Unbridled 'Passions': NBC's unabashed daytime soap lures in younger audiences

Each day for the last three years, Tabitha Lenox has wracked her brain trying find a plan that will successfully destroy her 18-year-old next door neighbor Charity Standish.

So far, electrocuting her, drowning her, trapping her in hell and freezing her in a block of ice have proved vain efforts.

This tale may sounds a little far-fetched, but there are many more where that came from. Tabitha and Charity are not University students, government agents or comic book super-beings, but as characters on "Passions," television's most infamous soap opera, they may be the next best thing.

Tabitha's most recent scheme rested on Charity's newly-transplanted heart failing when she learned that her fiance Miguel had been intimate with her cousin Kay while she was fighting her evil Zombie twin for her soul.

Almost comically, constant interruptions and endless hesitation on everyone's part caused the plan to fall through, again.

Tabitha, portrayed by Juliet Mills, the centuries-old resident mischief maker, and Charity, played by Molly Stanton, the up and coming paradigm of virtue, are just two of the witches in the small New England town of Harmony, the setting "Passions."

Since its debut in July 1999, the hour-long NBC soap, which airs at 2 p.m. in Princeton, has taken the world of soap opera to new highs – and lows – and captured a younger fan base in the process.

"It was a great bonding experience," Stacy Lau '03 said of watching the show with her freshman-year roommate. "We would get frustrated when classes were scheduled during the 'Passions' timeslot."

While Lau said she knew of several other "Passions" fans, the occasions on which they all watched together were few and far between. "Mostly it was just me and my roommate," she said.

Such miniature networks of "Passions" fans exist, cult-like and almost in secret, across campus. Those who watch the show only discuss it with others who watch the show, though some people convert a friend or two. Caught in the middle of a conversation between a pair of fans, a non-watcher will often be confused, disoriented, frustrated or just plain lost.

The addiction is not only a phenomenon at the University, as whispers of "that show with the witch and the talking doll" sweep crowds of high school and college students nationally.

Hailed in eating hall conversations and Internet chatrooms across the country as the most enchanting soap on the block, the show's notoriously fantastic plots and multitude of teenage and young adult characters have helped draw young people back into soap opera.

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Industry buzz over the past few years has speculated that the soap opera genre is dying out – longtime viewers turning away in droves with no younger suds watchers coming in to replace them. "Passions" has been credited in large part with reversing the curve.

Despite ratings statistics – the show averages about 2.1 million viewers per week, measly beside the consistent average of close to five million homes for "The Young and the Restless" – "Passions" has been a popular front runner with teens, a demographic some feel is more accurately reflected in Internet hype than Nielsen's, the media bible of ratings.

At the end of the summer, "Passions" was also among the top soaps for women 18-49, the target audience of nearly all daytime television advertisers.

"Passions" and its lead-in "Days of our Lives" were the only two soaps to make it out of NBC alive in 1999, when both fledgling soap "Sunset Beach" and 35-year veteran "Another World" were axed.

The "Passions" phenomenon has extended well beyond television, with the show posting frequent bonus features on its website at nbc.com/passions and a book in 2001.

"Hidden Passions: Secrets from the Diaries of Tabitha Lenox" was wildly popular when it debuted in January of last year, making several notable bestseller lists, including placing within the top five on the New York Times list. The book sprung from a "Passions" story line in which Tabitha's sidekick, the living doll Timmy (played by the late Josh Ryan Evans) decided to publish her memoirs to pay off hundreds of years of back taxes on Tabitha's house.

The drawback of being a show that is so popular with teenagers, however, is that mature themes and morals are often ignored. Viewers should not expect serious treatment, for example, of crimes, like murder or sexual assault. This year alone, two characters, brothers Luis (Galen Gering) and Miguel (Jesse Metcalfe), have been duped into sex with women through drugs or magic potions. And troubled young heroine Theresa (Lindsay Korman) was executed after confessing to a murder she did not commit. But both she and the supposed victim turned up alive and well only a few episodes later.

These factors that help to attract viewers also have a habit of turning them away. One campus fan said she found the show to be "extremely addictive" at first, but eventually the bizarre and snail-paced plots frustrated her to the point that she stopped watching entirely.

"I felt that the show went a little over the top," Lau said, referring specifically to a plot twist in which two characters who barely knew each other got extremely drunk, formed a May-December marriage and conceived a child.

Some fans are even ashamed of their association with the show. "It's a little embarrassing because I'm in college, and I used to watch it [in high school]," Lau said.

Finding a student on campus who will admit to being a current regular viewer of the show is probably even more difficult than following the show's farcical plot twists.

Mild embarrassment notwithstanding, people are watching. The youngest network soap is holding ground against shows that have decades of experience behind them.

The extreme nature of the show is not always a reason to tune out. One campus fan said she liked the all-or-nothing attitude the show's characters take – "how everyone is so profoundly good or profoundly evil."

In a town with constant visitations from angels and demons, inhabited by resident witches and randy zombie twins, it is probably best to be clear when choosing sides in the battle between good and evil.

Some fans and critics even admire "Passions'" approach to daytime drama, making fun of other shows and of itself. With Tabitha, the most outlandish character, acting as the show's historian and a satirist of sorts, plots are recapped often enough that new viewers are not left stranded. Tabitha usually comments on what she feels are the preposterous elements of the characters' actions and thoughts, not realizing that she is the most preposterous of them.