All My Children, that soap opera you consumed for twelve hours of when you were stuck at home post-yanking of your wisdom teeth, launched an open casting call for a real-life Iraq war veteran. Well, that sounds like it might actually be a good idea, in that it may bring the reality of war home for a demographic that prefers its stories fictionalized. Like on Army Wives. Oh wait, no.

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During last night's 11pm premiere of original Canadian-imported SOAPnet soap opera MVP, about a group of well-paid hockey players, the following pop culture primetime soap cliches were maintained:

• Someone died
• The guy who died was last seen snorting coke with an AmEx Platinum card off a mirror
• A sex tape was made (with a young lass)
• The hot guys take their shirts off — in and out of the locker room
• The cougars are on the prowl
• The paparazzi cause trouble

The only thing missing? A homo. Actually, they've got that too, but he's just a bit part, not a locker room patron.

See how MVP keeps it classy (see bullet point #4 above), below.

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To revamp the stodgy look of veteran soap operas, Guiding Light exec producer Ellen Wheeler has swapped out pedestal cameras and studio sets for "hand-held digital cameras to rove the three dozen small sets constructed within the hulking CBS Broadcast Center in Manhattan and outdoors in nearby Peapack, N.J." It's all an effort to attract younger viewers. And make the old ones feel nauseous. [LAT]

Readers were livid when they found out JT LeRoy wasn't the androdgynous figure behind the books on drugs and whores. But more than 100,000 haven't seemed to care that Charm!, a book supposedly penned by Kendall Hart, is not, in fact, written by that author.

Because Kendall doesn't exist. And they know it! (Or, hopefully they do.)

Kendall is a character on ABC soap All My Children, and the book she wrote began for her, or her character, as a soothing distraction from the over-dramatic life in Pine Valley, Pa., a town that also doesn't exist. Two months after Alicia Minshew's character began writing the book, it was available on store shelves. A fragrance of the same name goes on sale next week. And the book's publisher, Hyperion (like ABC, owned by Disney), scored walk-on parts for executive editor Gretchen Young and publicity director Beth Gebhard.

This isn't the first example of a fictional storyline finding roots in the real world. And at least the formula makes historic sense; soap operas were born, after all, to sell soap. Today it just so happens that they're around to move copies of Soap Opera Digest and, of course Charm!. They'll have a branded credit card soon enough.

Brian Williams and Charlie Gibson battle to be the ratings winners each month. Today and Good Morning America battle it out each week. But for daytime soaps, it's been an easy 35-year ride at the top for one. The Young and the Restless, the CBS soap celebrating its 35th anniversary this month, has won its timeslot for 1,000 weeks straight, averaging 5.78 million viewers.

Estrogen-happy chatfest The View, where a handful of decently-high-profile women get paid large sums of money to annoy each other, scored 851,000 viewers in the 18-49 women demo. Meanwhile, over at The Young & The Restless, where a hoard of mostly low-profile women to get large sums of money to annoy – then marry, divorce, get pregnant by their sister's husband, and then threaten to kill their mothers – each other, scored 1.19 million viewers in that demo. [TVBTN]