Zynga And Facebook Are Killing Soap Operas

[All My Shadows]

It's easy to shrug this type of thing off (I don't think it's as big a culprit as the article makes it out to be), but I still hold firm in my belief that the death of soaps extends far beyond cookie cutter claims of hack storylines, too many new characters, etc. It's so not that simple, and I wish one soap would be truly "good" (whatever that even means) again just to show that the ratings won't move a flipping inch.

[AS THE WORLD TURNS]

Correction on the date of Guiding Light being canceled. Guiding Light was canceled on April 1st, 2009 on April fools day

[DRW50]

I think that when soaps were good, or at least entertaining, the ratings would go up, at least for a while. I remember when ATWT and GL had brief ratings spikes in late 1996 (ATWT) and for part of 1997 (GL). I think soaps were still able to bring viewers back until a certain point when they just got so bad that people were too burned to ever come back.

What bothers me most about this type of article is not that it has to be untrue, because it doesn't, but because over and over network executives and writers and producers use this as an excuse so they won't have to admit to any mistakes.

[Toups]

I believe this. More people are doing stuff online rather than watching tv shows in the daytime. Take Bill Bell, Doug Marland, Agnes Nixon in their prime and have them write soaps in today's current market, ratings would be about the same. To me, the 3 biggest factors are: 1) more tv options 2) the internet 3) no younger generation that's being "cultivated" to watch soaps. You no longer have the young kid who watches soaps with their mother, grandmother, babysitter, etc.

[DRW50]

You probably would have more kids who watched soaps with their older relatives or babysitter if the soaps were better.

If there were well written soaps on today then I would agree that no writer could do any better but I think the soaps have been increasingly awful and empty for about 15 years now and that's when the ratings have continuously declined, whereas before then, even as more people moved away from the usual TV format, the ratings were more stable or if there were declines there could also be increases.

The soaps got to a place where they all but dared people to find something better to do. Then other options become more viable. Until that happened, the other options which people had in the 80s and the early 90s did not have a hugely negative affect on the numbers.

In some ways the Internet as a distraction, instead of the outside world or another channel, should actually improve ratings, because someone can still follow their show and be online.

[bellcurve]

+1

[alphanguy74]

I think that puts it all in a nutshell. Every other person I know tyhat loves soaps started on them because theyr'e parents watched them... kind of like cigarettes!! But I doubt i'd be watching today if I hadn't sat there at my mother's knee and watched Katherine drive Phillip off that cliff and everything that went with it. Part of it is de-sensitization. When I was a child, it was much easier to shock the viewer. In today's jaded world, everyhthing's been done and shown either in movies or on Showtime series. I STILL don't get the appeal of reality shows, who knows if that genre will last or not. It may live for decades, or it may die and never come back like the music variety show (much to my chagrin).

[DRW50]

I kind of feel like a lot of stuff hasn't been done. If anything I feel like television actually experimented far more 20 and 30 years ago than it does now.

[quartermainefan]

I think quality has very little to do with the size of TV audiences. This last decade was a period of quality television according to prevailing wisdom, and yet I have no doubt the audience for The Sopranos, Lost, or pick the award winning drama of your choice is only a fraction of the audience The Dukes Of Hazzard got. If quality was a factor then there would have been some soap somewhere over the last 10 to 15 years that saw a spike in ratings.

[chyti]

It is jsut a changed world from back then, there are many factors in way daytime tv watching is shrinking but the fact remains that it is shrinking and the currently content isn't really doing it any favors.

Young kids aren't interested in sitting with older relatives/babysitters watching soaps especially not when there are channels dedicated to them, internet, texting, xbox/ps3 and outside activities.

[DRW50]

There were video games, channels devoted to kids, and outside activities, back when soaps had much higher ratings.

I'm not sure if any soap has had enough quality over the last 10 or 15 years to have a major, long-lasting spike. I really can't think of one soap in that time which was consistently good enough to deserve a big ratings increase. Some still managed to have brief increases.

Lost I remember having very big ratings early on, probably not too far off from Dukes of Hazard. Dukes got around 18-21 million, Lost started at 15-16 million. When a lot of people thought the show became dull or confusing, the ratings dropped, but then the ratings for Dukes probably dropped too.

[Sylph]

The more I read this and the more I see Carl insist on things like quality writing and children watching with their parents, the more I realise soaps are dead and that they will not come back. I used to think they would, and do so triumphantly, but now I just think it will be a comeback on a niche channel or as something that's a mish-mash of a daytime soap opera and something else.

The genre is just obsolete, it refuses to follow the times in every way imaginable. The production values, sets, costumes, no location shooting, horrendous acting, idiotic dialogue, lazy stunts and soap clichés, the utter lack of any stories which reflect the social (or any other kind of) reality today... Teenagers don't give a rat's ass about them and are not going to tune in. They just find them boring, not even Oh, my God! This junk is so much fun — it's entertaining! I have to watch. Just take a good look at kids today and draw your own conclusions.

TV's dead too. And that kind of makes me said because although I used to hate it when I was only able to watch a TV show at one precise time, that had it's charm. Now you can watch in ten million ways and there's no... There's nothing. It's just plain consumption, usually of utter "junk food".

[JackPeyton]

People can talk about soaps needing better writing and production values to boost ratings all they want, but none of it matters. Soaps could be the best written, produced, acted, etc thing out there and the ratings would still be [!@#$%^&*].

I hate to say it, and hop on the bandwagon, but its a dead genre. Its going to go the way of the westerns within the next 10 years. Nothing can be done about it. Everything has a lifespan. Soaps have been around for over 100 years now. TV killed the radio soap, and now internet/cable/etc has killed the tv soap.

But really, its just the American Daytime soap that is dead. Not Soap Operas as whole.

[DRW50]

So when you see multiple reruns of an old show, one you enjoyed years ago, does that bother you, or is it just multiple reruns of current shows that you think are junk food?

[DRW50]

I sure wish we had had the chance to find out. Since we never had that chance, I will always believe that better quality might have made a difference. Quality might not bring in ratings but 15 or so years of chasing away your viewers to try to attract people who aren't interested and probably never were interested in soaps definitely didn't bring them in.