Soap Baby Switches
Baby switches are a tried and true staple of daytime soap operas, with one of the earliest and most memorable being Mike Horton on Days of Our Lives. While the audience knew his true paternity for quite a few years, Mike and the man who raised him did not.
Right now, two of the four remaining soaps have baby switch storylines dominating the plot. In fact, one soap has a baby switch as its only plot, and if Soap Hub is to choose which soap is doing this better, we’d have to go with General Hospital with one of the main reasons being it is not the entire show.
Sure, there is always one dominant front-burner storyline through several-month or several-week arcs on any soap, but on The Bold and the Beautiful, if you don’t want to hear the entire cast ruminate about Baby Beth and Hope’s (Annika Noelle) poor grief choices (combined with Thomas’s creepy stalker personality transplant), then there’s not much use tuning in.
Granted, this story has people talking. But, the reason it’s the only story fans talk about is that it’s the only story they have right now.
We understand that 30-minute soaps cannot fit as many plots on the canvas as hour-long shows, but 30-minute (and even 15-minute) soaps dominated daytime for decades, and we definitely saw (or heard) various stories told in that time.
While the performances on BB have been outstanding and we can feel Hope and Liam’s (Scott Clifton) anguish, as we anticipate Steffy’s (Jacqueline MacInnes Wood), there are so many characters in this story NOT to feel for.
Typically, one person knows the whole truth and that one person is the villain. On BB, we are up to six people who know Phoebe is really baby Beth and none are spilling because it would essentially ruin their cushy lifestyle or a romance.
How bad can we really feel for …continue reading on the next page —>
How bad can we really feel for Flo (Katrina Bowden) as she shows her guilt every moment? We’re just not buying it. If she felt that guilty, she would have spoken up by now rather than speak about speaking up every single day.
And, that is basically the crux of this baby switch. All these people know, but they ain’t spilling for some seriously selfish reasons.
Meanwhile, on General Hospital, know who Baby Wiley is and all three of them are known to be villains and were established characters before this all happened.
There’s birth mother Nelle (now in Pentonville), Dr. Liesl Obrecht who delivered the baby (as she attempted to escape Pentonville), and Brad, the adoptive dad who had tried to give up his deceitful ways.
Like on BB, new characters were introduced to help tell this story, but they were worked onto the canvas far from the baby switch for months so we got to know them before the baby anvils came flying down.
One of them is even sympathetic. Who watching GH doesn’t feel their heartbreak for poor Willow every day? This young woman thinks her child is thriving with two loving and adoptive parents but has no idea this is not her baby and that her little boy died soon after he left her arms.
The layers on GH are there sticking out as tentacles everywhere, but there are other stories being told throughout the hour for a little bit of everything. One character, Julian, knows Brad switched out babies, but he still has no idea who the replacement Wiley really is.
While we do think GH’s baby story should have been paced better and ended during May Sweeps, it is infinitely more engaging than the story on BB.
Do you think both baby switch stories need to come to a close soon? Let us know in the comments below.
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