* * *

Time now for a new weekly feature, Creme De Lacroix, in which Marlena selects, from the past week's menu, a soupcon of savory soap opera at its best!

Creme De Lacroix 9/27: Diagnosis: Terminal! The Dying Diva!

On As the World Turns, Carly mourns after finding out she has a fatal lesion on her brain the day before ex-husband Jack marries Katie. Even though Carly and Jack have been married and unmarried before, and the brain lesion is another soap cliche, attention must be paid to one of the great soap divas performing the exquisite agony of full-out soap martyrdom. I particularly like that Maura West's wavy hair is perpetually crumpled and rumpled to reflect Carly's inner chaos.

In honor of O.J. coming back from the daytime "dead" this week, Marlena would like to say, baloney! The 1995 O.J. trial might have caused a slump in the ratings, but what really "killed" the soaps since the 90s had little overall to do with him. At the same time as the trial, the early to mid-90s, dozens of new cable channels were emerging and proving to be stiff competition for the three networks, whose long-running soaps had forever almost monopolized daytime air time. I believe that what did the soaps in was massive backstage panic among network execs and producers who were afraid that old-fashioned soaps couldn't compete in a new atmosphere and with the new production standards provided by the wide choice of new cable channels.

About the same time as the O.J. trial, I happened to be interviewing an astute soap executive producer who had been around since the 60s and knew the medium of television better than anyone. My first question: "Why are you casting only beautiful, inexperienced actors under 35 now, instead of the older, really talented actors like the ones you are famed for casting directly from Broadway?" The producer sat me down in front of the TV in his office, put a remote in my hand and instructed me to click around the available channels. The "dial," which used to have 12 stations, now had 237. "You see which stations you stop and pause at the longest?" he asked. "It's the channels that have the most attractive people. They are young. They have immediate sex appeal. That's who you stop and watch. That's how television is going to work from now on."

And so began the casting of pretty faces over real actors whose experience, talent and nuance had added immeasurably to the texture of soaps over the last decades. (Think Gerry Anthony and Judith Light in the 70s on One Life to Live as just two of the many examples.) A short attention span and a fast finger on the remote also ended the era of long, involved, multi-layered storylines, spurring plots full of action, flash, violence, and just about anything that shocked or seized the immediate attention of viewers. Remember Megan McTavish's male rape of lesbian Bianca on All My Children, or just about any story done "tabloid" style by Jim Reilly, such as the burying alive of Carly on Days of Our Lives or Sami being sent to the gas chamber to be electrocuted for "murder" on the same show? Don't forget countless attention grabbing "natural" disasters that storylines have been hung on: fires, tornados, air crashes, a character falling down a well for a month. The flashy violence-laden mob stories on General Hospital were repulsive but successful in keeping the show relatively well-rated among soaps.

Cut down, too, were the long, drawn-out, reassuring family scenes (beloved by an audience that longed for emotional connections of their own) in which older, wiser characters (like As The World Turns' Nancy Hughes or Days of Our Lives' Alice Horton) advised younger characters on what to do with their love lives. No room for introspection or an endlessly repeating plot in the new speeded-up medium! Soon, most actors over 50 faced the choice of a facelift or firing. Some who survived were exiled before our very eyes to the far corners of the screen (think Jackie Zeman, Bobbie rarely on GH).

This is only the beginning of Marlena's theses on why soaps declined in ratings in the 90s and 00s. Once the numbers started going down, the networks were so freaked they went for flashy quick fixes rather than honoring the loyalties of their long time audiences. If you notice, I stay away from cursing out individual head writers, the usual fan reason for the decline of the soaps we watch every day. These writers are just trying to cater to whatever the network's latest idea of what works on daytime in this new television era happens to be. The results have often been disastrous: Let's pause a moment and gag along with Marlena in remembrance of some of the worst, most stupidly "inventive" storylines, such as McTavish's noted above. I also didn't get into the crime that networks now prefer to please the tastes of teenage viewers rather than us older fans who have religiously watched soaps for decades.

In the Comments section below, tell Marlena why you think daytime has declined since 1995. In my opinion, it wasn't the fault of O.J. Simpson, who I bet never watched a daytime soap in his life.

3. Before Trevor could take a steam at his new hotel, Sonny and Carly's nanny, Leticia, was found murdered. Did you see the chilling scene in which Michael, Sonny and Carly's grade school age son, demanded Sonny get revenge for the crime? Sick, sick, sick, Mr. Guza! Not more than three weeks into the story, Sonny ordered Jason to do a hit on Trevor!

4. For their safety, Sonny and Carly sent their kids away to Sonny's private island, and Alexis secreted Kristina and Molly off to Nicholas' castle. Normally meek mother Elizabeth, determined to protect mob enforcer Jason's son Jake, was seen loading a gun.

5. And the most important clue ensuring a big, big war: Sam whipped out a bikini and celebrated her new terrace hot tub over at her place. Now, Sam always sports cleavage or exposes some other part of her anatomy in those cheesy keyhole hot tops she and Carly tastelessly wear. But showing Kelly Monaco in a bikini? In a hot tub? Monaco is a former Playboy Playmate! Of course, in the story she did this to seduce Lucky, but it's not hard to pick up GH's message that luscious Sam could be this mob war's atom bomb. Jerry Jacks (whose side he is on?) sure got an eyeful when he ordered her to seduce Trevor.

6. This week ABC announced that Bruce Weitz will come to town next month as Anthony Zacchara. Weitz won an Emmy for playing Belker, a police detective who barked at people on Hill Street Blues. Like Stephen Macht, he is 60ish and has a character actor's face. Isn't this strange? Most soap villains these days look like matinee idols and are no older than 45. Best example: Paul Satterfield, who played villain Spencer Truman on One Life to Live years after he played Paul Hornsby on GH. So why did GH hire more than middle-aged craggy-faced Weitz and Macht? Not just because Tracy could use age appropriate dates! I conjecture that these two excellent actors, expert at portraying fear and terror, are going to helm a super-violent, end of the world mob war, which by my calculations should flare up by November sweeps, which is, wow, only six weeks away! Does this cataclysmic war reek of sweeps or not? Aha! These days soaps practically have to top themselves to maintain ratings. Remember the very successful Metro Court terrorist siege staged for a sweeps earlier this year.

As for me, I'm still hoping Genie Francis will come back for November sweeps as she did last year. As Laura, she brings back romance, tenderness and mother love to GH. But all signs point towards mayhem, with plenty of guns, rampant criminality and lots of violence this November instead. It's General Hospital! You're still watching, aren't you?

So, I'm left with questions. Whose idea was this story originally? The show's interim writers after McTavish or the show's brand new writers, James Harmon Brown and Barbara Esensten? I am not a fan of the latter duo. Remember the vampire stories on Port Charles? And the Reva clone story on Guiding Light, in my judgment the worst story in daytime history? It disturbs me greatly that in a little more than a decade of very mediocre headwriting on various soaps (PC, Loving, The City, GL) and staff writing on others, these sometime shlockmeisters have made it up the ladder to the most prestigious job of daytime writing, AMC. This is the house the great intelligent and humanistic writer Agnes Nixon built!

Although I have no inside info as to Agnes' current involvement in the soap (she's 80, but reportedly still comes to writers' meetings), I detect a note of her influence in this story. From the many interviews I did with her over the years, I know that motherhood has been always been central to her thinking about her show. The Spike/Ian story is really a story about motherhood and how a woman reacts with endless guts and love when her children are threatened. Is this very stylized story about deafness and premature birth only a gimmick plot or will it ultimately dig deeper and thus hit home with serious emotional power and win Emmys just as so many of Agnes' prestigious social issue stories did? (Ground-breaking stories on child prostitution, wife-beating, AIDS, etc.) There's a lot more of this story to go. If an Emmy-worthy success is indeed theirs, then Brown and Esensten will have pulled off the biggest image change since Ronald Reagan went from B-list actor to respected President of the United States.

And then there's the acting in the story to consider. Thorsten Kaye (Zach) finally has an AMC plot that doesn't seem too silly for his top-notch theater-trained talents and thus visibly bores him. The character of mother Kendall, whose life is being ripped apart by having two baby sons in crisis at the same time, is an actor's dream, real Emmy fodder. Alicia Minshew has grown exponentionally in the role of Kendall and is doing a very good job in this difficult story. But can I respectfully say this? To reach the level of tear-your-heart-out pathos this story is striving for, one needs the kind of actress capable of, well, tearing your heart out. The late Susan Hayward? A very young Judith Chapman? Judith Light in her One Life to Live days? Oh yes, I'd love see Light in this story, and so would you!

Many years later, OLTL stupidly broke up the enormously popular Bo and Nora. Why remains one of soaps' lingering mysteries. But the fact is that some time after Bo became a police chief, Woods' legendary sexy charm began to do a slow fade. Why was this allowed to happen? Another sad mystery.

So I'm hoping the breakdown Bo had after Asa's death will open whatever gate has been keeping that the old Woodsy sweetness and charm pent up for so long. Old fashion masculine charm may be a quaint 20th century concept, but truthfully it's been key to One Life to Live's ability to gallop along for 39 years and counting.

Caitlin Van Zandt and Orlagh Cassidy (Ashlee Wolfe and her mother, Doris, Guiding Light). Along with my reader Patrick who has championed them repeatedly, I love this alternately funny and heart-tugging mother-daughter duo. Thankfully, they were given more airtime than usual this month. In such a dysfunctional family dynamic, I can really relate to a story in which the mother really hates her daughter, and that twisted love-hate thing gives the daughter all kinds of insecurities. Ashlee is very overweight and vulnerable, and "Mommie Dearest" Doris knows it and goes for the kill: One day this week, for instance, Doris happily taunted Ashlee that her date was standing her up. Doris and Ashlee stand the usual supportive mother-daughter soap relationship (think the late Mona and Erica on All My Children) on its head. Van Zandt and Cassidy make Ashlee and Doris now the most compelling characters on GL.

Melissa Claire Egan (Annie Lavery, All My Children). I usually hate and despise sweet housewife Leave It to Beaver type characters on soap operas. And hero Ryan Lavery has long been my least favorite soap character. As weakly played by Cameron Mathison, Ryan is such a phony baloney! Then who ever would have predicted that the actress cast as Ryan's equally sugary new wife, Annie, would turn out to be genuine and totally believable. I'm talking about Melissa Claire Egan who is one of the only winning and true notes in the currently Spike-is-deaf melodrama (Annie is Spike's step-mother) that is playing out in a totally over the top manner on AMC right now. In her real sweetness and sincerity, Egan reminds me of the character of Tara (played by Karen Lynn Gorney) in the opening days of AMC. If only the already beautiful Ms. Egan didn't Botox her lips so much!

Jake Silbermann and Van Hansis (Noah Mayer and Luke Snyder, As the World Turns). Thursday my friend Chris reminded me sixteen times that Friday's episode of ATWT would feature the first-ever male-male gay kiss in daytime history. Participating in this historic event are the very young characters of Luke and Noah. The build of this romance has been written in a very low-key, realistic way (including Noah's confused romance with Maddie). What really makes it work for me is how natural the actors playing these two characters are. No self-consciousness here! (Does anyone remember a 1990 movie named Longtime Companion in which Patrick Cassidy plays Howard, a soap opera actor who very awkwardly participates in the first male-male kiss in "soap history"?) I know from Chris' enthusiasm that Luke and Noah's relationship has been long awaited by the gay male soap audience, which has been looking for a natural, lifelike representation of a long term gay romance on the soap screen for decades. There have been several false storyline starts on various shows before this. So bravo to ATWT, particularly headwriter Jean Passanante, for finally doing this story right.

Marianne Muellerleile and Kathleen Noone (Norma and Edna, Passions). These two former (and totally whacko) characters from Passions' past have been back visiting their friend Tabitha the last couple of weeks. They are now a lesbian couple! Who knew? In episodes this week, Norma, Edna, Tabitha and Endora, all wearing Carmen Miranda costumes, sashayed around the living room, dancing to calypso and ducking under a limbo stick. I almost died laughing watching this scene yesterday. It was the most fun I've had all this soap summer. Viva Passions, always the most delightful sexually confused soap in daytime history!

Ban cat fights! Stop soap opera violence between women! This is a cause I pioneered in a famous column back in 1997 (called of course, "Ban Catfights") after Jenna had a slap-down with another Guiding Light female character no one I know can remember now. I feel even more strongly about banning catfights now, as soaps and the women on them continue to lose their dignity in so many ways. In real life, cat fights are disgusting, and it's unacceptable for women to attack other women physically. In this nasty world, women should at least have respect for one another.

This is what soaps, essentially a women's medium, should be teaching. Did we learn nothing from the Women's Movement? Or from our Women's Studies classes? Do you want your daughters to see Carly and Sam on TV and think that getting into bloody girlfights in the halls of high school is a cool thing to do? I've seen them.

Now I know there are those out there who feel that catfights are campy (a la Krystal and Alexis on Dynasty) and part of the soap opera form. Marlena De Lacroix is the campiest girl in the world, but has never enjoyed women hitting other women. Krystal and Alexis are now part of long ago soap history, but we I have a feeling we are going to have to live with the Punch and Judy of Port Charles, Carly and Sam, for a long, long time. Have you noticed that of late, Carly has graduated from being a big ol' bitch to a full-out rage-aholic? She screams at everyone, every day! Meds needed!

Of course, raising the female violence quotient on daytime must have to do with what most ratings-hungry soaps are trying to do right now: raise the dramatic stakes. Can't they find other ways? Or at least show in some significant way that violence between women is wrong? At least, when Big Stephanie outrageously threw Jackie over a living room balcony last fall on The Bold and Beautiful, there were consequences: the Forresters lost their billion-dollar fashion family company in a legal settlement to Jackie and her son Nick Morrone. (And today, stubborn Steph still cries, "It was an accident!")

General Hospital: Night Shift isn't getting any better. I feel so betrayed! After all the SoapNeT and ABC Daytime hype, the show turns out to be a lightweight, another episode of GH with lofty but unfulfilled pretensions. What happened to the "primetime" E.R. style production techniques we saw in episode one, for example? They were virtually gone by last night's episode three!

Last night's NS episode was a new low in my long soap-watching career: an ENTIRE hour devoted to nothing but Jason worship. Janitor Jason, teary-eyed, baby-sat his secret son Jake, while Mama Nurse Liar (Elizabeth!) also worked the Night Shift at the hospital. Almost every other character in the hospital kissed Jason's ring and told him what a superb, wonderful father he would make. (Only "magical" Toussaint figured out the kid really was sired by Jason.) The cutest baby actor to be found in Los Angeles played Jake, and he outacted Steve Burton in every single scene. I kid you not!

I wasn't mad it was Vincent; I had suspected all along he was the freak because of his idiosyncratic breathing/wheezing patterns. But I was sure mad that I had to experience The Big Reveal in my supermarket instead of in an exciting theatrical denouement on Passions itself, on my TV. I had tuned in to Passions anxiously every day for months waiting for this moment!

I hate spoilers! They spoil soaps! They are totally counter-intuitive to the whole modus operandi of soap opera, whose scenes, episodes and storylines are purposely written every day with suspense in the form of cliffhangers to get you to tune in tomorrow. Why should I tune in tomorrow if a magazine, the Internet or my blabby best soap buddy who reads soap sites 24 hours a day has already told me what's going to happen?

Of course soap spoilers have been around forever (about 25 years) and a lot of you younger readers can't conceive of watching soaps without them, or at least without teasers, the milder form of spoilers that give only half a soaps future storyline in away instead of all of it.

But I remember a time before spoilers, when you could eagerly watch a splendid murder mystery on Edge of Night (as scripted by the great Henry Sleasar) or All My Children (as scripted by the venerable Agnes Nixon) or even Guiding Light (as scripted by the incomparable Doug Marland) knowing that the payoff would be a beautifully written denouement episode that you'd think about for days afterward. Now all you get is the Big Reveal in a supermarket while you are paying for broccoli, or in the middle of the night from the Internet when you have gotten up to take a slug of Pepto Bismol.

I was a young girl editor in the soap mag business when spoilers started, so let me tell you how it all began. Soap operas were very healthy in the late 70s and early 80s, but network publicists decided they needed what they never had outside of soap magazines: mainstream publicity. So they gave carefully worded spoilers to newspaper columnists and later to soap magazines. Readers loved them and it was a bonanza for the whole soap press. A friend of mine who worked at the networks, but who really loved and understood the true nature of soaps, whispered to me at the time, "Marlena, these executives do not even realize they are giving away the store!" And was he prescient! I can't help but think spoilers are one of the main reasons soaps have suffered such a decline in ratings over the last twenty years.

I remember asking a soap head writer at the time what he thought of spoilers and he actually growled at me like a grizzly bear. You'd growl too! The secret conclusions of all his carefully planned and written stories were being read out to editors by network secretaries!

All these years later, especially with the Internet now the dominant information medium, spoilers are a fact of life and sadly not only in the soap world. Why do you think J.K. Rowling is so hysterical this week because copies of the final Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows have been given out early, leaking the final secrets of Pottersville? Even with her imagination, she never could have invented a Big Reveal as bizarre as Julian and Eve's long lost son Vincent being the half-man, half woman who has been roaming Harmony all these months behind a multi-colored Phantom of the Opera mask.

Well, here we are in 2007 and Jill finally has her primetime shot in General Hospital: Night Shift. It airs on SoapNet once a week late at night. As a spin-off of GH, Jill's new Night Shift is more E.R. than cop show. Even so, in the opening fifteen minutes of the first episode, the GH we know literally comes to life with a much faster pace, swooping camera angles, real outdoor locales and action, action, action.

On the staid daytime show, we hardly ever see anything medical going on. Here, GH's hospital E.R. actually jumps much like a real one would, with all kinds of cranky patients impatiently waiting for care. In one seat a man with a cut bloody hand screams at a clerk trying to get his insurance data. In another a pregnant woman actually looks like she's in pain. In yet another is a surly psycho skinhead Iraq war vet. There's even a grinning granny doing needlepoint through it all. And suddenly there's a big explosion in an adjoining ambulance bay. So much movement on screen, and it all looks great!

So right away we see Jill's legendary production booth producing skills (much in evidence in shows like Santa Barbara and Guiding Light and in eclipse on shows like One Life to Live and AW) shining again. As if finally bursting out of a much frayed bustier, the show goes on to flaunt other goodies the daytime show can't do: Maxie hanging from a pair of handcuffs, being caught having sex in a hospital closet with Coop, caught at the same time with his pants down, and Robin and Patrick opening the show by having sex in the hospital shower. Two different couples having sex in the hospital on the same night! Marlena is shocked, shocked (tacky a go-go)! This even one-ups the famous season finale on Grey's Anatomy in which just one couple had sex on the job.

Sadly, however, the excitement of the opening promptly dies when the show makes the mistake of remembering it is essentially a soap opera. Instead of concentrating on introducing us to all the new show's characters right away, which the premiere episode of any TV show ought to do, the premiere nearly asphyxiates the audience with a story that canonizes crossover character Jason Morgan, looking as bulked up as Lou Ferrigno's Incredible Hunk. On regular GH, Morgan is always the hero, no matter how many people he has murdered! In the new show, he brings Spinelli to the E.R. after The Jackal shot himself in the foot. (That's supposed to be funny, I guess.)

While waiting for a doctor, Jason finds time to nearly save a woman who was blown up in the ambulance explosion, and later selflessly takes the legal rap for Spinelli shooting himself with his gun. Why, Lord, why, do we GH viewers have to see more of Jason, the scummy gangster saint, even on the spin-off?

The screen time would better spent telling us more about the three new student nurses, who I assume will be the female leads of the show: Leyla, Amanda and Jolene. They aren't on screen long enough in Episode One. So briefly, in fact, that I still don't know for sure who is who. One of them checks out Patrick, and Spinelli is literally knocked out with love at first sight by another. Watch this scene closely. Bradford Anderson enacts being struck by love as dramatically and as endearingly as a silent screen star. Whatever happened to his "eternal" love for Blonde One (Lulu)?

I'm especially intrigued by Dr. Leo Julian (Dominic Raines), who in his scrubs cap and bushy black hair looks a little bit like Chico Marx. Is he a clown, or is he really sexy?

But most interesting of the new players is Billy Dee Williams as the mysterious hospital janitor Toussaint In two minutes on the screen, Williams showed all the coolness and sex appeal he became a legend for in such movies decades ago as Lady Sings the Blues and Mahogany. As played by the super cool Williams, it's not hard to believe Toussaint has a bit of magic in him. Did you see him successfully push the elevator buttons when no one else could?

I hate to say this, but the premiere episode of Night Shift really bogged down for me whenever GH crossover characters Patrick and Robin starting hassling, as they always do, about their relationship. Although I love this pair of wonderful actors and Scrubs characters madly, on the daytime show I never bought nor was interested in any of their endless arguments. He loves her, she loves him, they are a perfect match. So why didn't Robin bag him, marry him and take him off to the suburbs a year ago? Because they are a soap opera couple? Instant wedding bells are what would have happened in real life! Yet their "problems" are repeated ad nauseum during this first episode. Patrick is a flirt and Robin is HIV-positive. Okay, that is a problem. Night Shift is wisely introducing a pregnant HIV-positive mother C.C. (Another World's ever gorgeous Alla Korot) for Robin to get to know. That's a nice plot conflict. But as much as we all love Patrick and Robin as lovers indelibly meant for each other, are they really enough to hang a whole spin-off on? I don't know. One of the student nurses must figure in here somehow.

Night Shift left me cold by the end of its hour (perhaps it should have started like soaps years ago did as a half hour show). But I'll tune in again next week even if watching two hours of GH in the same day is a big commitment. Night Shift at times may look dazzlingly like it's primetime drama, but so far it feels like just another flawed daytime soap opera.