May 2-6, 2011

[juniorz1]

Question: What happens if all 21,000 Nielsen homes actually watch the same thing one day? For example, like the Super Bowl- say each of those 21,000 homes has a Super Bowl party. Then what? You've got 21,000 homes all with 15-100 people in it- what do you do? Do you think that happened for the last episode of MASH? Or the premiere of Dallas following the cliffhanger of JR being shot? Just curious.

[edgeofnik]

What's hurting soaps more than ratings - it's the economics. The Talk's ratings are still below ATWT and I'm willing to bet a pile of money the trash that will replace AMC and OLTL will do worse (and I believe far worse). At least TT had model of View as a guide. Those other shows - YUK. All we can do is hope that websoaps really take off. I'm really into The Bay and look forward to its return. Haven't heard anything about Gotham lately, but hope that comes back.

[JackPeyton]

except that when they left, ratings went up...

perhaps they should just tell a good soap opera, like they did when they fired all of them and raised the ratings.

[Bella1974]

All of the other shows have fallen. Two weeks ago, OLTL had a whopping 20,000 more viewers than GH, this week it's 119,000, that's just not a significant difference. Where it matters, the key demo, GH hit a series low, but it still drew more younger female viewers than oLTL. The fact is that GH's numbers don't mean that OLTL should not have been canceled, what they show is that GH's days are numbered too, and that both shows are barely drawing any viewers.

[Ann_SS]

Exactly. GH has been given a reprieve because it has higher ratings in the key advertising demo, women 18 to 49 years. But like Y&R, GH's 18 to 49 women demo is collapsing. We know GH has slashed its budget, but if those demos keep falling as with OLTL, there will quickly come a point where the profit margin becomes too thin and it will be cancelled.

We are never going to agree on this. I don't see any evidence that there is an association between quality and ratings of the soaps specifically. Even when the soaps were subjectively "good," there were occasional upward bumps, but the ratings continued decline overall so the reason for the decline has to be other factors such as a declining audience as women flocked to the workplace, competitive programming, etc.

[JaneAusten]

But see I don't see these much higher demos GH has that the other soaps barring Y&R. They have teetered between 1.1 -1.3 for months while OLTL has been .9 - 1.1 on occassion. Thats not huge. And now OLTL and GH are basically the same for all intensive purposes. And yeah Y&R's numbers are collapsing also.

I am with you here. I think many just have a hard time accepting the fact that maybe soaps are just done as they are. The days of people being able to devote

5 days a week 5 hours a week to one activity especially one TV show is over. I think its pretty amazing that they draw the viewers they still do. Granted they are mostly older viewers but its still a feat. And the loss of viewers sad to say may just be the older viewers tied to these shows for years dying off too. My great aunt who was 92 just recently passed away and she watched Y&R and B&B since their inceptions until the day she died. No genre lives on forever and most

leave for a time and come back revitalized and different. The same will happen here.

[Ann_SS]

I didn't say that the demos are "much higher" just that they are higher which matters to ABC as it forecasts ad revenue and cuts costs. The ad revenue is determined by the 18 to 49 women demos during sweeps although from a little I have read indicate there is some negotiating in between. This is where Guza's relatively successful sweep stunts gives GH the advantage over the other ABC soaps. This why I said on the previous thread that while GH's demos are falling, it could be due to the good weather and that we have to wait until fall i.e. sweeps to really know how serious this drop off really is.

[DaytimeFan]

No no, lets keep DAYS' dignity here. No need to stoop to ANY of those characters.

DAYS is a goner once its contract is up, no character is going to change that one.

[JaneAusten]

Ok I misunderstood. I still haven't seen anything really significant in terms of demos on GH since the Dante shooting. But it's all moot at this point. Everyones demos and ratings are dropping. GH will get their walking papers next year most likely so maybe that's why they arent going all out anymore because it's not going to really matter anyway. And it could be seasonal. Y&R had a relatively climatic week last week in terms of story and they didn't get a boost.

[DRW50]

Again I'm not saying it's about quality as much as what draws people in. I have never liked Bob Guza as a writer, even when he was the darling of the soap press, but his first run as headwriter brought the numbers up from where they were in 94-95, at a time when other soaps were fading fast. Clearly his writing at that time spoke to people, and was helped by a strong EP in Wendy Riche.

I know life changes and time changes and so on, but I do believe that if GH was anywhere near that well put together today, the ratings would be much stronger. Frons essentially lets Guza's worst tendencies run wild, and viewers who tried to hang on and kept coming back and so on have given up, with stunts that would have been guaranteed successes at one time now generating nothing at all.

I think many would say the show is worse now than it was in 2003, and when it comes to something like VMG's return, I do think that affected the ratings. I don't believe that women suddenly started working more since 2003 or that people suddenly discovered a lot more channels since 2003.

[DRW50]

In many ways I think that with DVR, and with the ability to watch on the Internet, it's easier now to watch a 5 day a week show than it was in the days when you had no VCR, you had to rely on someone to tell you what you missed, or if you were lucky, you could find it in a soap magazine, weeks later.

If I felt like the soaps of the last 15 years were of a better quality, then I would have no problem saying, "The genre is dead, time to move on." But since I do think that the soaps of the last 15 years have, by and large, been poor to poorer to poorest, I can't believe that it's the 5 day a week grind itself that is responsible for the changes. I think people just got sick of watching crap, got sick of being treated like fools, and got sick of seeing a world that they can in no way connect with.

[JaneAusten]

Well I guess we can agree to disagree. I see your point. But viewers die off move onto other things. It happens in primetime why is it that daytime is

excluded from this with the bad writing used as a reason versus the reasons people gravitate from other TV shows over the years. Something else captures

their interest. Sure the internet is available but I doubt people are spending their days watching soaps all day on the internet. Sure some are but how is

that differnt than anything else. Yeah the DVR is available as is the internet which makes more alternate forms of entertainment available also. Could the

shows be better yes but I am still with Ann I really don't believe it would have made a difference. As for VM's return in 2002, the shows were already on the

decline before then and her return did have an impact for a time. But once she left the steady decline that was already happening continued.

[DRW50]

I don't think anyone is excluding this reason for why daytime has lost viewers. Many people do move on. Times change. I just don't think the massive bleeding of viewers is all from changing times. There is this idea in the press that women all sat at home all day and then suddenly OJ was on TV and all the women went to work and found other channels and soaps died. I don't believe that. Primetime has also had ratings erosion, but I think they have managed to keep more viewers, partially because more people watch TV at night, but also because there is more of a choice of programming and there is not as much contempt for the viewer and fear of a world beyond 1950.

There aren't that many more alternate forms of entertainment now than there were 10-15 years ago - in some ways I think there are less (aside from a few much-hyped primetime dramas, cable TV seems like a wasteland these days, to me). You can spend more time talking and enjoying yourself online or texting, but then I think many soap viewers probably had ways to do that even before the Internet, so I don't think it's either/or. They just don't have a reason to bother with soaps now, because they're so bad and they're not pitched to anyone who would ever actually watch a soap (how many middle-aged, white, straight misogynists watch soaps?).

You wouldn't have to spend all day watching soaps on the Internet. The episodes are available all the time. You could watch part of an episode and then go back and watch more later on. Or, these days, you could skip most of the episode and just watch what you want to.

If soaps gave people a reason to make an effort, they would, IMO.

[Ann_SS]

I agree that a good (or even mediocre) headwriter can bring up the ratings, but my positions is any increase is only a temporary event amidst a constant downward spiral which didn't start in 2003, btw. The decline started when the soaps first aired, but became sharper as the audience declined due to women entering the workplace and other programming became available, some even helped delay the decline like Oprah. I simply do not agree that if a soap was "well put together" that it would make any difference. The audience in the key 18 to 49 women demo simply is not there any more and no scripted program last forever.

Really, we just have to agree to disagree.

[DRW50]

I didn't mean the decline started in 2003 - I meant that was the last time GH had a sustained and strong jump in the ratings. That seems impossible now but it's not like 2003 was a lifetime away. Yet the soaps have been destroyed creatively in that timeframe, and viewers probably know it.

I guess for me, if it was just about nothing lasting forever and women working, the soaps would have died 20 or 30 years ago. I think there was something unique about soaps that drew people in, like college students, even as other more traditional viewers may have moved on. Soaps were able to adapt. All they know how to do now is regress, because they are run by incompetents who can justify their poor decisions by blaming the public.

But I realize I am one of the few who feels this way.