HOW TO MAKE A SOAP OPERA
by Gengar
Soap Operas are an icon of Americana, largely because they are amazingly stupid yet amazingly popular, despite a severe lack of Kung-Fu. These shows can get away with their incomprehensible, comic book reject plots, hollow, one dimensional characters, and assinine writing, because the television people just don't care anymore.
The people who watch soap operas can be roughly divided into two groups- homemakers and unemployed men. They attract these viewers thusly:
Homemakers: Exotic escapes, attractive men, elaborate, romance novelesque plot and dialogue.
Unemployed men: Sex. Lots and lots of sex. If there was no sex in soap operas, millions of soap opera viewers would watch reruns of F-Troop instead, because if there's no sex involved, F-Troop is the better show. Let's not kid ourselves.
Thus, soap operas are all basically the same. Let's create our own soap opera, to hop on the bandwagon like the hacks that we are and make money.
First, we must have a name... that's easy, it just has to be something that sounds romantic aka "stupid". Let's say...
SUNSET MEADOWS
Now we need characters. There are several basic characters that all soap operas need, so we'll create them.
Chesty McBubbles. Chesty will be our young... err... "vivacious" heroine, who constantly wears white t-shirts that are very tight and apparently mildly damp for some reason. Poor Chesty will be the subject of several evil plots, as is necessary.
Brock Landers. Brock will be the ubiquitous love interest/action her, as well as the gratuitous young man with large chest muscles to draw in those homemakers I mentioned. Brock will be a doctor, whose hobbies include stock trading, firefighting, saving Chesty McBubbles from evil people, and generally doing anything required by the inane plots, considering we mostly make them up as we go along.
Paola Vicini Madeupname Paola, with her vaguely Italian sounding name, will be the old, crusty fasion magnate who is approximately 1,000,000,000,000 years old but still dresses and behaves as if she's twenty, and is the subject of lust by every male on the show for some godawful reason. The actress playing this part should have been attractive at some undertermined point before the Big Bang, and be old now.
Evil McSlick. McSlick is the gratuitous young villain, who is designed to appeal to the unemployed men, as he is evil, young, attractive to women, and has had every woman on the show including Chesty at least once. A general, all around badass who is a millionaire, McSlick is also a doctor/firefighter/stock broker/museum curator/caped supehero, but has been to jail at least once, embezzles from his multinational corportation that doesn't seem to do anything, and bases is entire life around forcing Chesty to give up her love for Brock and marry him. He exists for no other purose, and seems unaware that EVERY WOMAN ON THE SHOW IS WILLING TO JUMP INTO BED WITH HIM for some imcomprehensible reason.
Professor Arameus Carpathia Arameus is the show's behind the scenes ubervillain. He wears a suit at all times, even while bathing, and is restrained only by the laws of physics. He is dedicated to thwarting everyone else on the show for some stupid reason, is bent on world conquest, and sometimes allies with Evil McSlick. He should be older than Paola, but a rather buff guy, and should won every judge, cop, and ice cream man in town.
Angie Failure Shorter, less proportioned, dumber, and less attractive (but only a little bit- this show still needs to swarm with nubile young actresses to make up for Paola in the unemployed male audience) than Chesty, Angie constantly fails. She fails to seduce the various other people, she fails at her job, and she generally is kidnapped/drugged/probed by aliens frequently.
Now that we have the base cast down, we can introduce random people who will quit and go on to better shows or kill themselves as the show runs, eventually replacing all of the above people with identical characters who happen to have different names. Now, for our first plot.
Let's brainstorm. It should go something like this:
Professor Arameus Carpathia, using his vast resources which apparently pulls out of some company that we never hear anything about, has built a new skyscraper in the town of Sunny Meadows where everyone tries to seduce each other all the time, to the exclusion of jobs despite the fact that they are all lawyers and doctors. This sky scraper is bad for some reason. Let's say it's hiding billions of dollars in stolen Nazi gold.
Evil McSlick is attempting to seduce Chesty by buying her expensive things, so he needs the Nazi gold. Exactly why he needs more money than the seemingly infinite amount he already has isn't important, because this plot is full of holes anyway. So he plots to hire a randomly inserted character to steal the gold. Let's say this new character's name is Napoleon Edlebrock, and he is an ex-CIA mastermind and global theif.
Paola learns of McSlicks' evil plot and reacts by wearing a halter top, much to the disgust of the male audience. She ruins McSlick's meeting with Edlebrock by tricking him into sleeping with her, which means he has to be hypnotized. Or something. Maybe we'll invent a stupid jab at Viagra and give it a silly name that makes absolutely no sense.
Angie makes a vain attempt at become evil by wrapping herself in a bedsheet and begging Brock to give her a massage, which gives the producers an excuse to show her shoulders. Now that that's taken care of, we can move on to the next show. By my calculations, this plot should take from now until five billion years after the sun implodes into a little charcoal briquette to finish, by which time entirely new characters will continue the same plot.
After it's resolved, Evil McSlick will discover the lost Continent of Atlantis, and Chesty will get Amnesia. The utterly stupid dialogue can be taken care of, because it sounds serious if heavy, silly music is played in the brackground.
Coming to a network soon...
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