Are You Kidding Me?!

I'm going to rant a bit. Prepare yourself!

As the World Turns just won the Writer's Guild of America Award for Best Writing in a Daytime Serial, beating the only other nominee, One Life to Live. What the hell?!

First of all, I can't believe that ATWT was even nominated to begin with. That seemed illogical enough, but then I figured that someone had to be nominated to make One Life to Live's slam dunk win look more fair, right? I mean, when there is one incredibly well written soap and seven badly written soaps and you still have to choose more than one nominee, there's no way around nominating an undeserving soap. (I hear, by the way, that The Young & The Restless is much better written now than it has been for the last couple of years, but I haven't checked it out for myself yet.)

But for As the World Turns to actually win is beyond crazy. Outside of the Nuke storyline, the show is unwatchable, even with a very talented cast. Inside the Nuke storyline, the writing is usually pretty bad, but Van Hansis & Jake Silbermann manage to save it and make it worth following.

One Life to Live, meanwhile, is just incredible right now. It's the only soap I watch every minute of, no fast forwarding. The best part is that the stories are all interwoven and connected, like they should be on a well written soap, but the other shows (and As the World Turns is especially bad with this) seem to favor isolated storyline bubbles where the stories don't really affect each other and half the cast never interact.

The stories on One Life to Live are clearly being written with an eye to long term story telling, not the Psycho of the Month brand of story telling that As the World Turns loves, where the plot of the moment is all that matters and then it's on to the next.

In other words, One Life to Live is written by people who clearly love and understand the medium of Soap Opera, while As the World Turns is not. (I should clarify that I'm mostly talking about overall story, created by the Head Writers, and not about the writers doing the day to day scripts who just have to write scenes and dialogue that follow the story set from above)

For As the World Turns to win at all is bad enough, but for One Life to Live to lose to them is unthinkable. It would have been much easier to take if they'd been nominated against a soap that was just as poorly written.