These are the only two soap operas I ever watched. I remember exactly how I started watching them. The summer I was 11, having suffered through a slew of terrible summer day camps and other horrors, I convinced my mother to let me stay with my grandmother during the day.

I didn’t have many friends in that neighborhood at the time. And children’s television being what it was before Nickelodeon became useful (How many fucking hours can you play Pinwheel, channel??), I resorted to mindlessly flipping channels looking for anything resembling a cartoon on rainy days.

That’s when I stumbled upon a show that involved some people on an island, one of whom was pretending to be a gangster to fool another gangster who was in love with the guy’s sister or cousin or something who was in love with some hot dude named Jake. 

Oh, One Life To Live, you had me from hello. 

The morning kids shows trailed off at 1:30, yet OLTL didn’t start until 2. That’s how I got in the habit of watching All My Children, too. And for many years onward, I kept up with all those crazy white people and smattering of slightly less crazy people of color until college and my lack of VCR ended it all.

I’ve poked my head in a few times over the years. Same old stuff, different cast (except Susan Lucci and Erika Slezak). Things got crazy over the years, but not as crazy as they did back in the day. Like the time Viki Buchanan spent several months in the days of the old west, having traveled back in time. No, I am not kidding.

Even though I haven’t watched in years, it still pains me in my heart that these shows are going away. That this kind of storytelling is going away. (I have a long post about that, too, which I’ll write someday.)

Let’s celebrate the end by talking about OLTL and AMC storylines and characters. The ones you loved, the ones that drove you insane, the ones that made no damn sense, anything at all.

From The Angry Black Tumblr | Comment below or Reblog @ Tumblr