EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH THOM RACINA (SB CO-HEAD WRITER AND SCRIPT WRITER 91-93) - PART TWO

In 1992 NBC decided to cancel SB. It 'true that at the last time NBC gives six months of life to the show and then they delete it on January 1993? 'Do this really happened or my sources are wrong? Can you tell us everything that you remember in the months before the cancellation?

I don’t know about NBC promising another 6 months, but I’ll say this: we knew were living on borrowed time from the day I joined the Dobsons on the show.  Jerry even said it to me that first day he came to my house, telling me he didn’t “know how long it will last.” 

Do you think that it was done everything possible to save SB?

In retrospect, we can say we should have done this or that, or we should have hired this person or that, or fired this person or that, but who really knows?  You do your best with what you have, your best at the time, on all levels, and you hope it works.  This is a quirky, odd business, television.  There are no rules, you can’t ever count on anything, and you thank your lucky stars you had a run like SB had, for most shows don’t ever come close.  Of course, the demise of a show as famous and popular as SB was simply the beginning of the end of all soaps, as so many others, so many with even better ratings than SB, have followed in its footsteps and are now gone. 

In the last three years four soaps have been canceled and since 1999 no new soap is produced. It 'obvious that the soap genre is in steep decline. I do not think the fault is the high production costs and the success of reality shows. The main fault in my opinion is that the soaps have not been able to reinvent itself. They are equal to themselves for decades. Following what circumstances it comes time to cancel a soap?

Yes, as I’m saying, the genre is in steep decline, there are only 4 left, and I will predict that they’ll all be gone in 5 years time.  I disagree with you that it isn’t productions costs and reality shows; television is about ratings, and that means money.  The costs are extraordinary, even after all the pay cuts and trimming of budgets.  If you owned NBC, wouldn’t you do a show that might cost a fraction of the expense of a soap and see what happens?  But there are other factors as well.  Soaps were pitched toward women in the Midwest who were standing in front of the TV ironing clothes, they were created by Proctor & Gamble to sell soap.  That audience, like the characters they were watching, eventually got up from the kitchen table and went out and got jobs, developed careers, opened up their world—and thus there is little audience left.  Plus today we have hundreds and hundreds of choices, whereas back in the heyday of soaps in America it was only NBC, CBS and ABC.  So often I’ve heard that fans started watching because their grandmothers or mother watched, and thus they got hooked.  Today that doesn’t happen, for Mom isn’t watching television, she’s working, and Granny, if she’s watching TV and not on the computer, is probably addicted to The Real Housewives of some such city.  One more thing: Paul Rauch has a memoir coming, which I’m helping him write, that will be published late next year, and in it he points to network interference as one of the main reasons the soaps lost their way.  So you are right that it isn’t only money and ratings and the competition of cheap reality shows.  Storytelling really has become stagnant, I think, because the network puts everything the capable writers suggest through the wash (a bad pun on soap here?) and it comes out too clean.  Meaning that the stains, which is what is interesting, are gone.  Stories are grey rather than black and white, the ups and down are leveled off, the colors muted, characters have no edge, so much of the humor is lost (a great SB trait back in the early days).  It’s writing by committee, when, as Paul says, the network should simply be encouraging the writers, not dictating what stories to tell and how to tell them. 

In the USA “Santa Barbara”  always remained in the bottom of the rankings ratings. In the rest of the world and especially in Europe it has had excellent ratings. Furthermore, despite having low ratings, it has been the most award-winning soap and and still there are dozens and dozens of sites dedicated to this soap, unlike the others soaps cancelled. People still contact you to talk about Sb? What made SB so special? Please tell us what you liked about "Santa Barbara" and then what you do not like about that show.

We forget that SB never had good ratings here, because it was so popular!  And I don’t mean popular as in people watching it, it just had a good vibe, everyone knew about it, everyone talked about it, it won Emmy after Emmy, and yet no one really ever watched it.  Yes, I get asked about it often.  Yes, the buzz still goes on.  But because I was writing other shows full time for all the years it was on, I seldom got to watch it, so I’m not familiar with it as a longtime fan might be, but when I did see, I liked it a lot.  I was attracted to the offbeat nature of the thing—something I didn’t think I’d find with it being called Santa Barbara, which is, actually, a kind of staid, solid, beautiful-but-dull city north of LA—and, as I said before, the humor.  Oh how I loved the humor.  On every show I wrote, I tried so hard to keep it funny, even in the midst of doom and gloom and reappearing dead people and the latest disease which has landed on our most loved diva.  SB did that well, and I think that’s a great credit to the Dobsons.

And now few quick questions: Which is your favorite soap of all time?

Favorite soap of all time?  Dark Shadows.  It was the last show done live, I raced home from school to be able to see a doorknob come off in poor Grayson Hall’s hand and then see how she’d use that moment to incorporate it into the action—it was a riot!  Plus I loved vampires and the whole idea of it, and I was at an age where high camp like that really turned me on.  In fact, it was the only soap I had ever watched before being hired to write General Hospital.

And the best soap ever?

That’s a tough question.  I’d say it’s a tossup between One Life to Live because it was so steady and consistent (and one I never did), and General Hospital, though I think it was the best show only during the 1980’s when it changed daytime forever, with Luke & Laura’s story topping all ratings for the rest of time.  Of course, I wrote that, so I’m prejudiced and not particularly objective.  So I’ll go with OLTL because of its staying power.

The worst?

Passions.  Ugh.

The most overrated soap?

Passions again.  I know that you’d think I’d be a fan of this one because it was so outrageous and crazy, but I just hated it.  Some things are too over the top.

The most underrated?

Generations.  Again, I was involved, but I thought we were never given a chance, not by the network nor the audience.  The show got a lot of spin that it was a “black soap,” but really only half the cast was black (and we actually thought we were going to attract a sizeable female black audience—but they wouldn’t leave All My Children) but the talk about color may even have hurt us.  It was a damn good show, however, and that’s why I believe it was completely underrated.

What are your professional plans for the future?

As I said, I’m writing Paul’s memoir.  I’ve got a new nighttime pilot being shopped that I’ve written with my dear friend Susie Bedsow Horgan, who wrote and executive produced OLTL, and is also my fellow martini drinker and wonderfully creative spirit.  I’ve got 3—don’t faint hearing this—reality show pitches that have gotten to the studio development point, and none of them have anything to do with soaps.  I also have another novel I’m itching to start, but where does the time go?

This interview is designed primarily for the Italian public. In our country, “Santa Barbara” was very much loved and followed. You've never been in Italy? What do you know about our country? You want to say something to the Italian public who loved SB?

I’ll tell you where the time goes, I travel.  I’m a junkie, probably was a pilot in another life.  I’m obsessed with airline miles, and use them for Business Class trips to Europe a couple of times every year.  I just returned from 3 weeks in England and France, and I’m off to Bruges and Paris in late September.  I have been to Italy about 9 times over the years, once took my parents to Rome, Naples and Positano for one of the most wonderful memories I have with them.  I was in Tuscany last May (oh how I love Siena!), and my heart has always been in Roma.  I’ve said many times, when I die, I want someone to scatter my ashes in the Piazza della Rotunda and I’ll be a happy guy.  Rome is, without a doubt, my Santa Barbara, my favorite city in the entire world.  It never ceases to amaze me with its incredible history at every turn and yet the passionate life brimming in the piazzas.  I mean, take a stroll through Trastevere at night!  Rome fills me with joy and wonder, I find the people fabulous and interesting, and dinner at Toscano off the Via Veneto is my idea of heaven.  I thank the Italian public for making Santa Barbara a success—I actually remember getting checks from the Writer’s Guild a few years later that were payment for “SB—Italy.”  Grazie!