DRAWING the lines

Patrick Mulcahey Looks Back On His Storied Daytime Career

- Tom Stacy

Soap Opera Digest: How would you characterize your B&B run?

Patrick Mulcahey: In my first couple of years on the show, it felt like a terrible fit for me. I liked the people I worked with, the work environment, the process of how the show was written, the trust Brad Bell [executive producer/head writer] put in me and the way he parried the network for us. But B&B is a difficult show to learn and an even more difficult show to write. It’s not just that the characters’ histories are so long and complicated. It’s that on B&B, maybe uniquely, all that history plays into present story every single day. I suppose the continuity of the storytelling in Brad’s hands is to thank for that. We know the audience doesn’t forget.

Most difficult was adjusting to the half-hour format. It has to move so quickly. The dialogue must be stringently concise. There’s no room to say anything twice. The long, leisurely speeches I wrote for SANTA BARBARA and GENERAL HOSPITAL could not work on B&B. I had to learn other ways of mining for character depth. All that learning I had to do made me a better and more versatile writer. I have to thank Brad and the cast and directors of the 2000-aughts for their patience while I figured it out. My own belief is that soaps, at bottom, are not about escapism or fantasy or even romance. They’re stories about families and the interconnectedness that both sustains and threatens them. B&B has never, ever forgotten this, which helped me find my way into the show.

Digest: What B&B stories did you help tell that you’re most proud of?