ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: YOU GOTTA HAVE FRIENDS: SOAPS' BEST FRIENDSHIPS

A lot happened last week on Days of Our Lives. Nicole and Kate exchanged bitchy remarks, Eve mourned Paige, and Ben was revealed to be the Necktie Killer (we’ll deal with that out-of-the-blue disclosure in another post). But perhaps the most powerful scene was also one of the simplest.

Bad girl Teresa is trying to mend her wicked, wicked ways, both for the sake of her infant son, Tate, and also possibly to attract Tate’s daddy, Brady. Up next on the 2016 Transform Teresa agenda? Dump Anne, the BFF who schemed with Teresa and always had her back… but who Teresa now thinks is a bad influence on her.

Teresa dumping Anne was as brutal of a scene as any romantic couple break-up, and it begs the question of why soaps, a medium initially created by women for women (how many genres can say that?) pay so little attention to the inherently dramatic subject of women’s friendships. (Read about my attempt to pitch exactly that story to TPTB, here.)

Male friendships, we have plenty of. Right now, on the very same DOOL, viewers are seeing the pay-off of an on-screen, on-and-off friendship of over 30 years. Viewers first met Steve “Patch” Johnson in 1985. They soon learned that he and Bo Brady had been best friends in the merchant marine, until a fight over a woman named Brita led to Bo putting Steve’s eye out (and this is why you shouldn’t play with knives, kids, even in the merchant marine). After much 80’s-era angst and location shoots, Bo and Steve patched (ha!) things up. Now, Bo is being held prisoner somewhere by somebody for some reason, and it’s Steve to the rescue!  Bromance powers, activate!

Meanwhile, the women of DOOL… eh. They’re friends, I guess. But nobody’s rescuing anybody from any prisons. And if women are involved in a front-burner friendship, it’s usually (sometimes platonically, sometimes not so much) with a man. (See: General Hospital’s Carly and Jason, Guiding Light’s Maureen and Roger, As the World Turns’ Katie and Henry, and Another World’s Felicia and Cass.)

Check out three of our favorite soap-opera friendships, here, and share yours in the comments!