Owning It

This morning, as I flipped through one of the free newspapers that helps make my commute bearable each day, I came across a small piece announcing that One Life to Live would be celebrating its 45th anniversary and its debut on OWN today.

Now, it is always exciting to see something in print about a project you're working on, but we in soaps have even more reason to be excited. For most of those 45 years, there was little or no publicity for One Life to Live or for any soap, particularly in outlets that didn't have "soap opera" in the title. Soap operas were essentially marketed only to soap fans, which meant that no matter how much time, money, creative energy, you name it, you might put into a special episode or series of episodes, the result was not the earthshattering one you felt it could be. Sure, there was satisfaction in a job well done, and the soap audience was a dedicated and faithful one, but there was often a tinge of disappointment that the work was not reaching a larger audience.

So, for me, no matter how far the reincarnations of One Life to Live and All My Children go (and I certainly hope they will go far, both on Hulu/ITunes/TOLN and on OWN), part of the accomplishment here will be putting them "on the map," with traditional and social media, in a way that was sadly lacking for so much of their long history. There's a reason that I saw a blurb about OLTL in a mainstream newspaper this morning. As with so many of our endeavors in life, making it is only the first part of making it seen, and there is no better anniversary present for OLTL than a step--lots of steps--in that direction.