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.

NEWS: Alicia Minshew, Holly Gagnier, Patricia Healy, Heidi Mueller, Beverly Penberthy, Frank Valentini

General Hospital casting new female teen role
GH has sent out a casting call for a "complex late teens Caucasian female who is beautiful and dynamic to start shooting a new contract role in two months."

Home of General Hospital alum Patricia Healy destroyed by fire
Patricia Healy (ex-Tammy, GH) had to jump out of the second-story window of her townhouse apartment when her home was destroyed by a fire that broke out at a nearby, under-construction building in Toluca Lake, CA, on June 19. Her beloved dog, Winston, was killed in the fire, and Healy and husband Sergio Terrazas lost everything they owned in the blaze. A friend of the couple is raising money on GoFundMe.

Holly Gagnier had fun shooting General Hospital
Soap vet Holly Gagnier (ex-Ivy, Days of our Lives; ex-Cassie, One Life to Live) in the role of GH's Jennifer Smith, picking up where Lisa Marie, Roseanne Barr and Sally Struthers left off. "I really had probably the most fun I've ever had on a soap," she says. "Tony [Geary, Luke] and Genie [Francis, Laura] could not have been more loving, more supportive, more encouraging for me to just go the distance with it."

All My Children actress Alicia Minshew joins Year Rounders
Minshew (ex-Kendall, All My Children) is the first actor to officially join Sudsville's new soap, Year Rounders, playing Georgina Phillips, who is described as a "slightly tarnished trophy wife with a bad prenup.” Look for her to have a different look than she’s sported on other shows, says Creator Meg Kelly.

Passions star Heidi Mueller marries DeMarco Murray, pregnant with second child
Heidi Mueller (ex-Kay, Passions) revealed on Twitter that not only have she and DeMarco Murray, who plays in the NFL for the Philadelphia Eagles, tied the knot, but they are expecting another child. The couple is already parents to a daughter, Savanna, 2.

Another World actress Beverly Penberthy at Alan Rickman event
Penberthy– who doesn’t look much different now– acted in the first ever play Alan Rickman directed in the U.S. It was called “Desperately Yours,” and was produced at the Colonnade Theater (now where Blue Man Group resides) in 1980, when Beverly was at the height of her long run on “Another World.” She and Rickman have remained close ever since then.

Restaurant TV star Willie Degel selling two homes in Hamptons
Degel, who lives in an Old Brookville home he built himself, has been building and selling homes on the East End for more than a decade. In 2003, he sold his first home, in Bridgehampton, to Frank Valentini, the former executive producer, director and composer for the ABC soap opera One Life to Live (now at GH), for $1.550 million.

In an age of reboots and personal expression, is continuity the devil for comics?
Soap operas, the model for the continuity-heavy superhero style (the editor of X-Men used to hand out Days of our Lives scripts to his writers to teach them how to write), never had any problem hooking new viewers; they might not know exactly what was going on, but they’d pick it up eventually. The point is to make new readers want to follow along even if they don’t get everything right away; when the story is boring, it’s easier to blame the continuity because it’s easier to fix than the quality of the stories.

Sudsville Network Will Launch This Fall: Meg Kelly to Pen New Soap Opera 'Year Rounders', Michael O'Leary to Host Game Show

Sudsville, a new online network of all-original programming aimed at the soap opera audience, is set to launch in the fall. Daytime Emmy winning writer Meg Kelly has partnered with Joseph Craig and conklin-intracom.com, a global tech company, on the new venture.

“These are broadcast quality shows that will star a mix of daytime, primetime and film actors, written by daytime and prime-time Emmy winners and produced by an award-winning production team,” says Kelly

"Conklin-Intracom approached us about a platform they were developing. We thought it was perfect for daytime fans,” explains Kelly. "There will be one major new soap opera (Year Rounders), 40 total episodes created by Meg,” reveals Craig. "And there will also be 16 ancillary series, a combination of reality and game shows and improvised shows, that are aimed at the same audience, including a three-time weekly soap chat show, A.M. Sudsville.”