ATWT Canceled

[Sylph]

Yes. I'd also love to see what would Mimi Torchin write.

There is also a special appearance in the comments by Tom Casiello and Jonathan Reiner.

[NYC123]

Sad to see ATWT gone. I never really watched it but it is a lengendary show

[Max]

The shocking part about this news is not that ATWT was cancelled, but rather that it was cancelled so soon after GL. P&G has a history of spacing out the cancellations of their soaps: GL was cancelled a decade after AW, which itself was cancelled a dozen years after SFT. (Even the one-two punch of the cancellatons of EON and SFT came two years apart.) And, because P&G always considered ATWT as the crown jewel among its soaps, I figured the company would have been determinded not to let it go off the air for the next several years.

ATWT's cancellation is by far the most significant soap cancellation to date. For one thing, ATWT--along with AMC, DOOL, GH, and Y&R--is a "brand" that has near universal name recognition among those in the general public who don't watch soaps. (No other cancelled soap can make that claim.) Additionally, this marks the first time that a soap which had been #1 for a very long period of time has been cancelled. (Aside from ATWT, only GH and Y&R have been #1 for extremely long periods of time.) Perhaps most significantly, ATWT's cancellation means that the genre will lose what I consider to be its most influential soap: ATWT was the first soap to become a megahit, the first to feature a supercouple (Jeff and Penny), the first to feature a well-known b*tch (Lisa), and the first (along with EON) to run for 30 minutes. (Also, were it not for ATWT's megahit status, AW and DOOL would have never existed; in turn, it was the success of those two soaps that led to the creations of OLTL, AMC, and Y&R.)

It seems obvious that OLTL will be the next soap to get the axe, especially considering the fact that the plan to move into AMC's old NYC studio has been postponed indefinitely. However, I don't want to make any surfire predictions, since just a few months ago I predicted that ATWT would outlast OLTL.

[Ann_SS]

There is no real comparison between MLBN and SoapNet. MLBN was created by the owners of MLB and their partners to promote professional baseball and earn media revenue from the game. Even if MLBN loses money for an extended period of time, the MLB can withstand the loses and see positives in promotion of the game. In contrast, SoapNet was created to provide additional soap programming. SoapNet discovered that there was no audience for repeats of some daytime and prime time soaps so they looked for alternate programming because it cannot continue to lose money for an extended period of time and stay on the air. Also, baseball has a humongous fanbase that SoapNet cannot begin to touch.

A more general thought, there is false belief among soap fans that there is an audience out there who would watch the soaps if only they were available or that the ratings would be higher. I think that these are faulty premises. There are few people would watch the soaps even if they were the bestest ever or if SoapNet showed them night and day. The failure of soap programming on SoapNet to garner a good audience provides some evidence to come to this conclusion. The soap audience will continue to dwindle no matter what due to factors outside of the network's control.

[marceline]

I'm not remotely surprised. P&G wants out of the soap business. They've made that clear. If there were any soft feelings for the show and it's status, the current economy made it impossible for anyone to indulge them.

[Max]

While I agree that P&G wants out of the soap business, the one thing that makes no sense to me is this: why did they wait ten long years in between the cancellations of AW and GL? (Why not just cancel GL in the early part of the decade, and then do the same to ATWT a year later?) The only explanation that makes any sense is (as you alluded to earlier) because of the bad economy, they can no longer afford to space out their soap cancellations but instead must shut down production ASAP.

[bellcurve]

Oh PLEASE.

Especially Jonathan Reiner! I remember when he used to run and moderate the TVGuide Online Website and Message Boards and he(the ardent Passions viewer) was rather pleased to kiss the ass of show-killer Susan Lee, and expected fans to just get off her back after he painted "such a sympathetic portrayal of her." It was disgusting. Reiner was the original Nelson Branco, minus the sleazy sexual innuendos.

I doubt either one of them is losing any sleep over ATWT's cancellation.

[Sylph]

Which is why I labelled it a special appearance. Note the irony & sarcasm.

[Ann_SS]

I'm not sure that P&G wanted out of the soap business as much as they only found it useful as long as they could advertise their products on the cheap and didn't particularly care about the quality of their soaps. I am sure that once their soaps started to lose money, they lost all interest and wanted out. However, they waited for CBS to finally have enough and cancel them.

[bellcurve]

Duly noted.

I just don't understand why those two would even bother saying anything. Casiello is too busy pimping Y&R on his Twitter to give a damn about his alma mater, PGP. And Reiner is a corporate kissass who now produces lame reality shows. There is a sense of irony in "the ones who made it," suddenly posting about the demise of ATWT. Like they're Meg Ryan or Julianne Moore or something.

[DRW50]

I was never a big fan of Reiner's; Casiello I'm not a fan of his writing because I think his writing for Y&R is off and he seems like he just goes with Sheffer from show to show, but I can buy he's probably genuinely sad the show is going.

[bellcurve]

He didn't follow Sheffer to OLTL. That was his good pal, Dena, who was HW the show. Maybe she'll surface to Y&R in some sort of capacity and get rid of Sheffer's team.

I don't buy either one of them is sad about it. Reiner works in reality TV right now. Casiello is probably just happy to keep a job and is tweeting about it to everyone who'll listen, at the expense of his dignity. If he spent half the time he focuses whoring the show on Twitter that he does on his breakdowns and scripts, maybe day-to-day Y&R wouldn't suck so bad.

[TC]

Seriously.

[DeliaIrisFan]

I haven't responded to this sooner, because I don't quite know what to say... ATWT was never "my show," like GL had once been and like AW was when it went off; I've never watched it regularly longer than a few months at a time. But I certainly caught it often enough over the years and was familiar with the characters and the actors, and I have always had a great deal of respect for all the history that was still packed into just about every episode - whether or not the writers intended it or were even aware of it - and the impressive, decades-long tenures of so many of the veteran cast members. And mostly I always wished that I had been around to see the glory years and/or that anything I've seen since I discovered ATWT could have drawn me in as a regular viewer. Now that will never happen, but I've been watching a few clips on YouTube from the mid-80s this week and I got chills. If I am feeling a sense of loss about this, I can only imagine what lifelong viewers - let alone lifelong employees - are feeling. My heart goes out to everyone who loved this show.

As for fans who are trying to find ATWT a new home being called "pathetic," I am pretty sure (especially after seeing Les Moonves' comments this past week about the cancellation) that anyone who devotes a significant amount of their free time to any one of these shows - whether they do so by trying to get Lifetime to pick up ATWT or by posting on a message board such as this one - is looked upon as pathetic by the networks who make these decisions. So I'm certainly the last person to judge, and I say more power to any campaign to "save" ATWT, whether or not it succeeds. But that's just me...

[Y&RWorldTurner]

LMFAO!