For the life of me I've never understood how an entire industry could get it all so wrong so completely so quickly. Since 1996, one by one, every single one of the US soaps has gone down the toilet. Some holding on longer than others, but eventually they have all succumbed to a sort of mass panic and reactive approach to writing and producing that has seen us go through almost an entire decade with no new soaps (the last new soap to debut in the US was
Passions in 1999, and the UK's
Doctors in 2000), and the cancellation of another eight. Today's post will be part one of what'll likely be a 2-or-3 part post about the soaps we've lost between 1999-2010. I would've rounded it off to 2000-2010 but sine we lost two in 1999 and none in 2000, it seems somewhat more significant, really.
PART ONE: The Casualties
ANOTHER WORLD (1964-1999)
NBC's longest-running soap when cancelled in 1999, the end was in sight when repeat offender Jill Farren Phelps was hired as Executive Producer in 1995. In a bid to "youth up" the show, killed off fan favourite Frankie Frame so she could hire Days of our Lives favourite Robert Kelker Kelly, redesigned the sets, redesigned the show's opening, and got DAYS' head writer James E. Reilly to write a ridiculous evil twin storyline for show maitriarch Rachel Cory (Victoria Wyndham). Result? The ratings rose in 1996 then collapsed in 1997. AW was gone a year and a half later.
SUNSET BEACH (1997-1999)
Not quite as long-running as
Another World but equally as troubled,
Sunset Beach was the other soap NBC unceremoniously ditched in 1999. Considering NBC's youth-obsession in the late 90s, SUN's cancellation was about as puzzling as the show's 12:00PM Eastern timeslot. A word of advice to the networks: Don't make your new soaps an hour in length until they get a solid footing in the ratings, and don't have your characters impregnate their rivals with turkey basters....EVER.
SUN was a huge success in the UK, with ratings so strong that UK network Five even offering to fund its continuation, but NBC declined, and SUN was cancelled after 751 episodes.
PORT CHARLES (1997-2003)
2003 was a shit year for soaps. These things seem to come in batches. 1999 saw two cancelled, and 2003 saw another two cancelled, though this time not on the same continent. In the US, ABC finally gave up its attempts to beat CBS'
The Young & The Restless in 2003 after this
General Hospital spin-off failed to attract even 1/5 of the audience Y&R had.
Their approach to beat the competition? Telenova-esque tales about sympathetic vampires, of course! This show was doomed the moment
Passions beat them in the ratings. Just goes to show you what desperation can do in the face of bad storytelling.
BROOKSIDE (1982-2003)
UK's Channel 4 was also getting a bit desperate for the young ratings, and after 17 years on C4,
Brookside was in trouble. Though producer Paul Marquess managed to lift ratings with his well-received storyline where young Anthony Murray accidentally kills his school bully, the show slowly declined again.
By 2002, the show was lucky to net ratings over a million viewers, and then came the final strike: Big Brother. Because, dear readers, why pay people to carefully craft storylines about well-written complex characters when you can have a group of shallow attention whores behave badly five days a week for virtually no money at all!
Brookside's final episode aired in November 2003 and netted 2.3 Million viewers, easily bested by its lead-in that night:
Wife Swap, viewed by 5.9 Million viewers.
FAMILY AFFAIRS (1997-2005)
The end of 2005 brought with it the end of Channel Five's attempt a UK-based soap, with their low-rated
Family Affairs ending after an 8-year run. Never the ratings winner the channel anticipated, hovering between 1-2 Million viewers weekly for most of its run. Initially this was fine for the fledgling Five, but by 2005, when the top-rated shows on Five were now watched by 3-4 Million viewers, 1 million wasn't gonna cut it. The constant revamping and influx of new characters near the series end in hopes of evading cancellation didn't help in the slightest, and the finale was watched by a mediocre 1.35 Million viewers.
PASSIONS (1999-2008)
It was time. In fact, I don't think
Passions would've lasted much longer even if NBC had decided to keep it on the air. Head writer James E. Reilly died shortly after
Passions' final episode aired on DirecTV's The 101 in 2008 while recovering from surgery. The fact of the matter was that the show's brand of ridiculous over-the-top storytelling (a girl whose dialogue was uttered only in thought bubbles, and a talking doll were among the cast members) had gone out of vogue by 2008, and had taken all of daytime, desperate to keep up, with it. The problem wasn't
Passions', it had consistently won huge ratings in the 18-34 demographic for years, often beating or tying lead-in series
Days of our Lives for #1 in that demo, but with the rest of daytime's increasingly desperate and contrived plotlines which tried in vain to emulate Reilly's success at crafting completely unbelievable and completely entertaining storylines. Reilly was equal parts an unendingly frustrating and an insanely talented writer, and his presence in daytime will be missed...kind of.
GUIDING LIGHT (1937-2009)
Here's where things get really sad.
Guiding Light was my first soap love. The most enduring dramatic story of all-time,
Guiding Light began life on NBC radio in 1937 and ran concurrently on CBS radio and TV between 1952 and 1956.
The show was almost always a major hit, running consistently within the Top Five of the US daytime ratings from the 1950s thru the mid-1980s. By 1990, the show was back in top form, thanks mostly to the incredible writing of Nancy Curlee & James E Reilly, but once EP Jill Farren Phelps got her hands into the pot, things got messy, and by the late 90s, stories like Amish Reva, Princess Reva, Clone Reva (I kid you not), and Maureen Bauer's focus-group-determined death (Phelps' favoruite excuse for an ultimately unpopular decision: point to the focus group), ultimately drove the show into a gutter, and by 2008, the show could no longer afford to be shot in its NYC studios. The series was moved into Peapack, NJ, in an attempt to emulate the success of soap/reality shows like
The Hills (I WISH I was joking), and the show became the butt of every joke in the industry. The show ended in September 2009 in a flurry of publicity, yet the finale only watched by 3 Million viewers, a number they'd bested only a year and a half before.
AS THE WORLD TURNS (1956-2010)
Our most recent casualty was the victim not exclusively of bad writing and desperation on the part of execs or writers, but moreso by the network. Tales of frustration from Executive Producer Chris Goutman at what he claims was severe interference from not just CBS, but even P&G caused huge problems for
As The World Turns in its final years. When the show turned to the groundbreaking Luke/Noah love story in 2007, actress Cady McClain claimed that someone high up at P&G was resistant even to the idea of a gay storyline on the show due to "religious reasons". This resulted in the soap world's chastest storyline in recent memory, with Luke & Noah not even allowed to kiss on-camera for well over a year. Once the audience's frustration over the storyline heated up, viewership dropped, and the show sank almost overnight from 3.2 Million in March 2008 to 2.5 Million by June, a level the show would keep until it's September 2010 cancellation.
And there you have it. The shows we've lost and the reasons it (probably) happened. Next time: The shows that are left, the good, the bad, and what can be done to fix it (as well as what will/won't be done about it).
