Interview with Abigail De Kosnik

1. According to the introduction of your piece Soaps for Tomorrow, you have been a fan of the soap opera since age 6, and currently are a fan of the soaps on ABC, CBS, and NBC. Do you have any personal pros and cons with how the networks present their soaps in terms of subject matter or just overall presentation?

I’m not sure what you mean by “how the networks present their soaps in terms of subject matter” – if you’re talking about whether I think that the networks are advertising and marketing their daytime dramas incorrectly, no, I don’t think that’s the case.  With soaps, I don’t think that bad marketing is to blame for  the decline in ratings.  Soap ads and promos have more or less been exactly the same since the 1980s.  But soaps have declined in quality in the eyes of many longtime viewers in the last fifteen years, and this has compounded the problem of the most “natural” soap audience – stay-at-home mothers and children/young adults who are home during afternoons and all day during school holidays – having tons of other options for what to do with their afternoon hours besides sitting at home watching soap operas (many moms now work outside of the home, many kids now are on their digital devices, etc.).  Because soaps have not delivered the kinds of stories that they used to, that their most loyal fans expect, their hardcore viewing base has lost interest, and they’ve failed to “recruit” new viewers to watch these shows (for example, moms don’t make their kids watch soaps, teenagers don’t gather at each others’ houses to watch soaps – and these used to be very typical ways that soaps found new viewers).

2. In your piece Soaps for Tomorrow you talk about fans’ obsessions with soaps getting so extreme that they begin to blur the line between fiction and reality. I am a member of a Ghostbusters fan club where we dress up in costume with replicas of the films’ props. Where do you see instances of fans costuming (or “cosplaying”) along the spectrum of fandom in terms of extremes?

Just to be clear, my essay isn’t about “fans’ obsessions with soaps getting so extreme that they begin to blur the line between fiction and reality.”  The essay is about fans of celebrities (real-life people) basically treating those real people’s lives as if they were fiction – fans of Jennifer Aniston, say, turning every bit of documentation about Aniston’s, Brad Pitt’s, and Angelina Jolie’s lives into narratives that are very soap-opera-like.  That kind of fandom isn’t (necessarily, or often) obsessive, I think that in today’s celebrity culture, which is documented 24/7 by paparazzi, it’s natural and easy for celebrities’ fans to create soap-y stories about the “dramas” that go on in those famous people’s lives.

Cos-play has a long history and has been a part of fandoms for at least as long as Star Trek conventions have been taking place, so a minimum of 50 years.  As the name indicates, cos-play is a form of play, and is becoming more mainstream as comic-book-based movies (all the Marvel and D.C. franchises that have been turned into films) have become tentpole franchises, which has swelled the attendance numbers of Comic Con and Wonder Con, at which cos-play is so prevalent as to be something of a norm.  So I think cos-play has nothing to do, in the vast majority of cases, with unhealthy obsession, and is now veering towards the total mainstream of performing fandom.

3. Along the lines of Question 2, do you believe that soaps are the most common factor in women blurring the lines of reality and a fictional world, or do you believe that there are worse programs out there causing more damage?

Again, my essay isn’t about “women blurring the lines of reality and a fictional world.”  Where do you get that from?  My piece isn’t about “damage” suffered by people as a result of watching television.  In fact, I am firmly against any claim that watching TV damages people, or causes people to lose their sense of reality.  Soap operas have long been blamed for causing some kind of damage to women and making them confuse reality and fantasy, but I believe that this has never been common.  Rather, soap operas are melodramas, and melodrama has never been a mainstream genre.  It’s outright sentimentality and focus on romance and relationships, and “feminine” issues of family and marriage and parenting, has always made it a marginalized genre, labeled “low culture” or “pop culture” or “trash culture” by cultural elites.  But melodrama (like other “suspect” genres of media – for example, video games) has never been proven to damage its audiences in some kind of systemic way.

4. You talk in depth about the interest soap fans have for celebrity gossip and the gossip spread amongst characters in soap opera programs. Do you believe that soap fans have been participating heavily in gossip as heavily, if not worse, back when soaps were on the radio, or even when early soaps were on television?

Yes – serial narratives always provoke gossip, and we have documentation that this kind of sharing and commenting and speculation occurred when soaps were only on the radio, when they were both on the radio and on TV, and when they were only on TV.

5. On page 242 of Survival of Soap Opera you talk about fans dissecting and re-writing celeb gossip to find the real person. How dangerous do you feel that this is compared to middle-aged mothers getting lost in the world(s) of their favorite soap(s)?

Again, I object to your presumption that middle-aged mothers get “lost” in the world of their favorite soap and that this is “dangerous.”  I included a quote from a William Gibson novel at the start of my essay that made this presumption, but take a stand against this kind of thinking in the essay.  Watching soaps is not dangerous to anyone, and the vast majority of women do not get “lost” in the world of their favorite soaps.  Nor do people who follow celebrities’ lives through paparazzi photos and online gossip blogs get “lost” or confuse reality with fiction.  Rather, they enjoy speculating and gossiping, just like everyone else online, about what their favorite stars are doing and thinking and who they are sleeping with.  That kind of speculation provides a great deal of pleasure to millions of people today, just as soaps did to millions of people in the past, with the sharp distinction that today, because of the 24-hour paparazzi cycle, audiences that enjoy this type of gossip don’t “need” fictional soaps because reality provides all the drama they need.  Look at how effective reality shows have become at dramatizing and narrativizing real people’s real lives.  We no longer need soaps for melodrama.  Reality provides that to an increasing degree.

6. How do you feel about members of the fan culture that write fan fiction, both of soap characters and the actors?

Great.  I love fan fiction and have written a lot of fan fiction in my life.  I regard fan fiction as a way for audience members to be creative and active with regards to their favorite media texts rather than receptive and passive all the time.  Since most fanfic authors are women, I think it’s very empowering for female media audience members to know about, and take part in, a genre of cultural production that is made by women for women, even when the source texts for most fanfics are authored/produced by men.

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