The Big Question-How Daytime might change

[Paul Raven]

How various writers, producers and actors would change daytime,of they could.

Megan McTavish Headwriter GL

"I would figure out a way for there to be more money available for us to spend. if we had more monry, we could train more writers, pay set designers what they're truly worth...And it would allow us to do some really wonderful things in terms of production. The effect across the board would be tremendous".

Felicia Minei Behr Exec Producer AMC

"I'd get rid of VCR's! We've found it increasingly difficult to keep the audience interested in those emotional scenes that build. They are crucial to daytime. They're our building blocks. Yet,if the audience has taped the show and they perceive in the first 10 seconds of a scene that there's no 'action' taking place, they zip past it. Then when we get to the crux of the story,they're asking,'What's going on? I don't understand. What was that about?'because they haven't taken the time to watch the scenes we've so crefully built leading to that denouement".

Jason Bonderoff Deputy Editor SOD

"First, I would stop making everyone on every show a core character. In the old days, you'd have a bunch of core characters and a whole bunch of other intriguing characters who would come in for the purpose of a storyline. When the storyline finished, they would leave. But now, with most shows running an hour and having grown over the years, it's not unusual for there to be upward of 30 characters, and we're supposed to care about all of them! If every character is equally compelling and sympathetic, nobody is a true vilian. we're rooting for every charcter.

"Second, I would reconsider soaps being on 5 times a week. it might be interesting to see what would happen if some shows were on two or three times a week. It would allow for some experimentation, maybe make daytime more like a miniseries, where one show is on for a number of weeks and months, and then when it's done, a new show comes on in it's place.

"Third, i would consider the one hour time frame most soaps have. Claire Labine once said the biggest mistake was abandoning the 30 min format and i agree. The hour form actually hurts story; you're forced to add more characters, juggle more stories, use up ideas at a quicker rate.

"last, I would not have every soap set in modern day USA. history is so rich with drama and intrigue it lends itself to being confiscated by soaps, and yet no-one has really done it. Setting shows in different time periods would open up new and interesting ways of telling stories."

Michael Malone Former headwriter OLTL

"Everyone is working as hard as they can to put on this beautiful, hour long drama five days a week, but you're constrained by time , as well as the physical limits of the studio, actors and crew.

"It would be wonderful to find a way to take a breather. For example, maybe suspend production of the show for summer, and use that time to reintroduce people to the show, I'm not talking about reruns. I mean figure out a way to recap what's happened in the past year, so that when we start fresh in the fall, everyone is clued into what's going on. It's necessary, because in many ways, daytime is not a user friendly medium, you have to know what's happening with the characters to enjoy it. Having some form of recap would allow people to find out what's going on with the show, and also has the potential to hook new, younger viewers.

"Another thing I would change is the fear that seems to be present when it comes to competing with talk shows. You don't want daytime trying to match those lurid, freakshow horrors presented on those vile programs, but at the same time you don't want the medium to retreat into a safe kind of blandness, either. Soaps have always taken risks, and they need to continue to do so.

"One of the risks I'd like to see is less reliance on the old literal conventions. One of the commandments of daytime is that the audience won't care about anyone they haven't known for a long time. This puzzles me. Don't we walk into a movie and instantly care about the characters up on the screen? One of the reasons primetime shows like ER and NYPD Blue are so successful is that they've managed to take the episodic form- which gives the audience the satisfaction of a plot with a beginning,middle and end-and they've embedded it within the larger arc of the emotional lives of the characters. This is what daytime needs to do.

"My feeling is that if daytime doesn't change, it's going to die. Some people might say,"Why shouldn't it? Other forms of entertainment have gone as audience needs have changed. look at programs like The Ed Sullivan Show.' But there's something about this genre that goes to the heart of why people love stories, and if it can find a way to express itself in a more contemporary way,I think it'll be around for another 30 years".

What do you think of their opinions?

I think McTavish is off beam by suggesting money could solve problems. The soaps survived because they made mega amounts for the networks.Once budgets increased,revenue went down.I think they should have been more creative in using what they had. Don't tell me that millions haven't been misspent over the years.Paying certain actors huge amounts was a mistake.I'm sure it set a precedent that ate up the budgets. When Deidre Hall came back to Days,she was paid a huge amount and the ratings went up for a few weeks. AMC would have carried on without Lucci,IF other characters and stories were in place.

As for Behr, she is right about taping shows.How soaps could get around this is a tough one.The one hour format comes into play here, as if you are taping 3 show, that's 3 hours of viewing to get through,so you might be more inclined to press ff.

Bonderoff's statements about the core characters is true, All the shows lost their identities when new characters were added who became prominent and then got involved with other new characters.The shows should have made a point of ensuring that the core families had a connection to all stories.It's a balancing act that a lot of shows got wrong.I guess none of the networks wanted to take the risk of resting a show and say,showing a miniseries for 6 weeks. I guess it wouldn't be seen as cost effective and the fear would be that the soaps viewers might not come back.

Doug Marland was involved with a possible miniseries for CBS called 'Cardinal Sins', so it was being considered.

Interesting to read Malone's take on having new characters in front burner stories.People go to a movie knowing that things will be wrapped up in 2 hours, so that is the mindset. Soaps are completely different.How can you tell a viewer that this character and story is only going to last x amount of time and if you did, what is the incentive to keep watching?

I'll type up what Ken Corday, Jeanne Cooper and others had to say and post soon.

[DRW50]

Thanks for posting this. I remember this article. I think that limiting number of episodes or taking breaks might have worked many decades ago but not by 1996 -- the ratings would have fallen even faster. I do agree that soaps had too many core characters. EON is an example of a show which thrived on having a lot of new faces for one story only.

I don't agree that VCRs damaged daytime. I think that FMB underestimates the audience. When I taped soaps I did not fast forward based on "action." I fast forwarded based on whether I cared about the people involved. Nothing can convince me that I missed a darn thing by zapping through years of Mike/Rosanna on ATWT, as they had the exact same conversation every time they were together. If soaps "carefully built" stories, then people would watch more scenes.

[beebs]

+1

I always found though that the TPTB always tended to treat the audience as a set of ungrateful plebes, so statements like these come as no surprise to me. In fact, I'd say that the VCRs are what kept us watching the soaps as a family much longer than we would've done without them. My mother was busy all day with work and school, and without that VCR, GL and ATWT would've lost her as a regular viewer well before she finally gave up when the clone story happened.

[DRW50]

Exactly. I think soaps would have been screwed much earlier than they were if not for VCRs. I think a lot of executives assumed for many years, and some still might, that all soap viewers were home all day. That's why they could just assume that people were tuning out because of talk shows or OJ. They did not realize how many viewers had tried to support their soaps and that many of those who were burned were not likely to come back.

I also think that almost any show has something which can be fast forwarded. I love Doctor Who but that doesn't mean I watch every scene of every episode. Honestly there are a lot of shows I would have stopped watching if I couldn't fast forward. It's when you want to fast forward EVERY scene that you give up watching.

[beebs]

Pretty much. The "more women in the workforce" excuse for why ratings have been dropping stopped making sense after the late 80s when VCRs became omnipresent in the home (and I think the slowly rising ratings the soaps saw between 1991 and 1994 pretty much are a testament to that). There has always been this tendency, not only in the soap industry but in the music industry too, to blame outside factors and claim helplessness to the "changing times" when the issue is actually the quality of the product and the assumption that the consumer doesn't actually know what they want to see. Frons is a great one for this with his "the viewer needs to be trained" mantra.

The truth is that the women in the workforce were still watching their soaps, but when they were able to do so. Nobody clued into this and eventually they went to desperate lengths to try to stem a tide that wasn't really turning.

Basically they told themselves ages ago that, like the blank cassette/CD was to blame for the music industry's falling sales, women in the workforce, OJ Simpson and VCRs were to blame for falling ratings. Translation: It couldn't possibly be MY fault that I'm failing at my job, it has to be something I can't control.

[DRW50]

Right. They also didn't realize that they were throwing away a good method to get new viewers, the multi-generational method, by directly chasing only young viewers, and not doing a very good job of chasing them.

It's sad because soaps had adapted before and they could have adapted again. Yet they didn't try because it is always someone else's fault.

[JackPeyton]

I dont think that there being less people at home during the day can be dismissed as a reason for ratings going down. I mean, how to soaps attract new people? I dont think many people just decide to put a 50+ yearold show on the tivo at random. Hell, i know i myself dont even like to add a show in the second season. Less people home during the day, plus more options, is a very real reason ratings fell, IMHO anyways. That, combined with the format just not being "in" anymore, much like westerns or even sitcoms and primetime soaps at times over the past 50 years, has everything to do with lowering ratings. Not to say the crappy state of daytime is blameless, it isnt as it gives very little to no reason to keep watching, but to dismiss more woman working, less people home during the day, and more channel options just doesnt make sense to me.

[beebs]

That was, to me, the most hilarious part of the whole thing. What got me hooked on DAYS back in 1996 when I was a wee young lad of 10, wasn't Sami/Austin/Carrie/Lucas, it was Kristen/John/Marlena! I found Austin and Carrie to be the most boring couple on the planet, and Sami just annoyed me. it was the older adult characters that interested me, and I always found it beyond frustrating that I never saw Alice during that period. I don't think TPTB realise that the young kids want to see conflicts involving older characters sometimes moreso than the younger characters.

What ended up turning me off Days for good (until last year) was the 2000 Teen Attack. I couldn't wrap my head around Shawn-Douglas aging only 3-4 years and Belle again more than 10. It pretty much singlehandedly cut my suspension of disbelief and I knew that the show would be nothing but a stampede of young people from then on, and that was the end of it for me. Rather ironic, rly.

[beebs]

Ah, more channel options to me DOES make sense though. If you have more choice about what to watch, then you're obviously less likely to watch one of the big 3 networks' offerings. But I think that decline would be significantly curtailed if the desperate youth-chasing hadn't happened on every soap. I also wonder how accurate the audience share in the weekly ratings are in determining how many people are watching during the day now vs. 20 years ago. Because if I look at Y&R in 2010 getting a 3.7/12, and I look back to 1994 and see AW getting a 3.5/12, I recgonise that the number of households has increased for the HH ratings, but what about the shares? Shouldn't that indicate that approx. the same percentage of homes have the TVs on during that time period?? Or am I completely off my rocker? Note that I do recognize that those shows aired during different time periods, but it still strikes me as odd that the share for Y&R today isn't higher if more people aren't home to watch anymore.

[DRW50]

The periods where the ratings started going down significantly were before Tivo. The soaps that desperately tried to seem hip and current during the time Tivo began, like Passions, quickly fizzled into nothing.

I don't think that a lot of people automatically see a soap as a "50+ year old show." Soaps during the periods of time that they attracted viewers often managed to still connect to people and to seem vital. When I started watching GL and ATWT I knew nothing about them other than that they were on and I liked a lot of the characters and the situations. You don't look at a soap and see the past. You see what you want to see. The soaps simply lost most of their ability to bring viewers in. They started being ashamed of the soap format which helped hook so many fans who were looking for an alternative. You used to get people hooked on a soap by word of mouth, by people at home on holidays, by families...soaps gave up on all of that.

More and more people left home in the 80s and the early 90s and the ratings were still good. The soaps then went into freefall trying to get lost viewers back and they have gotten worse and worse, being unable to figure out how to bring in those who don't watch soaps, while actively chasing away those who did watch.

I think a lot of executives believe that daytime viewers were glued to their sofa until sometime around 1994, and that just isn't true.

[DRW50]

Most cable is pretty much crap during the day. It's often just variations of what networks often did in the past (I think CBS ran reruns of All in the Family and Bewitched during the day for a long time). If daytime were putting out a better quality product they would still be able to keep viewers. Many homes have had cable for 20 years or more, but ratings didn't start going down for a number of years.

[SFK]

Yup. It mad less and less sense for us to keep cable when we were watching nothing but network during the day and all of our cable shows were available FREE online.

I also remember this article, and a later SOD piece would echo the sentiment about new shows taking place in different time periods, even syfy settings. The Corringtons pitched Reunion (that eventually became Texas) which was set in antebellum New Orleans

FMB, honey, just be glad they were taping at all. BTW, I'd still take a VCR's ff/rw functions over a digital cable remote's any day!

[DRW50]

The only stuff I look at during the day is usually networks and TCM. Sometimes GSN. Perhaps I am just old fashioned...stuff like E and MTV I haven't been able to stomach in years.

I miss the old remotes too. The DVR remotes are so difficult to operate and they end up going too fast or too slow and the most annoying part is when you want to fast forward something in the last 10 minutes and it goes so fast that it freezes at the very end and then stops and you have to start back at the beginning.

[JackPeyton]

VCR, TiVo, DVR, whatever means of recording. I just think that most people who record shows are previous viewers, not people who are new to soaps and just randomly decide to start recording them while they are at work, school, etc...

I am a bit confused by the second part here, so people dont look at them as a 50yearold show, the shows lost the ability to pull people in and were ashamed of the format, yet people used to get hooked by people telling them of it, watching when home, and with families? I so think most young people who watch soaps watch because of family/babysitters/etc watching, but not less of those people are watching for various reasons (the shows suck, to more options, to never being exposed). I dont think the soaps are blameless, because again most of them suck, but i do also think the american daytime soap opera has run its course. There is no one thing to blame, but a combination of various reasons.

As for the time frame not matching up of vcrs/more people working and falling ratings, i think it goes back to the how people start watching soaps thing. again, i think most people watch soaps because of mom&dad/babysitters/etc, and if more mom entered the workforce in the 80's, the babysitters watched mtv, then the young ones are not exposed to soaps, and when they get older they have mtv and other cable networks, why would they tune into a soap? then if mom/dad/grandma/whoever is now working, plau taking care of family, dinner, the house, etc soaps become low on the must list before fading off. Of course there are the people who just do randomly tune in and watch and get hooked, but i would bet that almost all of those people tune in when home during the day at random. The chasing the youth demo is def the worst things the soaps have done, and deserves alot of blame for where they are now, but in the soaps defense, that really is a network issue.

again, its just not any one or even a few things that can be blamed. soaps are very... random, i find. looking at my own family and friends... my mom watched Y&R, amc, gh, oltl forever, and then in the late 80's had a husband, two kids, a job, and no time. soaps went. she tuned in here and there when she was home during the day, but years later just gave up. My grandma loved soaps, but the minute oj hit court tv she was done and never looked back, eventually leaving court tv she just watched discovery ID network all day. my dad never watched a soap then in 2000 got cancer and became addicted, cancer was gone, dad back to work, quit the soaps, i myself watched with grandma when i was little, followed it during the summer/winter breaks/when i was home, and when i learned how to set the vcr i wacthed daily. for 10 years. then, well hogan came to days and i was over it, but i came back. however, i dont watch daily anymore because of cable. and i get that this is just my family and this doesnt apply to everyone, but i am sure these situations apply to more people than just me and my family.

Daytime could be the best written,a cted, directed form of entertainment and cable would still be a huge issue. Present people with 300+ options, and there will always be an issue for networks. And true, cable has been around for a long, long time (going back to, i think the 50's) however it became widespread in the late 80's and common in the early/mid 90's and viewership has only increased since then, and that does go pretty steady with soaps falling ratings.

Just to be clear here, i am not saying cable is the main reason soaps ratings ahve fallen, however i do think it has played a huge role in it.

[beebs]

And I don't disagree. Cable has had a big part in it. But the problem is when the execs all throw their hands up and say it's the ONLY part of it is when my back goes up. It's the shucking responsibility for the dearth in quality in the last few years that's completely headscratching to me. Writing poor, shallow, mysoginistic stories, marketing them to young women and then wondering why they're not watching. I mean, I guess they have reason to think it works! Just look at Twilight