TELEVISION: SOAP OPERAS: THE OLD AND THE DESPERATE

Thrice kidnapped and once kept drugged on a remote island for five years, Dr. Marlena Evans has suffered her share of improbable bad luck over her long soap- opera career. These days, though, her troubles have become increasingly unmanageable. Since last winter the virtuous psychiatrist, portrayed by Deidre Hall, on nbc's Days of Our Lives, has been possessed not by run-of-the-mill lust but rather by the devil himself. With eyes that turn a yield-sign yellow and a voice that sinks deep and demonic, Dr. Evans has misbehaved all over the fictional town of Salem. So far, she has burned down a church, unleashed a swarm of vicious bees and morphed -- with the help of movie-like special effects -- into a menacing black panther. Stay tuned for a scheduled exorcism.

Well, you won't find that on Montel Williams or the Ricki Lake show. Over the top even by the standards of daytime TV, Days of Our Lives' satanic plot line is just one example of the frenzied effort soap operas are making to maintain viewers and desperately lure new ones in the face of dwindling ratings. Currently 10 daytime soap operas are on network TV, just more than half the number that were airing in 1970. One reason for the falloff is the profusion of Oprah-style talk shows, which are able to serve up story lines about real-life family traumas, drug-abuse problems and evil boyfriends on a daily basis. During the past months, moreover, the soaps have been hit by their toughest competition yet: that interminable suspense tale, featuring a handsome former football player charged with murdering his wife.

"Thanks to the O.J. travesty (Will we ever be rid of this national embarrassment?), all the soaps have suffered a ratings decline," bemoaned Mimi Torchin, editor in chief of Soap Opera Weekly, in a recent editorial. Last summer, in early July, the serials lost an entire week of programming when they were pre-empted for the Simpson trial's preliminary hearings, and they have never really recovered. "It's been a battle all along," says Susan Banks, director of on-air promotion for cbs Daytime. "We thought the viewers would come back, but they didn't." Since the beginning of this year, when cnn and court tv began broadcasting the Simpson trial daily, the three top-rated soap operas -- CBS's The Young and the Restless and ABC's All My Children and General Hospital -- have each lost more than 10% of their viewership.