Oakdale days; why do so many terrible things keep happening to one town?(fictional town from 'As the World Turns')

Barbara Ryan has not been lucky in love. She was dumped by her stepbrother for a jewelry thief who reminded him of his ex-wife, and later she dumped him for a pretender to the Swedish throne who turned out to be an Egyptian-tomb robber. She was jailed for the murder of her first husband until he showed up alive, she lost her second husband in a mysterious ballooning accident, and she married her third husband three times but it didn't work out. As a consequence of her various marriages, she has been shot, drugged, kidnapped, committed to a mental hospital, afflicted by amnesia (twice), nearly gored by a bull, nearly poisoned in a remote Scottish castle, tormented by visions of herself as an eighteenth-century woman named Bianca, and had her oxygen supply turned off by a murderous uncle-in-law as she lay hovering between life and death. Just last summer, she was caught in a fire intended to kill her archrival, Carly; she lay in a coma, hovering between life and death again, and the unscathed and winsome Carly ran off with husband No. 5. Now, her once beautiful face burned and hideous, she hides in her lonely house rather than suffer the pitying gasps of strangers. Is it any wonder that in recent months poor Barbara has begun to nurture thoughts of revenge?

The shame of it is, though, that she will never be able to avenge herself on the true author of her torments -- a friendly yet floridly sadistic man named Hogan Sheffer. As the head writer of the soap opera "As the World Turns," Sheffer is responsible not only for Barbara's agonies but also for those of her thirty-odd enemies and so-called friends in Oakdale, the small fictional town near Chicago where she lives. Sheffer torments Oakdale, but Oakdale also torments Sheffer: he spends his days urging his brain to create ever more ghastly fates for the characters in his charge -- bitter and complicated misunderstandings that will take months to resolve, evil conspiracies, appalling streaks of terrible luck -- and at night he walks the streets of Oakdale in his dreams. He has five blank hours of programming to fill every week, fifty-one weeks a year, and if ever the thought arises that he may at last have plumbed the very deepest well of human misery he must push that thought aside and create misery anew. He must, in addition, master the countless rules of the soap genre, few of which are obvious but all of which are essential to success. It helps that he feels he has no choice. "I literally have no other marketable skills," he says. "I don't fix things. I'm a techno waste. I don't have a college degree. It's either this or I sell shoes."

"As the World Turns" has been on the air continuously since Eisenhower was President and television was just a few years old. It premiered in 1956, and Helen Wagner, who spoke the show's first line -- "Good morning" -- is still in the cast. The show has been sponsored from the start by Procter & Gamble, and is produced in a big old studio in Midwood, Brooklyn, an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood halfway between Brooklyn Heights and Coney Island. The studio is a factory as the Hollywood studios of the thirties were factories, in which stories are squeezed out as regularly as sausages, and all the ingredients are assembled on-site: upstairs are hair and makeup, the actors' dressing rooms, and the production office; downstairs are wardrobe, the writers' room, and the soundstage, with all the sets. The Midwood studio has been around since 1915. "The Birth of a Nation" was shot in Studio One when it was owned by Warner Bros., and Esther Williams filmed specials there -- her pool is still underneath the floor.

Many of the program's fans have been watching it for all forty-six years of its history. Novels, plays, movies, and other TV shows come and go, beginning and ending, suturing stories into shapes, but "As the World Turns" goes on forever -- as melancholy and inconclusive and inscrutably fascinating as watching neighbors through a window. Since it is a rare fan who never misses an episode, there is a sense, too, in which Oakdale exists in its own time, its tragedies and conspiracies unfolding whether or not there is someone there to see them.

Sheffer is extremely good at his job. In 1999, the year before he was hired, "As the World Turns" was nominated for only one Daytime Emmy. The year after he was hired, it was nominated for twenty-three Emmys and won eight, more than a show had ever won in a single year. But Sheffer has been around the block too many times (he is forty-three) to assume that his luck will continue. "There are two hundred and fifty episodes a year," he says. "Some of them are going to suck, and some of them are going to be fine."

One day, Sheffer sat at the head of the table in the writers' room scratching his nose with a pen. His hair was a mess, he was wearing a black T-shirt over a gray T-shirt, he had just come back from sticking his head out the window to smoke a cigarette (Benson & Hedges), and he was slouching in his chair. He took up a lot of space in the room, both because he has a big personality and a loud laugh, and because he is big in general (when he accepted his Emmy last year, he faced the audience with a blank expression and asked them to remember that the camera adds five hundred pounds). Around the table sat six other writers, waiting ...