You can't keep a good soap villain down

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Eric Braeden has played villainous Victor Newman on The Young and the Restless for 29 years. (SONJA FLEMMING / CBS)

Ruthless magnate. Serial groom. Charming rogue. Unrepentant schemer. Demanding paterfamilias. Defier of death. Tough, impatient, decisive, magnetic and infuriating.

The blackest of blackguards.

If these are the adjectives that pad the resume of a first-class villain, then there has never been a better candidate for the job, at least of the fictional variety, than Victor Newman.

As the revered scion and Machiavellian manipulator of the Newman dynasty on the daytime soap The Young and the Restless, Victor Newman, right down to the Snidely Whiplash moustache, is so bad that he's good; good at business if not relationships, good at skulduggery if not morality, good at keeping a daily story line addictively interesting for nearly three decades.

So the news that Eric Braeden, the actor who has played Victor Newman since 1980, was bowing out of Y&R -- today's show was reportedly to be his last appearance -- was a rather shocking development, even for a soap opera.

The 68-year-old Braeden, known for his shock of now grey hair and his gruff monosyllabic dialogue, took small-screen vileness to delicious new levels, manifested to perfection in his decades-long feud with his arch rival in business and pleasure, Jack Abbott, against whom he schemed and plotted and verbally sparred week after week, their mutual hate-hate relationship so intertwined (Victor recently received the heart of Abbott's niece Colleen, who died because one of Victor's plots against Jack backfired) that it was hard to keep track who started which fight when, much less figure out who won.

Y&R, developed by William and Lee Bell and set in fictional Genoa City, Wis., first aired in March 1973 and is daytime's top soap, with more than five million viewers a day, rivalling many prime-time hits.

The Emmy-winning Braeden, who joined the show in 1980 and reportedly earned a seven-figure salary, said in a recent interview with EW.com that he pulled the plug after a breakdown in contract negotiations.

"I have shown flexibility, they have shown none," he told the website. "It is over. I pulled the plug. That's it. No more."

The good news is that Braeden this week reached an 11th-hour agreement with CBS, signing a three-year pact to continue terrorizing daytime.

Popularity aside, Y&R has not been immune to the economic downturn, having lost Don Diamont (Brad Carlton) earlier this year when his contract wasn't renewed.

Daytime TV's soft advertising revenue, in fact, has seen a number of other high-paid soap stars hit the unemployment line, including Deidre Hall, who for 21 years played Dr. Marlena Evans on Days of Our Lives and who was axed from the show last year.

And while soap characters, and the actors who play out their often fantastical story lines, come and go, there are a handful of icons in the genre, including Susan Lucci (Erica Kane on All My Children) and Braeden.

The Victor Newman story is the stuff of vintage soap writing.

Originally named Christian Miller, he spent much of his childhood in an orphanage but made his fortune with Newman Enterprises after moving to Genoa City and learning business from the formidable Katherine Chancellor.

Married to six different women -- Julia, Nikki (three times), Ashley (twice), Leanna, Hope, Diane and Sabrina -- and father of four (Nicholas, Victoria, Adam, Abby), Newman is a quixotic character, deeply layered with arrogance and angst, imbued with all the failings and bravado that a true villain possesses, his dastardly deeds leaving him most recently responsible not only for the death of his own heart donor, but for the near-death of his granddaughter Summer from peanut poisoning.

He's been jailed, thrown in a psych ward and shot. He's had amnesia, epilepsy and was once car-jacked, but like all villains worth their salt, he's survived it all and inspired respect, if not adoration.

He is the eye of the Genoa City hurricane.

So the thought of Y&R without Victor Newman -- his character is recovering from a heart transplant and was going to "disappear" to Belgium for rehabilitation -- is hard to imagine, rather like Dallas without J.R. Ewing, or The Sopranos without Tony.

It may be that the truly great villains of scripted television are losing their edge and their resonance in the age of the reality villain, finding it hard to compete for viewers and advertising with the likes of father-of-eight Jon Gosselin, Survivor Richard Hatch and, cringe, Balloon Boy dad Richard Heene.

It may be that truth really is stranger than fiction, which says more about the evolution of television and our obsession with real-life train wrecks than with good old-fashioned character development.

And that's a cliffhanger that even the indestructible Victor Newman almost didn't survive.

-- Canwest News Service

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition October 30, 2009 D4