| Savoring Soaps: Luke & Noah: Will They Stay Real?; 10/4/07 | |
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| Topic Started: Dec 3 2007, 04:41 PM (273 Views) | |
| lukeandnoah | Dec 3 2007, 04:41 PM Post #1 |
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http://blogs.mediavillage.com/savoring_soaps As The World Turns' Luke and Noah: Will They Stay Real? by Marlena De Lacroix All eyes seem to be focused on the Luke and Noah storyline on As The World Turns. It's been promised to be a gay romance played out exactly as one between a boy and a girl would be on a soap. We're all so excited and anxious to see how this story is going to pan out. Even I have to admit to being a bit bored and impatient on days when Noah and Luke aren't on. You have to have a Ph.D. in Oakdale history and a good stiff martini to be able sit through and actually understand the endlessly talky Rosanna/Craig/Meg/Paul scenes! But I digress. So far, the two best things about the Luke and Noah story are: (1) how natural and realistic the characters are, and (2) the meticulous care with which this story is being written and produced. Even last week's breakup between Noah and Maddie was sensitively done without histrionics. However, a soap being a soap in this day of bells, whistles and cataclysmic sweeps events, Luke and Noah's budding relationship is bound to run headlong into a tabloidy stunt of some sort. It looks like this will happen sooner than later: Just this morning I read that this week Luke's homophobic, wife-murdering psychopath of a father, Colonel Winston (Daniel-Hugh Kelly) is about to shoot Luke on a fishing trip, leaving the college age kid paralyzed! Now, it takes a lot to shock Marlena, but I was immediately very angry. Such a violent, out-of-the-blue occurrence can overwhelm a sensitive breakthrough story about realistic young love, no? And then I got depressed and remembered something key: viewers like me have to be a bit patient and remember that the Luke and Noah love story is a soap storyline in the crazily competitive soap world of 2007, not the plot of an introspective independent movie. It's up to the writers to balance dramatic plots that are spectacularly shocking with characters that are humanistic and real. Ay, there's the (soap) rub, and the challenge of being a soap writer. Will As the World Turns' writers be able to use Luke's paralysis as a way to make Luke and Noah's relationship blossom into real love? We'll have to see. This soap being the traditionally family oriented ATWT, we already know that Luke has much love and strong emotional support from his parents Lily and Holden, his siblings and assorted grandmothers and uncles and aunts and cousins. How many of us are lucky enough to have a family like that in this day and age in America? No matter how fractured and tabloidy American soaps have become, most still provide, however tenuously, the kind of family context that make it possible to tell a real human story. Yes, even about two boys who happen to fall in true love. In the case of Luke and Noah (nicely played by Van Hansis and Jake Silbermann, respectively), I am dazzled by just how authentically young and vulnerable these characters are. In a soap would full of contrived teen hookers, hit men, and 17-year-old expectant mothers and fathers, young Luke and Noah seem refreshingly authentic. They remind me very much of the college students I teach. They are just trying to find their way in the world. Only Luke and Noah have a much, much farther way to go. And it's not because they're gay. It's because they're daytime soap opera characters. |
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4:36 AM Nov 22