I haven’t blogged much about soaps in a while, mostly because I haven’t had much time to watch them. Mike hates them, so we watched other stuff when he was in the hospital, and now at home. Hopefully he will be going back to work soon, and I’ll be able to get back to watching.
Anyhoo, I keep up with what’s going on over at a site called SoapCentral.com. The big news over at the Young & the Restless is that Melody Thomas Scott, who has played leading lady Nikki Newman for 30 years, is leaving the show. Apparently, Ms. Scott could not come to an agreement with the show, who asked her to take a pay cut.
Dan J. Kroll, the founder of SoapCenral.com, wrote a piece about this in his In The Bubble blog. Fans are invited to leave comments.
Some said that Ms. Scott was right to leave, that she should be paid what she is worth. Some argued that it looked as if the show was only asking FEMALE stars to take pay cuts…Jess Walton, who plays Jill Abbott, alsmot walked, but in the end decided to take the pay cut, saying that “a job is a job”.
But if they asked top male stars, such as Eric Braeden (Victor Newman) or Peter Bergman (Jack Abbott) to take pay cuts, we haven’t heard about it. I’d like to hope that the show was fair, asked the guys, too, and maybe they just took it with no dramatics. But we don’t really know.
Other fans who posted on Dan’s blog said that Ms. Scott should just suck it up and take the pay cut, as Ms. Walton did. Many soap fans have lots of time to watch now, live, not recording them, because they are out of work. It sort of rubs you the wrong way when you see someone who has a job , probably a very highly-paid job, not accept a pay cut in order to keep said job.
Soaps are getting to be a dying genre on TV. There have been so many budget cuts, and sadly, it often shows in the finished episodes. They hire a lot of young kids who will work for cheap, and don’t give stories to beloved veteran characters because it would involve paying them too much money.
You see it in the sets, too. Over on As The World Turns, half the characters live in the Lakeview Hotel, because the show can’t afford sets for each major character’s home. For a time, the other half of the town lived on Emma Snyder’s farm. Thank goodness they finally made a new set for Lily & Holden’s house, so they all moved off of the farm. But still, Holden and Lily are of only a small handful of Oakdale residents who have their own homes. The others are Brad and Katie Snyder, Paul Ryan, and Tom & Margo Hughes. Luke and Noah were supposed to get their own place, have they shown it yet? As I said, I haven’t watched in a while. They lived on Emma’s farm for a while, but then moved into Holden & Lily’s house when they finally made a set for that.
But I digress. The fact is, anyone who still has a job working on a soap should be grateful for it. As you may know, the longest-running soap ever, Guiding Light, has been canceled due to low ratings and budget cuts. Some of their actors will be lucky to land gigs on other shows, but there is not room for all of them. Some of the minor players may have to go back to waiting tables, or go on an admin job search. In these tough economic times, we all gotta do what we gotta do in order to keep rooves over our heads and food on the table, yanno?
Perhaps Melody Thomas Scott could get signed by another soap. But honestly, she’s been Nikki for so long, will fans accept her as any other character? And would another soap offer her the same salary she was getting from Y&R?
I doubt it. NOBODY in the soap opera industry has tons of money to spend these days. Right now they are struggling to maintain a budget and somehow not get canceled, as GL was.
