THE JOURNAL NEWS, WEDNESDAY, JULY, 27, 1983
CBS threatening ABC ratings reign By BILL CARTER
These are the days that try ABC’s soul (if it has one). Most certainly these days are trying ABC’s treasure chest, which has been vastly enriched by the days of the last four years. One of the worst-kept secrets, but a secret nonetheless, of the world of television is that those prime-time shows that receive all the hoo-ha and ink can’t carry the wet Kleenex of those oft-dismissed as trivial daytime shows in terms of Real Significance. Real Significance in television is determined by the number of digits following a $. Put simply: TV networks do their best business in daytime and it has become much more important financially to have a boffo daytime lineup of soap operas and game shows than it is to have the top of the charts in the nightly sit-com parade.
ABC knows this rule of the game all too well. Over the last four years it has won the prime-time ratings race zero times. But it has won the daytime ratings race every time. And every year ABC has been the leading network in terms of profitability. That’s why the news of the last two weeks must have sent a series of shivers down the spine of the powers at ABC. Two weeks ago, for the first time in four years (an incredible string of success, by the way), ABC did not finish the week in first place in the daytime competition. And last week the news was the same: CBS beat ABC in daytime, and by a rather comfortable margin. That snapping noise you heard coming from ABC headquarters in New York was the sound of oxygen masks going into place.
Officially, ABC expresses no distress about this development, saying it expected to lose ground given the circumstances of its programming maneuvers. While this is a perfectly reasonable viewpoint, the very fact that such programming circumstances came up is an indication that ABC suddenly has problems in daytime it did not have before. And those problems cannot be divorced from the general programming dilemma that has afflicted ABC for at least the last three years. The dilemma is this: ABC is not programming hit shows. Of the new programs added by ABC over the last three years, at most two, “Dynasty” and “Fall Guy” could be labled major hits. Most importantly, ABC has not had a single new hit comedy since “Mork and Mindy” back in 1978. This failure has finally started to haunt ABC’s once invincible daytime lineup.
The real reason ABC has tumbled in daytime is because it was finally compelled to remove one of its strongest daytime performers, repeats of “The Love Boat” from its daytime lineup. “Love Boat” is going into syndication this year on various stations around the country, thus the network can no longer use it as its weekday morning anchor. “Love Boat” has been playing in the 11- to-12 slot and doing gangbusters. It is the replacement shows in that time period that have all but single-handedly dumped ABC from first place in daytime. ABC shoved in repeats of a sit-com “Too Close for Comfort” at 11 a.m. and a brand new soap, “Loving,” at 11:30. The result has been that a CBS show that plays at 11:30, “The Price Is Right II" (the second half of back-to-back “Price Is Right” game shows) is now the leading show in all of daytime, displacing ABC’s longtime kingpin soap, "General Hospital.” Old “GH” is still doing well enough, as its second-place finish proves, but it is not the steamroller it once was. “Loving” is barely living, at the moment, which ABC protests is to be expected since new soaps always take time to find their balance.
This is quite true, but ABC is actually taking a giant risk with “Loving,” one that might not necessarily ever pan out. ABC has essentially broken one of the unwritten rules of daytime by introducing a serial in the prenoon hours. As David Poltrack, the head of research for CBS (admittedly a biased observer) puts it: “The daytime audience is still basically housewives. The theory has always been that they spend part of their days out doing things and part of their day in the home. The pattern of afternoon soap viewing was established because that was the time the audience seemed to choose to be home. To move a soap into the morning is to ask for as habitual a viewing pattern in the daytime as there is as night. In addition, there is an audience of kids and teens that tend to watch soaps either on their lunch hours or after school, and that audience isn't available in the morning either.” In other words, ABC is trying to set a precedent with a morning soap, one it may not be able to set.
Why take such a gamble? ABC may have had no other choice. Before “Love Boat,” ABC was able to use repeats of some of its youth-oriented sit-coms in the same time period, shows like “Happy Days" and “Laverne and Shirley.” But shows like that aren’t appearing on ABC anymore so there was nothing on the shelf to replace “Love Boat.” The fact that ABC reached for “Too Close for Comfort" is one indication of how barren the ABC comedy barrel has become. That show was canceled by ABC for its prime-time schedule in the fall. In the absence of comedy help, ABC had little choice but to try for yet another soap success. The soaps are basically what has given ABC all that daytime strength, but there too, CBS seems to be making a formidable challenge. In last week's competition, ABC had the top soap with "GH” and the third best with “All My Children." But CBS had the No. 2, 4 and 5 spots with “Young and the Restless,” “Guiding Light” and “As the World Turns.” That amounts to a push.
Interestingly, in ABC’s defense of its fall to second place in daytime, it points out not only that “Loving” will need time to build, as all soaps do. but that even while it does it’s likely to have a better audience that its game show competition anyway. A statement by the ABC research department said that "serials basically deliver young women," while game shows deliver “women less desireable to advertisers.” It seems advertiser lust is like the common kind of male lust - it’s taste leans toward youth. ABC also implies that the summer is no time to get a fair measurement anyway.
CBS begs to differ. Poltrack says both CBS and NBC have been getting stronger in daytime over many months, while ABC has steadily come backward. But he does not attribute this to a surge in popularity for his network's shows. Aside from the “Love Boat” glitch, the competition against ABC's shows has performed at a fairly steady level. But ABC’s shows have dipped. One reason: There is a new competitor in daytime as well as primetime these days — and it rhymes with Mabel. Poltrack cites the “HBO factor." though he included network daytime loss to all forms of cable in his estimate of “about one rating point." As in prime time, the audience that drifts to cable tends to be younger and that is where ABC counts most of its viewers. That means ABC has been more vulnerable to cable inroads in daytime
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