“Jkilled my son. » Episode 218 of Santa Barbara. In four words, the flagship soap of the 80s concludes its main plot, launched from the very first episode. In a reenactment scene worthy of an Agatha Christie novel, less classy, the viewer finally gets the answer he’s been waiting for since day one: it’s Sophia (Judith McConnell), heroine with Medean accents, who killed Channing Jr! Here. Said like that, it doesn’t sound like much, but when you look at the long history of Santa Barbara, this twist is not only extraordinary, but also… totally absurd! We explain to you.
Santa Barbara landed discreetly on TF1 in October 1985. The first channel set its sights on this soap launched the previous year on NBC to compete with the handful of other ersatz of the genre, including the sacrosanct Flames of love (still unknown in France), which bring together a number of American housewives in front of their screens every afternoon.
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Directed by Bridget and Jerome Dobson, a couple of screenwriters who have already flitted from one soap to another, Santa Barbara brings a touch of levity to the genre. And manages in a few episodes to establish strong but altogether classic characters: CC, the authoritarian patriarch, Mason, the unloved son, Augusta, the bitch on duty… But above all, she holds her flagship couple with two young lovebirds, quite gnangnan , the wealthy heiress Kelly (played by debutante Robin Wright, future Claire Underwood of House of Cards) and Joe Perkins, the valiant man of the bullied people, straight out of a Capra film.
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Stucco decorations and crazy brushings
If in the United States, it is necessary to wait for an earthquake to increase the hearings, in France, the soap opera, broadcast at 7 p.m. in access-prime-time, just before The wheel of fortunevery quickly caused a tidal wave, mainly with a pre-teenage audience.Helen the boys. The French are discovering the brand new format of the daily soap opera, they who until then had only been entitled to prime time soaps, on a weekly basis, like dallas and Dynasty.
Santa Barbara introduces them to the rules of the daytime soap (broadcast during the day) with its stucco decorations, its essential gleaming chandeliers, its low-end wardrobes all in rhinestones and its exteriors which are not. Here, everything is cheap, but we assume it. No problem. Viewers are used to it.
The strength of Santa Barbara, if we compare it to its elders, it is to have built its entire initial framework on a police investigation revolving around one and the same question: “But, damn it, who killed Channing Jr Capwell? »
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The series begins when Joe Perkins returns to Santa Barbara. Jeans, sneakers and a perfect brushing, the handsome boy with the square jaw is expected there by his family. He has just served five years in prison for the murder of Channing Jr, the son of CC Capwell, an oil tycoon with a colossal fortune. The sky fell on the young man who was to marry the beautiful Kelly, Californian blonde hair, ultra-bright white smile…, the victim’s sister. The latter, and we have to admit that we can only understand her, has rebuilt her life with Peter Flint, a blond Ken straight out of a deodorant ad with a “stick large”, who will later turn out to be a serial killer (let’s not rush, that’s another story that we’ll tell you another time… maybe).
What is certain is that Joe’s return to Santa Barbara reopens wounds that are still badly healed, especially since the presumptuous young man is determined to prove his innocence. Which therefore means that the culprit is surely basking the pill somewhere on a cardboard beach.
But then who fired the fatal shot? Is it Mason, the brother in need of recognition? Or one of the members of the Lockridge family, the sworn enemies of the Capwell clan, who had, for the most part, a multitude of motives to commit the terrible misdeed?
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In view of the prevarications of the plot, full of implausibilities and the few inconsistencies inherent in any daily soap opera, which always ends up tripping over its original bible, it seems that even the scriptwriters were also unaware of the answer.
Loves always thwarted
For more than two hundred episodes, the question will underlie all the more traditional intrigues of the soap: the thwarted love of Kelly and Joe, the thwarted love of Ted Capwell and Laken Lockridge, Romeo and Juliet junk from the soap opera, the thwarted love of Eden Capwell and Cruz Castillo, the Latino cop. For the rest, nothing but the very banal: murders, kidnappings, children exchanged at birth, unplugged respirators and regular distribution of slaps shamelessly season this detective story whose screenwriters finally decide to reveal the outcome at 218e episode (436e in France since they were cleverly sliced in half).
And this good old Cruz Castillo (surely faster to elucidate a murder than to put on his ultra-tight jeans) brings together, Cluedo style, the Capwell clan and a few Lockridges in the office where Channing was assassinated a few years before.
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So who killed Channing Jr.? After a long introduction, a vertiginous summary of the previous episodes and a very useful hypnosis of Sophia Capwell, the public discovers, dumbfounded, that it is indeed the latter who killed her own son. A mystery never happens alone, how is it possible since, at the time of the events, the culprit was dead?
It’s simple: death is never final in the kingdom of soaps, Sophia had indeed died after a boat trip with her lover Lionel Lockridge, but, and it is common, her body had disappeared. She had therefore returned, in the guise of a mysterious man, bearded and always decked out in dark glasses (why make it simple when you can make it complicated), to take revenge on her former lover whom she accused of having pushed her by- overboard before fleeing… (if you are no longer following, please start again at the beginning of the previous paragraph!).
saving amnesia
The poor girl, following a providential amnesia, very probably due to a post-traumatic shock (thank you Dr. House!), has thus forgotten that the evening of the murder of her son, she was there, hidden in the office, determined to kill her ex-lover. But the clumsy girl, disturbed by the darkness in which the room was then plunged, had pulled the trigger in the direction of her own son! (Ooh, it smells like shrink sessions ad vitam aeternam…)
Yes, we are on top of anything, but this outcome has the merit of creating a surprise. And to increase the audiences… Even if it means sinking into ridicule! We will not go back over the very theatrical staging of the scene, in which a grieving mother collapses in front of the imitation leather sofa, screaming her grief under the tearful gaze of her family, against a background of very dated synth, all in an approximate French dubbing.
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However, there is no question of disconcerting the viewer, who has already taken a liking to the tender Sophia, a woman manhandled by this female dog of life, who has only just found the love of her children (well, of those whom she did not kill by mistake). So the decision is made to hide his guilt from the police. Anyway, other misfortunes await him until 2,137e episode.
And Santa Barbara will continue on its way, cushy, even after killing the plot that kept its audience spellbound. And here we go again for an armload of tragicomic deaths (an ex-nun dies being run over by the rickety sign of the Capwell hotel, a waitress takes a molotov cocktail in the face…). Adventures that somehow provide an answer to the question posed by the French song recorded, in full success, to accompany the credits: “Santa Barbara, who will tell me why I have the pain of living…”