DramatistDreamer

It makes sense. So, of course, American daytime dramas won't do it. Just think of how much money, acclaim and talent CBS, NBC and ABC daytime has lost due to their inflexibility. Actors who were being ground down by the rigorous schedule asked for time off and couldn't get it and elected to leave. Productiom companies that left incompetent people in charge for way too long rather than make a concerted effort to search for fresh production talent. Refusing to even entertain the notion of merchandising products for the consumer marketplace because they'd have to *gasps* profit-share with the talent. The 60 minute episodes werr successful for about a decade and then they should have switched, just like they switched in the early 80s. Explain to viewers that, in order to be able to continue to make quality shows that are sustainable, they needed to revert to th "classic television soap model". Viewers might have grumbled at first, in which case they can level with the viewers that , if they keep going along this unsustainable route, many of their favorite soaps will inevitably be cancelled. TPTB never tried.

I'm going to watch and see whether the GOP really does end up splintering i n the next few years. It would not surprise me if they do.

Biden is likely working on replacing the members of the Board Of Governors, (which is absolutely within his power to do) who in turn, can get rid of DeJoy.

For years before GL and ATWT were cancelled, I said the same thing. These soaps weren't started as 60 minute serials, so why should they stay that way when it's clear that model no longer worked? It just seems like when execs' minds are already made up, there is a lack of will to do otherwise. If networks could juggle two different versions of "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?", surely they had the mental faculties and imagination to figure this one out too.

Talk about the law of unintended consequences. Some of the responses to this article are also pretty wild. Someone also apparently wrote: " I'm 78, send photo, along with your application".

Something @FrenchBug82 said in the GL thread truly got me thinking. To paraphrase: "Sometimes it's just as important to to cast the right actor for the role ss it is to cast a good actor" (or something like that, lol), which immediately got me thinking of how Lyndsey Frost was miscast for Betsy, though I really liked the actress. It didn't only have to do with her minimal romantic chemistry with Frank Runyeon-she didn't believably fit as Ellen and David's granddaughter. I think she had good chemistry with Pat Bruder, Forsythe Henderson and Melanie Smith, so perhaps I would've kept her within the Stewart lineage, or perhaps I would've made her a Lowell or even an English. I just wanted to get that one out, lol.

For years, I have said that soaps needn't be on air five days a week, especially if the quality simply is not there. The soap opera format began as a fifteen minutes serial. There is no law that they must stick with their present format. Except for a general obstinance and lack of imagination, that is. If the format is the problem, change the format. Maybe if some of the soaps had opted for quality over quantity, a few might have averted cancellations. Sometimee it feels like the five days per week explanation had become an excuse to continue to churn out badly written, poorly produced dreck.

Allegedly, securing the music rights was one of the issues. Judging from Brandy's earliest tweets on the matter, Disney temporarily forgot how popular this particular screen adaptation once was, but soon got to work to bring it to Disney+.

Stacey Abrams and her former campaign manager would like to tell everyone who believes that the results of the Georgia elections were all about Trump, "No they're not. It was as a result of a decade plus grassroots and statewide efforts , and here are the receipts. As well as how other states can replicate this, with their own modifications.

Any word from the Blue Lives Matter folk about Officer Goodman? Or do they, as I suspect, only care about White officers who mow down Black people in a hail of bullets? Goodman may get a commendation but I doubt it will change anything, any more than things were changed when that Black woman officer saved Scalise's life. I'd like to be wrong but history proves the rule, not the exception.

Shocking!! They did storyboards on the soaps??!! They must have done away with them by the 90s.

On one of the recent reunion livestreams, Hillary Bailey Smith talked about how Larry Bryggman, who played her onscreen father John Dixon (ATWT) told her about a storyline that happened sometime around the late 1970s or very early 80s, before she was on the show, that John found a dead body behind the sofa in his living room. HBS said that Bryggman told her that when the show returned to Joh Dixon the next week there was no mention of the dead body, they simply moved on.

I agree. One storyline that got made after Purdee's departure, the Keesha storyline had a number of problematic aspects, despite the fact that it gave TLW some very memorable, meaty dialogue.

About a year or so, I watched some GL episodes from '94 and it struck as sad how much Hamp had been marginalized by then and it only got worse after the departure of Kat. Had Y&R not put Nathan through character assassination, Nathan Purdee probably could've been brought back some time in the last decade, provided the storyline were good (a big "if").

These soaps have left so much money on the table by refusing to adapt. Again, I use Downton Abbey as an example as it is a period piece that can't exactly tell the most modern of stories, yet still found ways to be relevant to a contemporary audience. And do you realize how much merch they sold?! They never left one single dime on the table.

And always seemed to personify grace and beauty.

It does sound like we do indeed agree on the main points. It will be interesting to see how long these daytime soaps can hang in there with this type of provincial mindset. Seems as if they are barely hanging in there by a slender thread nowadays.

As a Black woman, I am not going to speak to the supposed skittishness of white viewers. I'm merely stating the ridiculousness of this assumption. By that assumption, Bridgerton should be racking up the threats. Only in daytime do people assume that nothing changes. Except ratings, of course.

This is egregious.

I'm all out of kudos to give to a genre that, in 2021 still can't bring itself to push past the idea that the mythical Midwestern house will catch the vapors if she sees anything that wouldn't get past a 1940 censor. I mean, soaps are still afraid to have a black man in bed with a white woman onscreen?

ATWT 30 years after the fact (the Reagan years, at that) gets a lot of criticism for what it/Marland did and didn't do, while look who slips under the radar-- Y&R, B&B, still on the air, neither has featured a relationship between two men. Y&R, which features a relationship between two women, finds this more palatable. I ko longer actively watch either show so I couldn't tell you what goes into the decision making on that end. It's laughable that two soaps that heavily feature the fashion and the cosmetic/skincare industries feature no gay men among their characters.

In a nutshell. The sad fact of the matter is that every single P&G soap has been off the air for a decade yet the problems of representation still persist.

At the risk of belaboring this topic, I wonder how much the daytime execs considered their viewers who were gay men vs. their fans who were women? It seems as though many of these writers/producers/network executives were catering to what they believed their core audience wanted, which is why you had a Hank, a confidante to Barbara (not a threat to Hal) and Iva (not anywhere near a romantic possibility) , defacto big brother type to Andy and Paul. You could argue that, to bring up that mythical Midwestern housewife who they often cite as the reason they put the kibosh on certain storylines, tptb probably assumed that characters like Hank could best be introduced to that audience as the milquetoast confidant with no possibility of being anyone's romantic rival by presenting them as close to a asexual as humanly possible.

Definitely understandable and I thought about that. One never knows how others will perceive something. Norman Lear and Carroll O'Connor thought most Americans would find Archie Bunker repulsive and were shocked at the reception he got. So you just never know and in the case of daytime soaps and that mythical Midwestern housewife, the stakes must have seemed too high.