692. Soap Opera Nostalgia with Amye Archer from Little Miss Recap

Sarah Wendell: Do I have an update to my FICE campaign? Why yes, yes, I do. If you are just tuning in, hi. Welcome. I’ve been running a campaign that I’ve been calling the FICE campaign with a very simple goal: I would like to replace the revenue from the dynamic insertion ads – the ones that you hear prior and after a podcast episode, usually for larger retailers? – with Patreon pledges. These ads are not in my control, despite my request to block entire categories several times, and recently an ad for ICE ran before my show. No, thank you. My goal is very simple: if I can increase Patreon pledges by two hundred dollars a month, I can turn off all of the ads for everyone going forward.

So, you know, instead of joining a Patreon for ad-free episodes, you can join the Patreon to turn off the dynamic ads for everyone who listens. Your generosity matters profoundly, and we are, as of Monday, November 10, six dollars from the goal. Thank you.

If you have been thinking of joining the Patreon, may I please invite you to hop in; the water is wonderful. Patreon pledges, in addition to eliminating the dynamic ads, cover hosting, distribution, paying for transcripts, and keeping me going week after week. It’s basically like buying me one nice cocktail a month, and for those who have, thank you. It was delicious. Pledges come with a lovely bouquet of benefits, too: bonus extended episodes, a truly lovely Discord community, full PDF scans of issues of Romantic Times, monthly crafty Zoomy hangouts, and you get to be a guest on the Holiday Wishes episodes, which I’m recording right now, and I’m having a ball.

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Thank you, thank you, thank you for your pledges.

[music]

Sarah: Hello, and welcome to episode number 692 of Smart Podcast, Trashy Books. I’m Sarah Wendell. My guest today is Amye Archer from the podcast Little Miss Recap. Amye was recently a guest on a paywalled episode of Fixing Famous People, a podcast I enjoy, talking about soap operas, and I was entranced. Amye is a fan of soaps going way back, and I was very eager to have her on as a guest to talk about soap operas, the romances within soap operas, and some of the overlap between soap fans and romance readers. We’re going to talk about time travel, various sides of the tracks, story history, alternate realities, and then, after we talk about the matrilineal cultural inheritance of soap operas and romance, we have a challenge. Amye brought some of her most memorably unhinged storylines from soaps, and I have brought some of my most memorably unhinged storylines from romance, so we’re going to swap.

Please note that in this section we mention sexual assault, faked deaths, transphobic language, and quicksand. And during the recommendations Amye mentions her memoir, which is about weight loss and addiction, so we discuss anti-fat bias and shame.

This is also a long episode, so we’re going to keep you company. Seems like a good time of year for that.

As always, I will have links to all of the books that we talk about, as well as where you can find Amye Archer. You are going to love her podcasts.

I have two compliments this week, which is delightful.

To Caryn: There are fourteen different people you know right now who are raising young people, who hope that that young person grows up to be just like you: thoughtful, funny, and a pro at carbohydrates.

And to Rosalinda: Squirrels are very busy right now, but they’re also gossiping about you, how fabulous you look, how kind you are, and how seeing you makes their day better, which is kind of funny because your friends are all saying the same thing.

If you would like a compliment of your very own, head to patreon.com/SmartBitches.

Support for this episode comes from Skims, who have new pajamas, and they’re incredible. I received a soft lounge sleep set from Skims, and I thought okay, pajamas! I have some; here are more. Ha! No, no, no, I was very wrong. These are so great! I am angry at how great these pajamas are. The fabric is smooth and soft and very supple, and this is very important: it’s not too thin or too thick. You know how some pajama fabric is so light a slight chill just goes right through it? Ho-ho, not with these! The lounge set is just the right level of cozy. I have already thought of a few people who I know would love these. Gifting is in the bag this year. The top – and this is a big deal to me – has cuffs, and the cuffs stay up when I push up my sleeves. I know this sounds like a very small matter, but I cook a lot on the weekends, which is also when I want to spend the day in my pajamas, and having my sleeves stay up was extremely exciting for me. I’ve joked a few times that my aesthetic is pajamas, but it looks like I tried? The soft lounge sleep set from Skims is pajamas, and I look fabulous. I am now planning which days I will spend in the Skims soft lounge sleep set, and the short answer is As many as possible. You can shop my favorite pajamas at skims.com. And after you place your order, please let them know we sent you: select Podcast in the survey and be sure to select our show in the dropdown menu that follows. And if you are looking for the perfect holiday gifts for everyone on your list, the Skims holiday shop is now open at skims.com.

Are you ready to take a meandering deep dive into soap operas? I had so much fun with this episode, and I hope you enjoy it too. On with the podcast.

[music]

Amye Archer: My name is Amye Archer. I have a podcast – I have two podcasts! One is called Little Miss Recap, and that is where we do recaps of reality television. We do Sister Wives; we do 90 Day Fiancé; we do a lot of documentaries. And then I have a second podcast called Murder She Watched, where we cover True Crime documentaries and longer length docuseries. Like, we’re doing The Staircase right now –

Sarah: Oooh!

Amye: – and stuff like that. Yeah.

Sarah: That’s very cool! Now, I wanted to have you on, as we were discussing, because of the bonus episode you did with Fixing Famous People, all about sop, soap operas, which –

Amye: Mm-hmm!

Sarah: – this is a topic I’ve had on my list to talk about for a very long time, and I’m very excited, because your knowledge is deep, nuanced, and thorough.

Amye: [Laughs]

Sarah: Where did you get your start with soap operas?

Amye: So I, I really love and treasure the whole medium of soap operas, because I feel like for so many Gen X-ers – and I’m not going to presume; are you a Gen X-er or are you millennial?

Sarah: Oh no, I am so Gen X. I am, I am –

Amye: ‘Kay.

Sarah: I am, I think about it a lot, too, because right now the people who have grown up and have always had the internet have, are having –

Amye: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – a completely different conversation than those, those of us –

Amye: Agree!

Sarah: – who got the internet as adults?

Amye: Yes.

Sarah: And I didn’t get the internet till I was in college, so I am on the I-didn’t-have-this-growing-up side, and I think that is a massive cultural pivot? And I think –

Amye: I agree.

Sarah: – soap operas are also part of that pivot in a, in a sort of distant way.

Amye: Well, and for so many Gen X humans, they were just a way that we connected with, usually the maternal figures in our homes?

Sarah: Yes!

Amye: ‘Cause my, my dad wor- – I grew up in a very traditional household where my dad worked and my mom stayed home with us until I was about ten. So she would have the soaps on all day –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amye: – and so I would watch the soaps all day with her, and my sister and I, some of, you know, our closest moments that I can remember were divided between two things: trying to figure out and solve the original Zelda on NES –

Sarah: I mean, goals.

Amye: – and –

Sarah: Goals!

Amye: – watching Guiding Light.

Sarah: Okay! Yeah!

Amye: Those were the two moments. We also did – and I, I did a whole Little House on the Prairie podcast with my sister called Gen X, This Is Why, and so we also loved Little House on the Prairie. Which was a soap opera in its own right.

Sarah: Ohhh, it was –

Amye: The melodrama and the heart- –

Sarah: It was very soap.

Amye: – the heartthrob Michael Landon, yes.

Sarah: And the fact that he just did not wear undergarments.

Amye: No. Just did not.

Sarah: You just needed to, you just needed to see all of Mr. Landon in his Landon, yes.

Amye: Yeah. Oh yeah! So I think it was, it was important culturally for us. It gave us some kind of invisible thread to connect those generations, and we didn’t – I have two daughters. They are, they’ll be nineteen in two months, and I always say that I have a very different relationship with them than I had with my own mother because as a Gen X-er we were solidly planted in the camp of Adults Are the Enemy.

Sarah: Oh yeah!

Amye: Adults were the enemy in every way: parents, teachers, the cops, authority figures.

Sarah: Trying to keep us – listen, I watched Pump Up the Volume with Christian Slater on repeat!

Amye: Yes!

Sarah: It’s probably why I’m a podcaster! Because I was like, Wow! This is incredible! [Laughs]

Amye: I can one-up you on that: I stole Pump Up the Volume with Christian Slater! [Laughs]

Sarah: I am in deep awe.

Together: Yes.

Sarah: Oh my God.

Amye: We stole it from our local video store, and we took it home, and we watched it religiously.

So it was, it’s just this idea that this was a place where we connected –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amye: – with the adults in our lives, and I have very special, treasured memories about soap operas regarding my  mother, my grandmother, I share it now with my mother-in-law. It is something that just connects all of us.

Sarah: And it’s so interesting that you say that, because I think a lot about how for men, the connection is sports.

Amye: Yes!

Sarah: The, the, the –

Amye: Yes.

Sarah: – the social tie and the cultural tie –

Amye: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – across generations is almost always a, a shared sports team of any, any type of sport. Any sport ball, the team identity –

Amye: I agree.

Sarah: – becomes your identity. And what’s really interesting to me is the, the maternal link that you describe with soap operas, that also happens with romance novels, which is where I tend to –

Amye: Mmm.

Sarah: – reside most of the time culturally? A lot of people, especially people my age, learned about romance by either being given a romance novel by an, a woman in their life – babysitter –

Amye: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – aunt, grandma, mom – or, like you and Pump Up the Volume, they stole it from a woman in their life who read romance.

Amye: [Laughs] So I’m a writer, and I’ve been a reader my entire life. I don’t have a lot of experience with romance novels! My mother –

Sarah: I’m so glad we’re talking! 

Amye: Yeah! My mother, who is the, really the one who got me into reading, she was really into Stephen King.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amye: I read The Shining when I was like ten years old. I’ve read a lot of what would be considered YA stuff at the time – the Judy Blume stuff and, you know, stuff like that – and I was reading, I, I do remember I was reading Mary Higgins Clark –

Sarah: Mm-hmm

Amye: – off my mother’s bookshelf, and then my grandmother gifted me V. C. Andrews.

Sarah: Oh, oh, yeah, well.

Amye: That was wild. That was a wild ride. [Laughs]

Sarah: That, that’s a soap opera! That, that’s, that’s like ten seasons of a soap in one book.

Amye: [Laughs] Yes, yes. So I didn’t read a ton of romance novels, but I feel like I was reading around them, if that makes sense.

Sarah: Oh, it totally makes sense!

Amye: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: Were you a Sweet Valley High reader?

Amye: I did read some of that, yeah.

Sarah: Because for me that was, I think that there’s a direct line between Sweet Valley High and the Sweet Dreams stories not only to –

Amye: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – Harlequin, which were books of the same sort of style? Like, they looked the same, except they sometimes had sex in them, which I discovered on my own, oops?

Amye: Yeah.

Sarah: And also to the CW teen dramas. Sweet Valley High was our literary teen soap.

Amye: Yeah!

Sarah: And then that became the television soap opera. I mean, there –

Amye: And there were some teen soaps out at the time. Do you remember – this is going to be a deep cut – do you remember Fifteen? [Laughs]

Sarah: The book?

Amye: No, the show on Nickelodeon. It was like a teen soap –

Sarah: Oh my –

Amye: – but it was –

Sarah: – God!

Amye: – horrific! It was –

Sarah: Did that just unearth from the back beyond of my brain? Yes! Exactly! Nickelodeon was the, exactly the place for that, too. Yep! Yeah, and Degrassi.

Amye: It was, it was really bad! I feel like around the time that the Sweet Valley High books were out, they were trying to do things like that –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amye: – to get the teen contingent for soap operas –

Sarah: Hundred percent.

Amye: – and doing things like that, and that was, ehhh – you look back on some of that Fifteen stuff, it’s real bad.

Sarah: Oh, it doesn’t hold up.

Amye: Mm-mm.

Sarah: No, not at all.

Amye: Mm-mm.

Sarah: Now, you said in the episode that I have listened to many times that the formula for soap operas is romance and rich people problems, which, honestly is true of a lot of romance novels then and now. And also, of course, every soap opera because the wealth is part of the fantasy.

Amye: Yeah.

Sarah: You know, like, these people are going to struggle with real problems. Like, soap operas did deal with real issues, and so did romance novels, but when you’re reading, especially in like a historical romance, you are reading about really, really wealthy people. You know that they’re, they are protected from a large portion of bad shit happening to them that you might now want to watch, so that when –

Amye: Oh yeah!

Sarah: – when bad shit does happen it’s just even, you know, even then! Oh my gosh, what happened! Now, the, there is an overlap – a, a significant overlap, I think – of romance readers and soap opera fans, especially from, from our generation.

Amye: Yeah.

Sarah: I personally never got into them, because I always felt like I would be invested in this couple, and then they would have, get a big marriage, big wedding, the wedding episodes were always –

Amye: Mm-hmm!

Sarah: – very opulent! And then something would happen and they wouldn’t be happy anymore, and I’m like, Well, why am I invested in these people if –

Amye: Many things would happen!

Sarah: Right! Like –

Amye: A groom, somebody’s ex-lover would come back from the dead –

Sarah: Yeah!

Amye: – somebody, they turned out to be brother and sister at the altar. There were a lot of things that could have gone wrong, yeah.

Sarah: They’re secretly twins! Like, all of this, and I’m like, Well, why am I invested in these people if it’s just going to go wrong? But again, rich people, peop-, rich people problems in romance are never-ending.

So what were, what were your favorite soaps, and what were the essential storylines of those soaps?

Amye: So there are certain tropes that are across all soap operas, but –

Sarah: And romances, which is why I love them!

Amye: Yep. I was a CBS watcher, and I, I will tell you that – so that was, at the time, Guiding Light, As the World Turns, The Young and the Restless, Capitol first, then The Bold and the Beautiful.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amye: And I watched soap operas for the romance. Like, I – and, and it’s so funny, because as you think about that time period in your life, you’re like, Well, that’s probably where a lot of my, like, social norms developed and a lot of my outlooks on certain things developed, and I really always wanted the rich people to lose. Like, I was always actively rooting against the rich people! [Laughs]

Sarah: I would love some downfall. It would be –

Amye: Yes!

Sarah: It would be great. And, and you know what? That makes sense, because – much like right now – in the ‘80s wealth was, like, ridiculously opulent and also –

Amye: Yes.

Sarah: – economically very separate from the middle class.

Amye: A hundred percent, a hundred percent. And I grew up in Scranton, Pennsylvania, which is a very blue collar area.

Sarah: I am from Pittsburgh; no wonder we vibe.

Amye: Yeah! So here I am, you know, in this coal town, you know, very much like Pittsburgh. It’s, you know, used-up steel, used-up coal, whatever. They, they came; they took; they left. And so, you know, I, I grew up among – my family was very blue collar.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amye: You know, my grandfathers were both miners. Like, it was very – or my great-grandfathers – it was very realistic to me to root for the underdog, and I always did, and I always wanted the big, bad, rich families to, like, have their comeuppance.

Sarah: Yes.

Amye: And that was reinforced over and over and over again in these tropes that we would see in soaps, which was person from the wrong side of the tracks comes in; they’re really the good person; the, you know, the rich family’s really the bad people; and it repeats over and over and over again. And so, you know, I really, I think that kind of shaped my outlook on things, which is terrifying.

Sarah: Makes total sense!

Amye: [Laughs]

Sarah: I mean, it makes total sense. And also, I mean, my, my ancestors were steelworkers, and I’m – I say this all of the time –

Amye: Mm-hmm!

Sarah: – talking about labor right now – I’m old enough to remember the last of the steelworker strikes and how debilitating they were for the people on strike and for the people –

Amye: Yeah.

Sarah: – who were, were, they were supporting. And yeah, there’s very much an Oooh, comeuppance and consequences are so delicious!

Amye: Yeah! It was, it was lovely, and we really just – you know, there was also this sense of, we learned not to trust things? Like, I was talking about with Chris and Dom, like, we thought that falling off a horse and becoming paralyzed, like, they were high odds that that would happen to you.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amye: We thought that if you did any kind of testing at a hospital, it was not secure. Like, there were just –

Sarah: Oh yeah, anybody was just going to walk in –

Amye: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – get your results. Oh yeah.

Amye: Switch those results – it was always happening. Just things like that. You just thought that they would always happen. There were always these – I learned so much about, like, courtroom drama, and there were always these, like, big reveals on the stand and stuff like – [laughs] – it was just so melodramatic!

Sarah: And the least secure medical procedure you could have, even now, is artificial insemination.

Amye: Oh, yeah, yeah –

Sarah: Forget it.

Amye: – you were definitely getting somebody else’s sperm, egg, something. Yeah. It was –

Sarah: Something’s going wrong.

Amye: They just threw it in a spinner and gave you whatever came up. Mm-hmm.

Sarah: It was like, it was like the, the Lotto. You could just, Oh, hey, this is the tube you’re getting. We don’t know who it is, but it’ll be a great plotline when we find out.

Amye: And it was interesting to think about, you know, you had these characters, mostly women, who came in from the wrong side of the tracks –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amye: – and they were always sex workers or sex-worker-adjacent. They were always, like, strippers or, you know, whatever.

Sarah: [Laughs] And the language about sex workers was real bad! Not great!

Amye: That was really the core of it for me, was giving a comeuppance to, to opulence and wealth. As a child of the ‘80s, that appealed to me.

Sarah: I can completely understand.

Amye: Yeah.

Sarah: So of your favorite soaps, what was the setup? Like, this was the evil family, and they owned a thing. There was always a, a rich family –

Amye: Mm-hmm!

Sarah: – they had a lot of economic and social control –

Amye: Yeah.

Sarah: – and they manipulated the people around them.

Amye: So for instance in Guiding Light, you had the Spauldings.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amye: They were the big family. Now, they owned Spaulding Enterprises, which it was never clear what that was.

Sarah: It doesn’t matter.

Amye: There was also – [laughs] – a lot of ambiguity around these things.

Sarah: Yep.

Amye: Like, you just didn’t know what they were. And then you had, like, the, the Lewises? They were oil men. So H. B. Lewis was, you know, they were from Oklahoma, I want to say?

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amye: And they were oil people, so they were rich too, but they were like the decent rich people, and it was kind of implied that they made their money, like, working. You know, working for it, where the Spauldings were – [laughs] – kind of like just, you know, walked into it or whatever. Although Josh and Reva traveled through time in a painting once and found that the Spauldings made their money from the Nazis. So there was that. Back at a time, Sarah, when we all agreed Nazis were wrong.

Sarah: That’s a delicious plotline!

Amye: That was a bad thing, yeah, yeah.

Sarah: I just love – this, this is going to be my favorite part of this conversation, ‘cause you’re going to be like, Well, no, this one time they went back in time through a painting.

Amye: [Laughs]

Sarah: And I’m going to be like, Yeah, mm-hmm! Sure! I believe that! Absolutely. I accept all of this without question.

Amye: Yes. So there was this, so there were the two families, and then later there came the Coopers. So the Coopers were like, Buzz Cooper owned a diner; his son was a cop. You know, they were just like your regular everyday people.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amye: And, you know, there was a lot of, of love triangles between these families. You also had Beth Raines, who, you now, her mother was like a housekeeper or something for the Spauldings, and she fell in love with Phillip.

So there was a lot of that that happened. Usually two or three families, one or two were rich, and one was like a blue-collar family. That was the setup, usually.

Sarah: And the class differences were always very visible?

Amye: Oh yeah.

Sarah: But only sometimes explicit. The class tension would come up, like, in an argument. Oh yeah –

Amye: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – well, your mom is a slut, or your dad, you know, your dad was a garbage man. Like, there, the class tension –

Amye: Yeah.

Sarah: – is going to come up –

Amye: Get back on the pole, stripper!

Sarah: Yeah.

Amye: People still yelled that to Nikki Newman when she was like seventy years old.

Sarah: Right? And –

Amye: [Laughs] I don’t know what was happening!

Sarah: And honestly, if I were a seventy-year-old former sex worker who used to work a pole, first of all, I would work really hard to keep those abs, because it’s impressive, and number two –

Amye: Yeah.

Sarah: – she’s going to have great longevity and a very strong spine. I would not fuck with her, even in her seventies.

Amye: Yes, correct.

Sarah: Let’s be, let’s be real here.

Amye: Correct. Well, she did fall off a horse, though. She…

Sarah: Which was the worst…

Amye: …around the horses.

Sarah: You’re going to – if you fall off a horse – like, just think of all of the illnesses that you used to get from falling off a horse. You – broken, broken bones; amnesia –

Amye: Mm-hmm. Oh, amnesia!

Sarah: – paralysis.

Amye: That’s another thing: we thought amnesia was readily available! Like, it could happen at any moment. You just bump your head on the door –

Sarah: Same –

Amye: – and you don’t know who you are.

Sarah: Same as, same as in a romance novel. We joke about this all the time, because in reality, amnesia comes with really awful side effects, like you don’t know how to control parts of your body, and –

Amye: Sure!

Sarah: – it’s not just like, Oh, I’m going to wake up and go through my normal day and not know who I am. Like, nonononono! It’s much more debilitating than that. But in fiction, in romance and in soap operas, that was a whole great plot device.

Amye: Yeah, and it was, it was often weaponized –

Sarah: Oh –

Amye: – because I can think of a hundred times when somebody would become, they would have amnesia and then, you know, the evil person, whoever that is, Alan Spaulding, Roger Thorpe, whoever it was, Stefano DiMera, they would take that person and make them fall in love with somebody they’re not supposed to, or fall in love with them.

Sarah: Yep!

Amye: So it was weaponized all the time.

Sarah: There was a book I used to read in the summer. It was part of this big – I don’t know what the hell I was doing carting this three-volume hardcover back and forth to the beach, but that’s what I was doing, and it was a, a, a collection of books by Sandra Brown, who writes sort of contemporary, opulent romantic suspense. It was huge in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and I read this book first –

Amye: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – called Mirror Image, where this – it’s like a reverse amnesia story? This woman is on a plane – she’s like a reporter – she’s on a plane going somewhere, and she gets on the plane and there’s this famous woman, this famous actress, I think, on, in her seat! And so she’s like, Whatever; I’ll just sit there And at some point during the flight the famous person, like, grabs the heroine’s necklace and is holding it and looking at it. Like, just, like, rips it off her neck and is holding it, and that’s when the plane goes down. And they –

Amye: Oh!

Sarah: – they both resemble each other – the book is called Mirror Image – they both resembled each other enough that the seat assignment coupled with her holding the necklace led to the reporter being declared dead. She wakes up in the hospital some days later, and she can’t, like, really respond, but there’s all of these –

Amye: Mm!

Sarah: – family members around her who are just, like, calling her by the wrong name, and then she’s like, I’ve got to tell people that I’m not – then they, her, she’s dead, and I’m not! Then someone comes in and threatens her life, and she’s like, Ooh!

Amye: Oh boy. Oh boy!

Sarah: So she pretends to be this person for the, like most of the book? And I was like, This is enthralling. This could be on a soap opera!

Amye: I feel like you just described Titanic, too!

Sarah: Exactly, right?

Amye: [Laughs]

Sarah: Yeah!

Amye: We’re still using these plot devices!

Sarah: Mistaken identity, amnesia, switch – yeah – switched at birth.

I want to ask you about something that you mentioned in passing in this episode: you had a newsletter on AOL –

Amye: Mm.

Sarah: – about soap operas. Please tell me –

Amye: I did!

Sarah: – everything about this. This is like early blogging, and I love it so much.

Amye: Yeah, when I went to college it was 1997, it would have been – ’97, ’98, somewhere around there – and it was during the time when Marlena was possessed on Days of Our Lives, and everybody was getting into Days of Our Lives. And I wanted to be a soap opera writer! Like, that’s what I was going to be, so – I was also, you know, there were several things at play. I was also, like, very overweight; very sort of scared to go outside; you know, very introverted is the word I’m thinking of; and so, like, I spent a lot of time in my room, and when AOL came out and I discovered this online community, it was excellent. I still think social media is good for, for that purpose, right –

Sarah: Yes.

Amye: – to connect us when we don’t want to be connected, or are not able to be connected. So I started The DiMera Times, and I had, like, I want to say two or three thousand subscribers? It was crazy!

Sarah: Oh my goodness!

Amye: It was crazy, and I did it on AOL. I couldn’t tell you, like, how I did it or what it looked like, but I, I know I had like an old computer –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amye: – I had Windows 95 on it, I was rocking Windows 95, and I had two VCRs going, one that did Days for my soap opera, and then the other one for my stories, you know, that I had to watch. So yeah! And, and it was great! And I did, like I remember – it’s funny, because when I started Little Miss Recap, my podcast, I didn’t realize that I was funny. And now I’m starting to lean into, I might be funny!

Sarah: No, you’re, you’re funny.

Amye: And I never thought that before. No one has ever told me that. You know what I mean? So I was like, Am I a little bit funny? But when I look back at Days of Our Lives – I’m sorry, The DiMera Times, the newsletter – I was doing comedy skits in that! Like, I would do, I’d take a scene, I would rewrite it? Rewrite of the day. I did this daily, by the way.

Sarah: Yep.

Amye: This newsletter went out daily.

Sarah: Love it.

Amye: So I would take, like, that day’s, like a scene from it and rewrite it in a funny way, and people really liked it! And I, I think that’s one of the first times I thought, Could I be funny? It was rewarding, it was amazing, and what I loved so much about it was connecting with people –

Sarah: Yes.

Amye: – which is what you get as a podcaster now. In some ways, Sarah, I’m like, I’ve been training for podcasting my whole life, because –

Sarah: Oh, roger that. I was obsessed with the idea of having my own radio show. I thought pirate radio stations were the coolest thing?

Amye: Yes, yes!

Sarah: And, and it’s not just Pump Up the Volume; like, I thought radio was the coolest thing ever.

Amye: Yeah, yeah.

Sarah: Which is funny, because I, I also think that there is a dividing line between when you had social media that was text-based and if you signed onto social media that was visual-based. Those are two very different forms of social media. I actually think the –

Amye: Yeah.

Sarah: – visual-based social media has a lot of detrimental problems with it that we’re still grappling with –

Amye: I agree.

Sarah: – and I don’t think text-, you know, text-based social media was a walk in the park either, but that’s definitely my preference.

Amye: Yeah, I agree with that.

Sarah: And I, and I agree with you about figuring out that you’re funny by writing online? I always thought that my brain was this weird place where only I was amused by the things that my brain would come up with –

Amye: [Laughs]

Sarah: – and it turns out that’s not true? And I, I mean, we founded, I co-founded Smart Bitches, Trashy Books twenty years ago, so I’m basically, my job is a twenty-year-old blog plus a podcast, which is very old technology. But I was just showing up and writing about romance novels and being like, what, Do you understand? Like, this is bananas! Let’s talk about this! Like, I would, I would, I remember at one point I was reviewing – if you like, if you like truly bananas vampire stories, J. R. Ward’s Black Dagger Brotherhood.

Amye: Mm.

Sarah: Some very problematic concepts involving race and culture, but –

Amye: [Laughs]

Sarah: – deeply addictive and –

Amye: There’s always that.

Sarah: – always that – but also very silly, and at one point I imagined, Okay, imagine there’s an adaptation of Black Dagger Brotherhood, and this is the conversation happening in, you know, in the break room with the actors, who are critiquing the role that they have to play in this installment. That was years ago. Now there’s a company that’s adapting these romance novels into film. Unfortunately, it is run by Elon Musk’s sister, so I’m not –

Amye: Hmm.

Sarah: – super in? Yeah, that’s exactly the noise I made.

Amye: Speaking of rich people who need comeuppance. [Laughs]

Sarah: Yeah, exactly. But even then, thinking I was going to be the only one that found this interesting. Nope! That was the biggest gift of the internet to me: people saying, No, you’re funny; tell me more. And also, all the weird things that I was interested in? There was absolutely someone else – maybe like a few thousand someone elses? – that were interested in that thing too.

Amye: Yeah, it’s amazing, right? I remember I wrote an article for Scary Mommy couple years ago like when we started Gen X, This Is Why, and it was basically about how Pa Ingalls ruined men for me.

Sarah: Mm-hmm!

Amye: ‘Cause I thought that they should be able to farm a full entire, you know, ten acres every day, and –

Sarah: By themselves. [Laughs]

Amye: – lie in bed and read poetry at night –

Sarah: Yep.

Amye: – and play the fiddle and be super respectful of women and be real hot in all ways, and men like that don’t really exist.

Sarah: No.

Amye: I mean, they do, they’re out there, but it’s hard to find, and I, I think that it ruined a generation of women. And men, maybe.

Sarah: Imagine the think pieces about portrayals of masculinity if Little House –

Amye: Yep.

Sarah: – was a hit right now.

Amye: Well, they’re trying to reboot it, Sarah. I’m not on board with this.

Sarah: No, I – just let it be.

Amye: Let it be. Let it be.

Sarah: This is the, this is the big downfall of having our generation in, in executive positions: people keep wanting to reboot things.

Amye: Yeah.

Sarah: Nonono, just, just leave them be. We don’t need more Care Bears; it’s fine.

Amye: No. No.

Sarah: It’s okay; we don’t need them.

Amye: Let it go.

Sarah: Let it go.

I also remember the sort of, when you were talking about Marlena being possessed, I, so my freshman year during the height of Marlena is possessed, and I went to an all-women’s college in South Carolina, and every afternoon there would be dead silence in the halls watching Days, and then you’d hear everyone give this collective gasp or scream or whatever. You would hear this noise come and go, but it was everybody in their own dorm rooms or in a group in one dorm room.

Amye: Yeah.

Sarah: The only time I remember that scream even louder was when Marcia Cross took her wig off on Melrose and had that scar on the –

Amye: Oh, Kimberly, yeah!

Sarah: The col-, the collective yell in my dorm was massive.

Amye: Yeah.

Sarah: And the, the idea that this was something that not only connected you to older women in your life – it was sort of a matrilineal cultural inheritance –

Amye: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – but it was also something that you had to keep up with it, and the best way to do it was to watch it while it was on, and you needed to keep up with it every day, so you would find people who were doing it, and that would become –

Amye: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – a lot of your social circle. There were all of these elements of connection between people that were based on We watch this thing every day from, you know, what is it, 2 to 3, 3 to 4. And you have to keep up with it –

Amye: Yeah.

Sarah: – you can’t skip a week. I mean, actually you can? The brilliant thing about soap operas that I, I have so much respect for is that they are written in a way that you can enter at any time.

Amye: You could skip years! There’s been times I’ve skipped a year and have caught up.

What is that show, Portlandia? Have you watched Portlandia?

Sarah: Yes!

Amye: So I only saw a couple episodes of it when it first came out, but in one of the opening, in the opening season, like one of the episodes, they’re, they’re at a dinner party –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amye: – and they’re all talking about, it’s the birth of binging, right? And they’re all talking about Battlestar Galactica, and they’re like, What season are you on? What season are you on? It was very similar. It was this cultural –

Sarah: Yes.

Amye: – phenomenon that we all talked about, but you had your camps! You know, you had your, your NBC, your ABC, and your CBS.

Sarah: Yep.

Amye: And sometimes you could cross those –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amye: – barriers, but a lot of times you couldn’t. And yeah, there was this cultural conversation around it; it was really interesting.

So I will tell you that I read an article not too long ago about the death of the soap opera, and something that they talked about was the O. J. trial.

Sarah: Oh!

Amye: And I very distinctly remember, I was dating my first husband when O. J. was on trial, and his mother was a big soap opera watcher, and I remember her not watching the soaps! She was watching O. J.! And I was like, Oh, there might be something to that.

Sarah: Ohhh! Yeah…

Amye: ‘Cause it was kind of around the same time that it started to decline.

Sarah: You’re totally right, because the O. J. trial was also during my freshman or sophomore year, one of the two.

Amye: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: I remember being in –

Amye: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – the dining hall when the verdict was announced.

Amye: Yep.

Sarah: Could you send me this article? I would be fascinated by this!

Amye: Yeah! Yeah, I will.

Sarah: You also, you also mentioned that you took a class on the history of the soap opera, which –

Amye: When I was at Penn State, yeah.

Sarah: – wish I had that class!

Amye: Oh, it was so great, so great. Loved it.

Sarah: Because it’s not, it’s not just the stories and the fact that they, some of them have been on since the ‘60s and the fact that everyone has a passing – everyone of our generation, if they had a TV, probably has a passing familiarity with something about a soap? Like, you might know –

Amye: Yep.

Sarah: – that Marlena was possessed, or if you were watching the nighttime soaps, you might remember, you know, Krystle and –

Amye: Blake?

Sarah: – Blake.

Amye: Oh, Alexis.

Sarah: Alexis! Thank you!

Amye: Krystle and Alexis fighting.

Sarah: Krystle and Alexis fighting and falling in a pool, which you can’t do anymore ‘cause everybody’s got a cell phone.

Amye: Yeah.

Sarah: You, you might remember John Black and everyone, like – okay, he looks exactly the same. How do you not know that this is another – how? Everyone in the show’s –

Amye: It’s a –

Sarah: – collectively deluded. Or, if you’re me, you remember the L-shaped sheet that they would all wear, where the, where, you know, the, the, the guy and the girl had just finished going to Bone Town –

Amye: Mmm.

Sarah: – and they’re lying in their bed in their post-coital haze –

Amye: Yes.

Sarah: – and she has the sheet tucked up under her, under her arms to cover her breasts, but he’s right next to her, and that same sheet is –

Amye: Is on the bottom.

Sarah: – down on his hips. So everyone had an L-shaped sheet for some reason –

Amye: [Laughs]

Sarah: – I do not understand. But –

Amye: Yes.

Sarah: – on top of that, there was a whole media system, a publishing system, an economy?

Amye: Oh yeah!

Sarah: There were product placements; there were products that were specifically associated with soap operas? Like, it was a whole economy!

Amye: I mean, that is the, the genesis of the soap opera is to sell goods to women!

Sarah: Yep!

Amye: So that was the very impetus for the whole medium. Yeah, and there were –

Sarah: They’re the original Sponcon!

Amye: [Laughs] Yes! Yes!

Sarah: [Laughs]

Amye: There were product placements, there was – I mean, it was just so robust, and, like I was talking about, you know, I wanted to be a soap opera writer, and I was offered an internship with Soap Opera Weekly –

Sarah: Incredible.

Amye: – and it was – and of course, you know, Gen X, we, we didn’t get paid internships! What are they? We didn’t even know what that was! So I remember saying to my parents, like, Can you guys pay for me to live in New York City? And they were like –

Sarah: No.

Amye: – no. No.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Amye: And it wasn’t, you couldn’t do those jobs remotely at the time. Like, you had to go there! So I couldn’t do it, and often think, like, what, what my life would have been like if I had made that big, big, like, what, twenty-eight thousand dollars a year at that time.

Sarah: Oh my God! You would have been –

Amye: Soap opera press, yeah.

Sarah: I remember in high school I took the ASVAB, which was the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude –

Amye: Mm-hmm!

Sarah: – Battery test, and I only took it ‘cause I wanted to get out of the class that it was during and it was an excused absence, and I hated that class, so I took it! And I was not interested in a military career. My parents were very firmly on the No, you’re going to go to college track, which at the time was still a question. Like, not everybody –

Amye: Yeah!

Sarah: – I graduated with went to college and that was completely normal.

Amye: Yeah. Mm-mm.

Sarah: The Coast Guard wanted me real bad, because I was very good at pattern recognition, and I had just been a student studying in Spain, so I spoke Spanish. And the Coast Guard was sending me all these offers, and they’re like, We’re going to pay you twenty-two hundred dollars a month. And that was…

Amye: [Laughs] And you’re like, Twenty-two hundred a month!

Sarah: I’m going to be so rich if I join the Coast Guard.

Amye: Yes! Yeah.

Sarah: Mom and Dad look at this, and they’re like, No. Mm-mm. No. I’m like, But it’s –

Amye: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – that’s so much money! And I’m like…

Amye: So much money!

Sarah: – because I’m sixteen!

[Laughter]

Sarah: It’s 1991! Like, that’s why it’s so much money!

Amye: Yeah!

Sarah: But you also –

Amye: Yeah.

Sarah: – talked about how you, you used to work in television, you worked at a television station –

Amye: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – and you had knowledge about the ad rates that soap operas would command, because it’s a dedicated demographic. You know –

Amye: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – you’ve got these people for this hour, possibly more. You know –

Amye: Yeah.

Sarah: – it’s most likely women, and even though no one likes to talk about it, women are the major purchasing driver in most multi-people households.

Amye: Oh yeah!

Sarah: Like, we make all the, we make a lot of the purchasing decisions.

Amye: Yeah, and there were certain breaks that were just more valuable. So I remember the 12:28 break – I’m getting into the weeds here.

Sarah: No, this is fascinating. Give me all of your weed.

Amye: It was the beginning of The Young and the Restless. Like, that was –

Sarah: Right.

Amye: – it was coming out of local news, going into The Young and the Restless. That was a really good break –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amye: – probably a hundred and fifty, two hundred dollars a spot. Again, this was early aughts. I worked there from ’99 to 2006, and…

Sarah: Big changes in media during that time, too.

Amye: Oh, huge, huge.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amye: Don’t get me even started on the political things. The political window. And so then, you know, going, as you got further in, the rates dropped!

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amye: So it was like, even then you were starting to lose value in the soap operas, and then Guiding Light, I’ll never forget Guiding Light. They did everything to try to save that show –

Sarah: Oh.

Amye: – ‘cause that’s one of the oldest running soap operas – and they took it from 3 o’clock in the afternoon and put it at like 10 a.m.? Man, was my grandmother upset about that. She was really upset.

Sarah: Soap operas are an afternoon consumption.

Amye: I know!

Sarah: This is like when you have a, like a, a sit com that’s on its way out, and you know –

Amye: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – that they’re flirting with canceling it because they put it on like Friday or Saturday night.

Amye: Yeah.

Sarah: Or Sunday afternoon. Like, yeah, you’re dead.

Amye: I think the thought process was Price is Right was such a juggernaut –

Sarah: Mm-hmm!

Amye: – of ad revenue at the time –

Sarah: Yeah.

Amye: – I think they thought it would be a good lead-in to, to that, but – ‘cause that was at 10, and Price Is Right was at 11.

Sarah: I used to get hungry the minute I would hear the Price Is Right theme, ‘cause if I was home sick I was watching The Price Is Right.

Amye: You were getting a grilled cheese or some chicken noodle soup.

Sarah: I was hungry during Price Is – and, and now, to this day, if I hear the theme of The Price Is Right, I start thinking about, like, Cup O’ Noodles or Campbell’s soup.

Amye: It’s like a Pavlov’s dog response?

Sarah: Yes!

Amye: Yeah.

Sarah: I still get hungry the minute I hear that theme song.

Amye: [Laughs]

Sarah: I can remember some of the commercials during soap operas! There was a lot of Palmolive, a lot of that one, that one toothpaste that was, like, red and blue out of the tube; was it Aim?

Amye: Aquafresh?

Sarah: Aquafresh, thank you. Yep!

Amye: Yeah.

Sarah: Mm-hmm!

Amye: Yeah. Or was it Aim? I don’t know! That’s a good question.

Sarah: Could have been either one. And I –

Amye: Yeah, either one.

Sarah: – I don’t even know if they exist anymore.

Amye: I was going to start googling it. That’s the, that’s the trash I do on my podcast…let me google it!

Sarah: We goo-, go ahead and google it! I don’t care.

Amye: [Laughs]

Sarah: Okay, wait, actually, I’m going to look it up, because now I need to know, is it Aim?

Amye: I think Aquafresh was blue. I think you’re right; I think it was, I think it was Aim.

Sarah: Yes, because it – well, no!

Amye: It had the stripe, and it never came out of the tube looking like that.

Sarah: It never came out of the tube.

Amye: Never.

Sarah: All right, so Aim is showing me that it’s blue. I’m sure everyone who’s listening to this –

Amye: [Laughs]

Sarah: Let’s see, sparkle –

Amye: Red –

Sarah: Colgate Cool Stripe came in stripes.

Amye: No. That’s not what it is.

Sarah: That’s not it is. How did the stripes get into striped toothpaste? There’s lots of articles about how it was made, but not exactly which one it was. Someone will correct me, or someone will comment and tell me which one was it that had the red and the blue stripes on the white toothpaste. I know someone knows, and they will help…

Amye: Yeah. Someone knows, and someone will, will help us, yes.

Sarah: Thank you!

Amye: [Laughs]

Sarah: So one of the other aspects that I think is important to talk about, and romance is experienced this, is experiencing this sh-, the same shift in that the things that were popular for a very long time are now no longer popular. Historical romance is in a deep coma right now. Like, you know, all the bodice rippers and the –

Amye: Yeah.

Sarah: – older books. Number one, mass market paperback is dead. No one’s printing it, no one’s stocking it, no one’s transporting it –

Amye: Yep.

Sarah: – no one’s selling it. And the audience for historical romance doesn’t want historical romance anymore; they’ve moved into fantasy. And the expectations of younger readerships are different from, like, what I understand as romance, which is fine; things change. The same thing is happening to, to soap operas: the audience is going away, and much like you mentioned with the pivot with the O. J. trial, they’re not coming back.

Amye: No. No.

Sarah: And it’s, it’s really kind of interesting to look at, because I think there’s an element of – I mean, I think you can, if you did a deeper analysis – this is a half-baked idea out of my brain – I think that there is a link between the tradwife media empire and the, the soap opera, the loss of soap operas. Because, when was the last time we had all of these women working at home or staying at home? During that time period.

Amye: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: Whereas now –

Amye: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – the tradwife emphasis is, you know, give up your autonomy; operate a farm; make it look really pretty on social media.

Amye: [Laughs]

Sarah: That is a, that is its own soap opera. They are writing a soap opera and publishing it to you every day on Instagram.

Amye: Yeah, they’re not, they’re not consuming content? They’re creating content.

Sarah: Exactly.

Amye: And the people who are watching soap operas, the, the hanger-ons, if you will, are people like, you know, like me. Even I don’t watch anymore, though, but people of my generation –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amye: – or the, our parents who are retired!

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Amye: You know what I mean? Like, the, the, the demographic that these shows were created for are now retired, and they’re the ones still watching it. And I think in ten years, when that’s gone, I don’t think they’ll be on anymore. I’m stunned they’re still on!

Sarah: No.

Amye: And…

Sarah: …have moved to streaming apps only, right?

Amye: Yeah, and I just feel like there’s so much good content?

Sarah: Oh yes.

Amye: I just, and, and you saw this sort of in the ‘90s when the soaps started to get really ridiculous –

Sarah: [Laughs] Yes!

Amye: – with their storylines. They started to move into, like, supernatural; they started to – and I think about this sometimes just from a documentary perspective? Like, I’ll see a documentary and I’ll be like, That was so extreme and so up here. I, is that, like, are we just moving the needle constantly –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amye: – towards the more extreme? I don’t know if you’re familiar with that doc that just came out, Unknown Number? It’s the, the –

Sarah: Yes.

Amye: – catfishing –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amye: – high school thing?

Sarah: I’m familiar with it, yeah.

Amye: Mm-hmm. It is all anybody’s talking about, and it is –

Sarah: It’s unhinged.

Amye: It is –

Sarah: Yeah.

Amye: – so perverse and wild, right? That I’m like – and, and we covered it. We did, it did really well on my show, and I’m like, I don’t know if we’re going to reach that again!

Sarah: Mm-mm.

Amye: Because it was so extreme. Think about early pandemic days: we had Tiger King.

Sarah: Yep.

Amye: That was a cultural moment. Right? We were all watching Tiger King.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amye: Now we expect every documentary about, like, an isolated, “crazy” figure – crazy in quotes; I’m not calling anybody crazy – but, you know, we’re kind of expecting everything to be Tiger King –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amye: – everything to be Unknown Number. Like, there has to be a twist! There has to be – everything is moving in that direction. It started in the ‘90s, I think, with the soaps when they started with Marlena being possessed and – Days of Our Lives had a story, the Gemini twins? Do you remember that one? There were –

Sarah: Oh!

Amye: – a brother and sister that were aliens?

Sarah: Yep. Oh yes.

Amye: Guiding Light was really putting Reva through it. They were cloning her; they made her Amish; she was time-traveling though paintings.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Amye: Stefano had an entire – I’ll, I’ll save it, ‘cause this is one of my top five, but it, it was just ridiculous and pushing the envelope, pushing the envelope. And it’s like, that’s not what soap operas were for.

Sarah: No.

Amye: Soap operas were for the, the grand romance and the classist, the classism and, you know, like, those classic tropes of, like, the, the girl wins the boy from the other side of the tracks, or this – you know, whatever. They weren’t very inclusive at the time, I might add, but –

Sarah: Yeah. When I was watching there was always two characters of color. They were always ending up together.

Amye: Yes. Oh yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sarah: Those, those – yep, there you go.

Amye: And there were no queer people.

Sarah: Oh! Pfft, no.

Amye: No. So did they, should, like, we needed to progress in that way?

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amye: But I think they just started throwing anything at the wall, and it’s this idea as a culture that we just want the more extreme, extreme, extreme and, yeah, I don’t know – I think it takes away from what soap operas were meant to be and what we loved so much about them.

Sarah: Which is what, in your opinion?

Amye: This idea of this is how people I will never meet or know operate! Like, it was very similar to why I loved reading so much as a kid. I was a poor kid – I mean, I was lower middle class. I wasn’t poor, but I was definitely lower middle class. I was not well-traveled, and books provided a way for me to see and know the world –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amye: – and to learn about people, and I was always really fascinated learning about people and how they operate, and –

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Amye: – I was never going to meet a family like the Spauldings! Do you know what I mean? So, like, I was kind of getting a peek into a world that I would never have seen otherwise.

Sarah: Yes.

Amye: Nowhere in that world was there going to be a brother and sister who were aliens. [Laughs]

Sarah: I definitely did not have alien brother and sister in my high school, for sure.

Amye: All right –

Sarah: Not a chance.

Amye: – so, like, it started to get fantastical, which is great if you’re into fantasy, but they took a genre that was not based on fantasy, and they started to try to turn it into it.

Sarah: Mm-hmm. And there’s also the continuity of it.

Amye: Yeah!

Sarah: It was as familiar as your own family. And yes, let’s, I mean, let’s be honest: every family has drama. Like, among my favorite threads are when someone is on Reddit, like, asking, All right, what’s the latest drama from your Nextdoor? What’s the big family drama that you’re dealing with right now?

Amye: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Sarah: Like, every family has drama, and one of my favorites tropes in romance – and also my favorite things to look at in pop culture; like, this is my, what I, I could talk about this for hours – is the distance between someone’s public persona and the actual mess that they really are.

Amye: Mm.

Sarah: And so soap operas were about this beautiful glitz and glamour –

Amye: Yes.

Sarah: – and this projection of an image, where actually, behind the scenes, like, in, you know, in your living room, you’re a hot mess, and everyone is a hot mess. My other theory –

Amye: Yeah!

Sarah: – in terms of pop culture – because I love thinking about this – is that when you have a celebrity whose public persona is so far from their actual person, like you, they have the public persona of being super great and lovely, and then behind the scenes you find out that they’re really awful?

Amye: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: The farther those two get, there is an elasticity, and at some point it will snap back, and the length of the distance is what determines the impact of that snapping back and what makes it such a big story.

Amye: Yeah.

Sarah: And soap operas played with that constantly.

Amye: Yeah!

Sarah: ‘Cause, you know, you’re pretending to be this, but in reality you’re this, and the longer the deception goes or the longer the mystery goes, like one or two seasons, has that guy found out that that other guy –

Amye: [Laughs]

Sarah: – slept with his wife? No, not yet?

Amye: Yeah.

Sarah: Okay, moving on! That distance made the impact of those dramatic moments so much more –

Amye: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – impressive to the audience, especially if you had the flu-, fluency and the continuity of how big this is.

Amye: Yeah, and often they didn’t let that elasticity get very long.

Sarah: No.

Amye: Like, they didn’t let that time span – soap operas were, were known for, a whole story arc would be a summer.

Sarah: Yes!

Amye: That would be it.

Sarah: The plot moved –

Amye: Some of the –

Sarah: – in half-inches every day.

Amye: Yes, and some of the bigger stories that I have down as some of my favorites were these ones where they took time –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amye: – and they gave us a whole year –

Sarah: Yeah.

Amye: – of it, and that was really fascinating to me, ‘cause normally it was, you know, this one’s having this secret baby, and it’s found out within, you know, either May sweeps or November sweeps; that’s when they were going to find out.

Sarah: Oh!

Amye: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: There used to be periods of time in the calendar year when all the wild shit would happen on all the shows.

Amye: Yep, yep. And then traditionally summer would be when the younger –

Sarah: Yeah.

Amye: – soap opera stars would, would kind of take over. You would have your teen storylines, your –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amye: – like Sami and Austin and Carrie on Days of Our Lives; like all that stuff, and Philip and Beth when they were young. That would all play out in the summer –

Sarah: Yep.

Amye: – ‘cause they thought teenagers were home watching soap operas, and we were.

Sarah: I mean, yes.

Amye: So it worked.

Sarah: We, we weren’t allowed to go anywhere, and we couldn’t get anywhere; then yes, that’s, that is where we were.

I also remember how there were some shows that were started in the summer because the network didn’t really think anything was going to happen with them? There’s a recap podcast of Northern Exposure called Northern Disclosure –

Amye: Mm.

Sarah: – with Rob Morrow and Janine Turner.

Amye: Yeah.

Sarah: The part that’s so fascinating to me is that they were a summer replacement show? They were given a very small budget and told to make like eight episodes of this, you know, story, fish-out-of-water story in Alaska – except it wasn’t Alaska; it was, I think, Washington State – and the summer replacement was what made the show so quirky, because they could get away with so much.

Amye: Yeah!

Sarah: It was just the summer! And the same thing with soaps: you could get away with all kinds of stuff in the summer, because that was –

Amye: Yeah.

Sarah: – that was a separate storyline, ‘cause it wasn’t sweeps. It was, people are on vacation –

Amye: Right, and –

Sarah: – and they’re going to miss two weeks of this show.

Amye: And they were trying to be, you know, this is where you saw the birth of that, like, trying to be extreme, trying to –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amye: – to rope in that younger audience, and in some ways I think it worked, and I don’t know. I think once again, once we got the internet, once we started to leave our bubbles, once we started to – everything changed. Nobody –

Sarah: Absolutely.

Amye: – no teenager was sitting home watching soap operas –

Sarah: Nope.

Amye: – when, like, YouTube came out, right?

Sarah: No! God, no!

Amye: It just wasn’t happening.

Sarah: And now YouTube is people’s Google! If they want to learn about something they goo-, they search for it on ChatGPT or Google, or on, on YouTube! It’s weird.

Amye: Yeah. Yeah.

Sarah: All right, I have asked you to bring three to five of your truly memorable, absolutely banana-pants soap opera storylines –

Amye: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – that you love thinking about. I have brought some of my absolute most banana-crackers Old Skool romance plots, and I asked my Patreon community, Okay, here’s what the interview is, is; here’s what we’re doing. I asked them to send me their favorites. So I have –

Amye: Okay.

Sarah: – favorites from people who listen to the show, and I have my personal favorites, but please tell me one of your most memorable, completely unhinged plotlines.

Amye: So I think for me one of the top is when Stefano DiMera on Days of Our Lives was murdering peo- – well, we had the Salem Stalker was murdering people.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amye: We didn’t know who it was. And they were killing off beloved characters! And they used very creative methods to kill these people, like a tiger killed somebody.

Sarah: As you do.

Amye: Alice Horton choked on her doughnut. Like, things like that. Like, they were killing people in these – and you were like, Oh my God! Like, is Deidre Hall leaving Days? Is Drake leaving Days? Like, you didn’t know what was happening. And then it turned out that it was a secret island that Stefano had created where there was like a second dimension or something, and the island was called Melaswen? Which was New Salem spelled backward.

[Laughter]

Sarah: Ohhh, you know whoever came up with that was like, I nailed it! [Laughs]

Amye: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So that was one, and it went, it was a summer storyline, it went all summer long –

Sarah: Yep.

Amye: – and people were losing their minds, because they thought their beloved characters were leaving the show. And it was around the time – I’m going to google when it actually happened? But I want to say it was around the time when the soaps started to decline anyway, so you were kind of like, This could be possible!

Sarah: Throw it at the wall; see what sticks.

Amye: Mm-hmm!

Sarah: Yep.

Amye: When did Melaswen happen on Days – [laughs]

Sarah: Sorry. Melaswen.

Amye: I know.

Sarah: Wooow!

Amye: It was, so it was 2003, 2004.

Sarah: Yep!

Amye: Yeah, and it was the Salem Stalker murders, and the killer was revealed to be Marlena Evans, who was then shot by police and believed to be dead. However, it was soon revealed that Marlena and other victims were alive and being held captive on Stefano’s tropical island of Melaswen.

Sarah: And causing them to hallucinate? Or taking them into a different dimension.

Amye: I think it was a different dimension. But I could be wrong; it may have been –

Sarah: I mean, there could have been –

Amye: – hallucination or drugs.

Sarah: – hallucinogens involved. Who’s to say?

Amye: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: Yeah! W-, wow. Okay.

Amye: Yeah. Yeah.

Sarah: All right, so I bring to you, in return, as a gift, the plot of one of my favorite problematic Old Skool romances, Silver Angel by Johanna Lindsey. The people who listen to the show know how much I love talking about this book. Okay.

Amye: Okay.

Sarah: So.

Amye: I need to see the cover. One of the…

Sarah: Oh yes! Okay, hang on.

Amye: Oh! Okay.

Sarah: Are you seeing the one with the guy leaning over the woman with the big spill of white hair? That’s the original cover.

Amye: Yes, I see it.

Sarah: Yep.

Amye: I see – wow!

Sarah: So it’s –

Amye: Okay.

Sarah: Romance covers have gone through so many cover trends. Like, we keep trying to change the trends of what they look like.

Amye: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: The clinch is long gone. People are not spending that much money on covers? They used to be, like, oil paintings. They weren’t –

Amye: Mmm!

Sarah: – they weren’t digitally made.

So Silver Angel, on the, on the bed there with all the hair? That’s, that’s Chantelle, and well, she is kidnapped and sold into white slavery, which is a thing that happens a lot back then –

Amye: Wooow!

Sarah: – and brought into the harem of Jamil, the king of Arabia. The king of Arabia is, of course, super hot and has piercing emerald eyes because it’s a requirement, and she’s –

Amye: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – really not happy about any of these things that are happening, but it turns out that the king had to go into hiding because someone wants to kill him, and the person who is posing as him is his twin brother, whose name is Derek. Derek is posing as Jamil –

Amye: [Laughs] Wait a minute, wait a minute –

Sarah: Yeah, yeah, see?

Amye: – wait a minute. Derek?

Sarah: Derek. Derek!

Amye: Okay.

Sarah: She’s, he’s named Derek. He’s also a rich English dude; he might have had a title; I can’t remember.

Amye: Okay.

Sarah: So there are other courtesan favorites who are really upset that Jamil is not acting like Jamil. Like, he has favorites that he calls to his, his chambers all the time, and all of a sudden –

Amye: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – he’s just calling Chantelle all the time, so all the other courtesans, like, don’t like her?

Amye: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: At one point she is fully depilated, except for her hair on her head, by a bunch of eunuchs? It’s very problematic depictions of many –

Amye: Wooow!

Sarah: – many things. Meanwhile, Chantelle is the favorite, but there, like – the thing about Old Skool romances is becau-, is because of where women’s sexuality was culturally at the time – this is the ‘70s, the ‘80s, and the ‘90s? –

Amye: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – for a lot of these heroines, sexuality and hornypants had to be visited upon them? They could not themselves be horny, because that was considered –

Amye: I understand.

Sarah: Yeah…

Amye: They had to be under some spell or –

Sarah: Yes.

Amye: Yes.

Sarah: Or just overwhelmed by his piercing emerald eyes and his turgid manhood –

Amye: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Sarah: – right? So Chantelle is like, I really don’t want to bone this guy, but he’s super hot, and, you know, Derek is like, I can’t tell her that I’m  not Jamil and that I’m Derek because I’m posing as Jamil, and they fall in love and eventually have lots and lots of sex, and then mayhem ensues. And then eventually they go back to England with –

Amye: So it’s the impostor! It’s the impostor…

Sarah: Very much.

Amye: Yep.

Sarah: Yeah, and a lot of twins switching places and –

Amye: Okay.

Sarah: – we’re not even going to unpack how Derek, the rich English dude, is a twin to Jamil, the king of Arabia.

Amye: Yeah, I don’t know –

Sarah: How did that happen?! [Laughs]

Amye: Derek just kind of –

Sarah: Derek. Derek.

Amye: Yeah.

Sarah: Yeah.

Amye: Yeah. I think I’d rather spend some time with Derek, to be honest.

Sarah: Honestly? Sounds great. He –

Amye: The pressure of just dating a king would be too much for me.

Sarah: Oh, way too much, way too much.

Amye: Yeah.

Sarah: But that is also another terrible historical, historical element of older, older romances, that the Middle East and southeast Asia, there’s this –

Amye: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – whole trope of uptight British lordly guys going that way to learn how to sex good and then coming back.

Amye: Wow!

Sarah: This, this is so –

Amye: That sounds like 90 Day Fiancé, UK version!

Sarah: It, it is white, white a lot, yes.

Amye: It’s so interesting, ‘cause reality TV is starting to mirror some of these tropes, but –

Sarah: Yes!

Amye: – that’s a whole other conversation.

Sarah: Yes, it really is. I actually put together some book recommendations for you, should you wish –

Amye: Oh!

Sarah: – and one of them –

Amye: Okay.

Sarah: – is based in a parallel version of The Bachelor.

Amye: Okay! Okay. All right.

Okay, my number two.

Sarah: Yes! Bring it!

Amye: It’s all things with Reva. So I very distinctly –

Sarah: This poor woman!

Amye: – remember when I was kid, Reva was from the wrong side of the tracks.

Sarah: Yes.

Amye: Okay, her mother, I want to say – and I, I could be wrong – her mother was Sarah –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amye: – and I want to say that she was a housekeeper in the Lewis’s house, and that, that was a trope. You see that –

Sarah: Very, very Sabrina.

Amye: – on many – yep – you see that on many soap operas.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amye: And Reva fell in love with Josh, and Josh was like a frat bro. You know, going to college. He was the oil tycoon’s son. So they fell in love, and, like, everybody just loved them and were rooting for them, but then there was, like, a lot of hijinks where he was set to marry somebody else, and then Reva married his father, and then Josh heard about this, drove into a tree. He became paralyzed. They go to this big function. He starts berating her, sexually shaming her, of course, and she jumps in the fountain and baptizes herself the Slut of Springfield. And –

Sarah: More power to her!

Amye: Yep! And then they, they eventually reconcile, but then at one point she gets postpartum from having their child, and, I mean, postpartum was not like you go to a doctor and you are treated for this. It was…

Sarah: I mean, it wasn’t even that commonly discussed at that time.

Amye: No. You just –

Sarah: That’s like a secret.

Amye: – you did something “nuts,” right?

Sarah: Yeah.

Amye: That was postpartum in the ‘80s. So she drove her car off a bridge in the Florida Keys. I’ll never forget it: big, red Buick, she’s coming down, and he’s like, No, no! And she’s like, I’m coming, Bud! And she just drives right off. And she’s presumed dead, and then many years later she resurfaces –

Sarah: Of course!

Amye: – in Goshen, Pennsylvania, in the Amish country. Alan Spaulding had found her alive and had made her Amish. [Laughs]

Sarah: As you do!

Amye: And, and she lived there for quite a while. Well, in the meantime, Josh falls in love with Annie Dutton, who…loved, and they were, like, you know, finding love, and Josh was healing from losing Reva, and it was this whole thing. So then Reva comes back, and then she’s cloned. Like, they just did so much stuff to Reva? It was horrific. And so that was one of, Josh and Reva’s love story is one of my all-time favorite storylines. It is, it is embedded in my…it is forever there, and I, I really just, I have such fond memories of, my sister would come home – she worked at McDonald’s when we were teenagers – she would come home after –

Sarah: Which was a major teen job when we were kids.

Amye: Oh yeah.

Sarah: Working at McDonald’s –

Amye: I had it too.

Sarah: – as a teen was the shit. Yeah.

Amye: Yeah. Well, she worked closing, so she would get home about 1 a.m. –

Sarah: Oof.

Amye: – and we would watch that day’s Guiding Light! We had it taped, and we would sit and watch it together, and oh boy, what they put Reva through: the time travel, the cloning. The cloning was kind of wild, now that I think about it.

Sarah: Again, a topic that was really not commonly discussed or even understood at that time. Like, we hadn’t gotten to Dolly the sheep yet. This was before that.

Amye: Well, her clone’s name was Dolly.

Sarah: Of course it was!

Amye: Yeah. Of course it was.

Sarah: I believe that might have – wasn’t that the inspiration for – no, it was Dolly Parton? I have to look up, where did the sheep –

Amye: Oh, I don’t know.

Sarah: – get her name? And if you think about it, if you sort of pull back at like a thirty-six-thousand-foot view of this, all of her storyline, a lot of it is about bodily autonomy! And having control over her own body in one way or another.

Amye: Reva had no control over her own body for a long time.

Sarah: It was somebody else’s to deal with and decide.

Amye: ‘Cause she also married Josh’s brother Billy. She was passed around –

Sarah: Oh boy, yes!

Amye: – the, the Lewis men, and then also simultaneously slut-shamed for that?

Sarah: Of course!

Amye: But also passed around like she was an object.

Sarah: Yes. And –

Amye: Yeah.

Sarah: – they, they were not at fault for any of this.

Amye: No. Of course not. Of course not. Yeah.

Sarah: And I remember that the, the wrong side of the tracks thing is one of the foundational elements of the Dallas storyline, because Pamela Ewing –

Amye: Yep!

Sarah: – was originally a Barnes, who was the hated family of the Ewings, and now –

Amye: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – Bobby had married somebody from the family who was (a) lower class and (b) that they hate.

Amye: Yes. Yeah! Oh, a lot.

Sarah: All right, I bring you Bertrice Small – a particular Bertrice Small – but Bertrice Small –

Amye: Mm.

Sarah: – was one of the original, they were called the Avon ladies? They were part of Avon Publishing; it was her, Virginia Henley –

Amye: I remember Avon ladies!

Sarah: Yep! So she was one of the original Avon ladies. She wrote truly incredible books that were sweeping periods of history with a lot of fucking. Like, so much – like, we, we colloquially call them shtupping through history books.

Amye: Okay!

Sarah: One of my favorites is Blaze Wyndham. She ends up being a mistress to King Henry VIII and being around –

Amye: Oh!

Sarah: – for a lot of the beheadings and – yeah, very – Bertrice was well into the Tudors. This is also a bit of a Tudor book. So this is –

Amye: Okay.

Sarah: – Skye O’Malley. This is a series. Skye just keeps going and going and going. But this is the first one.

Amye: I’m going to look this cover up too.

Sarah: Skye O’Malley, the original cover – let me see.

Amye: Okay, I see a lot of covers. Which one –

Sarah: Yes!

Amye: – is the original?

Sarah: So I think the original one is the one where this woman that kind of looks like Jaclyn Smith has a center hair part, brown…

Amye: Is being kissed by somebody who looks like Christopher Reeve.

Sarah: Being, being kissed by Christopher Reeve –

Amye: Yes.

Sarah: – in a velvet doublet –

Amye: Okay.

Sarah: – against –

Amye: Yep!

Sarah: – the back of some – yeah. And then you can see the other covers are just the title and author with a little tiny inset of that image. We went from, like –

Amye: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – full-on, you know, arousal and intimacy to just a little tiny peek. So yeah, Christopher Reeve and Jaclyn Smith are in this book. It is the mid 1500s, and Skye O’Malley is the favorite daughter of a minor Irish lord who owns a pretty successful trading company, and apparently is only, the only one of his daughters who is hot, and also he likes her the best. So Skye is dad’s favorite, and then dad marries an, a younger woman who then had some sons (because he needs someone to inherit, and it obviously can’t be all these girls, for God’s sake).

Amye: It could not be –

Sarah: No!

Amye: – a woman, no.

Sarah: That’s silly.

Amye: Of course not.

Sarah: Meanwhile, is Skye good at things? Yes. Does she later take over? Of course. So she has a bunch of sons, and then they arrange a marriage for Skye. The problem is Skye has hornypants for Niall, who is not from One Direction, and he’s sort of the, like, the, the big shot in town, in their little village. The arranged marriage goes through, but before the wedding night, Niall demands the right to claim her virginity as the landowner of the area, which was a whole plot –

Amye: Oh my God!

Sarah: Yeah, right?

Amye: Okay.

Sarah: I, I don’t even correctly know – I think it’s droit du seigneur, but it was in Braveheart. Basically, the lord can be like, I would like your virginity, not your husband. So –

Amye: Mm-mm.

Sarah: – the problem is they’re super into each other, so Niall’s like, No, I want the right to claim your virginity, and she’s like, Oh no! What will I do? They go to Pound Town all night long. This is the only time that Skye has sex but does not get pregnant per the review on my site. So –

Amye: Okay.

Sarah: – Skye’s dad is, like, real pissed about Niall’s, you know, inserting himself in many, many ways, and shoves Skye in a convent to make sure she’s not pregnant, and then after she’s not pregnant she leaves the convent and goes back to her husband Dom, who is terrible and, as happens in many Old Skool romances, sexually assaults her and rapes her a lot of the time.

Amye: Ughhh.

Sarah: Meanwhile, Skye has a terrible sister-in-law; Dom’s sister Claire is terrible to her, and it turns out that she has been banging her brother since forever. So –

Amye: Ohhh!

Sarah: – Dom cheats on her regularly –

Amye: Okay.

Sarah: – with his sister Claire.

Amye: Okay. All right.

Sarah: Then Dom dies –

Amye: Got some Game of Thrones going on here.

Sarah: Very Game of Thrones. So then –

Amye: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – Dom dies. Skye gets kidnapped by pirates at some point and is sent to Algiers, and she’s with Niall on this ship ‘cause she’s taken over her dad’s business. Niall gets shot in the chest, and so she thinks he’s dead. He, she ends up with, in Algiers with the whoremaster of Algiers. She is sold to him, but of course the, her, her, her cinnabar cavern of love is so powerful that he also falls in love with her. And then she ends up back in London! And she meets Queen Elizabeth, original recipe. They have a weird rivalry. Like, they hate each other, but they hang out all the time, so this whole section of Skye and Liz –

Amye: Wow!

Sarah: – buddy comedy! Then she finds out Niall is still alive. He’s married to somebody else; she marries somebody else; has a bunch of other sex through history; eventually ends up with Niall. They get married and bone lots of other people and then each other, the end.

And then in book – [laughs] – in book two, SPOILER: Niall dies, and she starts all over again!

Amye: Oh my God!

Sarah: This –

Amye: You know, as you’re describing this I’m like, This is could be a Tudors story. Like, this could have been the crown season whatever.

Sarah: A hundred percent.

Amye: Yeah.

Sarah: Super, super, off-the-wall shtupping through history. Everyone is horny and hot.

Amye: Mmm.

Sarah: That’s the other thing, I think. You have this expectation with soap operas that there was going to be one guy who was super hot. Like, his whole job –

Amye: Oh yeah.

Sarah: – was super hot with cheekbones.

Amye: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: Like, he had to –

Amye: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: Like, Drake Hogestyn’s cheekbones are a national treasure. Lorenzo Lamas?

Amye: Yes.

Sarah: Cheekbones. Cheekbones.

Amye: They were never – I’m trying to think; was it ever the rich guy who was the hot one? Often not.

Sarah: No. That’s his redeeming value.

Amye: ‘Cause the patriarch of – right – the patriarch of the rich family was often not very good-looking, because they had to, like, brainwash women to marry them and stuff.

Sarah: Yep. Or –

Amye: Yeah…

Sarah: – or they get married and find out that their wife was a gold digger, and they’d be mad –

Amye: Mmm.

Sarah: – and that would be…

Amye: Or, or banging their son, of course, always.

Sarah: Okay. I mean, there’s – all the time!

Amye: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: It’s just such a problem?

Amye: Okay, my final one: I bring to you, I present to you Brent Lawrence from Guiding Light. And I do realize most of these are from Guiding Light. I’m just sorry, that, that was my main one.

All right, so Brent Lawrence comes onto the scene, and he’s a finance bro. He’s, you know, good-looking, whatever. He moves to Springfield, and he meets Lucy Cooper, who is the blue collar family daughter –

Sarah: Yeah.

Amye: – Lucy. Lucy, at the time, was starting to have a relationship with Alan-Michael Spaulding. Spaulding are the rich family.

Sarah: Yeah.

Amye: Alan-Michael’s the son. Very good-looking. And Alan-Michael’s not paying her enough attention, so she starts flirting with Brent Lawrence, and then of course he drugs her and rapes her.

Sarah: ‘Course!

Amye: So then she starts to confide in Alan-Michael what has happened. There’s a big fight; he goes after him, which was another thing that I thought always happened, that a man would fight to the death for my honor, that that would a hundred percent happen in my life.

Sarah: This, and, like –

Amye: It still has not…

Sarah: – quicksand was going to be an –

Amye: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – a going concern for me –

Amye: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Sarah: – many times of my life? Yeah. A hundred percent.

Amye: Yep!

Sarah: This guy was going to, like, go, go hard and go home for my honor.

Amye: Yes! So he’s presumed dead, Brent Lawrence –

Sarah: ‘Course.

Amye: – and he, he, he’s presumed dead. He winds up being alive and comes back to town dressed as a woman named Marion Crane, which is a Psycho throwback.

Sarah: Wooow, that is a –

Amye: Yeah.

Sarah: – deep cut!

Amye: Yes. Yes.

Sarah: That is deep lore.

Amye: He looked, he looked a lot like Mrs. Doubtfire as a brunette.

[Laughter]

Amye: Like, it was really bad, and everybody’s like, Oh, the actor was so good he even went to, like, a support group for men who like to dress like women to learn how to do this. I’m like, this is so bad right now?

Sarah: Yikies!

Amye: I can’t even talk about this.

Sarah: Ohhh yes!

Amye: Mm-hmm! So he comes –

Sarah: So you’ve got, you’ve got gay panic; you’ve got –

Amye: Yeah.

Sarah: – what, what at the time was probably called transvestites. Like –

Amye: Yes. Yeah.

Sarah: – ooh, Yikies! Yep!

Amye: And he, he, as Marion Crane – and this played out for over a year, this storyline.

Sarah: If they’re going to invest in all that costuming they need to –

Amye: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – they need to get a good use out of it, right?

Amye: And he, as Marion Crane – and, like, it was so creepy –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Amye: – because you would see him go back to his apartment at night and, like, take off his wig and take his – it was very Norman Bates.

Sarah: Yeah.

Amye: And it was scary, and –

Sarah: I just googled –

Amye: – he ended up –

Sarah: – pictures to refresh my memory. Yeess!

Amye: Yes. Yes. And – [laughs] – first of all, Marion Crane was just so creepy in terms of how he would position himself as her all the time? Like, he was a shoulder-rubber! Marion Crane was a shoulder-rubber, and it was creepy. So he ended up, like, spiraling and killing a bunch of people, and – including Nadine Cooper, who was a fan favorite! And that’s, you know, in the end he was taken down and discovered, and Alan-Michael, I believe, killed him for real that time. That was one of my favorite storylines. I mean, the stereotypes were awful!

Sarah: Yes.

Amye: It was awful. It was –

Sarah: Super bad.

Amye: I mean, he just – why didn’t he just disguise himself as an older gentleman?

Sarah: Well, that’s not good for TV! That’s not good for ratings.

Amye: Right. Right.

Sarah: Like, that’s not scandalous as a man dressing as a woman. Oh –

Amye: It, it was –

Sarah: – boy!

Amye: – it was, it kept us glued for like a whole year. I’m telling you, we were really invested in that storyline.

Sarah: And you know, it’s funny: there is a lot of, there’s a lot of play with cross-dressing in, in romance, for a long time in historical romances, especially Westerns. The heroine, who is usually like, you know, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, would disguise herself as a boy by putting on a, like a, a boy’s trousers?

Amye: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: And sometimes it would work! Like, the disguise would be very effective, and the hero would be, like, really in turmoil about how he has all these feelings of attraction and, and, like, his, his – they all, so many, so many heroes could tell at a glance that a heroine was a virgin like it was some sort of pheromone.

Amye: [Laughs]

Sarah: It was very weird.

Amye: Wow!

Sarah: Or maybe, like, their dicks were like divining rods and they’d be like, Ooh, virgin! But –

Amye: Baby.

Sarah: – they, they, they couldn’t tell that this was, this boy was a, was a, was a woman in disguise, and they would be all tormented about their feelings. Or they could tell, and they just proceeded accordingly. But at no time, when I was seventeen or eighteen –

Amye: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – could I have fit in a boy’s trousers. Like –

Amye: No!

Sarah: – the whole premise is bananas. Everyone’s like, Oh yeah!

Amye: Yeah.

Sarah: Well, she put the stable boy’s trousers, and suddenly she was a boy. I’m like, What?!…

Amye: Oh, I know. I know.

Sarah: So my last one is one of my all-time favorite series. Much like soap operas, romance has also enjoyed a period of time when it was just loony-tunes. It was just zany. It was weird –

Amye: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – and you just kind of went with it, and the queen, for me, is Sandra Hill. Sandra Hill wrote a series about immortal vampire Viking angel Navy SEALs.

Amye: [Pauses] Say that again?

[Laughter]

Sarah: They were called the Vi-vangels. They were immortal vampire –

Amye: Nooo!

Sarah: – Viking –

Amye: …called the Vi-vangels?

Sarah: – angel Navy SEALs. Or vangels or – I’ve seen it both, but it –

Amye: Is there a book cover for – what would I google for this cover?

Sarah: So for this one, you’re going to want to google The Angel Wore Fangs. I don’t believe that this has been updated. This was very much in the –

Amye: Oh, I see it.

Sarah: – dehydrated, emaciated, muscular men posing with all of their abs so well defined they haven’t had a drink of water in like two weeks?

Amye: Yeah.

Sarah: Yep. This guy’s –

Amye: This –

Sarah: – actually steaming? Like, there’s steam coming off of him?

Amye: This guy could be in Vikings Valhalla tomorrow.

Sarah: Absolutely!

Amye: Yeah, okay.

Sarah: Big hair and everything. And you can sort of see the wings. But yes, they are all Viking, immortal Viking vampire angel Navy SEALs. The Navy SEALs part came into the series later, but they are immortal vi-, vampire Vikings.

Amye: I feel like there’s a couple redundancies here that are not needed? [Laughs]

Sarah: I mean, if – go big or go home. If you’re going to have them be vampires, why not also Vikings? Why not also immortal and also angels and then Navy SEALs? So this one –

Amye: Mm-hmm, okay.

Sarah: – was famous on Tumblr, and I love it deeply. It’s called The Angel Wore Fangs.

Amye: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: I cannot top the cover copy. I am just going to read the cover copy, and I am not making a single word of this up. Okay?

Amye: Okay, okay.

Sarah: >> Once guilt of the deadly sin of gluttony, thousand-year-old Viking vampire angel Cnut –

C-N-U-T; I have never found out how to pronounce this.

Amye: Okay, I’m going to stop you right there, ‘cause the lead character in Vikings is Cnut.

Sarah: Yep!

Amye: So here we go! This was totally –

Sarah: They were reading this book.

Amye: – I believe that series stole it from here.

Sarah: Sandra Hill has better, better be calling her lawyer. So –

Amye: Yes.

Sarah: >> – Cnut Sigurdsson is now a lean, mean vampire-devil fighting machine.

Amye: That’s his last name too. What is going on here?

Sarah: Wait, hang on. This is Vikings, right?

Amye: Yeah.

Sarah: The drama series.

Amye: Yes.

Sarah: Vikings premiered in 2013, so let’s assume that it was being written 2012 –

Amye: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – 2011, right? When did this book come out? I –

Amye: So –

Sarah: – did not remember the last…

Amye: – Vikings is historical fiction, though. So –

Sarah: So this came out in 2016! Maybe she stole it from the show! Or maybe they were just –

Amye: So King Cnut I think was a real person.

Sarah: Well, if he, if he was, this, this, he has a great side hustle in this –

Amye: Okay.

Sarah: – in this book. Are you ready? So –

Amye: Okay, yes, go ahead.

Sarah: – Cnut, lean, mean vampire-devil fighting machine, thousand-year-old immortal vampire Viking angel Navy SEAL, he has a new side hustle. Can you guess what his side hustle is? It’s a new job, side job, in addition to hunting the vampire-devils.

Amye: Dog walker.

Sarah: No.

Amye: Horse breeder. [Laughs]

Sarah: No. He’s ridding the world of a threat called ISIS.

Amye: No. Gah.

[Laughter]

Amye: Oh, gah.

Sarah: This new side job –

Amye: …did this come out again?

Sarah: Twenty-eight – God, did I, I don’t…numbers very well.

Amye: Okay. Okay! Okay.

Sarah: This came out in 2016!

Amye: Okay.

Sarah: A time when romance was certainly a time. And this is part of the Deadly Angels series? This is, this is book six in the devil, Deadly Angels series. Sandra Hill also wrote Christmas in Transylvania, a Deadly Angels novella, if you’d like to wish, read a Christmas version of this series. This is, this is a full-service series; it has everything you need.

Amye: Okay.

Sarah: So he’s ridding the world of a threat called ISIS –

Amye: Mm.

Sarah: – while keeping evil Lucipires, which are the demon vampires, at bay.

>> So when chef Andrea Stewart –

You know, she’s a chef.

>> – hires him to rescue her sister from a cult recruiting terrorists at a Montana dude ranch –

Amye: [Laughs]

Sarah: >> – vangel turns cowboy. Yee. Haw.

Amye: No! No!

Sarah: [Laughs] So we’ve got –

Amye: Look, I’m all about things turning cowboy, okay.

Sarah: Right?

Amye: I’m real into that romantic cowboy –

Sarah: Hundred percent.

Amye: – cheesiness, a hundred percent. Wow.

Sarah: Yep.

Amye: Wow! I just, I don’t know what to say to this.

Sarah: It’s, it’s my favorite to tell people about. So the –

Amye: Holy –

Sarah: >> The too-tempting mortal insists on accompanying him to this dude ranch.

So we’ve got a cult, we’ve got terrorists, we’ve got a van-, Viking vampire angels, and we’re in Montana at a dude ranch.

Amye: We’ve got cowboys.

Sarah: >> She surprises Cnut with her bravery at every turn.

Amye: Mm.

Sarah: Bitch has knife skills! Why are you impressed? This, she can break down, like, large animals! What, what are you impressed by? She’s got knives! Don’t be impressed.

>> But with terrorists stalking the ranch in demonoid form, Cnut tele-transports Andrea and himself out of danger but accidentally into the 10th-century Norse lands.

So they time travel. [Laughs]

Amye: Wow.

Sarah: This is…

Amye: Who green lit this book?!

Sarah: I, I think Sandra Hill is just like, she sends in a proposal and everyone’s like, Absolutely yes, let’s do it. Hundred –

Amye: Did AI write this?

Sarah: No! [Laughs] This is – Sandra Hill is a gift to us all!

Amye: Did AI generate the idea for it, is what I should say.

[Laughter]

Sarah: So they time-travel back to the Norse lands, and they have to both find their way back to the future to save her family and the world – don’t forget, he’s fighting ISIS –

Amye: Mm-hmm, of course.

Sarah: – and satisfy their insatiable attraction.

Amye: Wow!

Sarah: Wow!

Amye: Okay!

Sarah: Imagine that on Days of Our Lives.

Amye: I need to see that on the Dutton Ranch.

Sarah: Right?

Amye: I need to see that in Yellowstone.

Sarah: I, I want a – if, if they’re going to reboot, reboot Dallas, this is –

Amye: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – the storyline that I want!

Amye: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: Truly incredible.

Amye: Me too, me too. I’m particularly interested in the Lucipires.

Sarah: Oh, for sure!

Amye: I, I’d probably date a couple of those! I need to see them. Mm-hmm.

Sarah: I mean, if they’re good, if they’re a good villain, then they’re not going to be easy to kill, but the problem with a lot of these series that have villains for the vampires to, like, villains for the good guys to attack is that they’re very easy to get rid of? There’s just many of them. So they’re –

Amye: Okay.

Sarah: – not even that impressive.

Amye: I understand. Wow! This has been –

Sarah: Yep.

Amye: – we’ve gone toe to toe here.

Sarah: Mm-hmm. And I do have –

Amye: But you may have won with that last one.

Sarah: I – thank you! I do have one from Kara, who is in my Patreon, and I want to share this with you –

Amye: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – just because –

Amye: Okay.

Sarah: – it’s very soap opera. Wild Hearts by Virginia Henley, who’s also another original Avon lady. This is –

Amye: Mm.

Sarah: – Kara writing:

>> Orphan Tabby Lamont is sold to an old man who wants her virginity to cure his syphilis.

Amye: [Laughs]

Sarah: >> She gets kidnapped on her wedding night by Paris Cockburn, a Scottish lord –

Amye: No, no!

Sarah: Yes!

Amye: Cockburn!

Sarah: Yes! Absolutely!

Amye: Okay.

Sarah: I’m sure it’s pronounced Coburn, but it’s Cockburn.

Amye: Sure. Sure.

Sarah: >> He’s got a big family of siblings, all of them have different shades of red hair, and they’re all named after cities!

Amye: Hmmm!

Sarah: Much like celebrity children named Brooklyn or, you know, Paris.

Amye: Mm-hmm, okay.

Sarah: >> A sheriff or somebody comes looking for Tabby, but Paris claims that Tabby is just yet another one of the sisters because she has red hair, and hey, look, her name is a city.

Amye: Mm.

Sarah: >> Paris’s sister goes to Pound Town with the sheriff to keep him occupied. Then there, later there are kidnappings, there are things; an uncle’s mistress tries to sleep with Paris so she can get pregnant and claim the uncle’s fortune, but oh no, Tabby is the long-lost daughter of the rich uncle, but the happy ending, for the happy ending she winds up marrying her cousin/lover Paris, and they wind up living happily ever after making red-headed children for four hundred pages.

Amye: Okay! Wow.

Sarah: So you can see why, as a person who loves romance and knows a lot about the history of it, looking at soap operas –

Amye: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – how much affection I have for the –

Amye: Yes.

Sarah: – soap opera genre.

Amye: It totally fits! And you know what? I wonder if there was, you know, you were talking about you joking about what is going on in the writer’s room or the break room of –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amye: – that company –

Sarah: Yeah!

Amye: – I wonder if the executives at, you know, P&G are sitting down together saying, How do we get television to women? Oh, well, we base it on these romance novels that they love so much.

Sarah: Yep! And it’s weird –

Amye: Yeah.

Sarah: – because romance novel adaptations don’t, don’t traditionally do very well? But –

Amye: Yeah.

Sarah: – this was also the same period in the ‘90s and the late ‘80s when – excuse me – Judith Krantz novels were being adapted for television.

Amye: Yeah.

Sarah: There were all these contemporary, glamorous TV adaptations. I think Sandra Brown had some; Danielle Steel had a ton, tons of adaptation.

Amye: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: And again, Danielle Steel is like soap operas in a book. Rich people problems –

Amye: I remember reading that, but –

Sarah: – and romances, yeah.

Amye: My mother, you know, she had a couple Danielle Steel, a couple Judith Krantz. I read them, but oh my God, I was so young.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amye: I don’t, I don’t remember any of them.

Sarah: They’re not, like, they’re not meant to be super memorable, just because so much happens.

Amye: Yeah. Yeah! Yeah.

Sarah: It’s as much a story about what happens to them at is, as it is about them?

Amye: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: And at the same time, romance gets a bad rap for having sex in it, being loved by women.

Amye: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: There’s a lot of pejorative media about romance. Fortunately less now? But it has always been mocked. And so have soap operas!

Amye: Yeah! Oh yeah, absolutely.

Sarah: They’re denigrated all the time. But one of the things that you and, and Dom and Chris said was that these are like plays. These are like live-action plays happening on screen –

Amye: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – and if you were a regular on a soap opera you had to work really, really hard – I don’t even want to know what it was like to be a soap writer – to both –

Amye: Yeah.

Sarah: – advance the plot and make it accessible to anyone who just tuned in. And you’ve got a steady job! It’s a hard job –

Amye: Yeah!

Sarah: – it’s hard work, but you’ve got –

Amye: You have to memorize how many pages every day!

Sarah: Every day!

Amye: Yeah. Yeah.

Sarah: And so I look at, you know, soap operas, especially soap opera actors and writers? They do not get – they do now, but back at the time they did not get a lot of respect. Neither did romance –

Amye: No.

Sarah: – or romance writers, not just –

Amye: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – because it was something loved by women, but that’s a major factor in it.

Amye: Yeah. I agree. I agree.

Sarah: I love that we –

Amye: Because –

Sarah: – occupy related worlds.

Amye: Yes! And you look at some of the nighttime soaps, and they were, they were viewed differently, and I think it’s because their demographic was more – I’m not going to say they were geared towards men, but men watched them!

Sarah: Mm-hmm!

Amye: You know, like, I remember my mom watched Dallas, but she watched it with my dad!

Sarah: Oh yeah!

Amye: At night. So, like, it was a different, there was a different level of respect for those stories.

Sarah: Oh yeah. But those were, you know, prime time, and they looked –

Amye: Yes.

Sarah: – they looked more expensive.

Amye: Yeah. Yeah.

Sarah: The thing about soap operas is that a lot of the time they did not look expensive. They were not necessarily on location; they were almost always in a set. And then in 2020 it was like they were standing there with, like –

Amye: Mannequins.

Sarah: – store mannequins.

Amye: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – which was kind of wild, really. Wild.

So I always ask this question: are there any books read-, you are reading right now that you would like to tell people about? And I also have some recommendations for you.

Amye: So speaking of really dramatic, I am reading the – I’m a memoirist, so I read a lot of memoir.

Sarah: Oh, cool!

Amye: And I am reading this book, which is called Sister Wife, and it is by Christine Brown Woolley. So –

Sarah: Oh my!

Amye: – if you guys watch Sister Wives – or haven’t watched Sister Wives, I should say – we’re on season twenty starting next week, and –

Sarah: Season –

Amye: – Kody Brown has now, down to one wife. So he’s…

Sarah: So if it’s a singular, if it’s a singular, does his wife have to now be his sister? Sister wife?

Amye: …no. No.

Sarah: ‘Cause we’re – how does the adjective modify the noun now if there’s only one wife?

Amye: Yeah.

Sarah: Yeah.

Amye: There’s only one wife –

Sarah: …so tough!

Amye: – so they are living monogamy, pretty much. And so, you know, the show really had a resurgence since like about, I want to say 2018, when the family started to kind of fall apart, and Kody started to get his comeuppance a little bit?

Sarah: Mm-hmm!

Amye: And now we’re down to one wife, and Christine just came out with this tell-all memoir. And it’s, I’m going to be honest with you, it’s very good. Like, it’s not –

Sarah: That’s cool!

Amye: – salacious. You know what I mean? Like, it confirms a lot of things that we thought, but it’s really interesting story of somebody deconstructing Mormonism and deconstructing the AUB, which is the church that they were raised in –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amye: – and so it’s really interesting! It’s a good, it’s a good memoir, and we’re covering it on our show, so.

Sarah: That’s excellent! I am, I am always fascinated by memoirs of people who are leaving high-demand cultures? Whether it’s a cult or –

Amye: Yeah.

Sarah: – a religion.

Amye: Yeah.

Sarah: The organizations that sort of take over your life and demand many, many, many steps to demonstrate your fealty?

Amye: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Sarah: Yep. Are there memoirs that you think are, like, the ones you recommend the most?

Amye: One of my favorite memoirs of all time is called – [laughs] – this is weird – this is a deep cut, but it’s, it’s by Kelle Groom, I think her name is? And it’s called I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl. Is that it? I Wore the Ocean in the Shape – it’s one of my favorite memoirs of all time.

Sarah: Yeah!

Together: I Wore the Shape of a Girl –

Sarah: Kelle Groom.

Amye: I have a real love of memoirists who are poets?

Sarah: Ohhh!

Amye: So she’s one of them; Mary Karr’s one of them –

Sarah: Yes.

Amye: – Nick Flynn is another big one –

Sarah: Yeah.

Amye: – that I really love. Another Bullshit Night in Suck City is one of the best memoirs that I’ve ever read. Maggie Smith just had one: I Think We Can Make This Place Beautiful –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amye: – or something like that it’s called [You Could Make This Place Beautiful]. That was really excellent. So any of those, I highly recommend.

Sarah: And you mentioned you’re a memoirist. Are you working on your memoir?

Amye: My memoir was published in 2016. It’s called Fat –

Sarah: Holy shit!

Amye: – Fat Girl, Skinny?

Sarah: I did not know that! That’s awesome! Congratulations!

Amye: Thank you, thank you.

Sarah: I wish I remembered enough of my childhood to write a memoir, but I do not.

Amye: [Laughs] Well, okay, so I’m going to tell you something about memoir: a lot of people think, like, you have to live this big, interesting life –

Sarah: Yeah.

Amye: – to write a memoir, but you really don’t, because the way that it was described to me, and I use this all the time, and I can never attribute it to anyone, ‘cause I don’t remember who told me, but if you think of autobiography as the Mona Lisa, the memoir is her smile. It’s that slice of something –

Sarah: That is such a good way to describe it! Wow!

Amye: Isn’t it? It’s like –

Sarah: Yeah!

Amye: – that slice of something. You know, so my memoir is about the period of time where I was divorced from my first husband, and I was battling food addiction –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amye: – and trying to learn how to live in a thinner body and all of that. So that’s like my little slice of life! The conversation around weight and the way that we talk about it has changed dramatically since I wrote that book, and I’m always half tempted to pull it down – [laughs] – and revise it. But I’m like, you know what? No! I’m letting it stand, because that was, when I wrote it in 2014, that’s what it was!

Sarah: Yep!

Amye: You know, I wrote it for the fourteen-year-old version of me.

Sarah: Yeah.

Amye: You know what I mean? Who had nobody.

Sarah: Yeah.

Amye: So I, you know, I think that’s what good memoir does: it reach –

Sarah: Yes.

Amye: – reaches you in a, a dark place and pulls you out and says, There are others like us!

Sarah: Oh yes.

Amye: Here we are!

Sarah: So the books I have to recommend to you: first, I, if you want some Old Skool sort of very ‘80s, ‘90s glam, Mirror Image by Sandra Brown, about this woman who gets in a plane crash and is mistaken for this dead actress, and now all of a sudden she’s going to pretend to be her for a while.

Amye: Okay.

Sarah: There’s some great shower sex in that one. Really good shower sex.

Amye: Okay! Okay!

Sarah: If you want a little bit older and very soapy –

Amye: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – Judith McNaught, especially Paradise, which is about, I believe, a kid from the wrong side of the tracks, and then the heroine’s family owns a department store?

Amye: Mm!

Sarah: You remember department stores?

Amye: I remember!

Sarah: And you could –

Amye: We just covered Mad Men on our –

Sarah: Yep!

Amye: …show, and, yeah.

Sarah: But I think if you’re into reality TV, you might really, really like the Marry Me, Juliet trilogy by Jodi McAlister? The first book is Here for the Right Reasons? And it is set on a clone of The Bachelorette called Marry Me, Juliet, but it’s both about the stars and the contestants, but also the producers and the people behind the scenes.

Amye: Okay! That sounds interesting, yeah. Thank you!

Sarah: Thank you so much for doing this. It has been an absolute ball talking to you. I, I –

Amye: I loved it!

Sarah: I, seriously, was listening to you. I’m like, This is – of the episode – and I was like, This is really creepy, but this person and I would totally vibe. Where –

Amye: [Laughs]

Sarah: – where can people find you if you wish to be found?

Amye: I do wish to be found. So I am at Little Miss Recap, and you can find us everywhere, and also Murder She Watched, and I also, for my writing I have a website, amyearcher.com.

Sarah: I will link to all of these things. Thank you so –

Amye: Thank you!

Sarah: – so much.

Amye: And I hope you’ll come over and talk to me on Little Miss Recap at some point!

Sarah: I would love to! Name it and I will be there.

[outro]

Sarah: And that brings us to the end of this week’s episode. Thank you profusely to Amye Archer for being on my show and talking about her history with soaps. I had such a ball recording this episode, and I hope you enjoyed listening to it as much as I have.

I will have links to all of the books that we discussed and where you can find Amye, including Gen X, This is Why; Little Miss Recap; and Murder She Watched.

As always, I end with a terrible joke. This is really bad.

Did you know that cottage cheese isn’t really a cheese?

Yeah! It’s just a curd to me.

[Laughs] I’m sure some of you are like, Wait, what? It’s just occurred to me! That joke is from devildance3 on Reddit. Thank you, thank you, thank you. That one made me chortle.

On behalf of everyone here, we wish you the very best of reading. Have a wonderful weekend, and we’ll see you back here next week for the first of our Holiday Wishes episodes, where my guests are all of you! And if you are in Smart Bitches After Dark or the podcast Patreon, you can still sign up. And in the words of my favorite retired podcast Friendshipping, thank you for listening. You’re welcome for talking!

[end of music]