If soaps had stayed 30 minutes...

[Eric83]

During the 70's, soaps were at their peak. (IMO)

Over the three networks, they had as many as 17 soaps on the air at one point. In 1975, NBC expanded AW and DAYS to an hour, and thus started a trend in daytime to have hour shows. This led to shows being cancelled (TEON), or moved to different timeslots (The Doctors, Search for Tomorrow). I think in the long run, going to an hour did a lot more harm than good. It led to fewer and fewer soaps being created. AMC/OLTL/GH had three hours locked up on ABC, and CBS stuck with their Y&R/B&B/ATWT/GL lineup for over 20 years.

So I ask, do you guys think if these shows had stayed 30 minutes, that daytime would be in a better place. (i.e., more soaps, higher viewing audience)

[Soapsuds]

I doubt it. Look at B&B and how bad it is. I hadn't watched it in a while since this summer. I started watchin again this week and the show is dull borin and a total train wreck.

And for a 30 min show the ratings suck.

[ChiTownBoi03]

I don't think it would make a difference personally. Times change, and viewing habits change, which I think contributes to the ratings. I, and most of my friends, don't even watch soaps on an actual television.

[marceline]

Not really. Once you zap the commercials and FF stuff you don't like, they're practically 30 minutes or less anyway.

[applcin]

I don't think soaps would be in a better place if they stayed 30 minutes, mainly because it would mean either that (1) it would take twice as long to tell stories, and the audience, their options and their attention span have changed over the years, or (2) that the stories would suffer by being cut short and focusing only on the flash and shock value.

For example (1), I'm thinking of a show like Ryan's Hope. The time they took to build their stories, the tremendous amount of exposition that went on (stuff happens, then you see characters telling others what happened, etc.). Back then, there were more eyeballs available to watch the show and less options. People were more patient to watch the stories play out in more "real time". Today, I think a show like that would bore a lot of people. Or, with so much spoiler info available, they would tune out and tune back in for the "payoff."

For example (2), I think of Port Charles, novella-style and vampire-style. Relationships turned on a dime, there was no time spent building anything worthy of attachment because it would all just soon get overturned. Apparently, there's no drama or conflict to be had anymore in the context of a longterm relationship and characters' personalities are rewritten to sell the plot. The show had no flash when it was just about the group of residents. Then it became about vampires and suddenly it was sexy? Characters like Kevin & Lucy were ruined, relationships were constantly changed....all in the effort to present the most (forced) conflict and flash before (whoosh) moving on to the next thing.

I don't think it's necessarily a question of more soaps=more audience. Maybe once upon a time but not anymore. Daytime is not a big draw to most people anymore. If anything, it's more stigmatized now. Once upon a time, people would have gone to work or school and talked about Luke & Laura or what was big on DOOL that week. I know very, very few people who are watching soaps these days, admitting to watching them or talking about them. A lot of folks never watched them. Others who did years ago have said the shows just keep on doing the same old stuff.

People are a lot more impatient these days and the networks seem to be as well.

[SFK]

I agree to a certain extent in that quantity often comes at the expense of quality (but as Ruxton references B&B, even with half the time it still comes down to quality).

I guess AW's expansion was our first taste of "more is less" in daytime, an excellent serial spreading itself too thin under the false impression that viewers wanted more more more. Well, you end up boring those loyal fans to tears by stretching a perfect five minutes of scene into a superfluous fifteen and you're simply asking for too much of your audience's day (90 minutes!) to leave them sitting bored. You work your writers and actors to the bone, burning out your brightest stars, meanwhile twenty years up until cancellation later, many would argue that you never *quite* fully recovered.

I think soaps had to grow with the times and create more exciting material, but why not divvy up the excitement, why was an additional fifteen then thirty minutes needed? Chasing primetime? An occasional hour-long episode (like Walter and Lenore's wedding that got this all started) would have been fine imo. I wish there were more thirty minute soaps on the air, more variety, more jobs, more fun, and though no one's been able to perfect it in this country as of yet, I wish we had been blessed with several memorable (and even not so memorable) short-run novella-type serials over the years.

All in all, I think soaps have suffered from shortsighted, fevered, greedy thinking over the years, I think they fought battles that didn't need to be fought, created drama for themselves where there was none, and now they're pretty much self-imploding.

[All My Shadows]

I think, if anything, these shows would have been allowed to die naturally instead of being dragged on and on and on because keeping them on the air is cheaper than putting something on in their place.

[Jonathan]

If soaps had never gone to an hour, we might not have been privileged to watch characters such as Palmer Cortlandt or Adam Chandler.

[soapfan770]

To counter this while I don't watch foreign soaps like other SON members do so they may have more explanations but in recent year I often hear how certain British or Australian soaps which were once hugely popular, 1/2 shows airing 3-4 days a week faltering in both storytelling and in viewership. Some of the complaints in an article I read sounded exactly the same for our one hour soaps. So good or bad? I'd say a little bit of both depending on the show. The hour format did wonders for Bell and Marland, for AW and GL--not so much.

[SFK]

Right, again a question of quality. But I'll say this, I think I'd be less frustrated spending half the time following a struggling show. I'd probably never miss an episode of AMC if it only came on two times a week. Then again, if it still sucked, well, we'd REALLY have a problem.

I sometimes wonder if the soaps would benefit from no longer being a 260 episodes a year operation, and function more like "seasons" with maybe half the episodes. Of course there's the argument that you'd lose viewers for good once they wrapped a season, or maybe folks would be so hungry for their show to start back up again? I wonder how Degrassi will fare with its new daily novella format, still within the structure of a season.

[All My Shadows]

Something I always thought was interesting is that the UK soap Crossroads started off as a 5-days-a-week half-hour show, but TPTB thought it'd be better for the show's quality to scale back to only 4 episodes a week. As far as I know, that's the only time a successful soap has gone in the opposite direction (besides AW after the 90 minute mess) as far as weekly output is concerned.

[DeliaIrisFan]

I think soaps as we've known them until now need that constancy to retain viewers. Obviously the general tenets of "soaps" have been reincarnated in other forms that have been successful with less rigid schedules though, so who knows? But I feel like 5 days a week is such a commitment that a disruption is likely going to break the habit.

I'm wondering if anyone ever toyed with the idea of airing a soap every Saturday and Sunday afternoon? A lot of people are at home at that time doing much the same things that housewives used to do Monday-Friday in the heyday of soaps, and if you got hooked on a show it would be easy enough to remember to watch it because it's the weekend again. They could still go more in-depth than a primetime show with two episodes a week, although I'm not sure how the rhythm would work - you might overdose after a while constantly going from Friday cliffhanger --> Monday fallout --> Friday cliffhanger... But with some tinkering a formula might have emerged that was sustainable. It's probably too late now - there are already too many competing multimedia distractions on a weekend afternoon - but I wonder why as far as I know nothing like that was ever attempted as a kind of bridge in the 70s/80s when women were entering the workforce.

[cityfan01]

That's why I FLOVED PC's hour long Surrender episode. It was something special that everyone knew was going to be great from a show that had a shorter story-style. I believe that having half hour soaps with the occasional special episode would have worked out better.

And on that note....why haven't the networks thought about cutting soaps back a half hour as opposed to canceling? Instead of canceling both GL and ATWT, why not cut them both back to a half hour and giving the extra hour to the affiliates or to LMAD?

[Saving ATWT]

I think it could have helped only from the standpoint of their being more new shows created and cancelled and, therefore, more viewing options meaning possibly more hits. Right now, Y&R is daytime's only hit show with the rest of the pack fighting it out for next-to-last place. There should be at least one other show able to bring in 5 million viewers a day. A new hit would bring fresh attention to the genre. I find it almost funny that anyone waits for the ratings when six out of seven shows are all within .8 points of one another. More shows would bring more buzz and, just maybe, more viewers.

[DeliaIrisFan]

I agree. They might have retained their individual identities, and when the time came that they were no longer profitable, gone off as themselves. And maybe some of the "more bang for the buck" measures that have become the norm in the past 10-20 years (less rehearsal time, characters discussing incriminating matters in crowded restaurants with their archenemies in earshot, etc.) would have never occurred to the networks if they hadn't gotten lucky and bought themselves a few more decades of financial solvency by adding a handful of new cast members and using the same sets and crews to churn out essentially two shows for the price of one.

As far as quantity vs. quality, I'll go out on a limb and say that I think hour-long format has never been sustainable for more than a few years, even in the best creative environment. At least, in terms of the things that I look for in soaps. I'm not a Bell fan, and I don't think it's my place to criticize that formula, except to say that from what I've seen over the years, I feel like some nuances were sacrificed in order to keep churning out stories that kept Y&R # 1 in the ratings for decades.

Perhaps this is even more blasphemous, but I don't think I could have watched Doug Marland's ATWT in its entirety, from what I've seen on YouTube. The first few years were clearly magic - I can see it - but when I see clips from the late '80s and beyond, I just find myself rolling my eyes at the latest romantic configurations of the Snyder family or the fact that Frannie got embroiled in two murder mysteries by hooking up with two separate wealthy older men who may or may not have murdered their first wives, who were both named Carolyn - things like that. I recently stumbled upon an episode of ATWT from the early 90s in which Tonio had kidnapped Sabrina to the jungles of Montega/Mendorra/Moldavia and Dr. Bob went to rescue her. Granted it was out of context and maybe it was much more engrossing to regular viewers, but all I could think was that there really is no way to sustain an hour-long show - even Marland's homespun ATWT - without eventually resorting to stories about our beloved characters being in the middle of political intrigue in made-up countries and other such filler.

On the other hand, Nancy Curlee and Co's GL and Claire Labine's GH was some of the best soap storytelling I've ever seen - in part because of the large company that the hour-long format afforded them - but they both said publicly that they eventually burnt out. I think for the kind of soap I (used to) enjoy watching, only about 2-3 years is possible for an hour-long show. With network interference, it's more like 2-3 months - when the writers are already spread that thin, there's just no way to keep going back and redoing everything when a story doesn't test well with a focus group midway through and keep everything moving forward in a coherent, enjoyable way.

Whereas the half hour shows could go on indefinitely. Slesar wrote Edge of Night for decades, right, and by all accounts it never slipped. Pretty much any episode I've seen of AMC from any point in the 70s has been just delightful. Ryan's Hope is tough to say, because it didn't make it even 5 years before the network interference really started - Labine and Mayer admittedly burnt out, but how much of that was from battling the network and how much was from thinking up new stories we'll never know. But even so, 4-5 years of telling stories about essentially one family and the same set of satellite characters with whom they were romantically entangled while virtually eschewing soap opera cliches (except the ones it invented) is still a major accomplishment. And all of those shows were distinctive.