June 29, 1979 Gusto cover story: Soap operas

 

One of my favorite interviews.

June 29, 1979 

Buffalo Soap

As we join Dr. Mary Cassata, she is coming from the kitchen of her home in a reconverted barn in the Town of Pendleton. Setting out coffee and muffins, she’s ready to talk about her favorite topic. Soap operas. Dr. Cassata is one of the world’s leading authorities on TV’s daytime serial dramas.

        “The one thing you really have to understand about soap operas is that the audience involvement is so intense,” she begins. “Fans write, they send a birthday present and wedding presents, they mourn characters when they die. That involvement is a phenomenon itself. Soap operas have this power, this great power, and people haven’t looked at this the way it deserves to be looked at.”

        The pull of that fateful line “Tune in tomorrow” reaches back to the serialized novels of the early 19th century. American followers of Charles Dickens’ “Pickwick Papers” would gather on the docks to await the ship carrying the next installment. Soap operas date to the early days of radio. Among the pioneers was “Amos ‘N’ Andy,” which became so popular in the ‘30s that in some places all activities stopped when it came on the air.

        In the ‘70s, soap operas have come into their own. Instead of staying with incurable disease and divorce, their plots have ventured into topics like drug abuse, child abuse and mastectomies. “Some of the best acting, some of the best writing and some of the best issues are in the soaps,” Dr. Cassata contends.

        The decade has seen soaps celebrated on the cover of Time magazine. College students added their numbers to the 20 million daytime devotees and so did some of their professors. Literary critic Dr. Leslie Fiedler, for instance, is a fan of “All My Children.” Dr. Cassata’s favorite is “Ryan’s Hope,” a maverick sort of soap opera that Proctor and Gamble once turned down. It’s unusual in that it takes place in an identifiable urban local (New York City), involves ethnic characters (Irish) and tackles political affairs (the Troubles in Ireland). When one of the characters died, Dr. Cassata says she was truly upset.

        “I didn’t sleep for two nights,” she reports. “I did not even like Tom, but I knew him so well. I called the writers to tell them how I felt about it. They thought it was great. ‘Did you really mourn?’ they asked me. ‘That’s terrific.’”

        The TV industry is hooked on the soaps too, Dr. Cassata says. Daytime programming accounts for the lion’s share of broadcasting profits and soap operas amount to more than half the daytime fare on TV. Furthermore, a week of soap opera can be produced for less than an hour of prime-time program. Further still, Dr. Cassata believes the soaps promote healthier attitudes than prime-time shows.

        “Old people are dealt with better on soaps than prime time,” she remarks, “and people have meaningful conversations on soap operas. Many people don’t have the luxury of talking personally to someone who cares. And they deal with death on soaps. You grieve and you go through it. The involvement can get very intense, very real. I think you could derive insight from it.”

        Folks at the University of Colorado think so too. They developed a soap opera as a means to get health care information to Spanish-speaking people. The child abuse plot in “All My Children” was designed to reach child abusers “to try to persuade them to take another look at themselves,” Dr. Cassata says. “The soaps will spend several months on a certain issue and it develops as a catalyst for action. Entertainment is the main purpose, but writers will deal with major issues because they feel they have a responsibility to. With people like the American College of Gynecologists recognizing the impact, you’ve got to deal with the subjects in a really responsible way.”

        Dr. Cassata didn’t start out to become one of the world’s foremost authorities on soap operas. A native Buffalonian, she flirted with the idea of writing for TV when she finished college – she even lined up an agent in New York – but decided to go for an advanced degree instead. After 10 years as assistant director of UB libraries, she became an associate professor of communications in 1975. She had little more than a passing interest in soaps until she lit upon them as a topic for a doctoral course a couple years ago. She discovered that no serious research had been done on the soaps. The more she researched, the more captivated she became.

        “I found this whole virgin territory that went back to the ‘40s,” she says. “There were economics and an audience that had never been studied. There was also the uniqueness of how the story lines hook the listeners and draw them in. I have tons of contacts in the industry – producers, writers, critics, editors. They’re interested in what we’re doing up here. It’s not unusual for the writers on ‘The Young and the Restless’ to call and ask what we think about something.”

        It wasn’t long after Dr. Cassata started studying soap operas that she wanted to write one of her own. Her original idea was called “The Professors,” but her friends in the industry told her that a university-based series wouldn’t work except, perhaps, as situation comedy. Then last year the interest of two students – Randy Sherman and Jenette Dozoretz, both now graduated – revived Dr. Cassata’s desire to create a soap.

        The three of them have been working on one since January. They’ve written and researched what soap opera people call “the bible,” a book that outlines the lives of all the major characters. They’re concocting two years’ worth of story line and they’ve set it all right here in Buffalo.

        “We use the front-burner technique,” Dr. Cassata says. “We keep juggling the stories around. As you resolve one situation, the next one comes up for emphasis and it produces all this interaction. It’s not easy to write a soap. It demands a kind of discipline you don’t find in prime time. In prime time, things are simplistic. You have little time to distinguish between the good guy and the bad guy. In soaps, you don’t know what’s going to happen. The main character could die.”

        Dr. Cassata wants to break even more soap opera conventions with “The New Buffalonians,” as she calls it, than the creators of “Ryan’s Hope” did. The issues will be questions of “situational ethics,” of young people coping with identity and career crises. The characters, 27 major ones, plus extras, will represent a melting pot of nationalities and backgrounds. The central figures will be a blue-collar worker and his family.

        That’s Vince Miceli, his wife Anne and their two children. Vince has a successful brother, Sal, whose ambitious wife set him up in real estate before she died. Revolving around them are the Winters, who have “old money” and social standing; the Coopers, who are Black; the Goodmans, who run a pharmacy that happens to be owned by Sal Miceli. The conflict which sets the story rolling begins when the university approves the opening of a sex education center. Ms. Sherman presently is a facilitator at such a center at UB.

        For a final touch of authenticity, Dr. Cassata would love to see the entire show produced and filmed here. The locations, of course, would be quite different from the anonymous small towns soap operas usually take place in. Some of the names would be changed, though. UB would become Warren University – after Harry Warren, the man who penned “Shuffle Off to Buffalo.” Dr. Cassata thinks shooting a soap opera here would do the city a world of good.

        “It’s subtle how the location will work into the show,” she says. “You’ll get the image of a durable city. It’s just as easy for them to come to Buffalo, buy a warehouse and start producing shows. The people are full-time and it’s cheaper to produce shows in Buffalo than it is in New York. I’m sure the city would bend over backward to help them, too.”

        Dr. Cassata’s early talks with network executives about the show have been encouraging. What she expects next is a request to come up with a month’s worth of action. After that, a few sample scripts. Approval doesn’t guarantee that “The New Buffalonians” would come out the way it’s now planned. The final script is a compromise among the writers, the network and the sponsor. Dr. Cassata feels that the local enthusiasm for the project would help ensure a Buffalo setting.

        “Networks are fickle about programming,” she says. “Local support could make the difference between paying attention to the idea or not paying attention.”

        To draw support, Dr. Cassata and Tom Skill, her associate in the Program for the Study of Daytime Television at UB, have put together a talking slide exhibit to show to local business, political and civic groups. It sums up Dr. Cassata’s research and scriptwriting with her two young collaborators. It discusses how constant TV exposure might make the Niagara Frontier more desirable in the eyes of the rest of the nation. And it ends with a hook:

        “Can these three people from Buffalo write a successful soap opera that can compete with the big-time network soap operas? Can a soap opera about Buffalo change the image of our city? And can it put our city in the minds and on the tongues of people everywhere? Tune in tomorrow …”

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IN THE PHOTO: From left, Jenette Dozoretz, Randy Sherman and Mary Cassata. Buffalo News photo by Robert L. Smith

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FOOTNOTE: I wrote about Dr. Mary Cassata again in 2017 after she passed away at the age of 93 and got to tell how she co-authored nine books on soaps, including a New York Times best-seller about "The Young and the Restless," a program for which she served as a consultant. She created an original called "Getting There" with Jenette Dozoretz, appeared on numerous talk shows and wrote a column, "Ask the Soap Doctor," for Soap Opera Digest magazine.  

       She was inducted onto the Grover Cleveland High School Wall of Fame in 2006 and kept teaching at UB until 2012. In retrospect, since this was a year after "Hide in Plain Sight" was shot here, she was a bit of a visionary about establishing a permanent local film industry.

There's a nice bio of Jenette Dozoretz on the website of the South Florida dentist she works with. Turns out after she got her bachelor's degree in communications (with honors), she went to Erie Community College and learned to be a dental hygienist. She says she and her husband have lived near Fort Lauderdale for more than 30 years. No mention of soap operas. 

These days soap operas don't get mentioned much anywhere. They have suffered a major meltdown, done in by talk shows, game shows and court shows, which are cheaper to make. Only four – "The Bold and the Beautiful," "Days of Our Lives," "General Hospital" and "The Young and the Restless" – are still lathering up. "Guiding Light” was switched off in 2009 after shining for 72 years on radio and TV. "As the World Turns" ended in 2010 after 54 years. As of 2022, NBC has stopped airing daytime dramas altogether.