Soap Opera Lives

As I've blogged many times, we just get CBC and TVO chez nous. With Netflix, it's more than enough.

I could even live without Netflix. I just don't care that much about any of it anymore. I'll never watch the last season of Breaking Bad, for instance. And I can't even remember now how The Wire ended because I got tired of it, too, and didn't really pay attention.

I stopped watching The Sopranos at some point. Mobsters repulse me. I don't see the humour in their casual violence. It doesn't make me laugh, it makes me sick.

The ongoing pretence they have some kind of moral code is what's laughable.

Whoa, off topic much, Kathryn?

So yeah, don't get me started on mobsters, I despise them.

I watch Coronation Street on CBC unless a storyline is too aggravating for me. If it is, I switch to TVO, and the other night I was about to do that when I decided, no, stay the course.

Stop being such a wuss about dramatic storylines.

An unpopular and somewhat feared character I enjoy was having an affair, not of the heart or mind, really, although she did enjoy their banter, as well as the challenge of seduction, but because she wasn't living the life she wanted.

As she would eventually admit, she really just no longer wanted to be married, not to the man she was, anyway, not anymore.

I was ready to turn away because I knew she was going to get caught, try to deny it all, too late, marriage over, nothing left but a life of regret.

Also vilification for being an ungrateful jezebel by the worst hypocrites who ever walked the face of the Earth, given the sixty year history of Coronation Street, although I'm only acquainted with the last ten.

Well, I'm glad I stayed to see the storyline play out because that's not what happened at all. She got caught, yes, in flagrante delicto no less, by her husband's best friend, too, who ratted her out to her husband when she didn't fess up to him herself.

She meant to, but he intercepted her fessing up with a request to renew their vows, and in true soap opera style she changed the grim expression on her face to one of false sheer delight, saying, "Yes!"

It reminds of the time I said to my boss at the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency, where I was on assignment as an administrative assistant to an executive assistant, the worst job in the government, when asked if I was enjoying it, "I love it here!"

In fact, I felt sick every time I entered Place Bell, I hated it so much. When I got my next job, a policy analyst at Environment Canada, I was so happy it didn't even matter that it was deep into Gatineau, a commute involving two bus systems.

Oh he was so righteous with indignation for his pub buddy, the deceived husband's friend, another popular Corrie fellow punching so well above his weight in the romance department, it is to laugh.

Really the only evenly matched pairs on Corrie are gay. Otherwise it's princesses and toads who never turn into princes, not that there's much kissing, thankfully.

But when her outraged husband confronted her, and he's a popular character, a jokey daft fellow in good standing at the pub, beer with his mates solving all manner of ups and downs, she didn't deny it. Instead she copped to it all, adding, if not the former soccer star, it would've been somebody else, lest her husband deflect away from the why of it all, which was their marriage no longer working for her, if indeed it ever really had, and so she didn't want to be in it anymore.

She wasn't mean about it, but she didn't pussyfoot around why, either, refusing to accept all the guilt and blame for their marriage not working out, just because she'd had "a thing" as she called it.

I liked that. A thing. Not an affair, not a fling. A thing. An action to bring about change in circumstance and feeling, not intended as a replacement for a marriage with one man that wasn't working out with marriage to another who mightn't work out, either.

It was hard to watch though, too, because her husband didn't want the marriage to end, in spite of the thing. He didn't feel the way she did about their marriage, although she did point out that he wasn't really happy, either, an opinion with which he disagreed, but you could see the old wheels cranking around, too.

It was enough for him because she made it enough, I guess is how I'd put it, but they were nonetheless undeserving of each other, and you can take that every which way, but only one of them was admitting it.

Out loud, anyway.

No, he wanted to put the thing behind them and carry on. He'd even been trying to up his game of late, show his appreciation more, bring a little romance back to the marriage. But, of course, he was doing too little, too late, and in that same lazy way that had been the problem all along, while she was determinedly having a thing to bring it all to an end.

I don't think I've ever seen a storyline resolve quite like it. Certainly not on a soap opera. And at first I thought there might be a reconciliation and resumption of the status quo, was hoping for it, and tensed up when she not only copped to the thing but followed it up with the real why of it, which was that she didn't want to be in a marriage with him anymore, wishing him the best but we're done here, honey.

It was very cathartic, the scene, and I'm glad I didn't switch to TVO to avoid it. Interestingly, I'd had the same urge with regard to an earlier episode involving teen bullying, but stuck around to see a phenomenal bit of acting by a character not particularly noted for it, when he exploded in anguish at his son for being part of a gang bullying another teen.

Anyway, it did my heart good, the endless dramatic possibilities in vilifying an ungrateful jezebel who decides marriage to a perfectly decent bloke isn't enough for her, foregone in favour of said jezebel very undramatically stating straight up that, yup, marriage to a perfectly decent bloke isn't enough for her.

The myth persists about women, that we exist, really, ultimately, for men and children. Others. A woman's a wife and mother. Sister, daughter, friend. She isn't supposed to want to be the star of our own show once she's married, certainly not after she has kids.

She's supposed to be happy playing a supporting character in her husband's show or her child's show.

The thing is, it's a myth. We do want to be the star of own show. We always did. It just wasn't until recently we could admit it out loud, in this part of the world, anyway, and then go out into the big bad world and do it.