Just An Online Minute... Just Another Teen Soap Opera On MySpace

Thursday, March 29, 2007 by Wendy Davis

Just Another Teen Soap Opera On MySpace Former Disney chief Michael Eisner's new studio, Vuguru, will create a new 80-episode serial drama, "Prom Queen," that will run on the social networking site MySpace. The show, a murder mystery, will unfold in 90-second installments, starting Sunday. For Eisner, the move obviously marks an attempt to devise entertainment that will appeal to teens. At the same time, the initiative begs the question, why would anyone on MySpace need to watch a soap opera? They're living them. University of California at Berkeley researcher Danah Boyd recently authored a report detailing how teens break up with each other on their MySpace pages, leaving messages to each other for all their friends to see. "By breaking up through MySpace comments, the heartbreaker is attempting to assert their view for everyone else to see so that they cannot be accused of saying something else in private, different from what they believe that they did say," she wrote, in a paper she discussed this week at the ETech conference, according to CNET's News.com. Even teens who don't end relationships via MySpace have plenty of fodder for vicarious drama. Last summer, Blink-182 alum Travis Barker famously criticized his estranged wife, Shanna Moakler, on the site. Nicole Richie also used her MySpace page to launch an attack on her ex-stylist, "raisin face," a/k/a Rachel Zoe. Hard to imagine a scripted drama can compete with the likes of that.