Zynga And Facebook Are Killing Soap Operas

[Sylph]

Well, I'm glad. That we're on the same wavelength, that is. GG is kind of an epitome of what a teen show is today. The kids are rich, their lives f?cked up and they go around smelling of Guerlain perfumes, wearing Berluti/Louboutin shoes and Kris Van Assche/Yves Saint Laurent clothes. Or whatever. Then you add (the much more relevant) SHOCKING! factor etc. etc... Yet even with all the same day viewership, online viewership... I can't call this show massive. Nor anything resembling that. I actually don't believe that a show can be "massive" today at all. Either because it's too niche-y, because it looses steam after 8 episodes, because you have 150 channels all set up according to specific tastes and so on... That's why I kind of don't see network TV as something that will last all that much longer and that's why the soap operas in today's form won't either. Nor can the shows be called shocking anymore, shock/"shock" gets old pretty quickly and tiresome.

A soap opera is an expensive endeavour. Either in it's today form (cheap sets, lousy hair & make-up, awful costumes, overpaid actors who can't act worth sh!t) or that deluxe production thing I mentioned (stuff dreams are made of, dreams which won't become reality). That is why I see soaps in the future as some kind of a more elaborate, more thoroughly thought of MyNetworkTV model: telenovela-ish, limited run (it will run for either a specified number of seasons or until it looses viewership, à la primetime), that kind of thing. And airing on a specialised network...

Well, I was being drastic and over the top because I don't believe in daytime's ability to regulate itself. There's too much weed to make it a fertile, prosperous garden. I believe it's self-destructive and sooner or later if the same people remain, it will annihilate itself.

[All My Shadows]

I agree with most everything Jack is saying. Except, I don't and never really have gotten the comparison between soaps and westerns. Soaps are in a much worse place than the westerns were in the early/mid 70s. To define a western, one would have to speak only of its content -- types of characters, storylines, episodes, settings, etc -- but to define a soap, one speaks not only of the characters and stories but of the production style, the time of day it airs, how many days a week it airs, etc. A western could come back this season or next season because its outlet is still there, there's still a primetime where shows make between 20 and 30 episodes a year. They still have a foot in the door. They have their own premium channel that people pay to watch so they can see western movies and old ancient western shows from the 50s and 60s all day long. AMC, as much as they've tried to modernize themselves with original dramas and more recent movies, still airs a shitton of westerns on Saturday mornings. TV Land is the same way, their daytime is filled with hour after hour of highly rated reruns of Bonanza and Gunsmoke, and it's not unusual for an airing of one of those to make the Top 25 in cable ratings for the week (alongside sports, iCarly, Spongebob, etc). So that's something to think about.

Soaps, on the other hand, when they go and are replaced by another "standard" type of daytime programming, will there ever be a chance for drama to air five times a week in the afternoon again?

Soaps should have evolved more in terms of characters/story/etc, but more importantly, they should have evolved in terms of accessibility and availability. I remember watching an episode of The Tomorrow Show on the Museum of Broadcasting's website from around 1975, and Mary Stuart from SFT talks about how they big soap producers were considering the idea of moving some of the more popular soaps to late afternoon/early evening syndication slots. This was a time when almost every very successful network daytime game show was rewarded with a syndicated evening version (Match Game, TPIR, Feud, Pyramid, Hollywood Squares, LMAD, Gong Show, on and on), so it's obvious that it worked. Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune, as we know them, were products of that very practice, and they've shown that despite game shows being all but extinct in network daytime for 15 years, game shows in and of themselves were still very popular and still had a large audience. They just had to find a different way to reach that audience.

I love the whole idea of daytime as its own world, with its own celebrities and its own shows and its own atmosphere, but I truly and honestly think that if Y&R and/or GH were moved to later slots upon expanding to an hour, they'd be in better shape today. Hell, in many markets Y&R does indeed air in a later slot that is usually reserved for talk shows.

[R Sinclair]

It's interesting you'd say that. We get the Bio channel and, I have to admit, I watched Kim Fields' A&E Biography at 3pm instead of watching General Hospital a couple weeks ago. I think it was during one of the eight days Sam and Jason were being shot at in that cabin.

[bellcurve]

ITA Carl.

I also want to speak to being desensitized. In many ways, our culture has been desensitized, but what does that have to do with telling a good story? Not every story has to be shocking or tawdry or top the other or have some sort of "never been done before" element. It seemed like at the height of Reilly's DAYS I run, everyone was so obsessed with doing something shocking that has never been done before that they completely forgot how to actually structure and tell a story.

It's not enough to just "shock and awe" or "do something that has never been done before in daytime[!!!!]." The story has to be good too.

[SFK]

First of all, what the hell is Zynga? (Showing my 31 years? ) Does it have something to do with the Spice Girls? Guess I've been too busy playing Mappy and Pole Position on my Atari.

So, who are these non-multitasking people who can't play on the computer and watch TV at the same time? That's just par for the course with me. Even if you don't have a laptop and your PC's in a different room from the TV, you can pump up the volume and listen.

I am not buying the Facebook or Zynga-Zyng-Fun or anything else online excuse. It's about the quality and the convenience of soaps, it has to come down to that. There are plenty of people who don't have cable who find any manner of ways to watch programming that they'd otherwise be missing. They seek them out, because they are quality, or at the very least, entertaining shows that they desire to watch and they'll do so by getting their hands on dvds or downloading from torrents or getting lucky on YouTube/Hulu-like sites. If somebody wants to watch something, they will find a way. Simple as that. If something does not interest a viewer, they will not watch. Simple as that. Let's stop making excuses for soaps' poor viewership. They need to make like Oprah and get with the program.

As for convenience... if you're watching L&O reruns during soap hours, you're getting your hour-long drama fix in a self-contained ep and you have no obligation to tune in tomorrow. You won't miss a thing. Nothing that you won't catch again in a couple of months anyway. For a continuing dramatic primetime series, you have a simple 13 or so eps a season to get through, usually a minimum of 3-5 seasons, you can pace yourself or blow through it... there will be more series.

In a way, for me at least (and I of course have a background in soap viewing), soaps are perfect background TV. I'm more of a TV person than a radio person, I could have the radio on while I'm at home working around the house in the day, but I'll turn ABCD on and tune in and out based on what's interesting me. Even with cable, it's just in my bones to have AMC and OLTL on during those hours. As bad as those shows may get, that won't change until they are gone.

[SFK]

I'm not so sure that shock and awe is even what we're after. Don't get me wrong, I definitely enjoy that on VH-1 reality shows, but that's not what interests me on soaps. I can only speak for myself, but what I feel that soaps are truly missing these days is the charm and endearing quality of well-written characters and dialogue that carried the shows even when the writing was (rarely) slim. When I stumbled upon this world of Degrassi, there was nothing exactly earth shattering that kept me hanging on, typical soapy fare, but well-written and so full of charm and characters I cared about (which in this case even trumped the moments of iffy acting).

[Sylph]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zynga

[alphanguy74]

I don't see how anyone can think of this as hard on the head:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVSArV67O3I

I'd deliver tht baby over and over again!

[Sylph]

But, as you say, you are talking as a 31-year old male who owns an Atari.

You are talking about yourself.

You have to immerse yourself in a world of today's teenagers to see what they like and what they don't and somehow try to analyze the possible platforms shows will air on.

[SFK]

Thanks Sylph. I know all those games from FB et cetera but I guess I never caught the name of the parent company.

[SFK]

I think some of my hyperbole was lost on you, I'm not exactly living in the dark ages. But certain things like good storytelling will never go out of style or drastically change. I don't think things like the bells and whistles of fancy sets are the issue when younger viewers have been raised to accept crap acting as good, lame writing as the standard, unfunny sitcoms as modern classics. What DO young people want then? I'm not sure that they even know, the younger they get the less exposure they've had to how good things once were.

[All My Shadows]

But that's just it, they're not showing an interest in watching...at all. Nobody ever considers whether or not to watch World Turns or One Life or AMC or any of the others. Soaps have this massive stigma that will probably never go away no matter how well-written they are. The average viewer wouldn't know the difference between "good" soap and "bad" soap (words I hate to use because they are totally subjective), and nine times out of ten, simply because it's a soap, they'll find a way to poke fun at it and keep channel surfing. And a lot of that has to do with the fact that soaps are throwing down in the TV ghetto. AMC could turn into high-quality drama tomorrow and keep it going for MONTHS, but no one outside of the daytime community would know about it or care because they simply have no interest in good soap or bad soap or any soap at all. They're content with what they got, and there's no void for soaps to fill in their TV watching.

[chyti]

exactly young viewers don't want to watch soaps, they are hardly watching tv anyway catching episodes of whatever, whenever they have some free time. For young kids it is all about their social life and the stuff that interests them reflects that social life. Young kids know what they want and watching soaps is not one of the things they want to do, I don't even thing tv watching is high on their list of things to do.

[R Sinclair]

Hate to break it to you, double E... but we're the same age. You're just not as hip as the rest of us.

[SFK]

You know I was thinking of you and Eric when I said that!