EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Meg Kelly and Michael O'Leary on SudsvilleTV, and Their Love of the Daytime Soap Audience

Michael O'Leary

Meg Kelly won three Daytime Emmy Awards as part of the writing team at As the World Turns. She also wrote for One Life to Live and Days of our Lives. Michael O'Leary played Dr. Rick Bauer on Guiding Light for decades, picking up an Emmy nomination along the way. He also won an Indie Series Award in 2012 for his work in the web series world. Both multi-talented artists are part of SudsvilleTV, an exciting new online network that is expected to launch this fall with a lineup that includes the Kelly-penned soap opera Year Rounders, and O'Leary-hosted game show Michael's Amazing Soap Trivia Challenge. We Love Soaps recently spoke with Kelly and O'Leary about SudsvilleTV, and the love they share for the soap opera audience.

Read our exclusive interview below.

WE LOVE SOAPS: Meg, can you tell me about your background? I know you wrote for As the World Turns, One Life to Live and Days of our Lives. Was writing a soap something you aspired to do?
MEG KELLY: It's funny, I was an actress for years. I was with Arena Stage stage at 12 and 13, and toured Russia with them, and then I went to Circle in the Square in New York. I did commercials and Off-Broadway, and a Broadway show. My husband's an actor, Tony Rizzoli, and when we moved to L.A., I didn't really want to act anymore. We had our first child, we had our second one, and somewhere in that I started writing screenplays. I signed with ICM, and was a finalist for the Nicholl Screenwriting Fellowship, but I just didn't want to go down that path.  Because I had young kids, I went into daytime to be at home with the kids, and hands-on with them. So I did that, and it was great.

What I loved about daytime initially was you had to work at home. They didn't want to see you, so a lot of us were raising children and writing daytime, and it allowed for a certain balance in life. I wound up having a lot of respect for it, and really liking the audience.

My writing partner at the time was Hogan Sheffer. We did a pilot for CBS, then he got hired as head writer at Days, and asked me to come on as co-head. We had a lot of fun with story over there. Hogan had been a script doctor in L.A., and I started out with screenplays. The telenovelas were doing well at the time, and the rest of daytime wasn't doing so well, so we decided to tell our stories in 13-week arcs and use the screenplay mode. It was a really fun way to write, and the audience seemed to like it a lot because it moved quickly. It's a model I'll be using here with Year Rounders, and our other dramatic series will have a beginning, middle and end, and be told in screenplay structure as a soap--dramas driven by families.

WE LOVE SOAPS: That's like what ABC Family does. Actually, everything I watch in primetime I consider to be a soap, even though most don't want to be called that.
MEG KELLY: You're exactly right. The Sopranos was a great soap opera, and Game of Thrones.

WE LOVE SOAPS: I was just reading an article about seasons of 10 episodes being the new 13, which was the new 22.
MEG KELLY: It's fun to tell story in 10 episodes because it's very tight storytelling, and you can really make for a compelling season when you have parameters like that.