Michael Malone gave the soap opera world landmark stories on ‘One Life to Live’ – Toronto Star
A town divided. Shades of truth. The gauze of consent.
It all came rushing back when I read that writer Michael Malone died last week, at his home in Connecticut at 79. The name probably only registers with two distinct tribes: readers of deep-cut procedural fiction or old-school soap obsessives and, falling distinctly into the latter category, I breathed a silent wow.
Best known for spinning the tale of the first gay teenager on television, back in 1992 on “One Life to Live” — Billy Douglas, played by a 17-year-old unfamous Ryan Phillippe — and then following that up by writing the most intricate examination of sexual assault ever put to air — think: a small-screen answer to “The Accused” with Jodie Foster, but with emotional beats playing out for more than a year — Malone was the boldest of storytellers. His work was what Entertainment Weekly once called “some of the most literate drama ever to hit daytime …”
The Harvard-educated Malone was already the author of several novels — including some, like “Uncivil Seasons,” featuring a pair of mismatched North Carolina cops (ones that the New York Times called “two of the most memorable police detectives ever to appear in mystery fiction”) — when he got the outta-left-field call to take over as head writer of the age-old soap. He got to work. Fast.
“I couldn’t resist it,” Malone explained later. “I think Dickens would have done it. I make up characters and there they are in the flesh. I have my own Shakespeare company!” He added: “There was no way ever on God’s green earth that five million people a week would be reading my novels, but they might see Viki,” the show’s long-time leading lady. This, after all, was a time when soap operas sat right in the piazza of the culture, with about 13 on the air — reality TV not yet a force, some of which now offers the same dopamine as soaps to fans, and before the O.J. Simpson trial, which inextricably bled viewers from all the soaps.
The story of Billy Douglas itself can be construed as a tipping point for gay representation, if you consider that it was before “Will & Grace.” Before Ellen coming out. Before the groundbreaking depiction of Pedro on “The Real World.” The storyline on “OLTL” — which also tied in the AIDS Memorial Quilt and the issue of bullying — was not only early in making the invisible visible, but was told in a way only soaps can: slowly, deliberately, day after day, via a character connected to core families and blended inside a larger history running onscreen for decades in the fictional town of Llanview created by Agnes Nixon. (“OLTL,” when it was finally yanked in 2011, had run for 45 years.) There was gestation, in other words. There were stakes.
At the time, the network ABC wanted “OLTL” to surround Billy with mostly benevolent sorts, something that Malone resisted. He pushed back: “We would not make any of the racist characters nice people, so why would we make any homophobic people nice?” Indeed: he gave us the good, the bad and the ugly.
Interesting, too: in a matter of life imitating art, Phillippe, now 47, revealed in a recent interview that his own parents weren’t particularly pleased with his pioneering role. “I’d grown up going to Baptist school,” he said. “I was shunned at that point … I mean, this was 1992, and I was playing a gay teenager, and I was in a Christian school. They weren’t happy about it.”
The other landmark story that Malone initiated grew out of the Billy Douglas coming out, in a way as so often happens in a serialized show running five days a week, that story begets story, new pivots rise out of old tensions. As rooted in real emotion was the rape of Marty Saybrooke, played beautifully by Toronto actress Susan Haskell, then freshly out of acting school. Malone wanted a heroine who was complicated. Not necessarily the Good Girl. There Marty was: a rich party girl who’d previously spread homophobic stories about Billy.
She had lied once, in other words, about sex. But that, of course, did not mean she was lying now. “I wanted to do a seriously realistic story on what was going on in colleges,” is how Malone explained its origins in an in-depth analysis on the “Dead Ringer” podcast that dug deep into the significance of the storyline not long back. Date rape, specifically. Hitched to a large-scale conversation erupting then around the subject, made especially urgent because of a notorious Time cover story.
“The focus was: date rape is a crime. No matter what the girl was wearing. No matter what the girl was drinking,” Malone went on.
Years before #MeToo, the inciting incident was this: Marty is gang-raped by sneering football player Todd Manning and some other frat boys at a Spring Fling dance, with special focus paid to the courage of the victim in speaking up. More harrowing than daytime had previously allowed itself to get — gnarly even compared to prime-time standards — the show soared in ratings and buzz. Haskell won an Emmy. All the major players in the story did, in fact. Likewise, Malone himself for writing.
Because this was still a soap, with dramatic crests to meet, the story only capped once there had been a trial, a retrial, a prison sentence, a jailbreak, a hostage-taking and, eventually, a sorta redemption arc for the rapist, when later he saves the life of Marty, controversial to this day for obvious reasons — done to keep Roger Howarth, who played Todd and had become crazy popular, viable on the show.
In terms of soap history, it also hearkened back to other hot-button topics advanced. In 1973, for example, on the sister soap “All My Children,” Erica Kane had the first legal abortion on TV, the very year that Roe v. Wade came to be. While many soaps had veered to the more fantastical, beginning in the 1980s — Luke and Laura working together to stop the freezing of the Earth on “General Hospital” — the socially relevant had always sat company with the melodrama. One of the beautiful oddities in a quintessentially American art form, where the characters always seemed realer than in other genres because of their sheer longevity.
Lots of characters. Lots of perspectives. A true narrative onion peel. That was what Malone accomplished in this instance. Or as one fan put it best in a tweet this week: “The absolute pinnacle of soap opera storyline writing came from Michael Malone … the character creation/development, subject matter and story resolutions have never been matched.”
Even with more than a dozen novels to his name ultimately and another gig later head-writing another soap — “Another World” — it is his time on “OLTL” that endures. A very particular slice of television history.
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