Did the focus on appealing to housewives kill US Soaps?

[Faulkner]

Babies just work with a lot of the soap audience. Instant stakes. Victoria on Y&R popped out a whole litter that we never see because they were short-term plot devices who are now inconveniences.

[Gray Bunny]

 

Even then, and this ties in with the "Favorite Sets" thread, these DAYS (emphasis on DAYS), it's almost as if a baby-switch wouldn't be a huge ordeal, at least not to the toddler. Okay, so the kid finds out the nice people he always sees in the park and Horton Town Square who live across the hallway are actually his parents. Okay, so pick up your things, move across the hallway and set up shop. You're already familiar with the couple and you'll still run into the people you thought were your parents all the time. :::shrug::: Now where's my pacifier? 

[applcin]

Not to play devil's advocate here, especially as I agree with the point about mediocre and redundant storytelling, one thing is that these are shows that, unlike most others, have been on for decades and daily, as opposed to weekly. I think the possibility of any type of original storytelling ran out a couple of decades ago, probably more. Even the youngest soap (B&B) is over 30 years old. Any character on the canvas long enough is going to have multiple relationships, spouses, children, personality changes, and retcons of all of the above. There is nothing new left to do with them except tell the same stories with new faces added to the mix. Otherwise, the folks end up like Emily McLaughlin (GH's Nurse Jessie), who, as I recall, pretty much spent her later years manning the nurse's station and doing little else.

So while I think we did get saddled with a lot of mediocrity over the years/decades, I think even a Labine or Riche type would be hard-pressed today to come up with something that hasn't been done to death before. They may present things better, but the stories would still be who's cheating on whom, who has a terminal disease, a long-lost child, etc.

[SteelCity]

It would seem to me that soap fans just don't want anything new. No new characters, no new sets, no new anything. Any attempt at experiment results in immediate backlash from fans. Be honest with yourself.

[Faulkner]

But there is a lot that soaps haven’t done because the genre is so conservative and restrictive. Just a very small example: I was racking my brain trying to think about a white female character having a baby by a black male while on the show. There are retcons or backstories that happened long before a character was on the show (Opal on AMC, Donna on B&B, Rebecca on AMC, Nora on OLTL), and there are several examples of white men starting families with black women (Lily on Y&R, Simone on GH, Jessica on ATWT, Mel on GL, et al), I could only think of one example (correct me if I’m wrong): Amber on B&B with Marcus, and that was played as a titillating Who’s the Daddy? story with a white dude as the other possible father. Any romance was pretty much offscreen, and they never dealt with the reality of a white mother raising a child of color.

 

IRL black men marrying interracially is twice as common as black women doing so, yet on soaps it’s the opposite. But in this fundamentally racist genre, they’d either never value a black man enough to make him a real leading man with their pure precious white woman leads (and not just a fling or pit stop on the way to a white dude), fear racist backlash (Neil/Victoria, Y&R), or fear betraying black female viewers who want to see black men with black women (understandably given how poorly soaps showcase BM/BF couples). But these are questions soaps haven’t wrestled with, and we’re in 2018. And because the remaining soaps are so desperate and fearful of losing their core viewers (conservative white women in the Midwest and South), they’ll never wrestle with them. Yet they’ll do the crazy, cliched plots because they’ve trained audiences to expect them.

[sivad40]

The Bachelor franchise has a black Bachelorette  but they have never had a black Bachelor for the reasons you stated. Soaps risk alienating black women and white women by having BM/WW couples. Black actors are now being attacked on social media if real life partner/girlfriend/wive isn't black. Ironically  many of the black actors and actresses that are cast  in Hollywood are actually offspring of black men-white women couples. 

[Faulkner]

I totally get it. We’ve seen famous black men leave their black wives and seek out white women as trophies (O.J. Simpson being the prime example), which has felt like a slap in the face. If they don’t go outright white, there’s the colorist pursuit of the lightest of the light-skinned. Meanwhile, we’ve seen the studies that indicate that black women (and Asian men) are the least sought-after partners proportionately on dating apps, which is partially the result of centuries of racist, sexist propaganda. So I get why some black women would feel a bit irritated with images of black men with white women. I know it annoys black gay men to see constant images of BM/WM couples.

 

Speaking of The Bachelorette, they had more black men than normal in this year’s cast. Becca, who is white, selected several of them in the first rose ceremony. But, no surprise, those numbers dwindled. She’d strung along one black guy (whom she clearly had little interest in) for most of the season... until riiiight before the hometowns when she’d go and meet the families of her final (white) suitors. It was very cynical, a way of demonstrating diversity, but not really. The old boundaries remained intact in the end.

[xtr]

 

I'm going to go off a tangent for a moment but they should definitely have a black Bachelor. And I think the show needs to cast for that season in the manner they did for the black Bachelorette. They need to have a good amount of black woman/women of different races, so they will alienate less people.

 

They did a really nice job of casting for Rachel, the black Bachelorette. She had a lot of black men/men of different races in her cast, plus a decent amount of white men as well. Most of the men they cast for her were handsome and were gainfully employed/accomplished. I don't watch the Bachelorette/Bachelor regularly.  But I've seen different casts and her group of men may have been the best looking and most accomplished cast I've seen. Certainly the most diverse. If they casted in the same manner for a Black Bachelor it would land better with people in general IMO.

 

Going back to the OP's question, I definitely do not blame housewives for soaps declining. If anything they helped soaps get on their feet when they first started airing and helped make them popular. I don't blame any particular group for the decline of soaps, except for people who run the shows. I think that factors like poor writing and ignoring character's/shows histories have helped soaps decline. 

 

 

[DramatistDreamer]

 

Also the WM executives who run the whole thing don't want to see BM/WW because it would be like imagining their wives taking on a lover, and at that... an 'Other'.  As if that impacts their masculinity, any at all?

[Faulkner]

I thought Rachel’s season was... weird. Sure, many of them were accomplished, but it was clear that several of the white men, and even a few of the black men, had not and would not date a black woman. It was so obvious that Peter, the dreamboat white guy most people wanted Rachel to pick, was not into her and even recoiled a bit when she tried to kiss him. (Which is why it was strange when Peter seemed so emotional when he and Rachel split.)  Add to that the casting of an open racist as one of the contenders. The producers messed up what could have been a watershed season.

 

Soaps made a lot of money for a lot of people relying on housewives, and they just outlived their usefulness at the end of day. It’s crazy that it took 30 years for primetime to learn what daytime had been doing so well, but they stole daytime’s serial storytelling and wound up doing it better than the soaps. All that, better production values, and you could watch their primetime shows when you’re home from work and don’t need a five-day-a-week, 52 weeks-a-year commitment to stay up to date when you’re busy. And if a show begins to creatively fray, just cancel it and move on to the next. There’s no obligation for a primetime show to live forever (hard to do when cast members demand raises each year), but we expect our soaps to live longer than humans do.

 

Almost everything we watch these days is a soap, but no one on Game of Thrones or This Is Us is going to tout the debt they pay to Irna, Agnes, and Bill. Andy Cohen might.

[Faulkner]

This is something many have said, but GH’s success with Luke and Laura gave daytime enough rope to hang itself with. Everything became about chasing youth, supercouples, remote locations, James Bond-like spy plots, mob intrigue, etc. L&L’s  success showed everyone that the sky was the limit in terms of ratings and pop culture relevance, and everyone jumped aboard with their knockoffs. It was an arms race. But young people are historically fickle, MTV and cable were already on the rise, and society was changing. And by the end of the ‘80s, you had soaps with these massively bloated budgets that, due to downward ratings trends, had to be trimmed, which they’ve been doing ever since, yet they still had the same demands to do more with less. Which means going CRAZY.

 

And I don’t entirely blame the writers: I believe the bad writing is intentional (it’s part of the job description), which is why Curlee and Labine eventually said “Deuces!” They weren’t going to be mercenary and collect a paycheck to write sh!t. Again, the idea of soap became synonymous with the insane and ridiculous, which paid off for Reilly in the ‘90s but even he couldn’t fight the inevitable. Even Y&R, which had survived longer than most and had stayed the course, fell victim to it in the 2000s. I think Sony felt like they were leaving money on the table by not embracing the craziness of the other shows. 

[JellicleCat]

 

I find that odd, since Y&R was outranking all the other shows, and B&B, another show which had stayed relatively realistic in its stories, had risen to #2.

So why would anyone think that going for the more crazy, outlandish plots was the way to go when the top two rated shows was different?

[Faulkner]

I think probably greed, as in, “This show’s old-fashioned and boring and we get 4.0. If we amp things up a bit and do stunts like Clear Springs, we might get a 5.0.” That’s just my guess. Even if Y&R was #1 it was still seeing declines. And stunt-driven GH (EP’d by future Y&R EP JFP) was often regularly beating it in the demos. (EDIT: I was looking back at old demo ratings from the 2000s, and there were many weeks when GH, OLTL, AMC, and even DAYS were beating Y&R. Given that demos determine ad rates, not total viewers, I can somewhat understand the ABC envy that ruled Y&R post-2000.) I’m sure there was pressure to show growth even if there were good structural reasons for the declines. Not that the stunts did anything to reverse things, but I would just bet that was the thinking. The pitch: “This is a musty old soap for the blue hairs, and we could be doing so much better by ‘modernizing.’”

[applcin]

I don't particularly think the rise (no pun intended) of L & L and the action-oriented emphasis was the beginning of the end...perhaps it was for a certain type of storytelling, but not for the genre. I think that phenomenon and the copying of it, gave soaps a presence and "hipness" beyond what they had before. Without it, it's possible the soaps might have declined and gone off the air sooner. I think the fact that GH is the only soap left on ABC is a result of the favored status it gained during those years. Likewise, DOOL for NBC. Mind you, I haven't watched any of them for years but they're still there so a lot of people must be.

Curious about something for those in the know...I know that the CBS soaps have a big overseas presence and I see stars from those shows now on my Italian cable channels. What about the other soaps? What kind of life, if any, did/do they have internationally?

[DeeeDee]

 

Y&R has been attempting to imitate ABC Daytime ever since the arrival of Aunt Jack.

 

It just became progressively worse in the mid-late 2000s onwards from a combo of the regular systemic issues (racism/sexism/homophobia/transphobia/ageism/etc), massively entitled actor egos and insane budget cuts.