Opening One Week From Today...

One week from today, the product of the gig I've had these last 6 weeks-the online revival of One Life to Live and All My Children--will begin to appear on the Internet (Hulu, Hulu+, and ITunes). It will be the product of not just a lot of people's hard work, but also producers' and fans' belief that such a thing both could work and should be done. It's actually kind of amazing.
 
Having spent most of my career in television, I am fairly used to doing the work and then forgetting about it (or already being involved in the next production challenge by the time "challenge one" has hit the air). The charge I get is generally from the production process, not from the audience response.
 
I have often wondered whether a more immediate audience response, like the one in the theater, would give me that same charge, or whether the "can't fix it in the edit" feeling would simply terrify me. This weekend, I watched my teenage daughter on stage in a musical she loves. While she did not have a big, lots of lines part, she was "on" every minute. Clearly, she was getting a charge from that live audience feeling, and though I have no aspirations of being on stage, there were moments that I wished I could be part of that live energy too. No matter how many people watch a show on TV or the Internet, it's not the same as a living, breathing audience clapping right there where you can see and hear them.
 
In the case of the soaps online, however, while we won't actually hear the applause, the response will make or break the gig, for me and for hundreds of other people. So, while I will be forging ahead with the shows that will air in the coming months, I suspect I will be far more interested in the audience response than ever before. We might not actually hear the applause, but we will be able to see it in posts and tweets and hits. It won't be live, but it will be immediately measurable, just about the closest we "live-to-tape" TV folks can get to a live audience. There's no preview period--it's straight to opening night for a pair of shows we hope play for a very long time. And yeah, I'll admit it. I get a charge from that too.