Is the soap world asleep?

[rhinohide]

I do laugh at the ratings thread each week. But it's like any competitive event in a way. There's your local high school or intermural basketball, then there's March Madness, or the NBA playoffs. No matter how high (or low) the competition is, you still want your team to win. And some poor kid's parents are screaming at him to rebound and take the shot and get position, etc. (no one we know of course -- blush).

I've said it before and I'll say it again, are soaps really that good that we should cling to them like oxygen? As if when they die, we can't breathe? If primetime audiences were as resistant to moving on to whatever comes next as daytime audiences are, we'd still be watching westerns like Bonanza and Gunsmoke every night. Think about it! There are no westerns on primetime anymore. Is it tragic?

How catastrophic was the last episode of FRIENDS, or CHEERS, or BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER? If those shows hadn't exited to pave the way for HOUSE, LOST, 24, whatever you're watching now, would you be more entertained or less entertained. There's always something that comes next.

[All My Shadows]

LOVES. THIS!!!!!!!

EVERYTHING I was trying to say, but with much less rambling and filler!

[rhinohide]

Well I accept the compliment gratefully, but I'll point out that I had the benefit of ignoring most of the thread, not arguing point by point, and just skipping to the end -- and oddly enough that's usually my favorite part of anything, if it's satisfying. The last bite of ice cream or pie, or any treat I genuinely relish is the best. The very nature of daytime soaps is they're based on a continuum and therefore never ending. The whole trick is withholding the ending and then launching the audience to a new arc. There is nothing else like it. Books work their way up to a final chapter. Plays have a last act. Every primetime series has a finale at some point. In each of those cases, success is determined as much by how well you deliver the final beat as it was how you pulled the audience along the path. Only soap operas are required to go on forever and never achieve that level of "success". The whole "Ta Da!" moment.

What I would really like, if the demise of the genre is inevitable (and I believe that it is), would be to see it managed to a conclusion that is worthy of something that's survived for so many years. This sad, pathetic, wilting on the vine is tortuous for me.

[Vee]

All due respect, but you're talking out of two sides of your mouth; you're saying we're all just being fuddy-duddies for not wanting to move on to, say, Ellen Pompeo or Matthew Fox or the next symbol of the new dramas, while in the next breath you talk about the glory of daytime serials being the eternal continuum of shared history. The latter is correct, but it contradicts your previous post. If you're going to admit daytime has a lasting appeal that is untouched, then why are some of the posters so desperate to bury the genre as we know it?

Everyone wants to talk about killing the soaps so they can be reborn like the Phoenix, but no one seems to have the nerve to offer up their chosen viable alternative or revitalized soap opera, lest they be tagged as having fulfilled Sylph's original purpose for his thread: Another strawman soapbox to explain The World Of Daytime According To Sylph, And Why You Are All Too Declasse To Realize These Shows All Suck And Only I Am Right.

[marceline]

This reminds me so much of what's going on with ER right now. They are giving that show such an amazing sendoff. Not just the returns which have been great but also by wrapping up every story over the season. I've checked in and out on ER over the last 15 years and honestly if this wasn't the final season I wouldn't be watching it now because I got tired of retreading the same stories over and over.

But now you can just feel the way everyone involved, cast and crew, wants to give the show a goodbye worthy of what its meant to them and the audience. That's what I would want for soaps: a loving dignified goodbye when the time comes.

[MarkH]

Yeah, yeah, and I think the ratings say we're heading toward 'farewells'. (Although my thinking has been radically shifted by Brad Bell's last SOD interview, which correctly points out that the soaps STILL outrate all time-slot competition on basic and digital cable, outrate all cheaper successors [e.g., judge shows]). In a shifting landscape, soaps are far more viable than their absolute numbers represent. J. Bernard Jones at Daytime Confidential has said something similar.

What Brad Bell also said, and what the shrinking numbers clearly represent, is that we have to get back to soaps being cheap. They must pay for themselves, bring in the right niche audience (women, esp. younger), and generate profit.

All the creative stuff about which there has been much weeping and gnashing of teeth is, for the most part, a budgetary response. Newbies, youth-quake stories. limited sets...those are all about keeping costs down. The creative decline that people think they see are nothing but a visible economic response to economic constriction.

And herein lies the fundamental truth. As "mature" entities, it will not be possible to cheapen the current soaps and keep them creatively viable. The current soaps are about history and legacy and narrative throughlines that should be traceable for decades. To get rid of vets, ignore history...is to destroy what these shows are about. Innovation at these shows is a HUGE MISTAKE. These shows must be left (within boundaries...we don't need organ music and black-velvet drape backgrounds) to be what they always have been. After all, it is the loyal RESIDUAL audience (mostly older) that keeps these shows alive. It would be a grave mistake to innovate and change them. Instead, and here I agree with Marceline, they should be left as they are until -- to maintain their qualities -- they are no longer profitable, and then they should die.

It is this latter aspect that ABC and Days are not understanding. They think you can radically transform your legacy product (cheap it down) and still keep it viable. The ABC ratings contracts evinces the failure of this thinking. Days -- surprises me. I do not know how it is hanging on...but it is. Even GL's bleeding last year shows how their attempt to innovate was destructive.

So, it follows, that making new shows (maybe shows that are not expected to last more than 5 seasons -- like a primetime show) would be the way to go.

Maybe...but NOT in daytime.

While new shows can be cheap, innovative, unburdened by history, I think recent history shows they will not be viable in the daytime. The startup costs exceed the necessary returns...even over a five year window.

People talk about "cable" and so forth...but I think that will only happen if the next generation of serials is on at a different time of day, and probably not five days a week.

If you look at the last sentence, though, that translates to "Soaps, as we know it, will be extinct when the last of the current daytime shows -- probably Y&R -- is canceled".

Serials will flourish, but not daytime five-day-a-week woman-oriented soap-selling melodramas. THAT is over. Sad, but it had a good run.

But I think Brad Bell's comment is a very, very astute one (surprising from a man who mistakenly thinks his show is creatively strong!). The old rules that governed when a show was "over" no longer apply. As long as the soaps continue to outrate judge shows and talk shows (except maybe for The View and the declining Oprah), and any NCIS reruns on basic cable...there may be life left in the old girls yet. For these shows, I argue that we leave them in peace. Do not expect diversity or innovation or all that jazz. Let them be what they are for as long as possible, and then move on. I don't see this as a loss, really. We'll get our serial fix somewhere...just not in the daytime.

[brimike]

:lol: Some of us have learned to pick our battles, and that's just one that isn't worth taking up these days.

[DeeeDee]

:lol: :lol:

[rhinohide]

I guess you're right. My posts are somewhat contradictory. Although I don't recall mentioning anything about the "glory" of daytime, and if anything I said smacked of any sense of desperation, to cancel, or to continue soaps, I overstated my position.

[All My Shadows]

I don't know if this was meant for me, but I'm gonna respond just in case. If it's not meant for me, then just ignore it please Let me just stress that I don't think that soaps as a whole should be buried. If a soap comes out and is able to stay consistent in its focus and tone, then it can last for hundreds of years if people keep watching it. But if a specific show is seeing ratings decline and those ratings aren't going back up, then I just don't understand the point of rearranging and refocusing in order to keep that show around. Any significance that its familiarity and longevity might have had is out the window when you replace most of the characters in a matter of two or three years. Look at GH, for example. There are few, if any, ties between the current GH and pre-late 1970s GH, and that's not just the fault of passing time. If you look at early 80s GH, they were already in a process of rearranging the focus, taking it from the hospital, adding in action/adventure stuff. Look at DAYS...I'm seeing long-term, die-hard fans calling it "the new DAYS" because the connections to the show's past are falling apart. I don't even like DAYS, and I still feel bad that it's going through the shitter.

I just don't see why a show should limp along for several years if it's going to become something different from what it's supposed to be. When you look at the so-called short-lived shows like Santa Barbara and Ryan's Hope and even Loving and Passions, for the most part, you can look back and say...well Ryan's Hope is about a big Irish family, the Ryans. Santa Barbara is mainly an escapist, over-the-top soap about the Capwells. Loving is mainly about the Aldens and their acquaintances. Compare to ATWT, for example. Everyone's quick to say, ATWT is mainly about middle class families like the Hughes family. Uh...no, not really, not for the last 10-20 years. If a show is obviously moving away from it's original focus, and the audience number is steadily decreasing, why make drastic changes in an effort to keep the show alive? Why not just cancel the show and replace it with something else that has everything that you wanted to put into that first show? EricMontreal, I think it was, pointed out that it's cheaper to keep a show around than it is to start a new one, so maybe that's the main reason why they feel they have to keep shows dragging on for years and years idk.

I try so hard not to take the bait, but eh, sometimes I get sucked into the "circle-jerk think-tanks," too. I definitely have to use that phrase more often lol

[MarkH]

Are circle-jerks and think-tanks supposed to be bad things--separately or in juxtaposition?

[Ann_SS]

I have offered the telenovela formula as a way to redo the soaps that are canceled. I think that it is a good idea that could save the genre. It should at least be tried in the daytime to see how it goes before being dismissed out of hand.

[marceline]

Isn't that what Night Shift is/was?

[Sylph]

We had MyNetworkTV (horrible) telenovelas, those didn't work...

But mainly because they were terribly written and acted.

[JackPeyton]

they also were showen on a off network not in most markets that before had two distinct main audiances and only claim to fame was bringing Buffy over when the WB knew it was awful and wrestling.