Did the focus on appealing to housewives kill US Soaps?

[Paul Raven]

Obviously Passions went after that young demo in the (misguided) belief that they would stick with the show and move to the coveted 18 - 49 demo.

But youngsters are fickle beings and any appeal Passions had for them cooled off.

So TPTB had to find the next gimmick to attract the next set of young viewers.

But that strategy didn't work.

[All My Shadows]

100% false because teenagers will binge watch the shows they like for hours. Stranger Things, 13 Reasons Why, Riverdale, and a ton of other shows that are popular with mainstream adult audiences owe a lot to the younger demo who has no problem plowing through an entire season in one or two sittings.

[cassadine1991]

I binge watch these soaps whenever I miss more than 2 episodes

[SteelCity]

Stories with no foreseeable resolution, horrible acting, unlikable characters, gimmicks, bad writing and relying on fantasy are among the many things that killed the worst soap ever.

[ReddFoxx]

Passions was tedious to watch. The scenes are long to watch on Youtube even when you fast forward. If anything it was only worth watching to remark what a train wreck it was.

[SteelCity]

I still can't believe NBC let Sunset Beach and Another World go, but kept Passions on.

[Gray Bunny]

 

I stand corrected on the binge watching, but they won't be interested in binge watching a soap. It's just too slow-paced and uninteresting to appeal to more than a select few these days. 

[Clark Still]

Not the audience at all. The soaps failed to evolve during and after the OJ trial as well as during the rise of the Jerry Springer Show and the revamped Maury Povich show in the late 90s/early 2000s. All 4 soaps continue to fail to keep up with the times plus the bad writing/execs that kept medding with the creative process brought us to this current juncture. 

 

Why watch a bad soap when you can get a drama/tomfoolery fix in 15 min segments on Jerry and Maury and in hour form via Love and Hip Hop/Real Housewives/Basketball Wives?

[DramatistDreamer]

 

What was Downton Abbey, if not a soap?  Even Julian Fellows says so.

Some of the storylines stretched out over quite a bit of time (Bates' wrongful conviction) before they were resolved.  DA did high ratings among various age groups and the 18-34 demo was one of their most loyal. 

 

If the stories are compelling, (DA had an effective blending of multi-generational storytelling and use of characters of various age groups) people will stay but one cannot commit the egregious error of having long-winded storylines with no payoff.  

I gave up on Y&R because not only are the stories horribly written but the payoff is next to nil.  Also, Mal Young cannot write a proper reversal to save his life!

 

Back to the OT though.  After the 80s were over, I don't see the soaps as doing anything in particular to cater to housewives.  What the soap industry failed to do (and still fails to do) is to properly account for time shifting with their advertisers. When I was about 10, I learned how to program a VCR and used to set the timer to record my mother's favorite soaps as she had to work outside the home. I did this until I went off to college in the 1990s.  I know my mother far from the only one watching this way and the soap industry, in all likelihood knew this as well but never found a way to reconcile and monetize this aspect with their advertisers.  With DVR, the soaps still struggle with this.

 

Judging from the decline in storytelling during the time of the OJ Simpson trial, many of the soaps didn't make much of an effort to appeal to anyone.  IMO, they miscalculated in assuming that they could write 'placeholder' stories and the lapsed viewers would come flocking back once the Simpson trial had ended. Many never did.

[Faulkner]

Some context but nothing most of y’all don’t already know: Percentages of mothers who were stay-at-home moms over time. Interestingly, the percentage of mothers with children under 18 who didn’t work outside the home reached its lowest point, 23 percent, in 1999 when Passions, the last totally new network daytime soap, debuted. That was down from roughly half of all mothers in 1967.

 

Numbers rebounded over the next decade or so to 29 percent in 2012. (Note: the data are percentages of mothers 18-69 with minor children in their households, not all adult women.)

http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2014/04/08/after-decades-of-decline-a-rise-in-stay-at-home-mothers/

[Cat]

I would agree with many of you that the audience is not to blame. 

 

When an audience falls out of love with a show, there's a reason. The customer is always right! 

 

I also do not believe that targeting 'housewives' was the wrong move either. Females are discerning and committed TV viewers. And so are soap's male fans, including many gay men, and its African-American fans. Many of you who post here on SON fit those latter demos -- demos TPTB choose to pretty much gloss over.

 

One problem is that most women work and therefore do not stay home to watch soaps. DVR is the way around that, though. But the target demo is DVRing other shows!

 

The real problem is the people running Daytime. 'They have failed to evolve with the times' -- sure, that's a big part of it. How many times have soaps gone to the baby-switch well? What a useless SL that has no relation to 99% of peoples' lives.

 

However, the real reason is TPTBwho are lazy, mediocre and underachieving. If they disdain we viewers to the point of throwing just any old crap on screen, why should we honor them with our viewership?

[Faulkner]

Truth. The bad writing is a feature, not a bug, to them. “Don’t think too hard about it. It’s just a soap. Viewers expect nonsensical sh!t.”

[Cat]

 

Exactly. "They're dumb hicks in our secondary markets! They'll watch any old crap."

 

TPTB use the idea that 'viewers expect us to do this' as an excuse for their laziness and lack of imagination. The formula/template is making us do this!

 

And yet the formula/template is THRIVING in other genres -- in Primetime, on cable, on Netflix. The continuing story... of Another World is continuing on almost every comedic, dramatic and reality show out there. 

[SteelCity]

The audience also refuses to evolve.

[titan1978]

I think the reason why baby switch storylines see rating increases isn’t because the audience just loves them.  I think it’s literally the only long term things these crappy execs and writers still write for.  The build build build then climax with emotional stakes is what people respond to.  Soaps need that cliff hanger storytelling in as many stories as possible.  Instead they just limp day by day until they stumble on a who’s the daddy or baby switch.

 

It’s the only story template their brains can still do this with. They have even given up on building to a wedding.