Not if you work at ABC you don't. Which is why this week, after ABC made the stellar move to cancel not one but two of its long-running soaps All My Children and One Life To Live citing these exact issues, does it all prove to go absolutely abysmally wrong.
How so?
Neilsen Ratings (same day + 1) (courtesy: Soap Opera Network)
1. Y&R 3.3/11 (same/-.3)
2. B&B 2.0/6 (same/-.3) <---- ties low (3rd straight week)
2. OLTL 2.0/6 (+.1/+.3) *
4. AMC 1.9/6 (+.1/+.1)
4. GH 1.9/6 (same/same)
6. DAYS 1.7/6 (same/-.2) <---- ties low (6th straight week)
Yes, friends, the very shows that were cancelled so that precious friend General Hospital and its band of merry mobsters could live on ARE NOW BEATING IT IN THE RATINGS. Never mind the obvious fact that One Life To Live is the only soap on television right now to post consistent ratings gains over last year (they've been at least .1 above last year for over a month), the exact thing Brian Frons, head of ABC Daytime, has been saying was NOT happening. And the best part in all this is that he was planning to cancel OLTL in the first place, AMC's ratings collapse in the last year was simply a happy accident that allowed him to cancel both shows in favour of TWO already-done reality shows instead of just one.
Here's another problem: OLTL is the only soap on the network to be significantly under budget all the time, and has been for years. The show is extremely cheap to produce, and if a show is performing this much better than it did the year before, that's absolutely nothing to sneer at. Particularly when you consider that these gains are happening in April, a time when the ratings in daytime are usually falling fast, and not during a sweeps period, the time of year when the shows' ratings need to be as high as possible to attract advertisers for the next advertising period. The next sweeps is in May.
Won't Frons have quite a bit of egg on his face if OLTL maintains these ratings gains and moves into a consistent #2 position by the summer? I dare him to try justifying cancelling the network's two top-rated soaps in favour of their trainwreck ratings disaster and getting away with it. Only a fool would see how it makes any sense.
Keep in mind that this is based off one month of shows. I realize that at the beginning of the year, it was GH that was pulling in the big numbers and now they're struggling. But if OLTL can keep things moving like they're doing now, they're going to make ABC look like fools by the time the network plans to pull the plug in January. And won't that look sweet if they're a consistent #2 in the ratings by that point?
