The Guiding Light

I don't think I've watched, really watched Guiding Light in twenty five years — perhaps longer. (I first saw it in November, 1979, a fact I know only because the show expanded from a half-hour to an hour two or three days after I started watching.) I'm not even sure I followed it for all that long when I did — but it seems to have left an indelible impression with me.

I've seen a few minutes, here and there, in the years since (I was always surprised when I'd recognize an actor still with the series), but I've never had the time to return, and anyway, it was never the same as I remembered. Last year, the series largely abandoned the traditional studio to shoot primarily on location with handheld cameras, ostensibly to "reinvent" the format, though more likely with the hope of reducing production costs. It may be the same series, though in name only — several older cast members have been dropped (also to reduce costs), and I hardly recognize anyone. The jittery camera work just seems distracting.

Still, I was sort of disappointed to learn that the series would be ending in September, after a remarkable fifty-seven years on television, beginning in 1952. (The radio series ran from 1937 to 1956.)

I've always had a weakness for a serialized story — they seem to be more fun than most, somehow. I was never really aware of it while watching, but Guiding Light followed many of the same characters over the course of thirty or forty years. When I went back years later and read summaries of the stories that ran through different decades, I was surprised to discover that characters I remembered as adults had been introduced as children, often only a few years before. (They don't age in real time, of course, and it's the characters who remain, not the actors — though there have been a handful of actors who played the same roles for twenty or thirty years, first on radio, than television.)

I never realized the show had woven such a rich tapestry. I often wonder if this was a conscious attempt to appeal to the audience that had been following for so many years, or if it was driven by the practical demands of having to produce so much story material (more than 250 episodes each year).

I've been listening to recordings of radio episodes as I write this, probably from the late 1940s or early 1950s (I'm not sure). They're great fun — charmingly melodramatic, occasionally overwrought. In the episode I'm listening to now, a young boy is reluctant to confess his fear of boxing (boxing?) to his overbearing Father — while his mother's restless sleep is disturbed by strange, foreboding nightmares of her son's impending doom! In the episode that follows, she continues to feel unsettled: "I keep waiting for something. I don't know what. Something that might happen. Not to me — but to Chuckie."

At the end of that episode, the narrator reminds her (and us): "Have you forgotten your dream? You're not going to forget your fear. It will be with you — for months to come."

(I've no idea how long that story was drawn out, but according to this Wikipedia entry, radio listeners were given the opportunity to decide if the character would be found guilty of murdering her ex-husband, "who had let their young son Chuckie die in a freak boxing accident.")

I've seen a handful of older television episodes, as well, most from the 1960s. The stories seem to proceed at a leisurely pace, and nothing much seems to happen, though that may just be the particular episodes I've seen. I would never have imagined that in 1958, for example, a character was killed when "bicycling children accidentally pushed her wheelchair into oncoming traffic." (CBS was inundated with mail.)

Just reading the summaries can be very entertaining — particularly once you get into the 1970s, where the cast grows exponentially, the stories become more complex and the descriptions get into greater detail. (The names of several female characters grow ever longer, with marriage, remarriage, and divorce.)

I wish there were more episodes available to watch from the era I remember. (Most everything seems to date from long before or long after the early 1980s.) Though I must admit to some curiosity when I read this, about characters I remember from years before:

"Reva, who was believed to be dead a second time, was cloned at the request of her grieving husband Josh. When Reva was found alive, the lonely clone (named Dolly, like the sheep) committed suicide by drinking too much aging serum. As she lay on her death bed (actually a couch), Josh fumbled with a cure that would have reversed the effects of the aging serum. Unfortunately, he dropped it behind the couch and it was too late to save Dolly. This dreadful plot alienated erudite, intelligent viewers, and forever decimated the integrity of a once-intelligent, honored series. Worse, it was preceded and then followed by other ridiculous stories that usually featured the over-used and burned-out character of Reva, such as Reva The Ghost, Reva The Clone, Reva The Amish Amnesiac, Reva The San Cristobelian Queen, Reva the Time Traveller."

(I never imagined the audience for a soap opera would be described as "erudite.")

Perhaps it's just as well I was only able to watch Guiding Light for a brief time. Even then, there were numerous examples of outrageous soap opera misfortune — sudden, inexplicable blindness, characters presumed dead returning to life, multiple personality disorder, that sort of stuff — but nothing so extreme as science gone horribly wrong (and no Amish amnesiacs).