I followed One Life to Live from high school (like, 1979) on till it was cancelled, and liked The Edge of Night in the early 1980's. I found a lot of the story lines pretty ridiculous, but I come from a large extended family, and being a genealogy buff as well, all the interconnected families and personal relationships fascinated me. (And One Life was pretty heavily populated with gay eye candy towards the end, too!)
I watched Days of Our Lives but only the episodes where Sonny and Will were mainly involved. I thought the acting was crappy but the couple was so cute. The characters do some crazy stuff on this show... too much drama. Then I got bored of it and stopped watching.
I used to be an avid watcher of: -One Life to Live (my favorite) -The Young & The Restless -General Hospital -The Bold & the Beautiful They took up too much of my time, so when OLTL was cancelled, I stopped watching them all. I still watch an episode every now and then of the ones still on, but I don't keep up with it daily.
Oh goodness! Growing up I watched every single daytime soap, at one point or another. My favorites were always All My Children, One Life to Live, General Hospital, and Young and Restless. Nowadays I try to keep up to date on what's left, but only watch Y&R daily (been watching on-and-off since 1996!).
I recently watched most of the Sonny/Will storyline, after hearing the hype about the wedding etc... Then I watched a few full episodes and it hit me: out of all the "soap" insanity/unrealistic storylines, that arc, starting with "confused/questioning/frustrated" Will and his eventual coming out to Marlena and then the world, and his relationship with Sonny etc... felt more "real" than the rest, to me anyway. Yes some of the dialogue was a bit silly/awkward, but I thought those two actors did a pretty good job of finally showing some gay characters that aren't just at the center of scandal/disfunction/comic relief etc... Apparently they got some fan mail from yourg people who said they could more easily come out to their grandma because they could simply say they were like Sonny and Will. I wish I could have seen something like that on TV 30 years ago. As much as he's a fictional character I wish I had a friend like Sonny back then as well... Freddie and Chandler (and now Guy as well), if you ever by some random chance read this, thank you.
