SOAP SCUM: As we’ve previously mentioned, NBC canceled Another World in April, just weeks before the 35th anniversary of the soap’s first airdate. The final episode was scheduled for last Friday, so a new (and, from all initial reports, way stupid) drama could premiere following a week of Wimbledon pre-emptions.

This scheduling left the producers with only five to six weeks’ worth of episodes not yet taped at the time of the heave-ho announcement.

The producers chose to wrap things up as neatly as they could. The result has been some fascinating viewing–a daytime soap that moved at the pace of a nighttime soap, if not faster.

The first thing they did was to promptly close a particularly hoary supervillain-driven plotline (involving an evil scientist who claimed to be 200 years old, and who was on the prowl for a pretty female to involuntarily host his late girlfriend’s spirit). The soap magazines reported that particular storyline was to have climaxed with the May ratings-sweeps weeks anyway. But when it did end, it wasn’t just the good Bay City townspeople who were grateful to be rid of the sleazebag. It also meant the show’s remaining two-and-a-half million viewers could expect their last glimpses of the show to be glimpses of the character-based drama it had once been, not the tacky imitation of the worst of Days of Our Lives that AW had become.

(It’s worth noting, at this point, the crazy economics of network TV, in which a show seen daily by more people than live in western Washington can be a money-loser for its network and producer (not merely less profitable than a more popular show).)

Next came something a little trickier–the prompt, two-week denoument of what was probably to have carried the show over the summer, a complex murder-and-blackmail plot involving almost half the cast. Miraculously, the writers were even able to make the super-fast resolution of the murder trial a part of the story. A defense attorney at the murder trial raised repeated objections about his client being railroaded without adequate prep time. The judge quickly denied all the objections. It turned out the judge was corrupt, indeed in cahoots with the real killer.

That left about 14 episodes in which to rectify one love rectangle and a half-dozen other tenuous romances and marriages. As one of the writers told the NY Times, “All the couples people wanted together got together. The characters people wanted brought back from the dead were brought back.”

It’s how they accomplished these assorted reconciliations that may point the way toward the soap genre’s ultimate survival. Episodes were built around just one or two sets of characters (the lovers in question and their family/friends). Plot devices were introduced at the start of the episodes (an overheard conversation, a suddenly-revealed secret about somebody’s past) to either move a couple closer together or temporarily send them further apart. But the dialogue then quickly got past these developments, to concentrate on revealing the characters’ true feelings for one another.

Episodes were ended, not with somebody giving a stare of vague dread to the camera, but with either a note of closure or a cliffhanger that would be promptly resolved on the next show.

By choosing to go out on a high note, the AW producers and writers stumbled upon a shtick that might’ve saved the show, had the network let them use it previously instead of ordering them to come up with dumbed-down, dragged-out plots that had only served to turn off former viewers. The final days of AW were relatively smart, honoring the soaps’ traditional boundaries of “reality” while bending their traditional boundaries of “real time.” These episodes were, at their heart, about the characters, not about wild machinations or about action scenes a daily show can’t really pull off anyway. And they made their plot points quickly and moved on to the next, so you really had to either watch or tape them all (tough luck for viewers in those cities where two vital episodes from the next-to-last week were pre-empted for golf).

Will the surviving (and mostly struggling) soaps learn these lessons? Probably not.

Tomorrow: ArtsEdge and Focus on the Family get booked next to one another; no fights are reported.