Shaking things up on 'Guiding Light'

New camera angles and even outdoor shots are being used on the CBS soap opera. (George de Sota/jpi)

There's something oddly comforting about the classic daytime soap-opera aesthetic. Bold artifice has a perverse appeal, especially when you're home sick and channel surfing mindlessly among "OLTL," "ATWT," "AMC," and "GH." The stage-set living rooms - like overly vacuumed furniture-store layouts - look just as they did 30 years ago, when you were home sick and channel surfing. The lighting is still too hot, the skin is still too pancaked, the hair, thank goodness, is still too teased.

So it was with some trepidation that I tuned into CBS's "Guiding Light" recently, after a friend told me that the 56-year-old daytime TV soap is employing a new filming technique designed to usher the ratings-starved genre into the age of reality TV. Young people watch reality TV, according to the logic, so young people will watch soaps if they look like reality TV. Note: The last time creative geniuses tried to drag soaps into the future, back in the 1990s, the result was an influx of paranormal "X-Files"-like plots ranging from aliens to mummification. Shockingly, the addition of Satanic possession did not save the soap, although it may have given the Psychic Friends Network a spike.

And so I sat down with the new "Guiding Light," which has been on the air since the spring, and I became a little seasick. The old lighthouse was a-rocking. The show, on Channel 4 at 9 a.m., has traded in the polite, tense, canned soap look honed in the 1950s for a shakier point of view courtesy of rampant hand-held camera work. The old synthetic domestic world where angst is accentuated and cliffhangers are carefully hung is gone, replaced by a jittery cinematic approach that falls somewhere between "The Hills," "The Bachelorette," and "American Gladiators." The gloriously orderly and stiff choreography of yore is now more naturalistic on "GL," less nailed down. The actors walk into and past the cameras, which film from odd angles and frame rooms asymmetrically.

Rather than shots kept back at a civil distance, sometimes showing us a grouping of characters and keeping viewers at arm's length, the hand-held "GL" cameras get all up in the actors' faces - even the face of Ava's newborn baby, which is (unexpectedly!) black. During a recent couples therapy scene, we were either bombarding Carrie and Josh's personal space as they made last-ditch efforts to be happy, or watching them at a distance from the rear of the office, with the back of the therapist's left shoulder and her hair occupying a good quarter of the shot.

And now, rather than simulating the outdoors on a stage set, the "GL" cameras frequently follow the characters out of doors - always a dislocating and too-bright effect on daytime soaps. Think wedding videos.

The hand-held look worked well on "NYPD Blue" for a few years, until it became almost self-parodic with all the straining to seem real. At its best, the "NYPD" shakiness added a sense of raw presence to the show, as though we were in the room, watching. The constant, jerky motion kept us from languishing in TV-viewer passivity, and pushed us to attend to the violence and complex moral questions unfolding before us. The hand-held work on "Friday Night Lights" also asks us to sit forward, while the freely moving cameras allow the actors to let their emotions guide their marks. The improvisation between camera and actor on "FNL" evokes the informality of small-town life.

Hand-held camerawork can be even more jarring in movies when seen on the big screen. If a herky-jerky image is taking up most of your purview, especially in a dark theater, nausea is a real possibility. But when the movie is Lars von Trier's "Breaking the Waves" or Woody Allen's "Husbands and Wives," both of which are about queasy subject matter, the discomfort makes sense.

On "Guiding Light," all this in-their-face realism comes off like a miscalculation. The typical soap-operatic stories - so bogus and, at times, preposterous - can't quite support the direct impact that comes with hand-held camerawork. And neither, with all due respect, can the acting. Pungent daytime melodramatics tends to be as artificial as the scent of Ivory and Irish Spring, and fitting them with documentary affectations feels off base and, at times, ridiculous. On reality TV, verite can be humorous or ironic, but when it runs amok on a soap opera, it's just strange.

Do people - even young people - truly want daytime soaps to feel real? I doubt it. Will other soaps follow the newfangled - and less expensive - path of "Guiding Light"? I hope not. Anyone who is tracking a daily serial is probably hoping to see abnormally held facial expressions and fake trees, and not authenticity. And anyone who is home sick and channel surfing definitely isn't expecting it either.