NBC Daytime

[Paul Raven]

I think you are right.  VP of daytime is highest ranking with other positions reporting to them.

Here's Lin's resume which clarifies this issue

Linda Lou Bolen -vice president, daytime programs, NBC-TV;

b. Benton, III., March 23, 1941

Miss Hickey's School, St. Louis, 1958 -60

City College of New York, 1963 -67 (nights)

Fred Niles Communications, 1961- 62

executive assistant, Ziff Davis Publishing, 1962 -64

producer, Libra Productions, 1964- 68

free -lance producer- writer, 1968 -70

associate producer- writer, Metromedia Producers, Los Angeles,1970 -72

programing administrator, NBC , Burbank,May, 1972

director, daytime programs, NBC  New York, September 1972

vice president, daytime programs, NBC -TV, October 1973.

Edited January 23, 2023 by Paul Raven

[Planet Soap]

What did you all think of Sunset Beach & Passions? 

It's really something that all of the big 3 had an area where they struggled. NBC couldn't get daytime right, CBS still can't get morning news right, and ABC (since the late 70s) has had pretty balanced success in daytime, news and primetime. 

Slightly off topic but the mid to late 2000s was not a great time for NBC as a whole. Tom Brokaw left Nightly News (he had a solid replacement though) Will & Grace, Friends and Frasier ended, Katie Couric left Today (her replacement was also good), Tim Russert died and Meet the Press hasn't recovered since, Jeff Zucker's leadership didn't help either.

Edited January 24, 2023 by ironlion

[danfling]

NBC also had trouble establishing a prime-time news magazine show and a successful prime-time dramatic serial.

CBS had a very hard time having a hit in latenight programming as well as early morning programming.

All three networks tried to emulate the National Lampoon's Animal House movie by having a situation comedy in that vein.   All three networks failed in that area.

[Paul Raven]

With Texas, Santa Barbara, Sunset Beach and Passsions NBC had 4 attempts to launch a 60 min serial.

They were the only network to attempt that.

They were caught in an awkward situation of needing to fill that timeslot and launching at a time where 30 min shows were pretty much regarded as the poor relative.

However ABC and CBS never had the challenge of launching a 60 min show. Maybe that was part of NBC's problem. It's a big commitment for a viewer to take on an hour show with a multitude of characters and stories.

Very different than a 30/45 min show that you've been watching for years expanding to an hour.

Maybe NBC should have expanded The Doctors in the 70's. It would have been worth a try and could have solved a lot of problems.

[Mona Kane Croft]

I don't think a hospital based soap could survive the transition to 60-minutes without getting too far out of the hospital and morphing into a typical soap opera.  I would not have wanted to witness The Doctors becoming what General Hospital became, or anything near that.  But I do agree NBC had great difficulty maintaining a successful third 60-minute soap.   

[watson71]

Two other notes regarding NBC Daytime- it had success with game shows like Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune, Hollywood Squares, Sale of the Century, etc.  But NBC was notorious for putting on game shows for a brief time and canceling them- Go, Hot Potato, Match Game Hollywood Squares Hour, Blockbusters, many versions of Password, and Just Men (for which Betty White received a Daytime Emmy) and was still canceled.

Also, when AW and DAYS were challenging ATWT ratings in the early and mid 70s don’t forget that CBS counterprogrammed reruns of primetime hits All in the Family and MASH against AW.  For a time, they even moved the Price is Right to the afternoon as well.

[kalbir]

Texas was a dollar store Dallas. Santa Barbara was a dollar store Dynasty. Sunset Beach was Aaron Spelling attempting to create a daytime Melrose Place when Melrose Place itself was tanking. Passions was NBC being indebted to Reilly for keeping NBC daytime lineup alive in the aftermath of OJ and that's why it got the Days lead out.

Texas and Santa Barbara were head-to-head with General Hospital at the height of its popularity so they were pretty much DOA. Sunset Beach didn't even have an official timeslot.

Edited January 24, 2023 by kalbir

[Xanthe]

When Santa Barbara premiered it was scheduled at 9am in some markets. I don't remember what the conflict was or when it moved to 3pm.

[Jdee43]

Santa Barbara's "official" network time slot was always supposed to be 3pm. Individual stations could choose to air it whenever they wanted though.

For the first half of 1984, NBC had The Match Game - Hollywood Squares Hour at 3pm. For the second half of 1984, they had Santa Barbara in that time slot. Both shows were pretty dreadful.

Perhaps they would have had more success by debuting Santa Barbara as a half hour show at 3pm, and keeping the Match Game portion of the MG HS Hour for a half-hour Match Game at 3:30pm. That might have allowed Santa Barbara to stabilize, and they could always have expanded it to an hour in the late 80s whenever the new Match Game ran its course. But instead, it seemed like NBC was wedded to the rule that whatever show was airing at 3pm had to be at least one hour. They kept to this from 1975, when Another World expanded to an hour, all the way to the end of Santa Barbara's run in 1993, when NBC gave back that hour to its affiliates to program. 

NBC losing the 3pm hour in 1993 meant that Sunset Beach had to go to noon when it premiered in 1997, pretty much condemning that show to low ratings and eventual cancellation. 

 

 

 

[danfling]

The Match Game - Hollywood Squares show did not air in my market, and I am just now seeing the reruns on the Buzzr network.    I really enjoy it, and I think that the Hollywood Squares portion of the show was better than The Match Game portion.   (I had preferred the NBC version of The Match Game with the two celebrities and four contestants.)  There were more stars to play Hollywood Squares (nine) than on The Match Game (six).  

I also loved how NBC usually had at least one soap opera celebrity playing Hollywood Squares.  Ususally, this was a performer who was currently on The Doctors, Another World, or the serial Days of Our Lives, but, at other times, it was someone who had appeared on other soap operas and left (such as Leah Ayers of Love of Life and The Edge of Night) or Jackee Harry (from Another World).

 

I remember seeing Nancy Frageone (from All My Children and Another World), Nancy Stafford (from The Doctors),   Christopher Rich (from Another World), Linda Dano (from One Life to LIve, As the World Turns, and Another World), David Oliver (from Another World), Rick Porter (Another World), etc.    So, while promoting its own daytime schedule, it was also appealing to other viewers of ABC and CBS.

[Jdee43]

As others have mentioned, NBC's first attempt to add a soap to their core 3 after 1968 was Hidden Faces. It ran at 1:30pm, right before Days. It lasted 6 months, the first half of 1969. It performed so poorly in the ratings that NBC would not put another soap in that slot for the next 5 years, going with game shows instead. The 1:30pm slot was really tough, with Let's Make a Deal on ABC and As the World Turns on CBS, the latter the highest rated daytime drama.

Giving up putting soaps before their core block, NBC tried putting new soaps after it, first with Bright Promise at 3:30pm in the fall of 1969, running immediately after Another World; then the Another World spin-off Somerset at 4pm starting in the spring of 1970.

The ratings of Bright Promise and Somerset were never as high as the core 3; in fact, not even close.

Did NBC ever consider having Somerset run at 3:30pm, right after Another World? It seems like Somerset got slightly higher ratings than Bright Promise. So people were tuning out right after Another World, and then some of them were coming back for Somerset.  

Was expanding Another World to an hour in 1970 ever considered?

I wonder how things would have been different if instead of creating Somerset, they just expanded Another World to an hour from 3-4pm.

 

 

 

Edited February 14, 2023 by Jdee43

[Paul Raven]

Proctor & Gamble who produced Somerset had a policy that their soaps would not compete with each other. As CBS was running Edge of Night at 3.30 another P&G production that meant Somerset could not be placed there.

That policy stayed in place until soaps began expanding to an hour and it was impossible for them not to compete. EON went up against Somerset at 4pm when EON switched to ABC.

I always thought NBC should have cancelled Somerset and placed EON at 4 following the high rated AW.

[Jdee43]

https://www.nytimes.com/1992/10/05/business/the-media-business-for-nbc-stress-in-the-afternoon.html

For NBC, Stress in the Afternoon    Oct. 5, 1992

By Bill Carter

The plot line may not have enough intrigue or sex appeal to make it as a soap opera. But NBC's daytime programming is certainly a story of a relationship under stress.

The relationship in question is between NBC and its stations, and the stress for the network has been so great that Warren Littlefield, president of NBC Entertainment, said, "As far as daytime goes, we're not really a network anymore."

The change in NBC's daytime status is symptomatic of the widespread changes that have affected the television business as a whole, Mr. Littlefield said. Though the erosion of network control over prime time has received most of the attention, other parts of the television industry have been equally or even more affected, with each network having to concede that new approaches are needed.

Problem in Daytime

"The time for network arrogance is over," he said. "Every network has its own problem area. CBS's position with its late-night programming is similar to ours in daytime, and ABC isn't a network at all after 'Nightline.' Our problem area is daytime."

Mr. Littlefield said most NBC stations ran the network's daytime programs either out of sequence from the way they are scheduled or not at all. "Only 14 percent of the stations carry the shows live as we feed them," he said.

To deal with its daytime problems, NBC is seeking a partnership with its affiliated stations to create new daytime programs. John Rohrbeck, whose main job is president of the network stations division, has been put in charge of daytime as well in order to involve the stations more closely in daytime programming.

In the latest example of NBC's daytime problems, the network announced last week that it was canceling "Santa Barbara," one of only three soap operas still on NBC. The show had struggled in the ratings for its entire run and had little prospect of improving because so many NBC stations pre-empted it.

"We would have liked to keep it going," Mr. Littlefield said. "But the stations were telling us to wake up. They said, 'If you don't abandon the show, we will.' "

Mr. Littlefield said NBC was projecting a $15 million to $20 million loss on "Santa Barbara" this year.

The hourlong soap opera will be replaced with other network programming in January, but in the same announcement NBC said it was also dropping another half-hour daytime show, "Doctor Dean," a health advice show, and would not replace it.

Instead, that half-hour of time will be relinquished to the stations. NBC has now reduced its presence on weekdays to four hours. Until 1991, NBC had 5 1/2 hours of programming. CBS still has 5 1/2 hours, while ABC has also cut back in recent years to 4 1/2.

Even without its weakest hours, NBC runs a very distant third in the overall daytime ratings to CBS and ABC. This is a costly position for NBC to be in. Advertising support for daytime network programs remains strong, totaling about $1.1 billion in revenue this year.

But the profit goes to CBS and ABC. "Daytime is only marginally profitable for NBC," Mr. Rohrbeck said.

Tumbling Ratings

Each of the other networks has a separate executive in charge of daytime programs.

Mr. Rohrbeck said that managing daytime programming as well as the NBC stations division made sense because "the daytime business has undergone such a radical change."

While the average three-network annual rating in prime time had declined to a 34.1 at the end of last year from a 50.1 in 1980, the falloff in daytime has been roughly comparable: to a 13.3 last year from a 19.6 in 1980. (The value of a ratings point changes every year; currently, one ratings point represents 931,000 households.)

But the daytime falloff was proving much more costly to the networks in the mid-1980's. The total advertising revenue for daytime reached about $1.3 billion in 1985, but by 1988 it had fallen well below $1 billion. Advertisers cooled to daytime because they started to believe that the majority of the once-ideal daytime audience, young women, had entered the workplace and were thus unavailable to watch television.

ABC and CBS set out to change that impression by showing that working women still watched daytime television in large numbers. The two networks cited evidence that a large percentage of women worked part time or on weekends, and pointed to statistics showing that daytime soap operas were recorded more often by viewers than any other programs on television.

By 1990, the daytime advertising marketplace had turned around, with revenues jumping 19 percent in one year. Both CBS and ABC have widely popular soap operas like "The Young and the Restless" and "General Hospital" that reach millions of young women every week -- and provide large profits for each network. NBC has only one soap opera, "Days of Our Lives," among the top 10 daytime programs.

Filling an Hourlong Hole

In the short term, NBC plans to fill the hourlong hole left when "Santa Barbara" disappears with the other staple of network daytime programming: game shows.

But in the long term, Mr. Littlefield said, the network wants to give the stations what they most want: a talk show that will effectively lead into the syndicated talk shows -- like "Oprah" and "Donahue" -- that mostly fill the afternoon hours before local newscasts. "Talk with an edge is what's working out there," he said.

NBC will use its cable channel, CNBC, and its New York station, WNBC, as a kind of laboratory to develop possible talk shows. Mr. Littlefield said Star Jones, a former assistant district attorney in Brooklyn who is now legal correspondent for NBC News, would host a talk show similar to "Oprah" that would run first on CNBC, then WNBC.

If it succeeds in those places, it will be moved to the network.

Mr. Littlefield said NBC had to be committed to filling the four hours it has left in daytime, both because the stations cannot afford to buy that much syndicated programming and because the network needed to maintain a presence in daytime to help feed viewers into prime time.

"The promotional base of daytime is worth $30 million to me," Mr. Littlefield said. "The stakes for us are still huge in daytime."

[Franko]

Ultimately, NBC opted for John Tesh & Leeza Gibbons in the fall of 1993, and then Leeza by herself from 1994-2000 (the last season was syndicated). Star did host her own show, Jones & Jury, in syndication for 1994-1995.

[Paul Raven]

Variety June 1978

Plans by NBC daytime to serialize two gothic novels into 13 week serials have been scrapped. 

They were 'Spindrift' by Phyllis Whitney and 'The Dark Shore' by Susan Howatch.

This was shortly after Fred Silverman took over at NBC. He most likely kiboshed the idea as expensive and impractical/too risky.

Still it would have been fun to see that idea onscreen.

Instead the report says NBC will focus on building 'America Alive' and 'For Richer,For Poorer' as well as revitalizing 'The Doctors'.

We saw how that turned out.