Primetime Soaps

[Contessa Donatella]

@JAS0N47   Do you have access to ratings that would cover this show? I'm just curious about its ratings for 11 nights. There is no deadline on my curiosity. 

BEACON HILL ran for only 11 episodes from Monday night, Aug. 25, 1975 to Nov. 4, 1975 on CBS primetime. The premiere episode cost $900,000 to mount. The producer was Jacqueline Babbin, known for AMC. The setting was Boston right after WWI. It was much touted & had great expectations. It opened with a whopping 43 share but it did not at all hold onto audience. Patterned probably too closely to Brit soap Upstairs, Downstairs. 

[JAS0N47]

I only have back to 1978, but the Prime Time Network Serials book has this for Beacon Hill, so this will have to suffice for now. We'll be getting the 1975 Nielsen books eventually, so we can see if these verify:

 

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[Contessa Donatella]

Jason, that's fantastic & completely satisfies my curiosity. An amazing ratings ride from 23.1/42 with a low of 8.2/13, just a total mess. 

[JAS0N47]

And the future Days head writer, Anne Howard Bailey, wrote Episode # 11, the last episode to air. The final two episodes were pulled and never aired.

[Khan]

It's a shame "Beacon Hill" didn't take off with all that talent both on-screen and off.

[Contessa Donatella]

Great premise, great producers, great actors, Marvin Hamlisch did the music for it, by god, ... and I understand it is listed in one of those books about the worst flops in TV history!! Someone's looking for the pages to take snaps of them for me! 

Yes, a shame. And, what an excellent beginning! However, it just led to a precipitous fall from such a great height! 

[Paul Raven]

Who's to blame for `Beacon Hill'?

Bob Wood doesn't know what went wrong with the season's most ballyhooed new show; the creator blames the producer and vice -versa.

Robert D. Wood, the president of CBS -TV, is the man who had to make the decision to cancel Beacon Hill, and "I'm sick about it," he says. "With the departure of Beacon Hill, a little bit of me went with it." "I couldn't fault the intention of the series or the production, which was superbly mounted," Mr. Wood goes on. "There was some lint- picking about the writing on the part of some critics, but as far as I'm concerned it was the Tiffany of TV series. And in all my years in the business, I don't remember a series getting as much promotion or as much advance notice in the consumer press. "But the public simply rejected it. Watching the audience decline each week was like watching the rungs of a stepladder going down"

Mr. Wood says he doesn't want to play Monday morning quarterback on the reasons why Beacon Hill didn't attract a mass audience. "Maybe we were too ambitious," he says. But the creator of Beacon Hill, Sidney Carroll, says it could have survived if the producers had only followed his original plan. As Mr. Carroll explains it, he scripted the two -hour pilot and then wrote out plot outlines for the first 13 episodes of Beacon Hill. He got involved in the production of the pilot and says he was quite satisfied with how it turned out. He cites the episode's 23.1 rating and 42 share (on Monday, Aug. 25, 9 -11 p.m., NYT) as one of the indicators that "the general public liked the people in the pilot."

But between the completion of the pilot and the start of production on the first episode, according to Mr. Carroll, the producer, Jacqueline Babbin, changed the plot outlines he had written. "When I saw how the first two finished scripts differed from the way I outlined them," he says, "I walked off the series." In Mr. Carroll's eyes, the likeable characters he had created in the pilot were turned into "a lot of stinkers. They became nasty and sad and stupid." Ms. Babbin sees things a little differently. "Sidney's plots were charming little stories that could've filled 20 minutes out of each hour," she says. "But CBS wanted stronger material, stories with more bite, more guts to them."

Both Ms. Babbin and Alan Wagner, the CBS vice president closest to the series, disagree with Mr. Carroll about the quality of the two hour pilot. "With 19 characters to be introduced, it was like a French farce situation," she says. "The characters ended up being unsympathetic because the viewer wasn't given enough time to understand any of them. And CBS over promoted and ballyhooed the pilot to the point of stupidity."

"It was really an error on our part to open up with an episode populated with with so many characters," adds Mr. Wagner. "Everything became complicated, the public got confused and you couldn't follow the characters without a scorecard" Mr. Wagner points to a second "major error." "The series didn't find its direction early enough," he says. "The first batch of episodes were placed in too small a frame and were on too small a scale to interest an audience in 1975."

Ms. Babbin adds that the public didn't know what to make of Beacon Hill's characters because "they were too real - they weren't like the cardboard cut -outs you usually see in TV series, who seem to spend all their time in fast cars."

[Contessa Donatella]

Thanks for sharing that! It's a good example of what happens when the people BTS don't get on well. 

[Soaplovers]

It sounds like Beacon Hill jumped too quickly into the serialized waters before audiences had a chance to care about the characters.... and introducing 19 characters in a pilot episode would be too much to keep track of right off the bat.

Also, wasn't Upstairs Downstairs still running on PBS back then?  Why make an American version when you could watch the original version on television.

[Contessa Donatella]

Copycatting is alive & well in American business organizations! And, it was back then, too. 

[Khan]

David Jacobs said the same thing about his own failed soap, "Berrenger's."  IIRC, he warned NBC that starting off with heavily serialized stories would be a mistake, because the audience didn't know them enough yet to follow them every week.  DALLAS, FC and KL all began with self-contained episodes and gradually moved toward ongoing storylines for that very reason.  However, NBC was desperate to have their own DALLAS or DYNASTY.

Moreover, it's just impossible to build a weekly series of any kind around a cast of nineteen.  Take out the commercials, and there's only so many minutes you have in each episode.  You can have that large of a cast on a daytime series, of course, because they run five times per week, and not every character has to appear in every episode.  But you don't have that sort of luxury in primetime.  CBS really bit off more than they could chew there.

[Paul Raven]

Beacon Hill was a tremendous gamble at the time. Remember this was 1975 and the likes of Starsky & Hutch and Police Woman was considered standard drama fare.

I'm sure there were a lot of people at CBS that hated the whole concept and thought it was doomed to fail. Reading b/w the lines it seems they wanted more plot and less character stuff.

Maybe they should have started it over Summer to iron out the bugs instead of a splashy Fall debut.

Hill St Blues 5 years later was seen as daring and was low rated but NBC stuck by it. And compared to BH it was way more accessible to network viewers.

The Saturday timeslot was a problem also. A lot of viewers are not home every week so following a serial can be tricky. Had NBC already decided it was a loser and burned it off in a low rated slot?

Bottom line -was Berrengers any good?

[Contessa Donatella]

I was thinking about the Ewings & that being names of Pete's AW characters & also Carrington. Why do you think they used Pete's character names? 

I was also thinking about Anthony Herrera because Nov. 7, 1986 is "Hello, Barbara!" Day & I wonder if fans knew at the time that he was a deadbeat dad? 

[j swift]

Upstairs Downstairs was a cultural phenomenon on PBS from 1971-1975, (a primetime soap that doesn't get enough attention on this board).  Beacon Hill doesn't replicate the plot, but was clearly influenced by the British version.

Also, as noted in the text, you can't write a story about a household with staff in the US in the 1920's that doesn't involve the 'complications' of race.  Up to and including Downton Abby, UK culture romanticizes the working class.  Whereas in the US, setting a soap at the turn of the century and writing about the servant class is never going to be similar because we mostly want stories about upward mobility, and we associate maids and butler with miserable working conditions.

Edited November 10, 2023 by j swift

[Contessa Donatella]

Not just influenced by it, by intent they set about to pattern it after it.