The OJ Simpson trial, and your soap viewing

[DRW50]

I see the pop culture part, but executives also blame OJ. This is used as a scapegoat, as if viewers were sheep.

I also know that more women began working at that time, but the tone of the coverage is that women were chained to their radiators and then suddenly ran wild. Many women were busy before the early 90's, and they just made time to watch soaps if soaps were worth watching. Then there are other women, women I knew, who often stayed home, and didn't even have cable, but stopped watching soaps because they just felt alienated from them.

[SweetPea36]

I was raised with soaps. The women in my family all listened to radio soaps while they did their housework. My mother was an avid soap fan who watched DOOL from its very first day until she died last year. She also watched and loved most of the P&G soaps, GL, EON, ATWT. She didn't like either Y&R or B&B, although she occasionally watched one or the other. She watched some of the ABC soaps, especially OLTL. She liked GH because she had a major crush on Steve Hardy. She watched until it became what she called the Tony Geary show. She really despised Geary. She was not fond of the adventure yarns that took over GH, and she quit watching that show in the early 80s. I don't remember a time when our lives during the day did not include soap operas.

She turned off her TV rather than watch the OJ trial. When it was over, she went back to her pre-empted soap.

Most soap fans I knew did the same thing she did. I find it hard to believe the OJ trial was that devastating. Soap operas did themselves in with bad storytelling and bad acting. Mostly I think they forgot to focus on what made soaps what they were to begin with – family-centered dramas. Characters could do all kinds of things, but they came home to their families.

[Susan Hunter]

This wasn't Watergate or Clarence Thomas/Anita HIll or Bill Clinton's impeachment or Ollie North. It had nothing to do with government, politics or national security. I think OJ killed soaps in that it was the first time that network execs pre-empted original programming to broadcast a pop culture murder trial. It was in essence the first big F-U to the daytime dramas. It was the first big F-U to daytime drama fans.

[Eric83]

It wasn't a [!@#$%^&*] you to anyone. It is what people wanted to see so they put it on air.

I don't think it has anything to do with the death of soaps. I never understood that theory

[soapfan770]

Umm, can we stop for a moment and think about the state of each soap and remember what was going on with each soap in 1995? Remember this was the Kenneth Fitts era for the P&G soaps that nearly got each of them dead in the water, Y&R was solid but entered into an awkward phase and of course Days' ratings were solid and going up still but at the risk of permanently damaging the show's reputation.

Sure the OJ media circus hype was huge and lots of pre-emptions occurred along with other major incidents like the OKC bombing and while it certainly caused disruptions by the end of 1995 some of the soaps were becoming a mess storyline-wise and that's probably what drove viewers out.

[DRW50]

The CBS P&G soaps were a big mess in 1994. I guess if you had to choose between Clarence Thomas or Mike/Rosanna, and Judge Ito or Shannon's horrendous return, you would go for the latter.

I guess AW and Loving were already low enough that their viewers stayed intact.

[Michael]

I think the OJ trial also helped unleash a widely accepted public appetite for scandal and salaciousness. Between that, the Menendez brothers, Lorena Bobbitt, Nancy Kerrigan/Tonya Harding, and other scandals, these sorts of stories started to become our entertainment rather than simply items covered by the news.

[Susan Hunter]

It showed that the networks thought that soaps were expendable for pop culture salaciousness. If the trial had taken place in primetime, would their primetime lineups have been pre-empted for gavel to gavel coverage and analysis?

It doesn't really matter what state the soaps were or weren't in because quite frankly that is subjective, what matters is that the three major networks thought nothing of pulling their soap lineups in favor of tabloid celebrity trash and then were shocked when it blew up in their faces.

OJ didn't kill the soap opera, network executives did.

[Pine Charles]

I was young when this went down (elementary school), but for some reason have no recollection of it interuppting AMC (and I was an avid viewer in '94/'95). Odd.

[Gray Bunny]

Very true.

As for the state of soaps in 1995, wasn't the producer/writer musical chairs at P&G a result of already falling ratings from all the preliminary OJ coverage in 1994? Soaps had some great ratings at the start of 1994, and they really suffered once the OJ factor came into play. But it seems like all the PANIC of the falling ratings resulted in poor quality product and drastic decisions that proved to be failures.

[edgeofnight]

Just to compare -- but a generation BEFORE the OJ Simpson trial, there was an even BIGGER soap opera going on -- the Watergate televised hearings. It wasn't so much the fan outrage over pre-emptions, it was the network big-wigs who were losing advertising revenue. They, then, had to televise the hearings on a rotational basis...1 day - CBS, 1 day - NBC, 1 day - ABC, etc...

By the time the Simpson trial was going on, the soaps were no longer the 'bread and butter' of the three major networks. It was easier for the networks to break into a soap and report that 'attorney F. Lee Bailey sneezed,' or some other trivial matter relating to the trial.

Also, by the time of the Simpson trial, TV was no longer just the three major networks...cable tv and a host of other stations were vying for viewers' attention.

I also agree with the earlier poster who said that the sudden death of Doug Marland did irreparable damage to ATWT.

[tune_in_tomorrow]

I'm in the minority here with my view that the decline in quality of soaps doesn't have much to do with the decline in ratings. At least directly. I do think that any perceived decline in quality in conjunction with the OJ trial could have sped up the decline that I think was going to happen anyway. Soap viewing in my opinion, as others also have mentioned, is as much a habit as anything else (witness all the comments on this board about how awful GH, Y&R and DAYS are, yet most people still tune in). The trial broke that habit and if people weren't enjoying what they were seeing before the trial, it was easier to move on to something else. I still think the decline in ratings is simply because more choices were out there by the mid '90s -- large numbers of younger viewers never sampled the soaps so didn't form an opinion on their quality. Housewives in the '50s and '60s either died or aged out of the desired demographic, the college students and high school students in the '70s and '80s got jobs and families and also started aging out of the desired demographic, and there wasn't anyone left in large numbers to replace them.

[dragonflies]

plus 1

[DRW50]

If the shows had been a strong enough quality, they would have been able to keep the viewers who were aging out, or bring in new viewers. They'd done it before. Nothing about the world in 1994 was so different that a good show wouldn't have kept their attention.

[tune_in_tomorrow]

There was a LOT different in '94. The technological landscape had changed. Even if you wanted to stick with just what was on television (and there were more choices out there than television by the mid '90s), Fox, MTV, ESPN, TNT, USA, A&E, Lifetime, etc. etc. were all siphoning viewers off the three major networks in larger numbers at all times of the day. The number one primetime show in '86-'87 was The Cosby Show which had 34% of the population watching. In '94-'95, Seinfeld was number one with only 20% watching. (Last year the number one primetime show was Sunday Night Football with 13% watching). Daytime drops are similar.

I'm not arguing that TV is just as good as it was, my argument is that more competition from other networks, the internet, Netflix, etc. are going to have a greater impact on what "new" viewers will watch. They aren't going to sample the 3 major networks first because those aren't the only game in town.