ALL: What Do They Say?

[Sylph]

So... If you're a member of this board, you're a soap fan. D'oh. And in your life you probably, make that – surely, you know or have met people who used to watch daytime serials and then just stopped.

When you ask them why did they stop and when did it happen, what do they say? What are the most common reactions you encounter when you say that you still regularly follow?

I think the three most common I've hear were: She/he is still doing that?! (when telling where a character is now or watching a live/taped show), plain ol' indifference Blah, I just stopped/It stopped being interesting/It was fun, but I've moved on and You're still watching? Are you serious?

Juliajms mentioned yesterday those classic reasons why the viewership eroded ("the rise of cable, the number of women in the work force, budget issues and the lack of diversity") in the Y&R Potpourri Thread so I was wondering... Would it have mattered if soaps kept a quality on a very high level? Would the viewers still flee? Meaning, let's say I have a 100 channels on offer, is a person going to watch something that has the highest quality? Or is it the fact that they are still better than a lot of garbage, but they're seen as a dinosaur genre, a remnant of a long bygone era, which hasn't evolved still serving the same stuff they served 30 years ago and it was just too much?

Or something completely different? What is it that one show people flock the most to has that the other 99 do not and it's not quality, whatever it means?

[All My Shadows]

I don't know many people who were once soap watchers who aren't anymore. Most of them are still watching. The few who did stop, like my mother, only stopped young because she had to get a job and raise kids. No longer home during the day, and though interested in the shows, not interested enough to go through the trouble of taping everyday.

If any of the old timers I know start giving up soaps now, it'll only be because their soaps (GL and ATWT) have been canceled.

I think a lotta people associate soaps with a certain period of their lives, many times high school/college times. Once you got a day job, if you didn't care enough to tape it, you just lost touch with the show and that's it. You watch it years later to feel nostalgic, but most of the characters from when you watched it daily are gone, so you don't really make an effort to get back into the show.

[marceline]

The one friend I know who stopped watching was very clear: she prefers her Housewives. Her exact words: "As long as I have my Bravo and my HGTV, I'm happy."

I just recently discovered that a coworker of mine watches the ABC soaps. Actually she used to act on them. She did some work as an extra years ago. She's tuned out on AMC since Thorsten Kaye left. She watches GH faithfully. She also watches OLTL occasionally but I think I can put a stop to that.

My mother no longer watches soaps but when she heard ATWT got canceled she said she might start tuning back in just to say goodbye to Bob, Kim and Lisa. Especially Lisa.

[Paul Raven]

My sister watched Days in the 80's while at home with young kids.But as soon as she got back to work,that was it for her.Now she has zilch interest.

She has finished work,but would never turn the TV on in the day.

[EricMontreal22]

Among people my own age, revelations that others watch or watched soaps tends to happen when we're at a party and pretty intoxicated, LOL. I know Jack P on here said his friends all were proud of watching soaps, but with the guys (straight and gay) and girls I party with it's still usually kept a bit quiet. I remember somehow I made some All My Children comment (something like "wow that could be a story on All My Children) at my bday party last year and 2 girls and 1 guy--casual friends of mine not super close, all did double takes. It turned out all of us as kids knew about Janet from Another Planet and Natalie in the well. From trying to subtly get info (in my smooth drunken way no doubt) none of them had really paid attention to it for the past decade anyway, but not due to quality or anything--they used to watch on their lunch breaks from school, then went away to university, etc, and just fell out of the habit.

That seems to be the common one for me--people just fell out of the habit. of course the reason for this often is at least partly that the show stopped being as interesting--but more often it's that life just got in the way--they no longer were home when it was on, and weren't as obsessed as me to start taping, etc.

At another (more sober) dinner party I remember overhearing some obviously gay older guy talk about how he always watched AMC (this woulda been around 1999) but it had recently gotten so bad he made the switch to Y&R. They brought it up because some Y&R stars were coming to town to make a mall appearance.

I remember another (drunken) time hearing a bunch of people talk about Y&R and "I can't believe that old guy with the mustache is STILL on ugh! he'll die on the show!". And, of course, everyone of my generation seems to have watched at least some of the DAYS possession storyline (we all would have been 12-16 or so when it aired).

I've never heard any other show come up. OH! A navy guy I dated for a nanosecond when I was 20 once mentioned that he and his best friend in high school would watch Guiding Light every day after schoolthey loved it so much--but basically to mock it (of course these were two "straight" guys so they probably mocked it partly to save face).

True embarassing story, when I was 11 and OBSESSED with AMC (the only soap I watched that first year or two of soap love ) I found out about the Loving crossover (the John Wesley Shipp as Carter week long event). We had an old VCR that fosom reason wouldn't tape certain channels--including the Seattle ABC. I could still tape AMC because it was simulcast in Canada, but the unheard of Loving wasn't. I was desperate and finally my mom asked a good friend of hers if she could tape it that whole week for me--I was so embarassed back then, as a kid, to admit I even watched soaps but... And then the friend of my mom's (who was a fairly well respected author) confided to her (I think she assumed the soap was my mom's) saying "I know, I can't go a day if my VCR hasn't taped Y&R and AMC" (though she too had never heard of Loving, lol).

I amuses me that in my experience the talk of watching soaps always comes out when people are drunk--in my all time fave book (as people have pointed out here ) All Her Children, Dan Wakefield in his introduction talks about how to be a guy who admtte to lisening to the radio soaps in his day was a fate worse than being caght jerking off in the bathroom. It wasn't till his grad year at one of his first drunken parties that someone started quoting the opening epigrath to one of the radio soaps, and then a dozen or so other girls AND guys all chimed in--then started laughing and talking about all the Ma Perkins and Right to Happiness stories they knew, etc.

[EricMontreal22]

In All Her Children Wakefield mentions how among "intellectuals" like his profession it was basically seen as morally wrong to turn the tv on in the day--unless there was important news or a sporting game of course--and though he worked at home he'd never think to turn it on.

My mom didn't grow up with a tv and my family has no tradition with soaps (my grandma remembers listening to them on radio as a kid--when I stayed with her as a teen one Summer I found at her local library a bunch of records of old radio soaps and she heard me playing them and came in to listen--and could even remember the storyline on Guiding Light and one of the other ones!). But when my mom had us twins, and found that when feeding us she couldn't read like she used to when she just had one baby, she started looking for stuff on the new TV my dad made her buy--and got hooked on Edge of Night (this woulda been 80-82 or so), until she went back to work. She remembers her aunt, who was a fairly well known Canadian novelist, admitting to her she thought Edge of Night was great but it was probably the only soap worth watching (somehow the fact it was based around mysteries, elevated it in her eye).

Then as a teen my mom started watching AMC with me when she was home--I think more as a way to bond with her moody son, btu she did get hooked when she wasn't working odd jobs--and was also really intot he Vicki DID 1994 storyline (i've since learned partly for personal reasons--i think she was fasicnated to see those issues dealt with on screen). I can remember awkward moments like watching Kevin dealing with being gay with her, when I still wasn't out, etc. Anyway she still follows AMC now on her own--and watches it to unwind after her work (though I thinks he usually falls asleep before it's half over).

[EricMontreal22]

LOL you're gonna put a stop to her watching OLTL? LOL why?

[marceline]

Cause I'm a bitch with a grudge.

[EricMontreal22]

Even though I'm an OLTL lover (well not lately...) for some reason I love that. Let me know how it goes

[beebs]

My family were all avid soap fans up until about 2002-ish, when it all started really going to hell. At one point, between my mother, grandmother and I we had a whole lineup set to record (between two VCRs), and rotated between every soap bar Sunset Beach and Passions (Gran and I were AW fans to the end and both of us refused to watch Passions after the first episode). We'd wander between all the soaps depending on what stories were interesting us at that moment.

After about 1999, they all started dropping like flies to the point where a couple years later we stopped watching any of them. Gran loved B&B during the 90s, but stopped that because the Ridge/Taylor/Brooke saga was never going to end and was boring her to tears. Days had become far too stupid for her and GH was becoming too mob-infested for her even in '02. She ended up working during the day and hasn't missed the soaps one bit until I came home and she's been getting sucked in again to Days and OLTL (muahahah!)

Mum was loyal to GL and ATWT, but finally completely dropped off the GL boat when Cassie and Josh got together, which royally pissed her off. ATWT she just dropped around the same time. As for myself, I just lost interest after I started high school mostly because I wasn't home at lunch to catch PC or Y&R and thus couldn't turn the VCR on to record the rest of our lineup. That and GH's storylines were boring me to tears when they weren't inspiring me to yell endlessly at the TV.

My friend's babysitter's last straw with Days was Melaswen. And I know for me once Eileen Davidson and Louise Sorel left, I lost interest completely.

In all honesty I'd completely lost interest in soaps up until very recently when I heard Louise Sorel was returning to Days, and started reading about its creative renaissance and started paying closer and closer attention again. I don't really know anyone else who's ever watched them of my age group (I'm 23), and I know i'm the target demo for the advertisers. It's really a bad sign for daytime, methinks.

[beebs]

You know, I've always thought (and I could get shot down for this mighty quickly but who knows), that the decline of the soap began with EDGE's demise. It sounds weird but to have a soap that is watchable for guys and is based more around crime and mystery probably helped get people who wouldn't otherwise watch a soap to get hooked. I really think that that show has left an unfillable void in daytime and in that vacuum, a lot of prospective viewers who would've watched with a soap like EDGE on the air, have been shut out. It's that snob appeal that EDGE had that even though GH has tried for many years to attract that same audience to varying degrees/on and off, it never quite has managed to do.

[EricMontreal22]

No, I agree. Especially when it was shown late in the afternoon when some men would be getting home from work--a mystery based serial (still filled with classic soap opera elements) is a great "gateway" drug. I have so many people in my family--largely, oddly older women--who DEVOUR murder mystery novels and tv shows, yet see most soap operas as embarassing as reading romance novels... I've read how One Life to Live early on picked up a good teen audience partly due to being aired so closely to Dark Shadows (another "gateway drug")

I think for most people, even myself at 11 years old, who haven't gotten into soaps thru family and inheritance, they have to see their soap as special and different. Even when I got into AMC, at sucha young age, I truly felt it was MILES better, more sophisticated, etc, than any other soap on the canvas. Of course this was '91 and in some ways I could argue that was true--historically of amc but that's my snobbism speaking.

[YRBB]

I know my grandmother used to watch B&B and then she stopped. Whenever she saw me watching , she would say: "Why are you watching this? It's just the same and the same and the same." That's the reason she has for having dropped all the soaps she's dropped. She stops one, starts watching another. She gets bored, moves on to another one. She's also shocked when she sees that one of the actors is still there.

My aunt used to watch Y&R for as long as it was shown. She has kinda stopped because of work and catches up occassionally. But she has also started loosing interest in general, and feels that they're doing the same stuff over and over again.

[AllMyDaysatGH]

Well when I started watching AMC\DAYS when i was 10 (not to long ago people, only in 2003 LOL) I watched with my mom..and I remember her sort of in a way passing the torch along to me, if that makes sense, and saying that she just got sick of them! I would watch them with her, and I would be so interested, not knowing what they hell is going on sometimes, but being so enthralled with it...and she would be scoffing, rolling her eyes, randomly fast-forwarding, just overall annoyed with the shows...The shows weren't the same as they used to be, as she would say..and that's why she eventually stopped. She watched since the late 70's and told me they were all lightyears more better then and continuing into the 80's, early 90's, for the most part. I hope any, if not all, of that made sense.LOL

[Saving ATWT]

'Educated' people often look down on soap fans and, if you dare to confess your soap secret, take a step back and re-evaluate your smarts. Somehow soaps became trashy even though some pretty amazing artists such as Andy Warhol, Truman Capote and many others have been faithful viewers. I notice this to be especially true of writers who could actually learn a lot from the soap genre. It is funny that these same people love primetime soaps and harp about how campy-smart shows like Ugly Betty are.

I've met a few Europeans who love American soaps. They don't even seem to notice the lower production values which I think we all over state. Even Days and World Turns, the two shows with the least money, still keep the sets looking fresh and often do fine camera work.