If, as Mark posted, PGP/Telenext had spun off GL another soap with new characters with existing characters going and coming with a 1 or 2 day a week showing, I think that would have been fine. If that worked out, like GH: Night Shift, it could have been expanded throughout the week after a year or two. Unfortunately, they didn't do that. In my opinion, the powers that be have had enough time to work out the kinks in the current process, and they have had more than enough time to write good stories, which they haven't in over four years now.

I would rather have seen them cancel the show outright than whittle it down to nothing. It doesn't even bare a resemblance to the Guiding Light we saw just a few short years ago. The characters change daily and there is very little emotion in the scenes. To me, its like the show died and we continue to beat its dead corpse just for the sake of Proctor & Gamble's advertisements.

As for Goutman's statements regarding viewers don't want to watch soaps five days a week, I find that condescending and out of touch with soap viewers. With DVRs and VCRs, viewers would watch five days or more IF there was anything there to watch all five days. It is apparent that producers of some soaps don't want to invest their time for "five day a week" watching. ATWT and GL included. When people are entertained, they'll go out of their way to watch it. It simply isn't happening on most soaps now.

Here are the top ad spenders with changes in brackets:

1. Procter & Gamble (-4.33%)
2. General Motors (4.87%)
3. AT&T (-5.75%)
4. Verizon Communications (3.65%)
5. Johnson & Johnson (-5.62%
6. PepsiCo (9.12%)
7. Time Warner Inc. (-8.83%)
8. Toyota Motor (7.38%)
9. Ford Motor (-30.56%)
10. Kraft Foods (-10.36%)

I wonder which of these sponsors was the one to try and walk away from ABC.

Edited September 27, 200817 yr by marceline

From a completely financial stand point, I would think Ford would be the one trying to walk away. From a soap industry standpoint, I have to think its P&G. Why advertise on soaps that are your direct competition... unless you don't believe in your own soaps.

LOL Pratt keeps on a reeling in those viewers

My God what happened to Y&R!

It has been good but the Victor pouting/hiding in his home has gotten stale and boring.

It has been good but the Victor pouting/hiding in his home has gotten stale and boring.

It was so good for a few weeks that the sudden slow down seems so much worse. The Victor story could be interesting if it moved. :lol:

It was so good for a few weeks that the sudden slow down seems so much worse. The Victor story could be interesting if it moved.

Or if it didn't feature Victor.

From a completely financial stand point, I would think Ford would be the one trying to walk away. From a soap industry standpoint, I have to think its P&G. Why advertise on soaps that are your direct competition... unless you don't believe in your own soaps.

I don't know about that. Why would Disney advertise on any channel besides ones they own? Or GE? A global corporation with a million divisions can't afford to think like that. I can easily see Ford slashing its ad buy. But the rumor is the advertiser was a major sponsor of the soap that to me says Johnson & Johnson. Losing or potentially losing that kind of client would certainly start the cancellation talk.

I wholeheartedly agree. Any and all of my ideas for a new soap are based on the assumption that the current shows should no longer exist. It's like a scifi show where a character time travels at some point another character says "You shouldn't be here. Your presence here has destroyed everything!" That's how I feel about the current soaps. Most of them should have one off the air years ago and new shows should've filled those vacancies. Instead we have ReRon taking a serious, groundbreaking, REALITY-BASED story and turning it to typical soap pablum. He's taken the work of a far more talented writer and sacrificed it to his fantasy of what it would be like when he was finally in charge.

Imo, OLTL should have gone off the air after the end of the first Malone regime. (Although I can't help but notice how easily that version of Todd, Marty and Nora would fit into an episode of Law & Order: SVU.) And been replaced by a show focusing on the Gannons, Vegas, Bo, Nora, etc... until that didn't work anymore. Then it should have been replaced by something else and so on.

Instead the audience is forced to endure the equivalent of sitting at Thanksgiving dinner while Uncle Ron retells the story of his gallbladder surgery for the one hundredth time with a mouth full of cottage cheese If these shows had been allowed to run their course and replaced, maybe primetime wouldn't be the only place to find good soap these days.

I find it interesting that reruns of Law and Order during the day do better in the ratings than many soaps. I can see the comparisons to SVU, but can't say it's meeting that shows standards. At least when I watch reruns of Law and Order I can never remember the ins and outs of the episode, and still feel enough intrigue to continue watching.

I'm starting to think RC pulls character fates out of the horoscope section in his newspaper every morning. Something's just not adding up.

I wholeheartedly agree. Any and all of my ideas for a new soap are based on the assumption that the current shows should no longer exist. It's like a scifi show where a character time travels at some point another character says "You shouldn't be here. Your presence here has destroyed everything!" That's how I feel about the current soaps. Most of them should have one off the air years ago and new shows should've filled those vacancies. Instead we have ReRon taking a serious, groundbreaking, REALITY-BASED story and turning it to typical soap pablum. He's taken the work of a far more talented writer and sacrificed it to his fantasy of what it would be like when he was finally in charge.

ReRon??? :lol: That is good.