GL-Frons Interview on GL's Demise and Daytime's Struggles

[Dan]

My problem, not necessarily with what Frons said, is with those sounding the death knell for daytime as if this is the only genre that isn't working commercially. This is not a case where everything is doing well save for soap operas. Take a look around you, folks. The entire entertainment industry is evolving faster and faster than we would dream it possible. Primetime ratings are dropping too. The only reason why daytime is the first to feel the pinch is because daytime is a timepart that has always had smaller ratings with people at work and children at school. But make no mistake, soon we will see the #1 primetime show below a 10.0, if we have not already. I don't know. I don't pay attention to primetime ratings in general. Television is evolving and it is throwing everyone into a tailspin. They don't know what form the new tv will take and (most importantly for the network and advertisers) they don't know how to monetize it. It has already happened with the pretty much DOA music industry. It will happen to television and movies next. The quality or lack thereof (much to my chagrin) has nothing to do with it nor does it have anything to do with any fault with the genre itself.

[DRW50]

I don't know if changes in society can be blamed for the huge heaping helpings of misogyny and sleaze that now make up ABC Daytime thanks to Frons.

He could do something to help his shows. Instead he just moves a seriously ill patient out to California to see the sunshine, instead of getting a better doctor.

[EastMA2]

I don't have any problem with what he said about GL. True statements.

BUT I do have a problem with his statement about him hearing about changes in production and quality. OLTL is adopting GL's production style more and more often. That scares me because especially the other day when OLTL did that BLair Witch Project style, I thought the show looked awful. OLTL looks more like GL everyday and that is not a good thing!

[Jonathan]

Agreed. And it wouldn't surprise me if 50 years from now the actual TV set becomes obsolete. Television programming will continue to exist, but there is a steady wave of viewers who are watching their programs online now.

Web series are gaining momentum. Say what you will about Eden Riegel, but she's a forward thinker with the Imaginary Bitches concept.

[R Sinclair]

Get your facts straight. Her husband, Andrew Miller, is a forward thinker. He created, wrote, directed and produced Imaginary Bitches.

[Ann_SS]

Well, I did say, "I only wish he would do more and overhaul the TPTB at each of ABC's soaps. I think that the quality of the ABC soaps can be improved even if the ratings do not reflect it." I especially think that because the end is near that he should improve their quality so they could go out with a bang instead of a whimper. Truthfully, I don't believe changing EPs and headwriters would be enough to improve the quality of the ABC soaps. I believe that their problems are insidious and related to the cast members featured. Look at OLTL. The lack of acting talent of just about all the featured cast is cringeworthy. The show is damn near Passions and Sunset Beach level. GH is a walking disaster. Only chance of improvement is if Sonny, Jason, the Carlys, Luke and Spinelli are permanently put on the backburner or written off. They suck up 90 percent of the show. AMC may be the only ABC soap that has a shot, but it is a hot mess.

[DRW50]

I don't think OLTL's cast is that bad. Just the ones Frons loves the most (Gigi, Rex, Stacy). The others are more variable.

Of all the ABC soaps I think AMC is in the worst shape. They have no real identity, they have run off or destroyed most of their good characters, most of their new characters are huge failures. They drastically change the entire personality of the show with each new headwriter. What Pratt has been allowed to do to the show is shameful. That he basically gets to completely rewrite a core character because he worked with Jamie Luner on Melrose Place suggests no one there cares about the integrity of the show, if there's any left.

Many of the problems AMC and GH have are directly related to writer/production regimes Frons put in or allowed to run rampant. GH was a far more balanced soap when Frons rehired Guza. Guza under Frons' watch has systematically destroyed most of GH's center. The only reason they are surviving is because of Scrubs, the mob, and a good casting director.

I just don't buy anything from Frons. Even the line about GH being a failure for 10 years until Luke and Laura. The show was #1 briefly around 1972 or 1973, and then the ratings collapsed. The ratings started to gain steam again around 1977 or 1978, before Luke ever showed up.

[JinxxAvery]

What struck me was his statement that while scheduling a block of hour long soaps worked in the past, it is no longer the way to go and that "change is good". Sounds as if he'd really like to sandwich a hit talk or game show between two dramas in hopes of pre and post add on viewers bleeding over to the existing soaps.

[DRW50]

This would probably just cause the soaps to lose even more viewers, unless Aisha Tyler is some type of powerhouse.

[Cyberologist]

Correct and I totally agree

this has "nothing to do with business" his slaughter of history of ABC soaps his portrayal of women is horrid and his way of doing business using his pets for me because most of the characters I hold dear can't get a storyline because its rumored he doesn't like them and won't allow it. He can take his condescending opinion and stuff it'

[chyti]

At this point soaps need to start preparing exit strategies, this genre like others before it wasn't meant to go on forever and this idea to hold on tight is destroying what is left. Society and technology has moved on at a pace that daytime soaps are not able to compete with and for the general they are getting their soap fix somewhere else be it primetime, cable, internet or reality shows. Furthermore the quality is not on par with what is out there including acting talent, production value and writing.

Soaps are nothing like the music industry which choose to adapt to the changes in technology and culture, there is nowhere you can go in the city of NY where you won't see a person with earplugs in there ears, music is timeless. Unlike music where you are likely to see country music put to a hip hop beat and nothing but collaboration btwn past,present and future artist soaps sticks to old outdated ideas too scared to put a new spin on an old storyline.

[DeliaIrisFan]

Eh...

Even the things he said that were somewhat true are all relative... GL is and always has been turning a profit, or it would have been off the air ages ago. Whether or not it was making enough of a profit to satisfy the greed of the networks (and network executives in charge of daytime - who could be paid a few million dollars less for jobs that, it could be argued, are no longer as high-level now that half the population is no longer home in the middle of the day) is another question. But believing that soaps should still rake in the kind of money that they did in the 60s and 70s sounds like the same kind of nostalgia on the part of executives that Frons criticized viewers for having about GL. And the unquestioned clinging to the women 18-49 demographic as all-important, even long after that stopped being a demographic that is disproportionately at home in the afternoon, is nothing more than tunnel vision as far as I'm concerned. Setting aside that arbitrary standard, the difference between GL's performance in the ratings and that of Frons' ABC shows seems pretty negligible to me.

I could believe that maybe now, with the recession, soaps are finally reaching a point where they're actually bleeding money, but even if that's the case you can't convince me that it doesn't have as much to do with inflated production costs as anything else. I am not a business person at all, would never be able to stomach working in the corporate sector, but it sure seems like bad business to me to start spending exponentially more money when your revenue is declining. And yet, that was the only major attempt in the past 30 years to deal with the changing reality of the daytime audience: Soaps shifted to unsustainably more expensive production models to try to compete with primetime and movies, which was always an uphill battle because even in the best of times soaps' budgets were always going to be so much smaller. And ironically that trend began in the early 80s in an effort to hook the very first generation of women who grew up with an expectation that they would be working outside of the home for most of their adult lives. It wasn't going to happen, even with every soap trying to lure them in during summer vacation while they were in high school and college with their very own Luke and Laura clones running around on location sequences that were edited in post-production to include special effects stunts and to have the whole thing be set to the tune of pop music! Frons may not have been to blame for that trend, if his first job in the business wasn't until the mid-80s, but he's definitely overseen the trend continuing and exacerbating - there should never be CGI on soaps, IMO, not ever.

As someone who came of age since that time and never fit the traditional soap demographics, I can honestly say that everything that drew me into soaps as I was growing up was an element of classic soaps that somehow survived in the changing times. And in that time, the things I once loved have been supplanted more and more by other elements that just detract from that experience. Soaps could have just continued as they were in the 70s, more or less, only changing their production models only as better technology that was actually cheaper (digital cameras, etc.) emerged, and they would still probably be making at least as much ad revenue as they are now but cost a hell of a lot less to produce. Ironically, with DVR making it so easy to watch whenever you want, they might actually have attracted a cult audience today if they'd stayed true to themselves and actually offered something different than primetime shows and movies. Or they could have come up with feasible, sustainable attempts to attract different kind of niche audiences. We might still be looking at the end of the industry anyway. But the executives who foisted the second-rate primetime model on soaps in the past 25-30 years, often over the objections of experienced writers and producers who knew better, certainly hastened it. And the current practice of everyone in charge running around like chickens with their heads cut off, second-guessing everything to the point where almost nothing creative can happen is really speeding it up.

[Carolyn1980]

Primetime soaps are huge, telenovelas are huge, so what’s going on with daytime soaps that they’re hurting badly enough that they start dying off?

There’s a mentality in network culture that fears change in programming. When we expanded everything into hourlong time slots — except “The Bold and the Beautiful,” which is half-hour — we had this great system that flowed really well from one to another. It wasn’t broken up by game shows or talk shows. And, really, it worked so well for so long that people just didn’t want to change it. I mean, why would you?

So what do you do now?

Change is good. You have to remember that “General Hospital” didn’t do well for 10 years until they started adding new characters. And those, of course, were Luke and Laura.

Frons's answers to these two questions tell me that he is ready to cancel a soap, as soon as next year, most likely OLTL. He says flat out, "Change is good," regarding the idea of re-introducing talks shows and game shows into the daytime mix. And he talks about how a block of soaps "flowed really well" at one time, but implies that breaking that up with a game show or talk show might be a good thing now. In other words, AMC...then a talk show...then GH.

[DRW50]

You're probably right. Never mind that he's gutted AMC and GH beyond repair, but hey...Aisha Tyler to the rescue

[Ann_SS]

Pretty much. I think it is a mistake to cancel OLTL first. I would go with GH first, then OLTL, and then AMC. GH's ratings will likely collapse with a talk showor game show as its lead in so it might as well go first.