@Gray Bunny Exactly. Didn't America already try with the telenovela format with flops like American Heiress, Fashion House, Desire, and Saints & Sinners?

 

They did, but let's be honest. How were those ever going to work? The writing was so uninspired that, despite only running for a whopping 65 episodes, they filled each and every episode with coooooountlessssss flashbacks of whole scenes, over and over again. It was like the new material was part of a clip show, not the other way around. Not to mention they expected people to tune in 5 days a week against major primetime hits at 8 and 9 PM on a new format that the US was not accustomed to, without good writing, and before TiVos and DVRs were everything. Even I, as a rabid soap fan, could not commit (but would have if the writing was good). It was doomed to fail.

I watched Fashion House and Desire but tuned out after that. All the flashback and filler was annoying. I thought the writing was decent enough but the pacing wasn't good. Those probably could have been cut down to like 30-40 episodes aired 3 times a week if they got rid of all the unnecessary junk

Edited April 26, 20169 yr by Cheap21

In all honesty, OLTL & AMC 2.0 had the perfect models or were close enough. 4 episodes a week with a recap episode on Friday. Sadly, they should've never given the rights to Prospect Park. I don't think Hulu was a good platform to house them either. I think Netflix would've been a better platform. 

 

I think online streaming is the only way were are going to get innovative and great soaps again. It won't occur on network TV as it is a thing of the past. 

@Gray Bunny Exactly. Didn't America already try with the telenovela format with flops like American Heiress, Fashion House, Desire, and Saints & Sinners?

 

They did, but let's be honest. How were those ever going to work? The writing was so uninspired that, despite only running for a whopping 65 episodes, they filled each and every episode with coooooountlessssss flashbacks of whole scenes, over and over again. It was like the new material was part of a clip show, not the other way around. Not to mention they expected people to tune in 5 days a week against major primetime hits at 8 and 9 PM on a new format that the US was not accustomed to, without good writing, and before TiVos and DVRs were everything. Even I, as a rabid soap fan, could not commit (but would have if the writing was good). It was doomed to fail.

I watched Fashion House and Desire but tuned out after that. All the flashback and filler was annoying. I thought the writing was decent enough but the pacing wasn't good. Those probably could have been cut down to like 30-40 episodes aired 3 times a week if they got rid of all the unnecessary junk

I couldn't watch either show. The acting and stories were too atrocious and I felt they knew it was bad and decided to play on it even more. 

@Gray Bunny Exactly. Didn't America already try with the telenovela format with flops like American Heiress, Fashion House, Desire, and Saints & Sinners? I don't that filling these shows up with a bunch of scenery chewing youngsters, which they'll do, will help the matters even more. I'd only watch if it had serious actors tied to like @Soapsuds said--Kathy Hays, Don Hastings, Eileen Fulton, Hilary B. Smith, Ric Hearst, etc. I couldn't bear to watch something with someone with the acting abilities of Hayley Erin, Yvonne Zima, Vivian Jovanni, etc.  I just can't....

 

I also never got how multimillionaires on soaps too had these big ass estates but were so accessible for everyone. Ain't no way that'd be possible for real people with money. 

Those telenovelas Nickelodeon keeps forcing on the kids are the worst. Because they film some of their children's telenovelas for their Latin American channel in Miami they've been reusing the sets and doing English counterparts of the same stories for the US. I had to suffer through more than one with my young niece. It was terrible  and it had the look of 90s public access TV shows. And yes they do follow the 5 day a week format for them. 

You mean Hollywood Heights

With the MyNetworkTV shows, they did an omnibus, so I watched that. I didn't view it every night as no enough time, and the flashbacks. The omnibus wasn't as frustrating. 

Getting back lapsed viewers is very difficult. People move on and that's that. I think most people who leave a soap do so gradually and not just for one event.

@Gray Bunny Exactly. Didn't America already try with the telenovela format with flops like American Heiress, Fashion House, Desire, and Saints & Sinners? I don't that filling these shows up with a bunch of scenery chewing youngsters, which they'll do, will help the matters even more. I'd only watch if it had serious actors tied to like @Soapsuds said--Kathy Hays, Don Hastings, Eileen Fulton, Hilary B. Smith, Ric Hearst, etc. I couldn't bear to watch something with someone with the acting abilities of Hayley Erin, Yvonne Zima, Vivian Jovanni, etc.  I just can't....

 

I also never got how multimillionaires on soaps too had these big ass estates but were so accessible for everyone. Ain't no way that'd be possible for real people with money. 

Those telenovelas Nickelodeon keeps forcing on the kids are the worst. Because they film some of their children's telenovelas for their Latin American channel in Miami they've been reusing the sets and doing English counterparts of the same stories for the US. I had to suffer through more than one with my young niece. It was terrible  and it had the look of 90s public access TV shows. And yes they do follow the 5 day a week format for them. 

You mean Hollywood Heights

No not Hollywood Heights. That one was more teenish and done in Los Angeles. The new set are for kids, filmed in Miami, very bad sitcomish, filled with kids who've obviously never acted before and just remakes of their Latin American shows.

 

@Gray Bunny Exactly. Didn't America already try with the telenovela format with flops like American Heiress, Fashion House, Desire, and Saints & Sinners? I don't that filling these shows up with a bunch of scenery chewing youngsters, which they'll do, will help the matters even more. I'd only watch if it had serious actors tied to like @Soapsuds said--Kathy Hays, Don Hastings, Eileen Fulton, Hilary B. Smith, Ric Hearst, etc. I couldn't bear to watch something with someone with the acting abilities of Hayley Erin, Yvonne Zima, Vivian Jovanni, etc.  I just can't....

 

I also never got how multimillionaires on soaps too had these big ass estates but were so accessible for everyone. Ain't no way that'd be possible for real people with money. 

Those telenovelas Nickelodeon keeps forcing on the kids are the worst. Because they film some of their children's telenovelas for their Latin American channel in Miami they've been reusing the sets and doing English counterparts of the same stories for the US. I had to suffer through more than one with my young niece. It was terrible  and it had the look of 90s public access TV shows. And yes they do follow the 5 day a week format for them. 

You mean Hollywood Heights

No not Hollywood Heights. That one was more teenish and done in Los Angeles. The new set are for kids, filmed in Miami, very bad sitcomish, filled with kids who've obviously never acted before and just remakes of their Latin American shows.

 

oh... I never seen those except Hollywood Heights and when Degrassi did the telenovela format for a few seasons

TBH, these days, I'd much rather have a weekly, 30- or 60-minute series with self-contained stories and no convoluted arcs or mythologies that make it impossible for anyone to follow unless they do so from the very beginning.  Because, as much as I have loved serialized storytelling and always will, I have reached the conclusion that no one in entertainment learned a damn thing from Irna, Bill, Agnes or Doug.

TBH, these days, I'd much rather have a weekly, 30- or 60-minute series with self-contained stories and no convoluted arcs or mythologies that make it impossible for anyone to follow unless they do so from the very beginning.  Because, as much as I have loved serialized storytelling and always will, I have reached the conclusion that no one in entertainment learned a damn thing from Irna, Bill, Agnes or Doug.

At least no one currently in the business of producing or writing daytime dramas.

Or even primetime or cable or streaming dramas.

TBH, these days, I'd much rather have a weekly, 30- or 60-minute series with self-contained stories and no convoluted arcs or mythologies that make it impossible for anyone to follow unless they do so from the very beginning.  Because, as much as I have loved serialized storytelling and always will, I have reached the conclusion that no one in entertainment learned a damn thing from Irna, Bill, Agnes or Doug.

I do think that there are writers out there that have learned from the greats; however, it's hard to get into Hollywood and to sell anything when it is an industry that loves to hire people they know (and don't give a sh-t) rather than hire people who know and love the material or genre. 

I don't think soaps will compete as long as they cling to tired domestic drama material.   What was compelling in 1976 is not the same as in 2016 and we have seen in show after show from Lost to Walking Dead and all smash hits in between that the scope of material covered on TV has broadened greatly.   And yet soaps still want to tell stories about women being pregnant.   Not even a story which happens to star a pregnant woman, but rather the story itself is she is pregnant.   And why would anyone who just got through watching tonight's Game Of Thrones waste their time on such nonsense?

 

Strangely, the 1980s saw soaps when they cast their widest net seeking out types of material  (and consequently enjoyed their highest ratings)  but the 1990s saw soaps decide that this was somehow unsophisticated and embarrassing.    So what would make me watch a new soap?  Maybe a murder mystery soap?  Perhaps a soap with a hint of science fiction.    I gave up GH in last fall, and while I love Tracy Quartermaine I don't care she has an illness.  I've seen illnesses before, do you have anything where she marries a terrorist and doesn't know it?     Soaps have to speak to the times, and soaps forgot that.  

Why are we ignoring the fact that NONE of the current soaps (and very FEW soaps in general) were created to be showcases for science fiction, fantasy, action, adventure storylines? If that's the type of thing you want to see, stop trying to force it onto shows that were never meant to be those things. Most soaps were created to be domestic dramas. That was the fundamental purpose of Irna Phillips creating the very first one! They were all mutated to different degrees in order to chase ratings that were never going to be sustainable, and we ended up with dead soaps walking suffering through massive identity crises. I just don't understand how or why it is acceptable for daytime series to attempt to completely change identity and tone. A primetime series will never force itself to be something it was never meant to be. Once their time is up, they die (sometimes with dignity in tact) and something new comes along. Should they have put a wider variety of series on in daytime when they could have afforded to take chances in the 70s and 80s? Absolutely. I would love it if there'd been some soaps that focused on other topics, but as it stands, those shows were never created or never made it to air. The result is that each show with an established focus had to be poked and prodded instead of allowed to just be what they were supposed to be.

And now look at the mess that has ensued. How in the world can a show like DAYS ever, ever, please a large percentage of its audience when the show has been too many different things to too many different groups of people, all of whom want it to be the way they prefer for it to be?

And might I add, there is a huge audience of TV viewers who did not watch Lost, don't watch Game of Thrones, do not watch The Walking Dead, and do not care for any other shows that are hyped and hyped to be watched by "everyone." These are people who just do not give a f!ck about watching fantasy/sci-fi sh!t and would love to watch a good, solid domestic drama. The problem is that those shows don't exist anymore because A, TPTB do not give a f!ck about serving that audience at ALL because they can't make as much money off of them, and B, so many new shows are desperately and embarrassingly trying hard to fit into that forced-suspense, "should've been a mini-series because once this lame-ass plot is done after season 1, what are they gonna throw together next?" mold.

And no offense, but let's be real. Let's please not act like there's anything fresh or new or inherently interesting about the word "murder" or the murder mystery genre. The Queen was already doing it 30 years ago, except it didn't take her 10 episodes to tell a story, nor did she overdose on her own hype after three seasons.

And aren't murder mysteries one of THE most played-out stories on soaps of the last 20 years? 

We were asked what it would take to get people back, I said what I thought.   I don't know how what Irma Phillips intended in 1937 has any bearing on tastes of the TV public in 2017.    On the one hand you pick mega popular shows and say there is a huge audience of people who don't want to watch them (these, the most watched shows) and then turn right around and say there is a huge audience for domestic dramas despite then noting there are very few on the air, and it goes without saying that the ones that are on the air are not setting any ratings records on fire.   Murder is just an angle that has stood the test of time when it comes to fiction, and I would bet money any random murder show will do better than a random adultery and miscarriage show. 

 

I don't know if murder mysteries on soaps are played out, but if the one every two or three years has made it played out, then by your very definition stories where women get pregnant and don't know who the father is must have been played out circa 1962.    And yet they are still here.

There are only a few on the air, and they aren't setting the ratings on fire, but they're still being watched and are being produced within their means for their audience. I do not do Tyler Perry things at all, but he's found a devoted following with his soaps on OWN. Many of your lapsed daytime viewers are absolutely tuning into his shows because, good or bad, they are providing what Y&R and the others used to provide. Look on this board, look on social media. It's a niche audience, but there's nothing wrong with having a niche audience - it's the struggle for mainstream approval that stripped the soaps of their identity and turned them into desperate shells of themselves. While they tried (and failed) to hop on the latest bandwagon, they were losing fans who would have just been satisfied if the soaps had been true to themselves. That's just not something the shows did until they got a taste of it in the 80s (when the stars aligned and what was big in primetime was itself a variation of what daytime had been doing for decades). In the 50s and 60s, every last soap managed to completely avoid trying to mimic westerns, spy fiction, and sci-fi, which were arguably the biggest primetime drama genres of the era, and they thrived by just being themselves, by keeping true to the vision of what each show's creator intended. After the stars aligned in the early 80s, it became all about trying to make soaps into something other than what they'd been, though none of the shows had the means to pull it off, which is why any attempt at science fiction or fantasy in daytime in the last 25 years has been a complete joke to basically everyone who isn't a soap fan and probably most of us who are.

I'm on my phone, so sorry for the huge blocks of text. In regards to Irna in 1937, my point was that all of the soaps created up until a certain point were all rooted in domestic drama, starting with Irna's first creation, and so domestic drama they all should have been and should be until the grand finale. Dark Shadows wasn't a domestic soap, and it shouldn't have ever tried to be, and it didn't, so it worked. It was a soap with a different focus, and it's great that it was given a shot because it obviously captured an audience that the other soaps never touched. The network people should've tried more shows that were off the beaten path. There probably would have been more success stories like DS, but they didn't try, and instead, they gave facelifts to shows that didn't need them, and, once again, class, the shows were stripped of their own identities to try (and fail) to jump on the mainstream bandwagon.

 

And say the soaps do gravitate towards whatever gets the mainstream audience talking these days. Say you do have forced fantasy garbage (taped with three cameras on a soundstage at CBS Television City, btw, because that's what your budget allows). What happens when the attention shifts to something else? Do you just drop the sci-fi/fantasy crap to slip into the next trendy subgenre? Remember when GL tried to do that superhero nonsense with Harley? That's the type of embarrassing stuff that killed soaps. Remember when AMC was supposed to be like Sex and the City? Embarrassing!!

 

In regards to murder mysteries being played out, my meaning of the phrase there is that all of the attempts at such stories in daytime in recent years have been colossal failures, so how and why is that somewhere soaps need to keep going? If it's a murder mystery written well, then that's one thing, because you can take a timeless story, be it about a dead body turning up or a woman torn between two lovers, and always make it fresh if you know what you're doing and you have a real vision. On the other hand, a poorly written murder mystery is just as much a waste of time and resources as is a poorly written who's the daddy.

@Gray Bunny Exactly. Didn't America already try with the telenovela format with flops like American Heiress, Fashion House, Desire, and Saints & Sinners? I don't that filling these shows up with a bunch of scenery chewing youngsters, which they'll do, will help the matters even more. I'd only watch if it had serious actors tied to like @Soapsuds said--Kathy Hays, Don Hastings, Eileen Fulton, Hilary B. Smith, Ric Hearst, etc. I couldn't bear to watch something with someone with the acting abilities of Hayley Erin, Yvonne Zima, Vivian Jovanni, etc.  I just can't....

 

I also never got how multimillionaires on soaps too had these big ass estates but were so accessible for everyone. Ain't no way that'd be possible for real people with money. 

Those telenovelas Nickelodeon keeps forcing on the kids are the worst. Because they film some of their children's telenovelas for their Latin American channel in Miami they've been reusing the sets and doing English counterparts of the same stories for the US. I had to suffer through more than one with my young niece. It was terrible  and it had the look of 90s public access TV shows. And yes they do follow the 5 day a week format for them. 

You mean Hollywood Heights

No not Hollywood Heights. That one was more teenish and done in Los Angeles. The new set are for kids, filmed in Miami, very bad sitcomish, filled with kids who've obviously never acted before and just remakes of their Latin American shows.

 

oh... I never seen those except Hollywood Heights and when Degrassi did the telenovela format for a few seasons

I'm pretty sure the only reason they keep pushing them is because they're so cheap to make

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i526CxCgD1Y