Escaping Monica, Bill for Real Soap Opera

OK. Confession time. I’ve been keeping a secret, and I have to come clean.

Iwatchasoapopera.

I feel so much better, I can repeat that at a comprehensible pace: I watch a soap opera.

And what drove me to this state? Monicagate. For years, CNN was my office TV wallpaper. It’d play quietly in the background, and I’d look up and pay attention if something happened. As the Bill-and-Monica circus dragged on, nothing happened. Yet CNN sang the same old song, driving me batty. So I changed to ABC, thinking maybe I should check out those ever-popular daytime soaps. I’d look up and pay attention if something happened.

And did something happen. Emotional fireworks! Family fury! Murders, romance, blackmail, insanity! I got hooked on “One Life to Live.” Me, discerning critic. Thankfully, I’d at least settled on a respectable soap: “One Life to Live” is inspired by Steven Bochco.

No, really. So says executive producer Jill Farren Phelps, who invokes TV’s hallowed co-creator of “Hill Street Blues,” “L.A. Law” and “NYPD Blue” as showing her the way in pace, plotting and execution. “He married incident and emotion better than anybody else,” Phelps says she noticed back in the ‘80s, when she was getting into soaps from theatrical production. Bochco showed how “it was possible to build from an incident and to make enormous emotional fallout.” Phelps is trying to do the same thing at “OLTL,” which doesn’t act like your mother’s soap opera.

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For one thing, things happen fast. Forget that laggard old daytime pace, where even simple events take weeks to unfold. One recent day in her show’s second half-hour, a nasty rapist took his lawyer, Nora (Hillary B. Smith), the show’s heroine, hostage right in the courtroom. Worth days of worry, right? Sorry. The very next day, before the half-hour mark, the baddie takes another lawyer hostage, Nora’s beau, Sam (Kale Browne), and then the bad guy’s shot. Dead. Over. In less than one TV hour. Talk about needing to pay attention.

Of course, the emotional fallout lingers for weeks, among Nora, Sam and Bo, Nora’s ex-hubby and the police commissioner, who failed to fire in court to save ‘em because he’d recently shot Sam by accident. Plus Bo is dating Sam’s manipulative ex, Lindsay (the electric Catherine Hickland), who’s keeping a paternity secret that could blow all their relationships sky-high.

Though my shorthand description may make the tangles sound silly, they’re anything but in the way they play out. These are grown-ups who act like it, who seem to truly know one another, whose pasts continue to inform their present. They have complex, if not contradictory, personalities. They even have real jobs they actually seem capable of doing. (Some work at their town’s two competing newspapers. Now, that’s life.) And there’s relatable resonance to their circumstances. These are not pretty people who moonlight as spies, serve as dukes and princesses, or throw hissy fits of pique, then forget whom they love and hate by next week.

“When it’s at its best is when we’re really ripping through human emotion, when we’re really exploring the way people feel,” Phelps says in her Manhattan office. “That’s why I have loved this Bo-Nora-Sam-Lindsay story, because it has dissected, day by day, the way people feel when one relationship explodes and then another relationship comes together.”

“OLTL” over the last two decades has been as guilty as other soaps of diverting its characters into past lives, nether worlds and overseas adventures. But daytime queen Agnes Nixon created the show back in 1968 to focus on the tumult then shaking society. “OLTL” originally contrasted the lives of the wealthy and the working class.

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It tackled racial themes, with one stunning plot revealing that a white heroine was actually a black woman. It tackled drugs, AIDS, mental disorders. When Phelps came on board two years ago--she’d previously led “Guiding Light” and “Santa Barbara” (after starting in soaps 20 years ago assembling “General Hospital” music in the glory days of Luke and Laura)--she wanted to get back to gut-wrenching family grit.

And everybody’s in on the action. The young, the old and target-demographic adults all get socko stuff to do, and they truly interact in multigenerational story lines.

“OLTL’s” levelheadedness is a revelation for folks like me, who always figured soaps were filled with silliness. “I like realistic stories about walking through life,” Phelps says, “how you fall down and then you get up, how you rise above it, and how you make your way through stuff, and how you fall in love and how you cope with loss. I think that’s what we all go through.”

Steven Bochco should be proud.