Restless, But Not So Young

Cathedral City, California 

April 7, 2023

     Several years ago I posted about The Young and the Restless, a soap opera I’d been watching.  Now, after a long hiatus, I’ve begun following it again, though not every day.  

     As is the way with soap operas, the show’s core characters have remained the same, with some additions, but a few of them are being played by different actors.  Adam Newman, the black sheep of the wealthy and powerful Newman family, who was my favorite back when I originally posted about the show, is now portrayed by a different guy, and I can’t quite get used to him.  The wily Tucker McCall, illegitimate son of the late Katherine Chancellor, is also being played by someone else, but I like this new guy better.  And so it goes.  Also, there are a few newer younger characters.  They’re less straight and white than the old timers, but still boringly the same in terms of wealth and privilege.  They trade off positions as CEOs or COOs or CFOs of divisions or subsidiaries of the mega corporations owned by the big families of Genoa City, Wisconsin, where, improbably, all this wealth resides.  Originally the businesses were competing cosmetics companies, but they’ve diversified to include media groups and fashion arms.  It’s humorous to hear these good-looking but clueless actors plan mergers and acquisitions, startup enterprises, and such, knowing that in real life they have very little idea of what they're talking about, and that for the most part neither do their viewers.  But really, why shouldn't people who are about as deep as the Kardashians rule the corporate world?  They might do less damage.

     The mainstays of The Young and the Restless, truth be told, are not young any more.  Eric Braeden, who plays Victor Newman, the ruthless ruler of Newman Enterprises, and easily the most important character in the soap, is 82 years old, but still going strong.  (Those of you who have watched the soap will instantly recognize his photo, above.  But as is the case when hearing about other peoples' grandkids, if you don't watch the show, you won't give a damn.)  Victor Newman's current wife Nikki is played by Melody Thomas Scott, who is 66.  Peter Bergman, who plays Jack Abbot, the head of the rival Jabot company, is 69.  They and their adult children are quite fond of playing musical spouses with one another.  It would be fair to say that they have the sexual memories of barnyard animals. Victor leads the pack, as he should, having been married fourteen times to nine different women.  Jack Abbot is a comparative celibate, with only six or seven marriages to four different women.  Nikki has been married twice to Jack and four times to Victor.  And one woman, Sharon, has been married to Victor and both his sons.  

These folks have grown long in the tooth along with their parts and with the soap itself.  Back when he came into the show in the 1980s, Eric Braeden/Victor Newman was in slick early middle age, with a nice fat porn-star moustache.  The moustache remains, but silver has taken over his still-enviable hairline.  He's a decent- looking guy who has held up well, as has Bergman.  Melody Thomas Scott is rather pretty too, and hanging in there, though she's being held together with corsets and plastic surgery and makeup.  Some of the middle aged women are prone to showing far too much cleavage (or more accurately unsupported gappage), which at this stage is quite a bit lower on their chests than it once was.  But part of the blame for that surely lies with the show’s wardrobe people, not just with the actors themselves.

  The Young and the Restless is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.  And like old couples who've been together that long, some of the core characters have grown a little softer and more tolerant of one another, not because they really get along, and not because they don't want things to happen differently, but because they lack the energy or motivation not to get along.  

     As I write this, Phyllis Summers, with the connivance of Jeremy Stark, has faked her own death, and it looks as if she's going to frame Diane Jenkins for the apparent murder.  This is a bit of karmic payback to Diane, who faked her own death some years ago, after which Nikki Newman got the blame, although she was exonerated.  Then, last year, Diane Jenkins reappeared in Genoa City, alive and well, in order to reestablish her relationship with her adult son Kyle, whom she gave birth to after a relationship with Jack Abbott, and also to steal Jack away from Phyllis, which she has successfully done, so far.  Got it?  If not, no problem, since it doesn't really matter.

     Now, there are those who say that soap operas are unrealistic, because of things like absurdly wealthy folks sitting around drinking coffee and scotch and trading corporate responsibilities, and characters faking their own deaths, and people coming out of comas after years, and the fact that the principal actors constantly marry one another, and so on.  But aside from all that superficial silliness, I would submit that soap operas, as a form of story-telling, are closer to reality than movies and episodic prime time television shows, and certainly more so than most novels, short stories, and plays.  Indeed, there are key elements of truth in soaps that are almost entirely missing from other story-telling mediums.  First, soap operas, like real life, don't have a dramatic beginning, middle, and end, in which a story is smoothly moved along to its supposedly logical conclusion by fortuitous or unfortunate events and then tied up, for better or worse.  Instead, they just continue for years until the actors die and others replace them.  They creep, in their petty paces, from day to day, like Macbeth’s proverbial tomorrows.  Secondly, soap operas, like real life, consist of a series of short, fragmented, and often pointless or inconclusive conversations, in which little is accomplished one way or the other.  What action actually occurs usually happens elsewhere and at a snail's pace, or instead randomly and instantaneously.  Often things that seem important at the time turn out to be unimportant, and vice versa.  Rarely does a deus ex machina descend to intervene, and often the good go unrewarded and the bad go unpunished.  All that, I submit, is real life.  And perhaps it is that verisimilitude, rather than the glamor of hotel-dwelling tycoons, that most attracts those viewers who find themselves at home alone in the afternoons, shackled to their quotidian tasks, day in and day out. 

     And the young on both sides of the screen, even when they are no longer young, are still restless.