When I was eleven years old and in the fifth grade I loved this silly teen soap opera called Swans Crossing. My favorite character was Sydney played by the amazing Sarah Michelle Gellar. I was terribly sad when the show stopped airing, even though WPIX had it airing at like 6am or something crazy like that. I was getting my fifth grade butt up and watching it.
In the spring of that year my Mother told me that the girl that played Sydney was now on the soap opera she always watched while eating lunch—All My Children. At this point I really only knew a few things about AMC; it had a character named Dixie, a guy named Tad who came back like the year before, some woman named Erica Kane existed. That’s what I knew at the time. Heck I was eleven, and the only soap opera I had ever sat down and watched besides Swan’s Crossing was Another World. But because SMG was on this show, the next time I was home sick I got to watch AMC.
That was how I began my viewership of AMC on my own. I fell in love with all of it. I remember when I started sixth grade another girl in my get to know you group also watched AMC. Whenever it was just the two of us waiting before gym class we would discuss the latest of Trevor and his kids, or Kendall trying to ruin Erica or Adam trying to keep things going with Gloria.
For years when I was home from school, or not in class (college schedule usually left me open for AMC), I knew the characters, I loved them and most of the time they acted normally. Sometimes things shocked up, made us laugh, made us cry. I adored Tad and Simone, heck if he wasn’t going to be able to be with Dixie; Simone was a really great choice wasn’t she? I remember sitting in my dorm room when Leo “died” and crying that my hall mates were like WTF?
Then Chuck Pratt came on and I knew things for AMC were going to be bad. I knew he never cared about characters just what crazy thing he could do—just like Guza from General Hospital (that’s another post for another day). At this point, I remember watching AMC when I could and being confused about pretty much everything and everyone. They didn’t make sense at all. They made decisions I just didn’t understand.
We got a few months when Lorraine Broderick that worked out some major missteps that Pratt did, however we then got the show killers, who made AMC so bad I couldn’t watch it. I couldn’t sit through the show at all. I would put it on and I had no idea what was going on. My former boss would always ask me what was going on; I used to be able to tell her anything she needed to know. At this point though I had no clue whatsoever was happening.
Then we got that awful Thursday, I will never forget when I found out the news. I was at work, my last day on the job and excited that soon I wouldn’t be dealing with tourists or trying to balance college students schedules anymore. I looked down at my not so trusty smartphone (it likes to turn itself off) and saw the tweets of the news. I held back the tears for a while until I went into the restroom and cried for a moment.
A few nights later, out with some friends at the bar where in the haze of a few too many cosmos I balled my eyes out about the cancellation of AMC and OLTL. AMC will soon be off our TV screens, but it is no longer going to be gone. I know a lot of people are sketched out by the internet thing, including a certain leader that didn’t want to be a leader (if you know who you are, good for catching on), but let’s be grateful that no matter what, we will be getting our AMC fix one way or another. Which is amazing because it finally feels like the show it once was, it can make you laugh and cry, cheer and shout. If whoever stays with the series when it moves to the internet and keep this going then we’ve won.
Heck as long as the characters make sense again, they feel like themselves, act like themselves then it’s all good. I am glad that the viewers who won’t be following the show to the internet get to have this show back once again. It would be a true tragedy if the show were to move on a low note rather than the high note we have happening right now.
Embrace it, love it, hold it in your heart.
Remember that the soaps didn’t start out on TV, the started in Radio and made the move. Guiding Light made that move and lasted a very long time in its new home. Perhaps we will be lucky and blessed that the same could happen for All My Children.
