Daytime's Greatest Weddings (review)

There's something a little bit scary about this cascade of daytime soaps at their most outrageously soapy. Maybe it's the bombardment of ridiculous wedding dresses and bizarre veils. Maybe it's the actors talking about their characters as if they're real people. Maybe it's the hosts of the General Hospital segment, Jackie Zeman and Brad Maule, who look rather terrifyingly like a blow-dried evangelical couple pleading for your money on late-night TV, and talk up soaps with the same kind of fervor. Maybe it's the sheer crassness of ABC's attempt to take the money of daytime-TV fans. There's no real content here, just an amalgam of clips from and giddy interviews with some cast members of All My Children, One Life to Live, and the aforementioned GH. The grainy black-and-white footage, dug up from the era of the Johnson administration, is mildly amusing for fans of retro kitsch, but most everything here seems to date from the glitzy, over-the-top 80s. It's like reliving gossip about people you don't even know, who don't even exist: Cliff and Nina, Frisco and Felicia, Shaun and Tiffany, and of course Luke and Laura, whose wedding is still the most watched episode in the history of soaps. Removed from the larger context of ongoing stories, all this disc accomplishes is to show up the absurdity of soap operas and impossibility of following them. Strictly for fans.