The OJ Simpson trial, and your soap viewing

[DRW50]

I think most of those cable channels probably weren't appealing to a daytime viewer anyway - some might have been, but most of them were just running stuff already seen on the networks. That was around the time, give or take a few years, that all cable channels began to seriously homogenize.

I'm sure that the long preemptions did cause some viewers to lose interest, but I also feel like if the shows were easy enough to get back into, then the numbers would have improved. The soaps which did make more of an effort to get new viewers in a fresh way, like DAYS, rocketed up in the ratings. Most of the soaps were depressing, stagnant or outright bad, and they paid the price. I think it comes down to executives taking viewers for granted.