U of Ideas of General Interest -- March 2000
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Contact: Andrea Lynn, Humanities/Social Sciences Editor, (217) 333-2177; [email protected]
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Soap-opera scripts, a window on 'cultural myths,' given to library
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Showcases that typically display rare and priceless Bibles now are featuring scriptures of another kind -- the scripture according to daytime television.
Scripts, story lines, photographs, bios, reference works and other memorabilia that document the award-winning television series "The Young and the Restless" are on display through March 20 in the University of Illinois Rare Book and Special Collections Library. While not exactly rare -- the Library now has "thousands upon thousands of them," said Nancy Romero, the Rare Book librarian who put up the display -- the "Y&R" scripts "are modern manuscripts."
The scripts are a gift from Kay Alden, the show's head writer. Alden lives and works in Chicago, but the program is taped at CBS Studios in Los Angeles. She joined "Y&R" as a scriptwriter in 1974, and became head writer in 1998. Many of the scripts contain editing marks and other notations in Alden's hand, plus production information, including cast, sets and work schedule.
Alden began shipping the sometimes steamy, always dramatic scripts about the roller-coaster lives of typical American families when she learned that the Rare Book Library collected TV scripts. When they arrived at the Chicago warehouse to pick up the first batch, library representatives were surprised to find not one, but 14 boxes. It is an embarrassment of riches, Romero said, noting that scholars typically use scripts in their research on popular culture. However, at least one professor of English as a second language had his students act out scenes from the show to perfect their English.
Another UI professor, Norman Denzin, an authority on popular culture, compares soaps to Charles Dickens' serialized novels, because they "provide narrative continuity and meaning in daily life, and place people in situations that are glamorous, fantasy-like and realistic." Thus, soaps allow viewers to "vicariously live through real-life problems without confronting the problems directly."
"These texts," he added, "reproduce larger cultural myths concerning patriarchy, family, male-female intimacy, friendship, women's sexuality and women as objects of the male gaze. These texts also are places to study how whiteness is constructed and reproduced in everyday popular culture."
The Library now has the majority of scripts written since episode No. 44, which aired on May 24, 1973. The show's writers are closing in on their 7,000th script, said Terry Delgado, Alden's assistant.
The weekday series premiered on March 26, 1973. Its creator, William Bell, was a young advertising executive in the 1950s when Irna Phillips approached him about writing for her daytime serial "The Guiding Light." Phillips, a 1923 UI alumna, is considered the mother of TV soap operas.
Today, some 50 million U.S. viewers watch one or more soap operas every week. Browsing through the exhibit, Caroline Szylowicz, a staff member in the UI Kolb/Marcel Proust Archive and a native of France, observed that even in Paris, U.S. soaps flood televisions at midday. "One of the most popular of these," Alden crowed, "is, indeed, 'The Young and the Restless.' "
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