The End of an Era

So last week the sad announcement came that "All My Children" and "One Life to Live" had been canceled. Obviously reality tv has taken over for soap operas, allowing real people to behave badly in their actual lives instead of paying actors to portray outlandish situations, and I have my own feelings about the adverse effects of this trend on our society. For one thing, it has encouraged people to treat each other terribly in order to gain that elusive prize of fame. With these two soaps' demise comes the end of an era of rather over-the-top daytime programming that was a shameless fantasy. I'm sure they will be replaced by another set of Real Housewives or maybe a show about what happens when you put 10 people who hate each other in a house filled with tarantulas.

While a few soaps remain on the air, I feel sad for the loss of AMC which was the soap that ruled in my house growing up. My grandmother used to tell me that she would feed me lunch as a baby while watching AMC. I watched it with her when I came home from school in my pre-teens years. And as an adult, I would find a strange comfort in tuning in to the adventures of Erica Kane every once in a while when I might find myself at home for lunch. I worked as an extra on AMC a few times, and it was the gig that lent my career legitimacy for my grandmother even though I had worked extensively in theater before working on the show. I also will venture a guess that my first glimpses of good male shirtlessness came on a weekday afternoon between 1 and 2pm on ABC during my teenage years.

So in honor of a show I feel I passed my life with, I post Cameron Matheson in all his shirtless glory. May he find other places to take his shirt off, and may I find something interesting to watch on that errant weekday afternoon when I am home for lunch. Until then, I am...

Yours in shirtlessness,
Nandita
President
IMS