Did US soaps used to be better?

[applcin]

I add my yes as well.
 

I would say all of the above and then some.

As far as just the passage of time itself, you figure the longer something is on, the more repetitive the stories become, like how many times can a couple split then reunite, how many long-lost children can someone have, how many "back from the dead" and "who's your daddy" stories can there be...eventually, things reach a point where you've seen it all before and it can be mind-numbingly boring, especially if badly written. Also throw in things that have eaten away at the viewer base like more women working, the OJ Simpson trial, which preempted multiple soaps for multiple days (one article stated it cost the soaps 10% of the audience that didn't come back), more channel and viewing options. Soaps require a time commitment and a lot of people either don't want to or can't make that commitment anymore.(Look at now with weekly shows, how many people don't watch "live" anymore, opting instead for recording or streaming.) It was interesting to note that when Ryan's Hope (which started in 1975) was rerun decades later on a cable channel Soapnet, some viewers found the slower pace boring. Like if 2 characters had a conversation, you'd hear about it again and again because they would tell their friends and family and basically counsel one another about it. When that happens on a 22-minute show, stories take a long time to develop. People were now used to faster-paced, more action-filled storytelling.

As far as the quality, I think soaps had more of a niche or a sort of style about them that gave some of them a kind of uniqueness in the genre, even if, ironically, they tended to copy one another in some things, esp. in the late 70s-early 90s. GH was the action/adventure soap, Edge of Night was the mystery/film noir soap, Days of our Lives was on a roll in the 80s with creating multiple supercouples with amazing chemistry--even though they copied GH's whole anti-hero, supercouple, adventure thing, they did it quite well. Stories and characters seemed new and fresh then--a sexy "bad" guy with an eyepatch who falls for a nice girl (Days), a family of Texas cowboys in Pennsylvania (One Life to Live), secret agents with exotic accents (General Hospital)...it was all just loads of fun. But, as styles go, things eventually become outdated or shift their focus...and if that focus becomes so narrow, that can turn people off, too. (Heaven knows, I only took about a decade's worth, if that, of the Sonny/Jason mob infestation of GH until it (and uber-villainous Cassadines who don't stay dead) bored me out of the show for good.)

 

You know what they say about Hollywood now, that they don't make originals anymore and just keep remaking things? I think the soaps reached that stage a long time ago.

[DramatistDreamer]

 

That seemed to be a recurring theme for some of the P&G soaps during that time period.

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 A few years ago, I saw a scene on ATWT where David Stewart was knocking on the door of the Stewart cabin and rushed in, I swear, I thought the entire wall was going to fall down! But I overlooked it because the drama was so riveting.

 

 

As for the passage of time issue, it's funny when you look at the timeline of soaps. There was plenty of innovation between the 1st Golden Age (which included the transition from radio to television) and then from the 1st Golden Age to the 2nd Golden Age (encompassing the late 60s/early 70s through the 80s), but after the late 1980s, the soaps seemed to be extremely slow to innovate.

 

I look at today's model of binge-TV watching. Well, I used to record the soaps for my Mom as a child (I taught myself how to program a VCR at a very young age, along with the manual) and sometimes, depending on my Mother's work schedule, I'd save episodes and she'd watch a block of episodes (usually no more than 3) on the weekend to catch up.

 

I am sure that soaps, who do plenty of market research for their advertisers, knew that women were in the workplace more. So why did they not try to all get together and advocate for delayed viewing to be given greater consideration in the Nielsen? I know how a Nielsen device works so, it could've been quite straight-forward to get a "Nielsen Family" to note how often viewers watched Live and how often they watched Delayed.  If they discovered that a significant number of viewers were recording their shows (and I believe there were) and watching at a later time, at least this knowledge would've put the onus on Advertisers to come up with campaigns that would prevent viewers from Fast Forwarding through ads as the soaps and the companies that produce them could at least have claimed that viewers were watching their soaps but perhaps they were skipping the commercials, so the fault would obviously not lie with the soaps.

 

Because of the great times of the 1980s, most soaps had become complacent and were very unprepared for the real life soap opera of the OJ murder saga and trial. 

If you take a look at some of the dismal writing in the months preceeding and proceeding pre-emption, it becomes clear that very few of these shows were at their best at the time of the trial and I think since they had taken audiences for granted that they would all return, didn't do what it would take to lure them back.

 

Once you lose an audience (and some were leaving before the OJ trial pre-emptions), it's pretty difficult to get them back.

 

In the soaps defense, it's pretty difficult to innovate and tell fresh stories when you are limited in the types of stories you can tell as soaps tend to either stay away from certain topics and subject matter or present it in a very 'lite' way.  At least by the 90s, it had become that way for most soaps. Certain subjects are deemed too edgy for the daytime.

[Paul Raven]

My two cents worth...

 

Another factor that contributed to soaps eventual downfall,was I believe,their popularity that came about in the 80s. The rise of GH and its action/adventure/supercouple approach was a change in direction and got soaps noticed in the mainstream. Money was being made but costs were rising because of salaries/location shoots/sets etc 

The pressure was on to compete.

 

In the process some shows lost their identity. Doug Marland in 1980 revamped GL using the Bauers and the Dobsons characters he inherited while weaving in the Reardons as the new core family that would take the show through the decade.But once he left subsequent writers dropped the Bauers and Reardons,introduced new families and the show became a mish mash of characters. Same with AW. Viewers dropped away because the shows no longer had that continuity.

 

[applcin]

I've always wondered about the whole validity of the "Neilsen" ratings. Never in my life was Neilsen tracking my viewing or that of anyone that I knew. Like, how much of the population were they basing their ratings on? It's like those polls where they say "90% of Americans" think this way and, in the fine print, you see that it's one publication surveying 1,000 people (presumably their own readers).

[DramatistDreamer]

 

I once housesat for a "Nielsen Family" so when I watched TV, I had to turn on the box. It's real but from what I know, it is indeed a relatively small sampling, that is supposed to represent a group percentage of the population. Sort of similar to a company like Gallup that conducts surveys.

 

[All My Shadows]

No

[Soapsuds]

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[vetsoapfan]

 

In the golden age of soaps (the 1950s to the early 1980s, or even into the 1990s with a few soaps), viewers were treated to the wprk of brilliant scribes like Irna Phillips, William J. Bell, Roy Winsor, Agnes Nixon, Henry Slesar, Claire Labine, Pat Falken Smith, and Harding Lemay (among others).

 

Now we have putrid dreck inflicted upon us from endlessly recycled hacks like Pissy and Smelly, Dena Higley, Ron C., Charles Pratt, etc.

 

So yes, without a doubt, soaps used to be better. And viewers took quality for granted because even when a long-running series slipped for a while, it would almost always bounce back. Nowadays, the most we can hope for is that the soaps might be "less awful" under newer regimes than they were under the previous ones.

 

Personally, I think the 1970s were the genre's halcyon years.