ABC Looking at New Daytime Show

[Soapsuds]

Yeah I am sure one of the soap will go.

[Sylph]

Perhaps they will use 1/3 of the money they finance OLTL with for this new show, and the other two thirds will go to AMC and GH to plug the leaking holes.

[dragonflies]

GH tends to go overbudget, and it's the ABC soap that Frons puts money into more than AMC and OLTL as well.

I thought though that Y&R for a long while was way more expensive to produce than GH though

[Khan]

It is. That's why they hired Darius McCrary (nuMalcolm) to make sandwiches for the rest of the cast and crew. ;-P

[DRW50]

I don't think AMC's budget will improve until they fire JHC. She seems to be so incompetent and burns through so much money, you'd almost think they use it for toilet paper.

[Khan]

No, that's what the scripts are for. ;-)

[Y&RWorldTurner]

I'm going off the soap budget reports TV Guide published a few years ago. In 2006, it cost like $1.3 to produce DAYS a week, GH was $1.25 million, and Y&R was $1.2 million.

There's been budget cuts since then, with DAYS being hit the hardest, so now GH and Y&R are the top two, with GH edging out Y&R slightly.

[Sylph]

How horrifying it is to see they spend a million dollars on such cr*ppy episodes!

[marceline]

Sounds like a plan.

[CSF]

I know several years back, Days budget was between 1.8-1.9 million a week.

But wasn't GH's budget 3 million a week and Y&R's 2.5 million a week at some point?

[Y&RWorldTurner]

Yep, and then the budget cuts of 2006 and 2008 happened. I think DAYS is produced on a budget of anywhere between $700,000 and $800,000 a week now.

I'm not aware of this, it certainly wasn't during the past decade.

The sad thing is, soaps were produced on a budget of tootsie rolls and lolly pops in the 60's and 70's, and yes it looked that way, but the creative content was a lot more compelling and daring, not so anymore.

[EricMontreal22]

It's syndicated--here we get it on ABC

Wha? I always read GH had the highest budget (though the rumour was in the last year AMC had some budget probs going over and OLtl was consistantly under).

[EricMontreal22]

+1

I def have been enjoying the show a lot more the past two or so months, but I think what really needs to be done is to get an EP with more vision.

[EricMontreal22]

I respect your opinion, but don't really get why you're so excited--couldn't most daytime newswatchers who wanted another news show just watch CNN, MSNBC, Fox, etc? What new elemenet will this bring to the table?

Re budgets, I think AMC has more or less fixed its probs in LA--the original gossip remember had to do with the fialure to rent a storage space, etc. Also, ABC are smart enough to know after a move like that for the first little bit the show will need to settle into its budget--just the nature of the industry.

[EricMontreal22]

Do they make that much? A show like Lost is expensive to make. I know in the 70s daytime often helped support primetime--LaGuardia's book quotes Fred Silverman (when he was at ABC I think) saying that most primetime dramas cost so much that they don't make a profit for the network until things like syndication packages are factored in.