Cancelled Soap Questions

[Spoon]

Why didn't NBC expand The Doctors, 2-3pm after Days and AW expanded to one hour?  You think it would've been a safer option than expanding AW to 90 minutes.

Edited May 5, 2022 by Spoon

[Contessa Donatella]

There's coverage of the network expansion, from half hour to hour & their starting with AW & leaving it that if it went well with AW that they would then and only then go forward with DOOL, in Elana Levine's 2020 book Her Stories. There is no mention of expanding The Doctors. There is no mention of the further expansion of AW from 60 min to 90 min. Not from that source, and frankly useless because it lacks a source, but I have a quote that the NBC Programmers, presumably after doing it & looking back on their actions, admitted that they went to a 90 min show because they did not have any better idea to try,

[Contessa Donatella]

Moved to an Hour Timetable:

AW Jan. 6, 1975*

DOOL Apr 21, 1975*

AMC 1980

Y&R 1980

*Both AW & DOOL had special standalone one-off episodes that were 60 min. a number of months before making the permanent change in the dates here above.

 

Y&R began 1973.

 

AW went to the disastrous EPIC FAIL 90 min. show Mar. 5, 1979

AW went back to an hour Aug. 1980

While AW was doing the 90 min. show, the HW left over the issue, so, byebye Harding "Pete" Lemay.

[danfling]

There was a proposed spin-off show of The Doctors.   I do not remember the show's name.

[Khan]

Wasn't its' proposed title something like "The House of Hope"?

[JoeCool]

 

All My Children went to 1 hour on April 25, 1977.

[Spoon]

Here's another one.  Did anyone really "follow the search"?  In other words was the (small) NBC SFT audience, mainly NBC loyalists as opposed to migrated CBS viewers?

[danfling]

I think that there were both.   Many people who had been watching on the CBS network followed the show to NBC.    I had watched the show around 1968 and 1969, but I had stopped watching when Jo was re-married to Dr. Tony Vincente.     When the show moved to NBC and Linda Gibboney joined the cast (after her role on All My Children), I started watching it.      (I really had followed actress Linda Gibboney to the show.)   I kept watching until its cancellation, although the last year did not hold much interest to me.    I originally had not Loving, but it got better, and Loving eventually became a favorite show of mine.

[Contessa Donatella]

CORRECTED FILE:

Moved to an Hour Timetable:

AW Jan. 6, 1975*

DOOL Apr 21, 1975*

AMC Apr 25, 1977

Y&R Feb 4, 1980

*Both AW & DOOL had special standalone one-off episodes that were 60 min. a number of months before making the permanent change in the dates here above.

 

Y&R began 1973.

 

AW went to the disastrous EPIC FAIL 90 min. show Mar. 5, 1979

AW went back to an hour Aug. 1980

While AW was doing the 90 min. show, the HW left over the issue, so, byebye Harding "Pete" Lemay.

I was told that the general wisdom was that CBS fans did not follow. New NBC fans, like me, began to watch. But, it would have needed a combined audience to succeed.

Agnes Nixon, Bill Bell Sr. & Claire Labine & Paul Avila Meyer were all against the expansion. Pete Lemay had regrets about the expansion.

[soapfan770]

Why didn’t the networks better support their 1/2 hour soaps in the 80’s and 90’s? I know some affiliates had unwieldy power back in the day but the fact network pre-emptions killed off Edge of Night and Ryan’s Hope while a show like Loving just failed to thrive over lack of clearance is sad. By the time ABC & NBC got more strict/doubled down in the early 00’s it was too late. 

[Mona Kane Croft]

After the most popular soaps switched to the 60-minute format in the mid-1970s, the remaining 30-minute soaps were treated as the red-headed step-children of the networks.  They were a lower priority than the hour long shows in every way.  Often given the worst time slots, or moved around the schedule willy-nilly. They typically had the worst or most inexperienced writers, and when a head-writer on the 30-minute soap was successful, he/she was often grabbed-up by a 60-minute show, leaving the 30-minute show in a lurch. They did not receive as much promotion as the 60-minute soaps on the networks themselves, nor in the soap press.  And I believe even the audience held most of the 30-minute soaps in distain -- assuming they were unappealing, uninteresting, or old-fashioned.  It always seemed to me, the networks were just waiting on all the 30-minute soaps to be cancelled.  The one exception to all this was The Bold and The Beautiful, which had the power of Bill Bell behind it, and the enthusiasm of CBS.   

[Contessa Donatella]

When Sally Sussman was HWing the new-at-the-time half hour soap I thought she was a very strong HW. And, PC, of course, had so many different people HWing & turmoil is always bad for the soap but they had plenty of good people. Think, even a broken clock is right twice a day!

And, isn't B&B sheltered by having Y&R lead in to it? It's protected & for its own sake we can all be happy that it does so well internationally as that is its niche.

About GEN, it was said that it had protection but it lost it & so didn't get to play out that third year of its first contract.

[Chris 2]

The issue with the 30 min soaps is that they often aired at noon or 12:30 or 4:00 and those were prime slots for stations to air syndicated or local programming, and not have to share revenue with the network.

Stations in larger markets aired news in the noon slots; back then it was less of an issue of ratings, and more an issue of community responsibility. There was no way any of our local affiliates were going to dump the noon news in favor of a soap opera. They were committed to news.

Our local NBC station didn’t air The Doctors in its final years, nor did it air Search for Tomorrow. It had a local talk show called “People Are Talking,” which was popular and got higher ratings than The Doctors or SFT. Our local ABC affiliate didn’t clear Edge of Night at 4:00; it showed Big Valley and The Waltons and other syndicated reruns which were more profitable for them. It did air EON on a one-day delay in the mornings for about a year, after it moved over from CBS. But then it dropped EON, never to air it again.

[Contessa Donatella]

My mother's local affiliate, Greenville, SC, did not air Yr 1 of SB & then they didn't air the last year, either. My mother was so mad.

[kalbir]

Let's be real here. When CBS moved Y&R to 12:30 pm ET, it destroyed everything ABC and NBC threw in its path. Ryan's Hope, The Doctors, Search for Tomorrow, Loving, Generations, The City, Port Charles all fell victim.

CBS was also the last to give up the 4 pm ET slot and I don't find it a coincidence that this occurred in September 1986, the same month Oprah went national. 

Edited May 15, 2022 by kalbir