schedule. (Oddly, while they hyped
the Anna connection first time around, this time, when Anna really was
returning, they did not mount an ad campaign during GH to lure viewers.)
Try as they might, ABC cannot convince me that intertwining all four of their
soaps through shared characters is a good idea. Ironically, I watch all four soaps,
albeit (with the exception of GH) only sporadically. Still, I do not
like the notion that Pine Valley, Port Charles, and Llanview all exist in the
same parallel universe. I remain convinced that when things are running smoothly,
each soap has its own atmosphere and that executives tamper with that atmosphere
at their peril. Each soap has a unique style, and trying to treat them as if they
were interchangeable and therefore indistinguishable is an insult to the shows
and to their fans.
For me, transplanted characters are a stunt, like when Eleanor Frutt defends
a teacher on "Boston Public" or Bobby McDonald meets Ally McBeal. I am not particularly
fond of those prime-time stunts, but they are thankfully rare events and I can
overlook them, as they do not permanently impact the shows I love to watch. It
is the nature of soaps, however, that the crossovers we are suffering through
on ABC's afternoon shows do alter the shows involved. Skye Chandler is
suddenly not Adam Chandler's biological daughter, but secretly adopted. And this
story is not playing out on AMC, but on One Live to Live, with Adam
slipping away from the police on AMC to visit his distraught child and
then returning to his home base, leaving Skye and Rae to work things out on OLTL
without him. Changing the relationship between Adam Chandler and one of his children
changes the AMC universe, and if it were played out on AMC, where
we could see all the nuances of the family dynamics involved, that might work.
On OLTL, however, we get half a story--we see Skye's reaction, we watch
her absorb the news and react to her newly discovered birth mother. We do not
see, on a sustained basis, her father's side of the story. And OLTL fans
who never watched AMC can not possible understand all the implications
of this character learning that her parents were not who she believed them to
be. Fans are not treated to an expanded universe; they are cheated of a complete
and textured story. That is a real shame, since it is the long expanses of time
that soaps have the luxury to use in telling their stories that lends them much
of their unique appeal.
I will not suddenly start watching AMC religiously because Anna Devane
is back from the dead. I will continue to peek in once or twice a week. If ABC
cannot lure me, a long-time Anna fan, to watch more episodes of a show I already
sample by resurrecting her on AMC, who do they think this move will benefit?
I watched an episode this week in which Anna had snatches of memories of people
from her past (she, of course, has amnesia). Suddenly we saw quick shots of Robert
(the divine Tristan Rogers in his prime, yum yum), Robin (when Kim McCullough
was young and adorable), and the dastardly Faison (when Faison was a villain to
be reckoned with). It was amusing for me to see these old familiar faces, but
what would an AMC viewer who never watched GH years ago think of
that scene? There was no indication of who these people were to Anna, no way to
let the audience know why these particular faces swam before Anna's confused eyes.
So ABC continues to flog this tired "cross-pollinating soaps" stunt, apparently
convinced it is a concept that will entice viewers to expand their soap-watching
horizons. For this viewer, at least, it is not working. It only reminds me that
the executives who push such ideas have no clear idea of what actually does inspire
strong viewer loyalty. I have ranted about this in the past, when Rae Cummings
was soap-hopping and we reflected on past efforts to coordinate things between
soaps. Sadly, I fear I will have reason to rant about it for years to come.
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