ATWT Canceled

[Vee]

Ignore Sylph, he's just having another menopause-addled "John the Baptist" moment, except I think even John The Baptist had a discernable point. Somehow soon, JJ Abrams will enter the conversation. All Sylph really cares about doing in these threads designated for certain soaps or storylines is lecturing posters about how they are wrong about the core tenets of daytime, and everyone is an antique fossil except him, his idols and his Brilliant Career which is still so much vaporware. If I was wrong about him, he would've said so.

Sylph does not have a solution to the problems daytime faces, most of which are self-afflicted and most of which come about because of pervading philosophies and mindsets within the industry and its executives. The truth is there is nothing so ancient and tired about daytime's core deliverables, which have been with us since Charles Dickens and continue today even in crap like The Hills. What's tired about daytime is not the concept, but the majority of the people making them, who resent the product and therefore, lack the ability to sell it and revitalize it. When Sylph says daytime is terminal and people who enjoy some of the essential things about it are naive bumpkins, he is throwing in with Christopher Goutman, Barbara Bloom and Brian Frons, whether he knows it or not. You're still mouthing the company line, even if you're wearing lots of Hot Topic. Which, BTW, you're too old for.

[DRW50]

I wish we'd had the chance to find out. If ATWT had written for Bob and Kim in the past decade, then they might not be gone today.

I do agree with some of your points about how many stories there are to tell. I just think the success is more about the quality of those stories, moreso than the stories themselves.

[Vee]

Please indicate the difference between soaps doing this and any of the staged reality soaps on MTV or VH1. Or L&O. Or CSI. Those shows are soaps now too.

[DRW50]

Yes, that's true. You said it better than I could.

[Vee]

Yes, well. Teenage nihilism bores me, what can I say.

[JaneAusten]

Why can't the problem with daytime simply be what the showrunners indicate they are. More entertainment options available and less people at home during the day. It's not like primetime hasn't lost viewers also. I would guess daytime is proportionate to network primetime TV in the percentage of viewers lost. Example the last episode of Cheers drew in 85 million viewers when they went off the air and was the number 1 show for the week. When ER aired their last show they were number 1 or 2 and drew I think 16 million viewers.

It's been reported I think that reruns of L&O get higher ratings than all the soaps except Y&R during daytime(maybe not higher demos). Doesn't that go a long way in proving the "more entertainment option" theory.

[P.J.]

I guess so. I take that to mean, those crazy knick-knacky things fan groups do to prove a point. Like sending packets of Kool aid, band aids or whatever in support of their couple.

[DRW50]

I thought Cheers had 40 million for their last episode. I might be wrong though.

You have a good point, but daytime has been blaming more entertainment options and less people at home for 15 years now. And instead of trying to improve, the soaps have just become worse and worse in quality, and we get more and more excuses and more and more open contempt.

It would be one thing if soaps had been valiantly giving us all types of wonderful material over the past decade or decade and a half, but instead I think they've just run as far as they can in the direction of material which they believe is popular, but which is actually a very niche market, a market watched by people who probably have no real interest in soaps. So much time wasted on Guza's fantasies of being the long lost Soprano, and yet, most of the hardcore fans of that show would probably laugh their head off when they see Jason and Sonny and their slomo gun battles.

[Sylph]

Yes, primetime declined too. That's our too many times repeated reason for soap operas failure: the multiplicity of choices today's viewer has. It is ironic that the thing viewers craved the most killed the viewership: a plethora of choices for every taste. Looking back, it was so logical that it would happen. Divide 12 by 6 and you get 2, divide it by 12 and you get 1. Simple maths.

Also, I wouldn't have mentioned it hadn't you said That's what brought viewers to soaps for decades. Not true. They did not bring viewers. Viewers just kept escaping and never looking back. The simple statistics shows it. There is no arguing with mathematics. It didn't go up and down — except perhaps when Y&R gained viewers in the first couple of years — it just kept going down. No ups and downs, just downs. The end was imminent. Unrelenting, inescapable, unavoidable. No Marland, no Lemay, no no one could do anything to change that.

Like I said, and JackPeyton confirmed in different terms, they failed to contemporarise, to evolve. They are stuck in a rut, recycling old stories, copying the greats of soap operas in horrific ways, undermining iconic stories. There was just nothing that could bring people back. People want novelty, their lives change, their tastes too, they might have loved and cherished the ATWT of their childhood, and it is nice to come back to it once in a while, but people grew up and it no longer holds their interest.

And when I mentioned 1989, among other things, I meant, for example, the décor. Heavy wood, cheap costumes, complete lack of verisimilitude, the tape technique, the lighting... Then a horrific mix of too much surgery on too many daytime stars, badly done, the cheap make-up, the horrific hair styles... Bill Bell might have wrote rich best of them all, but rich people don't live like that any more.

[Sylph]

There is a difference between a core and the way it manifests. Which is what I'm saying: the core didn't manifest properly. The manifestation wasn't suited for 2010.

[JaneAusten]

the problem is soaps have been trying to be all things to all people. They still to an extent try and I say try to appeal to an extent to that long time loyal viewer. Now they do it unsuccessfully but I do think they try while trying to draw in new viewers(that coveted demo) with their shock value storylines. Problem is they have failed on both counts.

Since television and entertainment seems to more and more be veering away from what I would call mainstream entertainment(that which appeals to a broad audience) and seems more focused on niche audiences, I'd rather they cancel all the soaps and start from scratch with niche shows that appeal to that coveted demo they want and move it to some cable station like the CW which appeals and covets the demo they reputedly want. Guza can then have his Soprano's want a be show on some cable station and maybe they can reinvent a vampire soap for the CW to appeal to all those "Twilight" fangirls.

[Vee]

It's easy to claim classical daytime storytelling is old hat, but this is merely a corporate slogan, woefully inaccurate and untested. For example: No one can say that DAYS, GH, GL, ATWT took no chances with stories or ideas. It's just that those chances by and large failed and degraded the industry. Goutman and Wheeler both wrote their shows for "three day audiences" and claimed that and other half-ass "innovations" would streamline and modernize daytime storytelling. Instead we have plots on ATWT that last six minutes, and Rosanna finding her sister kissing her fiance at the top of an episode but letting Carly design her wedding dress at the 50-minute mark. GH is a joke, a bad drag act of a cable drama. GL is dead. DAYS has been neutered.

It's not that daytime has to be people sitting around drinking tea everyday. That is not the core tenets of daytime. It's the core concept of an ongoing serial, of towns of families, it's how they are paced, it's about the narrative and the audience investing in one another long-term, symbiotically. That's why people watched those shows, how they became a part of their lives. They had characters and families and a world to follow, they knew it was going on without them or could go anywhere. This kind of ongoing narrative predates even Irna Phillips, or radio or television.

No, a soap cannot be done the same way ATWT was in 1989 or Y&R was in 1978. But what does that mean, exactly? The styles change, the methods and vehicles of telling the story, the ways the audience interacts with the program. Maybe, in the end, the amount of days a week, or running time. But that's all. Can there be ancillary material online, interactive components? Instead of a trite musical act performing, can characters be taken on remote to shoot live-to-tape or otherwise and experience a show like "Live 8" along with the audience? Can characters get a private confessional in online material? You can do all this and much, much more to do new things without doing what most soaps have done in their own attempts to modernize, which is shortchange and ignore the classic components of serialized drama which have served us well for centuries: Character, family, history, and commitment between both audience and storyteller. Were he alive, were they young today, Douglas Marland and Agnes Nixon would have done this. They would have modernized, but they would have kept to their core components for daytime storytelling. You could still do the same kind of careful, intricate, nuanced storytelling we had under the golden age of ATWT. It's simply a matter of presentation.

[All My Shadows]

But you don't understand. Soaps just need to tell good stories. That's it. And they'll last forever. Forever, I say! All they have to do is tell good stories, use their vets, "have diversity" (whatever that means), and "have balance" (ditto), and they'll last hundreds and hundreds of years because people will always be interested in watching soaps exactly the way they are presented to us right now: 5 days a week, in daytime, and the only way the audience counts is if they are watching it five days a week, in daytime, everyday, for the rest of their lives.

Basically, I feel like I'm in bizarro world because I'm finding myself in agreement with Sylph for this last page and a half.

I think something being lost in this discussion is this: there's an EXTREMELY LARGE difference between us, people who not only watch soaps, but get online and discuss them day in and day out, also watching YouTube vids of "the olden days," and everybody else, who are just not that committed. Yeah, the decrease in quality from soaps may have turned those casual viewers away, too, but how many casual viewers do you think are gonna say "Well, I stopped watching such-and-such because they lost sight of what the show was really about, it was about family, good vs. evil, it was about long conversations around a cup of coffee, it was about the little moments of everyday life blah blah blah and I know this from only watching every now and then when I was sick or on vacation from work."

It won't matter if John or Lucinda or Lisa or whoever is in frontburner storylines. It will not matter. Casual viewers (casual viewers, not us) do not care about "mining history" because half of the time, it was probably history they never saw, and I don't think they'll respect "mining history" just because. They might even put it down. "They're still talking about stuff that happened 40 years ago? WTF? They can't be original?" Not everyone studies soap opera and wants to be the perfect soap opera writer or cares about the "core tenets of soap opera."

I'm sorry, but soaps being stuck in the daytime ghetto for all of their existence has also played a major part in the slow death of the genre. Come on. Game shows were in primetime in the 50s and early 60s, but when they hit first-run syndication in the 70s, they were pretty much insured a long and lasting lifetime. People keep saying that CBS picking up LMAD was just them picking up a "tired old game show from 40 years ago." LMAD may have last saw a successful life over 30 years ago, but the game show is still alive and kicking, and when you have a genre that is still very viable, you can afford to experiment with things like bringing back old-as-hell shows. Game shows have been thriving in syndication for over 40 years now, and primetime game shows experienced a brief renaissance in this decade after being considered a thing of the 50s. Other scripted genres have enjoyed reruns for decades, but soaps have always been stuck in daytime, where they are virtually invisible to anyone who isn't at home to see them.

[Sylph]

[Sylph]

KABOOM!

I'm even getting a lap dance.