Staying Home Sick Will Never Be The Same

I became aware of soap operas as a boy, when I would stay home sick from school. Back then, our options on television were slim in general, but during the day? Forget it. The channels we had available to us in the New York Metropolitan area were 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11 and 13. Occasionally a few VHF channels came through, but they were snowy and/or in Spanish.

Channels 5, 9, and 11 were the local channels, and 13 was PBS. 2, 4 and 7 was where most of the good, or at least decent stuff aired. 2 was WCBS, 4 was WNBC and 7 was WABC, and they still are, as far as I know. Those three channels were the ones that carried the nationally syndicated soaps. My mother was not a huge soap opera fan, but I loved TV as a rule, and the unspoken understanding was that being sick somehow gave me the right to watch television all day long.

I vaguely remember stopping on Days of our Lives and watching for a while, being somewhat interested in peeking in on the lives of adults, with sex and violence, and all the other good stuff they tried to hide from me when I was a kid. Then, I would infallibly get bored and switch either to a game show or, perish the thought, I’d turn off the television and actually read a book.

The soaps made a comeback during high school, when it became a favorite pastime of my little group of friends to get together at someone’s house – usually someone who lived closest to our school, because of the time factor involved – and watch the tail end of All My Children (“All My Kids,” as Maria and her sisters liked to call it) before getting into General Hospital.

At first, we watched it as a goof, while sneaking shots of Southern Comfort and plotting our weekend mischief. But a curious thing happened. “GH,” as we called it, started getting . . . good. But I mean really good. There was Hutch “the baby-faced hitman” (Maria’s again) who all the ladies adored and who was plotting to kill Luke. And there was, of course, that most passionate of daytime relationships, Luke and Laura. Although Luke looked vaguely like Frank Purdue with a blond wig made of pubic hair on his head, and Laura looked like every overly made-up bimbette you saw at the Galleria mall on the weekends, the chemistry and Forbidden Love thing were just too much to resist.

Now it appears that the long-running English-language soap operas are going the way of the dinosaurs. I guess with the advent, and expansion, of cable television, coupled with the virtual extinction of that elusive mythical creature the "Stay-At-Home Mom," they just couldn’t compete. When my boys are home sick from school, the absolute LAST thing they would want to watch would be one of the classic soaps. They prefer the Food Network. (Thanks, honey, for that.)

As it happens, I am home sick from work today, and no, I have no interest in All My Kids or GH. I’ve got hours of DVR’d HBO programming to look at. The world most certainly has changed, but I have no doubt those soaps will take their proper place in television’s Pantheon.

Oh wait, I know. I’ll watch some “Novelas.” Ay, si!