Langford On Soaps: Blame It On Irene!

This week’s column is a day late (but hopefully not a dollar short) thanks to Mother Nature putting a beatdown on the area in which I live. I thought the brief earthquake we had was enough for one week, but other forces had something else in mind. The hurricane over the weekend left me without power, cable or internet for a couple of days, put my soap watching on the backburner and caused the delay of the column this week. Thankfully all is well now and here we are. Enjoy!

LANGFORD’S PICKS AND PANS

All That Matters

It’s a sad end for Roman and Deniz…

We reported awhile back that Dennis Grabosch, who plays Roman on ATM, is leaving the show and the soap has decided to kill the character off with the old soap plot device of a brain tumor, leaving us with yet another dead gay character, not to mention a tragic end to one of soaps' most beloved TV gay couples. For reasons beyond my control, I can’t present the clips from this show to you, but I didn’t want to let this final arc for Roman and Deniz go by without commenting on the storyline that will bring their relationship to an sad end.

First off, I have to gripe about the fact that the show is killing off Roman in the first place. Not only am I bothered that we'll have another dead gay, I just think it’s a lazy way to wrap up Roman and Deniz's story and shows little respect for their worldwide legion of fans. But it's not just this show. Too many time soaps kill off a character rather than come up with another way of writing them out. People take new jobs, leave town, go to visit relatives, any number of methods could be used to write Roman out. But soaps take this route far too often, and more often than not it leads to a momentary blip of drama that comes to very little in the end.

And on this show, with its very short term memory when it comes to plots, Roman will be forgotten quickly. Deniz will quickly move on to a new love, most likely female. I suspect we won’t see Deniz in a gay relationship ever again.

But with all that, I really did enjoy the scenes that followed in the wake of Deniz’ impulsive proposal of marriage to Roman. It was a very sweet gesture on Deniz’s part, but I don’t understand why Roman turned Deniz down. If he’s determined to make the most of the rest of his life, and he openly admits he loves and needs Deniz, why not marry him? It doesn’t make sense to me. But while that did bother me, I found the ensuing scenes to be beautiful and sweetly romantic. Most especially when Roman and Deniz just silently and lovingly lay together. I’m sure some folks were upset because the boys didn’t kiss, but that would have been jarringly out of place in my opinion. It was perfect just like it was.

Speaking of perfect, ATM still boasts some of the sexiest men in soaps. Ben, Thomas and Florian are adorable as ever. And about the uber hot Ben: I laughed myself silly when he showed up at his wedding late because he was too busy going deaf! The insane plot twists on this show just keep coming.

Hollyoaks

Hollyoaks continues its new plot thread of Brendan becoming suspicious of Silas. While I’m looking forward to this storyline as it plays out, as usual this show is sloppy with the details and is riddled with plot implausibility.

It’s just hard to believe that Silas could so easily go in and out of Lynsey’s apartment with such frequency and never be spotted. Or that Silas could monitor Lynsey at all hours on his tablet and no one would notice. And I’ve already mentioned that it's difficult to buy that no one would even think that Lynsey could be right about Silas, especially since he acts so oddly. These things are an unfortunate and unnecessary distraction.