Soap Opera Comeback
By ice rivers
- 428 reads
Since the day my father took me to ringside seats to watch a professional wrestling match, I've always loved wrestling. It brings back wonderful memories of my father.
Wrestling has become sports entertainment. It's clear to everybody that the results of the match are detemined before the match begins which apparently takes it out of the realm of sports.
Fine with me, I'm still entertained.
Recently I heard someone describe wrestling as "athletic soap opera." MMMkkkaaayyy. That seems fair.
After watching WWE one night, I decided to check out a non-athletic soap opera. Once upon a time, daytime network teevee was full of ongoing dramas that were watched by housewives in the morning when they were taking a break from their housework.
As time went on and more women joined the "work force", viewership in soap operas declined procipitously, only a few remain on the daytime schedule. Now that I am a person who has dropped out of the work force, I decided toi check in on a soap opera and see what's goin' on these days.Maybe I could get hooked on something else.
I had two to choose from The Young and the Restless or The Bold and ther Beautiful. I flipped a coin and started watching The Bold and the Beautiful.
When I came into the show, an older gentleman who apparently is the patriarch of a rich family was being pressured by his much younger wife to renew their wedding vows. The much younger wife had been carrying on an affair with one of the lawyers working for the older gentleman. She realized the error in her ways and wanted to recommit to her marriage. The word, however, had gotten out about her infidelity and her rivals within the family, including the older man's son and his wife who had once been married to the older man ,decided to spill the beans on the younger woman's affair during the wedding vow renewal which caused a split between the older man and the younger woman and drove the younger woma into the arms of her previous lover the lawyer who became in charge of drawing jup the divorce papers between the older man and the younger woman with whom the lawyer was carrying on a torrid affai.
Wow
That's quite a paragraph.
Meanwhile the grand daughter of the older man has given birth to a baby. Her husbandis a doctor and a wonderful man. They decide to get married but the Doctor is hesitant about introducing his family into the family of the rich patrairch because the doctor is adopted and doesn't know his real parents. He admits to having foster parents who come to the wedding. They are very proud of their son. The wedding cermeony begins when the actual but uninvited birth mother of the doctor shows up. The birth mother turns out to be a woman who was once married to the patriarch and murdered the mother of the gril getting married to the doctor. This character has not been in the show for seven years. She confesses to the doctor that she is his mother. She is also proud of her son who she gave up for adoption and just wanted to see him and hold her grandson. This goes over like a led zeppelin with the other folks at the wedding and she is tossed out on her ass and is forbidden from ever coming back. The doctor's wife is particularly insistent about this because her husband's birth mother had shot HER mother who was also an ex-wife of the older gentleman.
The Doctor faces a dilemma because he has to recognize his real mother yet reject her totally because of the animosity that his new wife hold for his birth mother. The birth mother confronts the man who adopted and raised the Doctor. It turns out that she had been impregnated with the doctor while having an illicit afair with the man who is the Doctor's father. She uses this information as leverage to manipulate her way into the Doctor's house to hold her grandchild and at that exact moment the Doctor's wife walks in, catches the forbidden woman holding her son and slaps the shit out of the doctor's mother which leads the mother to have a fake heart attack.
Wheew.
Meanwhile the patriarch decides it's his fault that his much younger wife strayed in the first place because he had not been paying enough attention to her. If he had paid more attention she wouldn't have strayed. He reveals that the reason he was less attentive was because he was suffering from erectile dysfunction. It was his inability to satisfy the much younger woman that led her to the arms of the lawyer. He tekes the blame and tears up the divorce papers and he and she are back together. He still has erectile dysfunction which he confesses to the younger woman but comes up with a solution. He okays/encourages the physical relationship between his much younger wife and the lawyer. One night he sends the wife over to the lawyers house with a message...."Enjoy the night". The younger woman and the lawyer do just that and she returns to the older patriarch who inquires how things went. The much younger woman admitted that things went well which seems to please the older patriarch who doesn't want to deprive his wife of her passion simply because he is unable to fulfill it and then.......
And then, I realized that I didn't like any of the characters and I didn't want to know how this particular dilemma was going to work out.
I haven't watched it since.
I did watch wrestling last night or should I say fast forwarded it before I got to the real drama of the money I had wagered on the Monday night Football game.
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Comments
wrestling is a soap opera,
wrestling is a soap opera, but there's soap operas and soap operas.
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There are real life soap
There are real life soap operas going on around us all the time but we forget to tune into them. I'm an immigrant living in a foreign country so I have joined a couple of the social media groups for immigrants here. The ranting and raving and bickering and arguing that goes on between them is incredible. I stay out of it. Similarly, going to a café and eavesdropping on other customers there or just studying their body language conjures up all sorts of story lines. Again, I don't get involved. I've tried watching the soap operas on television but they're never as interesting ... far too contrived!
I enjoyed reading your work. I'm going out for a coffee now. Who knows, it might give an idea for a story or poem of my own.
Good on you.
Turlough
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