What is so Special about the folks of ABC DAYTIME!!?

[NothinButAttitude]

But seriously, y'all better leave my P&G soaps alone !! We fought hard to keep them! Let the LIGHT stay on and WORLD keep turning!

[Cheap21]

After the light went out, the world stopped turning. Fortunately all the children have more than one life to live apparently so the prospect of their new future seems as promising as the days to come, at least through 2014. Too bad some fans are still restless but that's to be expected when bold moves are made especially when they generally don't work in your favor

[NothinButAttitude]

Were you trying to READ me?! If so,

I give props where they are due. . .

[SFK]

The soap world is a relatively small one. It's like a repertory acting company with actors bouncing from show to show across network lines. I think this is more a case of "who you know". JFP will understandably recruit actors she's enjoyed working with over the years. Her last, longest stint was at GH so we will see GH faces (and even some of her GH faces were NBC faces before that from her earlier stints on SB and AW). Then you have the case of Y&R now being cast by Judy Wilson who cast for AMC for years (and was an ABC associate CD before that, working on RH and OLTL). It's only natural that we will see some of her favorite finds now on Y&R.

[SFK]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_21IDV8x6Ww

[EricMontreal22]

Soap opera church?

[Mr. Vixen]

Have a seat and stop with the shade. I plus 1'd her because I thought it was funny giving how angry the title of this thread made you come across as. To be honest, I didn't even read your original post in this whack ass thread and Cheap's response was enough to let me know I didn't need to.

I don't know what happened around here, everybody's so damn paranoid and cray cray these days.

[Ryan Chamberlain]

I never got why they skewed younger. I watched the CBS soaps until I was 20 and then I started watching ABC soaps. Not for the younger characters either. I fell in love with the vets on the shows. Even when they were undead. Here's looking at you Ghost Alan Q.

[EricMontreal22]

Initially it was a way for ABC to try to break into the soap market which was still insanely loyal to CBS (and then NBC started to make in-roads with The Doctors and, after a year or two of not doing very well, AW and DAYS). A younger audience was largely untapped for soaps in comparison--hence trying for shows which not just might actract younger but also different audiences (ie willing to be more diverse with OLTL, the failed youth "beach" soap Never Too Young which was replaced by the gothic and then supernatural soap Dark Shadows, etc). While OLTL and especially AMC did emphasize younger than was typical (and there had been young romance before of course, like the huge Penny love story on ATWT), it was carefully done by Agnes so that, unlike Never Too Young, she realized how equally important the roles of the older generations were--something to this day soaps often forget when they get a mandate to do more youth stories.

[will81]

I guess you guys are only talking about the USA, since many of the ABC soaps never made it to other countries or did for very short runs. The shows that were most popular overseas were GH, Days, Y&R, B&B, Santa Barbara etc...Not many ABC soaps in that bunch.

[EricMontreal22]

Yes, of course we are. Well, North America (soaps have always had a large Canadian viewership and apparently a larger percentage of the population for some reason watches them here according to some sources--I'm sure there's a joke about it being toocold to go outside or do anything but watch tv here... Another World before its cancelation oddly as one of the top daytime shows here).

But I think the popularity overseas was partly due to who sold their soaps first to foreign countries. ABC was much less interested and saw much less opportunity to do so--so was behind the game. Oddly, perhaps the most popular ABC soap overseas was Loving! It was so popular in South Africa that people have mentioned one of the characters sorta pseudo officially joined one of their own soaps when it finished--I always doubted this so asked a friend of mine who lived in SA until three years back and he said absolutely--he never watched but could name the major characters and said they would get newspaper headlines. It also was very popular in Italy and especially France.

(I didn't think GH was that popular overseas. In the 80s Pine Valley--AMC was very popular in Italy but it lost that by the nineties).

[will81]

Funny that shows like Santa Barbara and Loving were so popular in other parts of the world and were not great ratings grabbers in their country of origin.

[AdelaideCate007]

Loving was definitely huge in South Africa. When I lived there, pretty much everyone I knew watched it. When I lived in Italy, my neighbours would watch it with the subtitles on and learn English phrases and stuff like that from watching the show. The thing I remember most about it airing in France was that it was called Lovingly Yours.

I thought Santa Barbara was like B&B and always way more popular overseas than it ever was in the US.

[will81]

Yeah SB was big here in Australia, so was Another World until the early to mid 90's. Loving I don't think aired here, or at least I don't remember it.

[AdelaideCate007]

Yep. I grew up in Australia most of the time, and we always watched SB, AW, and the Bell soaps. We had the other ABC soaps, but I don't ever remember Loving airing here.

I didn't realise AMC was popular in Italy.