If everyone were black this would be Tyler Perry presents Madea's Changing Channels.

Ironically, Shemar Moore would play the light-skinned Black who ultimately "saves" daytime by marrying the abused heroine fixing the network's woes.

Edited April 19, 201114 yr by Khan

Because you didn't tell good stories. None of that means a damn without good story. Or did we forget to cover that between the cross-country road trips and the skunky perfume tie-ins?

WHo needs good stories when you have all of that?

Because you didn't tell good stories. None of that means a damn without good story. Or did we forget to cover that between the cross-country road trips and the skunky perfume tie-ins?

Don't you just love how a former ABC exec says all these things THEY did, it shows us right there where the problem is. EXECS shouldn't run soaps, if they let the Head Writer and Executive Producer do the job they were hired for the genre would have been much better off.

You are right in saying they failed in telling good stories, although thats because those execs were involved too much, we are sometimes

too hard on this or that writer, but in fact, what we see on screen isn't really the full visions of the head writers on our soaps as their visions get screwed up and rewritten by these idiots at the networks who think they know better. I remember writers saying how they loved working for Bridget and Jerry Dobson on SB, breakdown and script writers would get a simple line from Bridget saying "feel free" meaning they as the breakdown or script writer had full creative power in the script, whereas other EP's/HW's would provide lines and lines and lines of instructions. Thats the secret of the great talent like the Dobson's, they had faith in the creative people they hired, there is no faith anymore, no freedom, network execs feel they need to micromanage and they never let the writers and producers have creative control over anything.

My bad. You right, Jack. All we needed was one more knick-knack at Wal-Mart and AMC & OLTL coulda been saved.

Because you didn't tell good stories. None of that means a damn without good story. Or did we forget to cover that between the cross-country road trips and the skunky perfume tie-ins?

Yup, throughout that whole thing, never once mentioned a thing about if the writing was worth a damn. Maybe if they had actually put in people in charge that could write stories people want to watch.

Sara Saedi

Oh. THAT Sara Saedi. Director of West Coast Programming and one of those in charge of original programming for SoapNet. Of course she's going to bat for Frons, they worked together closely.

Her credibility is now blown.

You are right in saying they failed in telling good stories, although thats because those execs were involved too much, we are sometimes too hard on this or that writer, but in fact, what we see on screen isn't really the full visions of the head writers on our soaps as their visions get screwed up and rewritten by these idiots at the networks who think they know better.

On the one hand, I agree. But, OTOH, I feel like if the writers had stood their collective ground more and not allowed the execs to pummel and bully them into submission, there might've been less bad material stinking up the shows. As it is, I feel like soaps are dying primarily because today's generation of scribes don't have the training or the backbone their forefathers and mothers had. Instead, they're yes-men (and -women), unwilling to rock the proverbial boat, b/c they've allowed their relatively fat(ter) paychecks to make 'em scared of going hungry.

So apparently the Today Show had a segment where they talked about Hoover pulling it's ads from ABC. I didn't catch it myself, being talked about on twitter.

Ironically, Shemar Moore would play the light-skinned Black who ultimately "saves" daytime by marrying the abused heroine fixing the network's woes.

And a last minute cameo by Oprah.

Oh. THAT Sara Saedi. Director of West Coast Programming and one of those in charge of original programming for SoapNet. Of course she's going to bat for Frons, they worked together closely.

Her credibility is now blown.

She, Sara, also wrote the Whatifs.

Wendy Williams just talked about it now.

Wendy just said that Erika Slezak was crying when she was going to book her for the show

OK.

None of THIS...

We brought back legacy characters, we brought in younger characters in hopes of raising our teen and 18-34 demo, we cut costs, we executed high concept action driven storylines, we executed high romance emotionally driven storylines, we started a cable network so women could watch their soaps at night, we produced webisodes, we used CGI to raise production value, we did endless research to figure out what was working for viewers and what wasn't, we went back to focusing on social issues, we went HD, we traveled all around the country so soap stars could meet their fans, we hired Latino actors to attract the telenovella viewers, we went more salacious in our narratives, we went more true to life in our narratives, we went multi-platform, we did shorter close ended story arcs, we sat in rooms for hours with writers and talked in great depth about every single character on each show and what their objectives were, we took risks, we played it safe, we sold an All My Children perfume in Wal-Mart, we published books "written by" our fictional characters, we killed off beloved characters, we brought back beloved characters from the dead, we even brought a movie star on General Hospital...and the ratings still didn't go up.

had ANYTHING to do with THIS problem...

we didn't dispose of computers and additional TV sets in people's homes to get families back to one TV per household. (Teens and kids don't watch soaps with their moms anymore, because they don't have to--- they have their own TVs in their rooms or computers to keep them company.) We also didn't try to get women out of the work force and back into their homes to watch TV during the day. We didn't confiscate every single DVR in every single house and destroy it. We didn't put an end to cable TV and the 200+ channels soaps compete with, we didn't hold Telemundo and Univision hostage and forbid them from airing telenovellas, we didn't outlaw Reality TV or primetime shows that ripped off our format, and we didn't create a time machine to take us back to the heyday of soaps in the 1980s.

DAYTIME.

GHETTO.

They did ALL of that sh!t that didn't work at all, but they never once thought about grabbing the bull by the horns and doing something to get these shows out of a dying day part. SOAPnet does NOT count.

we sat in rooms for hours with writers and talked in great depth about every single character on each show and what their objectives were

Strange how there was never any on-screen indication that such discussions had taken place.

http://www.crystalair.com/story.php?id=201104007

WASHINGTON (CAP) - President Barack Obama continued to reveal details of his deficit-reduction plan this week, including a controversial provision that would raise taxes on the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans in order to save the recently cancelled ABC soap opera One Life To Live.

"One Life To Live is, uh, part of the cornerstone, the bedrock of American culture," said Obama in a press conference Monday. "How many of us spent lonely afternoons following the adventures of, you know, Bo and Clint Buchanan, and Viki, who suffered from dissociative identity disorder and became Niki, the sexually promiscuous party girl, and Karen and Larry Wolek, who, uh, had control chips implanted in their brains by the evil Dr. Ivan Kipling."

Obama recalled rearranging the rabbit-ears antenna on his small, black-and-white TV set as a youth in order to pick up the soap opera. "It was often very tough to get the signal there in Kenya," he said. "By which I mean, of course, Honolulu."

The budget provision, which would filter funds gleaned from the tax hike directly to ABC-TV in much the same way PBS and National Public Radio receive government funding, has not surprisingly drawn fire from the GOP.

"This type of thing is exactly the reason the country is in the fiscal trouble it's in," said Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), whose own budget plan would drastically slash Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, public education, environmental protection, social services and snow plowing, as well as eliminate road repairs on thoroughfares that go by senior centers and homeless shelters.

Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl - who drew fire recently when he said that "well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does" is abortions, when the number is actually 3 percent - also spoke out against Obama's plan.

"Actually, what I had meant to say is the well over 90 percent of what One Life To Live characters do is get abortions," said Kyl. A CAP News study of episodes of the soap opera since its debut in 1968 shows that in this case, Kyl's figure is actually a little low.

And potential Republican presidential contender Sarah Palin, star of Sarah Palin's Alaska, called Obama's One Life To Live plan "redonkulous," saying, "Who wants to watch a big, dysfunctional family of crazies with dumb names say stupid things and go all over the place having babies and silly stuff like that?"

Obama said he remains undeterred, however. "To restore fiscal responsibility, we all need to share in the sacrifice - but we don't have to sacrifice the America we believe in," he said. "That's an America, you know, where Clint Buchanan can go back in time to 1888, or, uh, Viki Buchanan can get trapped in the lost underground city of Eterna and discover she had a long-lost daughter she never knew about because she'd been hypnotized to forget the birth."

Obama did say he was willing to compromise, though, noting that his plan includes no funding to save the also-cancelled All My Children.

"That show is just silly," Obama said.