The Soap Opera Machine

Before we begin, this episode contains references to sexual assault.

On a dark, foggy night in 1994, on the soap opera One Life to Live, a police car blows a tire on a deserted two-lane highway.

It swerves across the median and sends an oncoming sedan plunging off the road.

You're in the wrong lane!

After bashing its way down a steep hillside, the sedan skids to a precariously balanced, teetering halt.

Don't move, okay?

Don't move.

Inside the car are two children and the young woman you just heard, who's named Marty Saybrook.

Marty's legs are bruised and bleeding, and any time the younger child moves, the car jerks violently forward.

They're helpless and stuck, moments away from plummeting to a fiery end.

And then Marty spots help.

There's a policeman.

He's coming down the hill.

Officer over here.

There's a child in the back.

She's hurting that she's unconscious.

And I can't move.

But when the cop peers into the driver's side window, Marty recoils.

Oh, no.

No.

No.

Marty knows this man.

And though he's wearing a uniform, he is not a police officer.

He's Todd Manning, her rapist.

You know this less than a year ago?

Less than a year ago that you and your fret brothers raped me.

I didn't exactly write it down in my date book, no.

Todd Manning had arrived on One Life to Live as a villain, the malevolent, sneering football player who leads his two fraternity brothers in the brutal gang rape of Marty Saybrook.

Don't you dare touch me.

Since the rape, there's been a trial, a mistrial, a prison sentence, a jailbreak, a hostage-taking, a near-drowning, and numerous additional attacks, all leading up to Todd's re-apprehension.

He was being taken to prison when the police car he was in blew attire, causing this very crash.

He stole one of the officers' uniforms and headed out into the night.

Todd's on the run.

If he stops to help Marty and her passengers, he'll be arrested again.

Hurry up!

Help him while you can.

Todd can continue being the villain.

He can abandon the woman he raped, let her and the kids die, or he can do something heroic, sacrifice his freedom to save their lives.

In other words, Todd Manning is at a crossroads, but he's not alone.

One Life to Live was at a crossroads too.

The show had set out to tell a story from the perspective of a rape victim, and here it was on the cusp of telling the story of her rapist's redemption.

How had it gotten here?

How had it justified getting here?

And what was going to happen next?

The answer to all of these questions, it's almost a soap opera unto itself.

This is Decoder Ring, a show about cracking cultural mysteries.

I'm Willip Haskin.

In the early 1990s, One Life to Live began airing an unprecedentedly hard-hitting story about sexual assault.

The storyline, widely considered to be a high watermark of conscientious soap opera making, riveted audiences, won awards, and turned the villain at its center, Todd Manning, into one of the most memorable characters in the show's history.

In this episode, we're going to explore how this plotline came to be and how the villain it created came to run away with the series.

It's a look at the relentless high wire act of making a soap opera, at the creative decisions, commercial considerations, and moral capitulations that go into it, and at how one show birthed a storyline so successful that it set off a behind-the-scenes conflict that lasted for literally decades.

So, today, on Decodering, how do you solve a problem like Todd Manning?

That's the sound of the fully electric Audi Q6 e-tron and the quiet confidence of ultra-smooth handling.

The elevated interior reminds you this is more than an EV.

This is electric performance redefined.

A soap opera is a machine.

A huge, astonishingly complex perpetual motion machine made up of hundreds of moving parts.

Scripts, cameras, actors, writers, directors, producers, network executives, continuity specialists, sex dressers, ideas, egos, history, money, and more, all working together to churn out over 250 hours of narrative television a year.

To accomplish this logistically bonkers feat, the soap opera machine operates non-stop at a breakneck pace, no matter what.

It does a marathon at a dead sprint.

And the One Life to Live machine, in particular, started running in 1968.

This time.

Created by Agnes Nixon, the woman who modernized the soap opera by bringing contemporary controversial issues into daytime, One Life to Live was unusually diverse for its time.

The show, which aired on ABC, included characters of different classes, ethnicities, and races, living side by side in the fictional town of Landview, Pennsylvania.

But by the 1980s, the show's social awareness had been replaced by something kookier.

It's a whole city buried underground.

Like that, a storyline about the discovery of the lost city of Aterna, buried beneath a mountain right outside of Landview.

The lost city of Troy was buried under seven other cities.

This

is greater than Troy.

Big, fantastical stories like this had been common across soap operas throughout the 1980s.

But by the early 90s, audiences were losing interest.

The show still had 8 million viewers a week, but that was down from its mid-80s peak.

So when the show found itself in need of a new executive producer, basically the operator of the soap opera machine, ABC hired someone unusual, a woman who had never seen a soap opera before.

Todd Manning was not a glimmer in anyone's eye yet, but this is when his story really begins.

In 1991, with the hiring of Linda Gottlieb.

I had literally never seen them.

I just thought they were just, you know, boring, waste of time, and only stupid people watched them.

I was very arrogant.

Linda was a veteran producer who had spent decades in educational television before moving into feature films, at which point she developed and produced the hit movie Dirty Dancing.

When the head of ABC Daytime called Linda about the job, she asked her to send over two weeks' worth of episodes.

And I sat there and I watched two weeks of One Life to Live, and I thought it was the worst thing I had ever seen.

And I called her back and I told her exactly that.

And she said, well, if you took it over, you could change it.

And then I got interested because I learned early on that real power in the movie or television industry does not rest with your titles.

It rests with your ability to be able to put out your own vision.

Linda's vision was in line with the series' roots.

She would improve the show and boost the ratings by reflecting the world the viewers actually lived in.

I wanted it to be about real people with real problems, and it could still be very dramatic, but I didn't want to have twins frozen in time and

kill people off and put them in deep freeze and have people come back from the dead.

Linda was confident she'd be able to make these changes.

She'd made movies after all.

How hard could fixing a soap opera really be?

And I want to tell you, I walked into the land of soap opera and I never in my whole career to this day did anything as difficult as run one life to live.

Linda's first move as executive producer was to replace some other key parts of the soap opera machine, namely the writers.

Who could write a soap opera?

You know, I thought, well, if he were alive, I'd hire Charles Dickens.

So who is like Charles Dickens?

I am a passionate lover of Dickens.

He's my idol.

That's Michael Malone.

In the early 1990s, he was a novelist, teaching classes at Swarzmore and the University of Pennsylvania.

He'd written about a dozen well-reviewed literary novels, intricately plotted, multi-generational yarns with multiple plot lines and huge casts of characters bouncing off one another in small-town settings.

So Dickensian, but also basically, soap operas.

Michael was brimming with ideas, but like Linda, he had no experience in daytime television.

He came aboard as the head writer anyway.

I said I'll come if I can use the power of this platform to do stories of social relevance.

He says his peers and friends reacted to his new gig like he'd announced he was going to play piano in a brothel.

He didn't mind.

As he likes to say, Dickens would have done it.

Linda finished staffing up the writing team.

She hired a co-head writer and at least five story writers and five script writers, the lowest level of the writing totem pole, but the people who actually penned the dialogue.

And then Michael and the writers started putting their stamp on the show.

Their first storyline to fully showcase their vision began airing in April of 1992.

It was about a high school student named Billy Douglas who was struggling to come out of the closet.

The network had initially resisted the story, but Linda convinced them to do it.

It was one of the first portrayals of an openly gay teenager on American television.

I kept saying I can't be gay.

But I knew I was.

And it hurts so much to go on lying to you, to my friends,

but most of all to myself.

That's Ryan Philippi, then 17 years old, as Billy Douglas.

The story directly addressed homophobia and bigotry in Landview and climaxed with episodes featuring the AIDS quilt.

It was socially conscious soap opera that worked, educated, and entertained.

It got press, attention, and thousands upon thousands of pieces of fan mail.

It was thrilling.

I said, what other thing could I do that could reach 8 million people a week?

Michael Malone had an idea.

I wanted to do a seriously realistic story of what was going on in colleges.

Date rape.

In the early 1990s, there was a national conversation going on about date rape.

One of the events that inspired it was a Time magazine cover story about Katie Costner, a college student at William and Mary.

Kostner had told school officials that she had been raped by a student she'd invited to her dorm room.

The university agreed a sexual assault had taken place, but allowed the student to remain at the school.

Many Americans saw Costner's story and others like it as an example of a crime that was hideous, common, and not taken nearly seriously enough.

Others pointed out that Costner had agreed to go out with her assailant and invited him in.

It's the latter group that the writers of One Life to Live wanted to reach.

The focus was: date rape is a crime,

no matter what the girl was wearing, no matter what she was drinking, it was a crime.

Soaps had done rape storylines before, but they had not been so clear-eyed.

In fact, the most well-known rape storyline in Soaps up to this point had turned into a romantic fantasy.

In 1979, on General Hospital, Luke Spencer had raped Laura Baldwin.

Two years later, Laura admitted that she'd fallen in love with Luke.

The two went on to become Luke and Laura, the most famous couple in soap history.

Their wedding was watched by 30 million people.

Linda and Michael were trying to tell a story with the same mass appeal, the same melodramatic urgency, but one that presented rape as a brutal assault rather than the beginning of a seduction.

They were asking the soap opera machine to make something it had never made before.

On a soap opera, story begets story.

New plots arise out of the tensions of the old.

It's that perpetual motion, like an endless line of falling dominoes.

As Michael and the writers began to plot out the rape story, they saw that the Billie Douglas coming out arc could be its domino.

In order to make the point they wanted to about date rape, they wanted a heroine not everyone would initially believe.

And there was exactly such a character right there in the middle of the Billie Douglas story.

She was named Marty Saybrook, and she was a poor little rich girl who had spread homophobic lies about Billy and the town's reverend to his parents.

Reverend Carpenter is a homosexual, and I saw him trying to seduce your son, Billy.

Marty is a trouble young woman who has lied about someone else's sexuality.

Therefore, people don't believe her when she says this has happened to her.

That was the germ of the story.

Marty was played by a young Canadian actress named Susan Haskell, now Susan Haskell Kay.

She auditioned for One Life to Live six months out of acting school.

I was very, very lucky.

I don't have any one of those struggling actor stories.

Actors are another part of the soap opera machine, and they're not just cogs.

Soap shoots 60 to 90 pages of script every single weekday.

Just for comparison, a movie might shoot five pages in a day.

This enormous workload requires the actors to spend thousands of hours in character.

As they like to joke, that's often longer than they spend being themselves.

This can make the actors unusually protective of their fictional alter egos, even as they have a more tenuous hold on them than the actors in prime time do.

Because on SOAP, characters are not irrevocably linked to the actors who play them.

Characters are recast all the time, meaning one actor will replace another in an existing part.

Occasionally, when an actor has to be out on short notice, the show will even sub someone in for them, for the day.

It's a tangled setup that makes the characters surprisingly substantial to everyone involved.

Not just the actors, but the writers and the audience too.

To manage this situation, this tug of war essentially over these fictional beings, the writers would bring the actors in to go over their future storylines.

And they did this with Susan.

The story they had come up with was especially harrowing.

It would be a gang rape perpetrated in a frat house by a number of fraternity brothers.

It was a departure from the date rape cases being debated in the news, but it would give the show maximal story, lots of characters and perspectives and drama, everything in the kitchen sink.

Susan had some concerns.

I asked them, please don't do this and then make me get over it really fast.

Like, that's just wrong.

And I also said, Don't ever put me together romantically with any one of these people because I will quit.

The One Life to Live writers reassured Susan.

This would not be a frothy soap opera fantasy.

The story would be serious, uncompromising, and realistic about the emotional fallout of rape.

But while this got Susan on board, it made the network bulk.

Linda had to give them the hard sell.

Michael Malone again.

She was over there telling the network, we're gonna do this story.

And they were saying, we can't do this story.

This is too gritty.

This is not what daytime does.

And

she kept saying, look, this story is gonna work.

The story is gonna get writing.

And you know, my belief here was that nighttime television does all these things.

And there's no reason why we can't combine this with the best aspects of daytime.

and pull people in.

Linda convinced them to do the story.

And it was just around this time that a young actor named Roger Howarth came in for an audition.

When Roger Howarth was barely 20, he dropped out of college to try and make it as an actor in New York City.

He got some small parts in regional theater and off-Broadway.

The money wasn't good, but he loved it.

I was so pleased to be working for $54 a week.

Then, just as his wife got pregnant, a casting agent for a soap opera asked him to audition.

He got the job, but they didn't end up needing him.

Roger got paid anyway.

And so they gave me a check, and

one of those episodes was worth

10 weeks of off-Broadway.

So I said, yeah, I'd really like to be on a soap opera.

And so I auditioned for One Life to Live.

The part he landed was so small, the character was called Frat Boy Number One.

He was intended to be a minor player in the rape storyline.

But Roger had something going for him.

He was really good.

He was never intended to be a contract player.

Susan Bedzel Horgan, a writer and producer on One Life to Live.

Wow.

He played these levels.

He played these complicated ripples that...

Maybe were in the script, but I think he went beyond.

And we thought, wow, maybe we need to really keep this guy.

So, Susan gave frat boy number one a name, Todd Manning.

As Todd, Roger was sarcastic and brash, and you didn't quite know what he was gonna do, what sneering spin he was going to put on a line.

Here he is in the scene at the frat house, where Todd baits a black female classmate, the girlfriend of one of his frat brothers.

Looks like we're not politically correct enough from his yet.

Don't hide behind that phrase, Todd.

I'd rather be politically correct than a bigot.

Whoa!

I was calling names now.

Well, Todd, I have had it with you and your cheap shots.

Rachel, can't you just take a joke?

You can hear that Todd's smirking and smug, thrilled to be winding Rachel up.

But what you can't hear is how tall he is, how big, a plausible football player, with this mane of long, straight hair.

He looms over Rachel when he says she can't take a joke.

Besides, I would never discriminate against a woman as beautiful as you, Rachel.

You hear that?

He thinks it's funny.

Dropboy number one was supposed to be a throwaway bad guy, but Roger made him stand out.

He was a scenery-chomping villain, charismatic and chilling, an instant audience favorite.

And the audience is another part of the soap opera machine.

Linda, Michael, and the writers could see what the audience was responding to in ratings, in focus groups, and in polls called Q scores.

And they used that information to write to what was working.

Until recently, with the advent of streaming, this back and forth was one of TV's distinguishing characteristics.

Its creators were getting feedback as the work was unfolding.

On One Life to Live, that feedback loop was turned up just about as high as it could go.

The show's production schedule was incredibly tight.

You'd outline an episode and would be on TV just a few weeks later.

So when Rogers' Q scores skyrocketed, the writers leaned in.

Oh my god, this guy is so good.

He goes so deep and there are so many levels to him.

Jean Pasanante, who also came out of the theater, had been working at ABC when she was assigned to help Linda hire a new team of writers.

And then Linda had hired Jean to be one of them.

You know, you can't take your eyes off him.

And when that's true for an audience, it's true for the writers as well.

With Todd on the show, the rape story clicked into focus.

Marty and Todd began to circle one another.

They have a consensual one-night stand.

Later, she tutors him in math.

When he fails his exam, he blames her.

At a raucous frat party, he seeks his revenge.

As scores of extras rage downstairs and rain pounds outside, Todd and two of his frat brothers take a drunk Marty up to a bedroom, tie her down, gag her, and rape her.

Roger Howarth and Susan Haskell Kay.

We came in on a Saturday and it was completely unheard of because they wanted to shoot something that was incredibly dark and violent.

It was quiet and,

you know, could go into my dressing room and just sit to get ready.

I think it was the writer's intention to really

explore some gnarly, unpleasant stuff.

The sequences, some of which are filmed with a handheld camera from Marty's point of view, are not graphic, but they are unsettling and long and much darker than daytime had allowed itself to be at that point.

They aired over a period of three weeks.

The letters started coming in almost immediately.

There was a lot of

fan mail, a lot of fan mail.

I was, you know, I hired somebody to help me with it because I didn't want to just not

respond to these women and some men that just had been there and it was helping them.

And,

you know, that's like gold.

But that wasn't the only response the storyline was getting.

Michael Malone.

I remember one of the guards came back to say there are a bunch of young women standing on the sidewalk and they're waiting for Todd Manning.

And when he came up, they started screaming rape me todd rape me

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There's an archetype on soap operas, the character that the audience loves to hate, the one who behaves badly but is way more popular and fun to watch than some noble goody two-shoes.

And Todd Manning seemed a bit like a classic love to hate him character.

He was a handsome, devil-may care, bad guy that One Life to Live had explicitly given more screen time because viewers were so interested in him.

But he was also something new, a frightening character emerging from a more serious, morally charged depiction of rape than previously seen on soaps.

And while most of the audience knew how to square this, a small segment didn't.

Rape storylines on soaps had so often turned into fantasies.

The rapists at their center transformed into heartthrobs that they watched a brutal story about the horrors of rape and they asked to be raped.

A small part of the machine was on the fritz.

Well, I'd be on the front steps of the studio and be like, oh, I wish Roger would do that to me.

Everyone working on the show was disturbed by this reaction.

But for Roger Howarth in particular, who had to bear the brunt of this response and all the other ones people were having to Todd, it was a lot to take in.

One time he was sitting on a stoop in Manhattan with his infant son when a fan walked by.

She says, You're Todd Manning.

And I just was a little confused by that because my name was Roger and I did that little math.

She then said,

So, can I ask you something?

Why do you think it's okay to rape people?

What I said was, Well, I didn't rape anybody.

I'm not Todd.

My My name's Roger.

And that was the tame stuff.

Can you rape me next?

Those are things that happened.

And I was in my 20s.

And I didn't know.

I didn't know.

I didn't know how to respond.

What was so unsettling was that One Life to Live was not priming audiences for a Luke and Laura thing.

Todd was terrifying, and he remained so as the story headed into the courtroom.

I want you all to take a look around you, gentlemen.

Your futures are going to be decided here.

In a few hours, you're going on trial for the rape of Marty Saybrook.

Penalty up to 50 years.

The climax of the rape storyline had always been intended to be the trial of the three frat boys.

At its start, the town is divided about Marty.

Remember, that was the germ of the story, that she'd lied before, that she was not the perfect victim.

But the audience has seen the rape take place and knows Marty's telling the truth, so they can feel her excruciation as she listens to lies and slander, struggling to prove what's true.

And of course, no one is more slanderous than Todd.

What did she want?

She wanted to have sex with us.

All three of us.

Originally, the writers had planned for the trial to last a few weeks.

When they started writing and later airing the episodes, they realized there was more story there, especially for Todd.

Gene Pasanante, a writer on the show again.

There was this great moment where, you know, he leans over to Marty from the stand and says, Marty,

I forgive you.

It was just so shocking and appalling.

So every day he pulled out something else and we kept writing to it and writing to it and writing to it.

The trial stretched on and on, becoming an umbrella story that involved nearly the whole cast sitting in the courtroom every day.

The climax came in the closing arguments.

The attorney representing the Frat Boys, played by Hillary B.

Smith, has learned they're guilty and in fact that Todd raped someone else before, and she doesn't want to defend them anymore.

I want you to see with your heart, not your eyes.

Let's go to that room in the fraternity house.

Close your eyes.

Do you see

a young woman luring three innocent men into a room to have sex?

Or do you see three

men

trapping an unwilling prey?

Do you see them throwing a woman down on the bed and holding her there by force, bruising her neck and her wrists?

Do you see them trying to stifle her cries of passion?

Or do you see them shoving a sweatband in her mouth so they don't have to listen to her screaming for help as they rape her?

This speech is an inspired bit of soap making.

It showcases One Life to Live's ambitions to tell a different, grittier story while making the show's point of view really clear.

Believe Marty.

The actress crushes it.

It emerges naturally from the attorney's character.

And it's that domino generating more story.

Because a defense attorney isn't allowed to give a speech like this.

I therefore declare

a mistrial.

So Todd is still free, but not for long.

After trying to re-attack Marty, he gets whacked in the face, giving him a permanent scar, a mark of evil.

While he's recovering in the hospital, Marty secretly records him confessing, and he and his two frat bros are finally sent to prison.

Todd Manning, for the crime of rape, I sentence you to eight years in stational prison with a possibility of parole and four.

The storyline, as it had been planned, had come to its end.

Except on a soap opera, there is no end.

The writers had planned for the rape storyline to end as follows.

Marty would be vindicated and Todd Manning would go to jail and stay there, ridden out of the show for good.

But circumstances had changed since they made that plan.

The storyline had been a bigger triumph than anyone could have imagined.

Our ratings were just like,

really going through the roof.

That's Susan Bedzow Horgan.

You've been hearing from her as a writer and producer.

But just around this time in 1994, she took over from Linda Gottlieb as executive producer when Linda's contract was up.

We were the poor little One Life to Live little engine that could and suddenly buzz, you know, by everybody.

Roger Howarth, Susan Haskell, the actress who played the defense attorney, and the One Life to Live writing team all won daytime Emmys for their work.

More specifically, Todd was now an extraordinarily popular and uniquely fascinating character played by an award-winning actor who could seemingly do anything the writers threw at him.

All of this meant the show had a problem.

For the moral coherence of a story about the trauma of date rape and the secondary trauma of not being believed, Todd needed to be in jail.

But for every other reason, ratings, storytelling, audience engagement, the basic dramatic quality of the show, he couldn't be.

And for a soap opera, there's really no choice there.

The machine was crushing.

It wasn't going to stop now.

Did you ever think, like, oh, this is kind of squeaky.

We're redeeming this rapist.

Yes,

we did.

We had to figure out

how we

would justify that.

The writers needed to bring Todd into the ongoing narrative of the show so he could interact with the other characters, not just skulk around.

But they needed a solution that was as grounded and substantial as the story they'd just told.

They might have written Todd into a corner, but they couldn't get him out of it in some corny way.

That meant no twin brothers, no brain transplants, no amnesia.

After countless hours in the writer's room, they decided on a new direction, a justification they could live with.

What really is redemption?

Can someone be redeemed?

Or are we forever vilified for something that we did in the past?

Then that became Todd's story, the redemption story.

They started by breaking Todd out of jail and keeping him as horrible as ever.

This whole redemption thing, it doesn't happen overnight.

He tortures the defense attorney who betrayed him in court and it devolves from there.

There's months and months of plot, the show using all the time it has to show a Todd increasingly consumed by angst and self-hatred.

He's doing things that are so awful, even he wants to stop.

And it's in this state, at this point, that he arrives at that crossroads by the car crash.

It's okay.

There's a policeman.

He's coming down the hill.

Officer over here.

But a child in the back.

She's hurting that she's unconscious, and I can't move.

So, Todd Manning is on a hillside in the dark next to a smashed-up car, weighing whether or not to rescue Marty Saybrook and two children from certain death.

Yeah, well, it may be too late.

Yeah, well, I don't have time to stand here and argue about it.

Okay, this place is gonna be crawling with cops any minute.

A villain would leave.

But is Todd Manning still a villain?

All right.

All right, hold on.

I'm coming.

I'll get you out of here.

Todd saves the kids and carries Marty up to the road.

He sits with her so she doesn't bleed to death, even as the cops are closing in.

He does the right thing.

He's changing.

Even Marty notices.

You know, you said something just before you carried me up the hill.

It was the first time that I'd ever heard you admit

you might have done something wrong when you raped me.

All those months in prison

and then all that time on the run

it kind of ruins your social life you know what i mean

nothing to do

except think about things

when todd's sent back to jail he goes to therapy a lot of therapy todd's fraught relationship with his father has been a part of the character since the beginning and now the writers pay it off as the core of his anger uncovering abuse and abandonment i would have given anything you know,

to get my father to love me.

And when I saw how much he hated me, I tried to change.

I tried to be just like him.

So I pushed people around and I bad-mouthed everybody like they didn't mean anything, like they didn't matter.

Throughout the storyline, Todd's history as a rapist is front and center.

It basically is the storyline.

Gene Pasanante.

I guess in my mind, it was always about

never forgiving him for what he did, but

understanding that growth was possible.

He's always on a tightrope.

He hates this about himself, but he recognizes it in himself.

Thanks to the heroic car crash rescue, Todd gets a pardon from the governor and leaves prison.

Back in Landview, after quite a bit more story, he is finally able to apologize to Marty.

Finally got to see

myself the way the

whole world sees me.

And I know why they do.

Because

I was a monster.

I was nothing but a monster.

It's a big moment.

Marty walks over to Todd and reaches out a trembling hand to wipe his tears away.

As soon as she touches him, she snatches her hand back and runs out of the room.

But in the hallway, alone, she smiles to herself and says, Goodbye.

And with that, a bit over a year and a half since Todd Manning was introduced, his redemption arc is complete.

Marty begins to put him behind her and gets a new big swishy love story.

The writers had threaded a needle.

They'd made the character grow morally without destroying the original rape storyline.

They'd given the audience what it wanted in a way that they could live with.

And in the process, they had totally bent another part of the machine out of shape.

I didn't feel terrible playing a terrible person.

When they started to redeem that person

is when it began to get sticky

because

it just was.

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Since his start on the show, Roger had been playing Todd as a psychopath.

But that wasn't what Todd was anymore.

After his redemption, Todd remains tortured and self-hating, but he begins an unstable and very fun-to-watch romance with another spunky town pariah, one that quickly became extremely popular.

It's also revealed that Todd's the long-lost brother of the series matriarch, which happens to make him a multi-millionaire.

He's gone from frat boy number one to terrifying rapist to very rich anti-heroic protagonist, a romantic lead right at the center of the series.

And Roger Haworth knows that another actor would have just accepted this, appreciated how much work he was getting, and put his head down.

But the women who had been screaming, rape me Todd on the street, had always thought Todd was a viable love interest.

And now the show did too.

He could see that the writers and audience genuinely believed that Todd had grown morally, but he just wasn't sure the character really could or should.

From my standpoint, we were forgiving sexual violence and making excuses for bad behavior.

Roger played against Todd's kinder, gentler side, beyond what the writers were looking for, and he pushed back on the love story.

But as much as Roger resisted what was happening with Todd, Todd was still ultimately controlled by the writers.

Gene Pasanante.

We knew that it was hard for him, but we had this character.

And, you know, there's, you know, when you're a writer, for a soap, it's kind of like there's Roger and then there's Todd.

You know, there, I mean, which one is more real to me?

You know?

And it fluctuates.

So in 1995, when Roger was reportedly making $4,000 a day, guaranteed three days of work a week, and usually working all five, he did something about it.

I felt somehow that we were actually promoting violence against women and it was confusing to me because the show was produced by women, written by women, and designed to be watched by women.

And I just felt really, it just didn't sit right with me.

And I left the show.

When Roger told Susan Bedzel Horgan, the executive producer, that he wanted to leave, she agreed to let him out of his contract so long as he didn't work for for another soap opera.

She knew he was distressed.

On the occasion of his leaving, Roger gave an interview to Soap Opera Digest, in which he said if the rape had been an unrealistic, soapy thing, then it wouldn't matter how the show had proceeded, but instead it had been, quote, in-depth and brutal, and that made it feel to him like it did matter.

On the show, the character of Todd was shot and presumed dead.

For Roger, leaving didn't go quite as planned.

I wasn't a cooked human being yet.

I quickly spent all the money I had and realized that I had no other skills and really was completely unhireable.

And I had to borrow money to get back to play Todd.

Six months later, he was back on the show.

And so was Todd Manning.

Roger had left the machine.

And when he came back, he tried to beat a less squeaky wheel.

Even as Todd's history as a rapist receded further into the background, it still informed the character, still was mentioned from time to time.

But Todd became a newspaper mogul.

He had a kid.

He had two extremely popular romances.

There was a whole period where he talked to a parrot, a comedy arc.

At least I hear the way everybody talks to me.

Todd, you're the greatest.

Todd, have I got a deal for you?

I know what they're really thinking.

Beat the bird.

Exactly.

And though playing a reformed rapist did get easier for Roger, he never made peace with it entirely.

It just didn't sit right with me.

It was a shame.

I spent every dollar I made playing Todd Manning.

I just,

I couldn't get rid of it fast enough.

And I was stuck in this weird cycle.

And because I just didn't, I didn't want to be the guy who was doing that, but I didn't know what else to do.

It was peculiar.

But, you know, looking back on it,

I took the money.

Over the next decade, One Life to Live had a number of different head writers and producers.

It was a chaotic time for the business.

The O.J.

Simpson trial preempted months of daytime and started a hemorrhaging of of viewers that's never stopped.

But when it came to the question of Todd, the machine finally seemed to be in equilibrium, chugging along, all the parts in order.

But not for much longer.

So, after all those years of relative calm, in 2003, Michael Malone and his co-head writer, who had left in 1995, were asked to return to the show.

Roger heard a rumor about what they had planned for Todd and expressed concern about it to Michael.

He was apprehensive that we're to

make him rape somebody again.

So there was some friction between

I think he thought that you were going to make him fall in love with Marty.

Yes.

Yes.

Were you going to do that?

Well,

there was pressure to make that happen.

Everyone on the show had originally agreed that Todd and Marty would not turn into Luke and Laura, but time had passed.

The context had changed.

The success of the original storyline meant that returning to it was like greatest hits play, more likely than anything else to entice lapsed viewers back into the fold.

It had all the potential upside of a sequel, basically.

But rather than appear in a sequel, Roger threw a wrench into the machine.

His contract was just about up when all of this was going down.

And the person who had told him about the potential Todd and Marty storyline had also slipped him a piece of paper.

On that piece of paper was the executive producer of As the World Turns.

And he said, do you want to work on a different show?

And I said, sure.

He quit One Life to Live.

He worked on As the World Turns until its cancellation in 2010.

With Roger gone, the machine had lost one of its most important parts, but it had also lost its brakes.

The final chapter reminds me of something Linda Gottlieb said about her time working on the show.

When you stay there long enough, you kind of drink.

You kind of drink the tea.

When Roger left this time, One Life to Live recast his part.

The actor Trevor St.

John would play Todd Manning for nearly a decade.

He didn't try to imitate Roger.

He did his own thing, less sarcastic and theatrical, more coiled.

But it worked.

Audiences accepted him.

Todd remained one of the show's central characters.

And this new Todd gave the writers a freedom they hadn't had.

In 2008, they availed themselves of it.

The Todd and Marty pairing other writers had once promised would never happen happened.

An ABC promo described it as the story you thought you'd never see.

It's true.

God help me.

I love you.

There was a wrinkle, of course.

Marty had amnesia, so she didn't know who Todd was.

In order to make the story make sense for the character and the actor and the audience, the writers had to do all these contortions.

And it didn't even work.

The audience in general was creeped out.

They knew the history.

The show had spent years calling back to the storyline as a horrible trauma.

And the world had changed enough that a story about a woman canoodling with her rapist no longer seemed appealing.

Later, retroactively, it would turn out that Todd and Marty hadn't had sex.

Because in 2011, it was announced that the character Trevor St.

John was playing was not Todd at all, but his twin brother.

Victor.

I had transferred all of my son Todd's memories to my son, Victor.

Now they were truly identical.

This was so Roger could return to One Life to Live.

After everything, and a good therapist, he wanted to be there.

And at that point, I'd made my peace with all of it.

I felt very healthy and positive.

And I finally figured out that I didn't have to spend every dollar that I made.

I was happy to be just happy to have a job.

In an acknowledgement of Roger's own feelings about Todd Manning, the way he'd always insisted on playing the character, the show used the fact of Victor and Marty's relationship as retroactive evidence on behalf of the storyline's logic.

This guy has a relationship with Marty Saybrook and none of you figured out that he wasn't me?

It didn't occur to you that that might not be something that I would do?

It's all very meta.

What had begun as a soap opera storyline grounded in the real world was now squarely in the land of far-out soap opera plots, winking at the realest thing of all.

the machine that makes the show itself.

And in fact, a machine malfunction is the only reason Todd's not still with us.

One Life to Live was canceled in 2013, and Todd Manning was one of three characters who made the jump to General Hospital.

But then another company bought the rights to One Life to Live and tried to make it into a web series.

It didn't work, but they still own Todd Manning.

You could watch Roger Howarth on General Hospital, though.

The defining characteristic of a soap opera is that up until the day it is canceled, it operates as though it will go on forever, that the machine will always be running.

One Life to Live aired for 45 years, which is much closer to forever than most series get.

And when you're on the air for that long, a lot of things change inside the show and outside of it.

When the Marty Saybrook rape storyline was conceived in the early 1990s, it was possible for a soap opera to push parts of its audience and parts of society to think about sexual assault differently.

That's hard to imagine happening now.

But what's also hard to imagine happening now is anyone telling such a story getting as wrapped up as One Life to Live did in the rapist's point of view of having the Marty Saybrook rape story also become one about Todd Manning.

Soaps don't do this anymore.

These days, sexual predators are barely characters, or at most they get very contained arcs.

And this avoids a lot of ickiness.

It spares the writers from having to contend with the audience's fascination with alluring rapists and the show's complicity in making them appealing.

But it also avoids a lot of complexity.

It means a soap will never find itself in the position One Life to Lived did, having to contend with an unexpectedly potent and alive character, and then stumbling into genuinely hard questions about what to do with people who have done something really bad.

One Life to Lived spent nearly 20 years with Todd Manning, a man who had done something unforgivable at its center.

And this duration, if not much else about the storyline, has a kind of realism to it.

People who have done bad things stick around.

Life does not unfold morally, even if we prefer our stories to.

Linda Gottlieb started all of this because she wanted to inject a nighttime sensibility into daytime.

to be gritty, to be realistic, to have a point of view.

But those things eventually become liabilities in a soap opera, a format that needs the flexibility to go on forever.

One Life to Live never solved the problem of Todd Manning because it didn't need to.

All it had to do was keep him around.

This is Decodering.

I'm Willa Paskin.

You can find me on Twitter at Willapaskin.

And if you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can email us at decodering at slate.com.

If you haven't yet, subscribe and rate our feed in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

And even better, tell your friends.

I want to give a very special thank you to Mara Levinsky, who helped so much in the thinking and reporting of this piece.

It would not have been possible without her.

Also, thank you to Hilary B.

Smith and Cassie DePaiva.

Also, thanks to Rebecca Lavoy, Jeff Giles, June Thomas, Derek John, and everyone else who gave us help and feedback on the way.

This podcast was written by Willa Paskin.

It was edited by Benjamin Frisch and Gabriel Roth.

Decodering is produced by Willipaskin and Benjamin Frisch.

Cleo Levin is our research assistant.

Additional production help from Margaret Kelly.

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