NBC Daytime

[Khan]

SUNSET BEACH was awful from day one.  Awful actors, awful characters, awful premise and storylines, all handled awfully.  In fact, in all my years of watching soaps, it might be the one soap that I've hated most.  Lord knows I'm not a Bob Guza fan, but I think ankling that show at the first opportunity and returning to GH was the smartest decision he ever made.

PASSIONS, on the other hand, had potential - at least in the beginning.  To use a home renovation term, the show had "good bones."  However, I think the audience figured out pretty quickly that JER was a one-trick pony, who got lucky at DAYS, a show that was in so much trouble before he got there that anything he wrote for it was bound to be an improvement; and that, for all the talk of him being this master plotter at shows like GH and GL, his actual, day-to-day writing for his own creation reeked.  Pretty soon, people weren't watching PASSIONS because they thought it was good; they were watching, because they were laughing at how awful it all was.  Instead of realizing their error, however, and maybe figuring out a way either to get JER a more competent EP and Co-HW or to force him out altogether, NBC doubled down, suggesting that PASSIONS was always meant to be campy and satirical, when anyone with even half a brain knew that that wasn't the case, lol.

I think NBC would have been better off expanding SFT when it acquired the show from CBS in 1982.

Edited May 15, 2023 by Khan

[Faulkner]

I agree. SuBe represented everything I hated about “California soaps.” Even actors like Sam Behrens, who were somewhat accomplished, seemed mediocre on the show. The only ones who somewhat transcended the show were Sarah Buxton and Dominique Jennings. However, I was pleasantly surprised to enjoy Sherri Saum and a few other actors in different roles later on.

[Darn]

I will never understand Sarah Buxton's appeal. She always looked like a series of bad plastic surgeries and affected acting to me. 

Edited May 15, 2023 by Darn

[Chris B]

I do think they should’ve expanded The Doctors to an hour instead of taking Another World to 90 minutes. The show had good ratings and was an Emmy darling. I feel the hour format would’ve allowed them to flesh out the show better. They did one 90 minute episode and two hour long episodes and expanded the cast as if they were going to expand the show, but of course it never happened. 

[DRW50]

I know they didn't have much luck creating Somerset and shipping Lahoma/Missy/Sam over, but does anyone else think if NBC actually had spun off Carolee and Steve, it might have worked?

[Vee]

I loved some of the actors on SuBe: Genre queen Lesley-Anne Down, Sam Behrens (who I think did okay), the amazing Dominique Jennings who has worked so little since. I never really took the show too seriously but it was a fun light watch at times during its ridiculous storylines - like the JER Scream knockoff story, was it called Terror Island? I'm a sucker for a soap that can actually execute a decent slasher storyline, and IIRC (from almost thirty years ago) they mostly did. Unlike the Salem Stalker a few years later.

Sarah Buxton I enjoyed, but she was always limited. People kept insisting she move to an ABC soap and I was like 'uhhh, good luck.'

[robbwolff]

I never understood how NBC was planning to move Steve over to the proposed spinoff. As I recollect, in early 1970 when they were planting the seeds for the spinoff, Carolee was involved with the student nurses and the mystery of the lock box, while Steve was romancing Althea, then played by Virginia Vestoff. Was Althea going to be part of the spinoff too?

[j swift]

I had no idea that Dianna Christianson, the character played by Faye Dunaway in the film was based on NBC Daytime executive Lin Bolen.  Bolen is heavily featured in Harding Lemay's Eight Years in Another World because she pushed for the expansion to sixty-minute episodes.

There's this tidbit for the Washington Post about the first time Network was shown on TV:

"Even before CBS could schedule its showing of "Network," NBC began airing its answer to the film, a perfectly terrible series about a mythical fourth network. Trans Atlantic Broadcasting, called "W.E.B." The tidy irony here is that the program was created by producer Lin Bolen, who was said to have been (and who has said she thinks she was) the model for the Diana Christenson character played by Faye Dunaway in "Network." Bolen was formerly a programming executive at NBC.

Chayefsky has denied repeatedly that he based the character on Bolen or that, as was reported, he followed her around taking notes he did follow around such network news luminaries as John Chancellor(NBC). "I wouldn't know Lin Bolen if she were sitting here right now." Dunaway did meet Bolen, Chayefsky says, but that was after the script was written."

And she continued to deny the connection right up until her obituary in 2018

"Bolen worked for NBC in the 1970s and was responsible for commissioning the long-running game show Wheel of Fortune. She also is credited with bringing long-form narrative to soap operas, expanding them to hour-long formats.

It was long rumored that the ruthless Faye Dunaway character of Diana Christiansen in the 1976 satirical film Network was based on Bolen, something Bolen denied.

She was appointed VP of daytime programming at NBC in 1972, rising to become the VP of programming in Sept. 1975. NBC thrived under her leadership, becoming the No. 1 network in ratings."

It is understandable that Bolen would deny being the model for Diana because the character was described as soulless.  Also, spoiler alert, she conspires to murder a man due to low ratings (no wonder Pete Lemay quit as the audience began to wane -lol).

Edited May 19, 2023 by j swift

[Jdee43]

I had no idea that Lin Bolen was the inspiration for the Faye Dunaway character in Network either! No doubt she was a more interesting character behind the scenes than those on-screen on any of her shows! Here's a photo of her that ran with her NY Times obit, where she's on the set of The Doctors in 1972.

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Edited May 19, 2023 by Jdee43

[Paul Raven]

In May 79 Fred Silverman announced NBC's longterm plan for daytime

10-11.30 Game shows

11.30-12.30 The Doctors expanded to an hour

12.30 New 30 min soap

1.-2.30 90 min Days

2.30-4.00 90 min AW

That crazy plan obviously didn't last long. Once the AW numbers came in and also probably the feedback from producers on how hard it was to maintain quality and staff morale,NBC had a shift in thinking.

[Planet Soap]

Lol! I can totally see her as Phyliss on Y&R

[Khan]

I see her more as Phyllis' sister (not Avery, but a new character) than I do as Phyllis herself.

[Jdee43]

https://www.nytimes.com/1974/10/19/archives/nbctv-trying-an-hourlong-daytime-proliferation-is-noted.html

NBC‐TV Trying an Hour‐Long Daytime Soap Opera

By Les Brown   Oct. 19, 1974

When daytime soap operas moved from radio to television in the early nineteen‐fifties, they retained the accustomed 15‐minute format. In 1956, the networks found 30 minutes to be more suitable. Now, NBCTV is preparing to expand one of its long‐running daytime serials, “Another World,” to a full hour every day, beginning next Jan. 6.

If the innovation proves successful, NBC program executives expect that other serials will adopt the 60‐minute format and that in time it will become standard for daytime melodrama. NBC also plans to experiment with a one‐hour episode for two of its other soap operas, “Days of Our Lives” and “The Doctors.”

The serials — which came to be called soap operas in the radio era because they were favored advertising vehicles for soap companies — have diminished in number in recent years because game shows have proved more popular with women in the 18‐to‐49 age group that advertisers of supermarket products are most eager to reach.

Lin Bolen, vice president of daytime programs for NBC‐TV, acknowledged that the network was violating an old show business principle by tampering with a hit, but she said the 10‐year‐old serial was being expanded to an hour in hopes of rejuvenating the entire genre.

She pointed out that during the last five years, despite numerous attempts by all three networks to establish new daytime serials, only one, “The Young and the Restless” one CBS‐TV, has developed into a success.

Proliferation Is Noted

Soap operas require 18 months to two years on the air to prove themselves, while game shows succeed or fail in a matter of weeks, Miss Bolen noted. She cited this as the reason for the proliferation of quiz and panel shows on daytime television.

The NBC schedule has seven game shows in a row, followed by five serials. Two of the serials, “How to Survive a Marriage” and “Somerset,” are not hits by commercial television standards, and one of them will be canceled to allow for the expansion of “Another World,” Miss Bolen indicated.

“We are reasonably convinced that the daytime viewers have become more sophisticated in recent years and that, what formerly satisfied them in the 30‐minute sketch form no longer does,” she said. “A complaint has been that the stories progress too slowly, that too little happens from day to day.”

The 60‐minute form would facilitate both story and character development, and the longer scenes will be played out in a single episode instead of being strung over several days, she added.

“To make serials interesting, we have to do something daring,” Miss Bolen said. “I hope this is the coming thing.”

The case for the longer soap opera was made on May when NBC offered a special one‐hour edition of “Another World” in celebration of its 10th anniversary on the air. The episode scored the highest Nielsen rating of any daytime program that week.

The serial is packaged, and sponsored by Procter & Gamble and is taped at the NBC studios in Brooklyn. Among its regular featured players are Jacqueline Courtney, Irene Dailey, Hugh Marlowe, Beverly Penberthy, George Reinholt and Michael M. Ryan.

[Jdee43]

I guess we have Lin Bolen is to thank for the hour long soap opera and Wheel of Fortune? Those are the two things that she put on the air that are still around! Her legacy?

I think the 60 minute format was ok for established shows. Trying to introduce new shows at 60 minutes was a mistake though. It's never worked long term. Santa Barbara came the closest to success, at 9 years, and even that show would have been so much better, and perhaps lasted longer, at 30 minutes.

Interesting that from 1965 on, all the new soaps NBC tried to introduce failed. In hindsight, perhaps they should have just doubled down and focused on the health of their old stand-bys of DAYS, The Doctors, and Another World.

[Contessa Donatella]

Personally I believe that the network expansion was overall a detriment to the genre. Not hard to believe since it came not out of any creative impulse but just strictly the quick & easy way to increase ad revenue to the networks. 

 

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