WTD? or Who’s the Daddy?: a story where it is unclear who a soap child’s father is. Possibly the most staple of all the soap staples. Well, after boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back.
There are really only three types of soap pregnancy:
1. The (super-)Couple pregnancy: a couple goes through all the trials and tribulations and finally gets married. Soon after they have a baby. It’s happily ever after, soap style. It’s usually how older siblings come about.
It’s how we have Days of Our Lives’ Shawn-Douglas Brady, General Hospital’s Maxie Jones and The Young and the Restless’s Fenmore Baldwin.
This is the child most likely to get kidnapped or to suffer through ongoing childhood trauma.
2. The inconvenient one-night stand pregnancy: someone, male or female, makes a big mistake, gets drugged or gives into temptation, and a child is conceived. Often, these pregnancies are solely for the purpose of throwing a spanner into the works of one or both of the characters involved and winds up in miscarriage.
But it’s also how we had All My Children’s Adam “JR” Chandler, Jnr, Santa Barbara’s Chip Capwell Castillo and GH’s Kristina Corinthos.
This is the child most likely to wind up with an adoptive parent (official or otherwise) who takes them on as their own.
3. Who’s the Daddy? The child who’s paternity is in question in the early stages of pregnancy, up until birth, or, if the writers can really drag it out, until the child is struck down with its first life threatening disease that can only be cured with bone marrow or a transfusion of a rare blood type.
Obviously, this is the child most likely to be the subject of a life-threatening childhood illness that requires the donation of blood or bone marrow. It’s also the child most likely to end up accidentally almost sleeping with a sibling.
It’s how we have roughly 80% of all soap children.
It’s also how we end up with wholly complicated family trees and a dearth of full siblings born onscreen. It’s also frequently subject to being retconned when and as convenient.
A WTD story usually takes one of three forms:
Either, for any number of reasons, contrived or otherwise, our heroine (or bitch) sleeps with two men in a short space of time. Surprise, surprise, she winds up pregnant and has no idea who the father is. She could be having an affair, or she could just be combining clichés by combining WTD? with an inconvenient one-night stand pregnancy.
Or, in rarer but hardly unheard of circumstances, she visits a sperm bank/goes in for artificial insemination where somebody has been tinkering with the merchandise, and once again, she has no idea who the father is.
Or, finally, she knows who the father is but passes the child off as someone else’s for a reason often only rational to her.
For an example of a fairly standard WTD? story, see Y&R’s Phyllis Summers. She was having an affair with the married Nick Newman, but also had a one-night stand with her ex-husband Jack Abbott. Unsurprisingly to anyone who had ever watched a soap, even though Phyllis had believed she couldn’t have any more children, she found herself pregnant and unsure of who the father was. A period of uncertainty followed while both potential fathers got their hopes up, and eventually the baby was revealed to be Nick’s.
Occasionally, if our “heroine” is GH’s Carly Benson, she can combine several of the classic WTD? elements. When, in 1997, Carly found herself pregnant with baby Michael, she didn’t know if the father was her then live-in boyfriend/step-father Dr Tony Jones, or her drunken one-night stand AJ Quartermaine (himself the subject of a WTD? story when his mother Monica was unsure if his father was Alan Quartermaine or Rick Webber). Instead of really settling that dilemma – the baby was AJ’s – Carly wound up passing the baby off as the child of AJ’s estranged brother Jason Morgan. Ultimately the truth came out one piece at a time and through a series of events best left to a whole other entry, Carly wound up raising Michael with her multiple ex-husband Michael “Sonny” Corinthos, after whom he was named. None of which worked out particularly well for young Michael, based on present evidence.
Also good at combining elements, not to mention throwing in an additional Who’s the Mummy? twist, was AMC’s Kendall Hart Slater. When, in 2005, her friend Greenlee Smythe, devastated by the ”death” of her husband Ryan Lavery, was advised she couldn’t get pregnant after suffering a miscarriage, Kendall agreed to act as a surrogate and carry a child conceived in a test tube using Greenlee’s egg and Ryan’s frozen sperm. However some tinkering with the clinic electricity supply by Kendall’s husband Zach Slater and some dubious practices by the doctor performing the procedure, Greg Madden, meant that Kendall wound up pregnant with her own child, not Greenlee’s. She kept that to herself and in the meantime a question arose as to exactly who’s sperm had been used, so for a period of time it was uncertain who either of the baby’s parents were. Ultimately Kendall came clean about the fact the baby was hers, and Ryan was revealed to be the father, and thus Spike Lavery was born.
Then there’s second child syndrome. A soap couple (super or otherwise) gets married, has a baby and all is happy. But where to go from there? Having them just have a second child without any drama or question lacks, well, drama. So the marriage gets tinkered with, or may even come to an end, new partners and mistakes happen; even when a soap couple manages to have a second child together, it’s extremely rare that there isn’t a WTD? story attached to it. So while Days’ Bo and Hope Brady had Shawn-D with no questions, their two subsequent children, Zack and Ciara, were both the subject of WTD? stories, and retcons once the writers got sick of that plot and preferred Bo and Hope to only have children with each other. And while GH’s Frisco and Felicia Jones subsequently had Georgie, she was the product of a post-divorce one night stand during Maxie’s heart transplant ordeal, and it wasn’t known whether Mac Scorpio or Frisco was her father until after she was born. In the end she was Frisco’s biological child, but Mac’s in every other way.
Finally, in a recent poll over at my Soaps By Remote blog, WTD? was the story voted as the one readers would most like to retire for a while.