NBC Daytime

[TVFAN1144]

The affiliates would never have gone with giving up that much local time to the network 

[Contessa Donatella]

Well, they had no choice. It was imposed on them. They hated it. AW had been a darling to them till this. They figured it was the show's idea so they began to dislike AW.  And, that's about when the NBC affiliates began to be called renegade affiliates. Threatened to drop the show altogether, etc. And, it was Fred Silverman's baby. Pete Lemay quit over it. After the fact an NBC programmer said they did it because they couldn't think of anything better to do! Talk about your debacle! Now, of course the term "renegade affiliate" is a redundancy. 

Edited July 4, 2023 by Donna L. Bridges
left off last line

[TVFAN1144]

The affiliates would want their noon newscasts.   CBS affiliates nixed the idea of giving up the 1 to 1:30 slot in the east for 45 minute versions of Search and World Turns

Stations would have probably put The Doctors in early morning slot or preempted altogether. 

[Contessa Donatella]

(During 1978-79) "NBC was the only network to cancel a soap, "For Richer, For Poorer," and it expanded one of its hour-long daytime dramas to 90 minutes. It appears the expansion of "Another World," hasn't set a trend. CBS and ABC aren't planning to convert any of their current soaps to 90-minute marathons. The NBC experiment was looked upon as a failure by the two competing networks and they could be right. "Another World" wasn't leading its time period in the ratings as an hour show, so the move to 90 minutes was implemented with the hope of building an audience that would stay for the whole hour and a half. It did not work out that way. In any event, NBC has been toying with the idea of turning "Days of our Lives" into a 90-minute entry." 

Steven H. Scheuer. (1979). Daytime Programs. TV: The Television Annual 1978-79. Collier Macmillan Publishers. p. 124.

[Broderick]

No one knows if a concept will work until they try it.  

But the 90-minute expansion of Another World seems so bone-headed.  Who on earth is going to devote 90 minutes of their weekday to watching a movie-length television show?  And what writer has the capability of creating 90 minutes of compelling drama daily?

Edge of Night made such good use of the 30-minute format.  Granted, that's a "niche" soap (mystery and suspense), but every scene appears to serve a distinct purpose.  Two people don't just meet randomly and chit-chat.  If two characters end up in a scene together, a pertinent bit of information or a clue is going to be exchanged between them.  There's an "economical quality" to the writing, and there's never much blatant padding. 

A lot of that conciseness is lost in a 60-minute show.  A 90-minute show seems like a disaster waiting to happen (and it was).     

[Contessa Donatella]

I have called it a cockamamie idea. I stick with that. I think it's an awkward time length. Too long for a show. Not long enough for a movie. Probably needs an intermission. Not going to get one. I believe that Fred Silverman was a genius but this was an example of his folly not his brilliance. 

I tend to think that the half hour was the best for soaps creatively. They managed with the hour. They got into real trouble with 90 minutes. I also place AW's epic failure hour & a half show as one of the top 5 worst things that happened on or to a soap! 

[Contessa Donatella]

NBC Daytime Head of Writer Development. Lin Bolen 1968-1975, Madeline David 1975-1979, Linda Line 1979-1987.

Vice President of Daytime Programming, Lin Bolen 1972-1976. Bolen was very involved in developing & mounting the soap "How to Survive a Marriage", called a women's lib soap, broadcast in 1974-75. She is responsible for taking first "Another World" & then "Days of our Lives" from half hour to hour long. She also did an hour trial run with "The Doctors" but did not pursue expansion there. Bolen was the first female Vice President of Programming at a TV network and she took NBC to #1 in the national Nielsen ratings. Wikiwand credits her hour long shows with attracting new viewers and being hits with young women. Bolen cancelled the fifteen-year run of game show Concentration in early 1973 to replace it with game show Baffle, which ran one year, in order to increase ratings of younger female audiences as daytime and late-night were seen as NBC's profit center at that time, and advertisers wanted programs that attracted young women. Bolen also ended the eleven-year run of Jeopardy!, feeling its demographics were old. The show's creator and producer Merv Griffin did not wish to change the show's format making Bolen commission a new game show from Griffin, Wheel of Fortune, which debuted on January 6, 1975, and was an immediate ratings hit; Jeopardy! would later be revived in 1984. Bolen departed NBC Daytime in the spring of 1976 while it was still #1 to form her own Production Company, "Lin Bolen Productions, Inc."

President of Daytime Programming, Fred Silverman, 1978-1982. . He was the man behind the 90-minute "Another World" fiasco. Before NBC he was a huge success at ABC & CBS. His NBC tenure was largely a let-down. Things were so bad that Johnny Carson quipped that NBC now stands for Nine Bombs Cancelled. Many high profile & expensive failures. For example, SUPERTRAIN was the most expensive TV show ever produced up to that point & it was a high-profile failure. Also failures HELLO, LARRY, THE BIG SHOW, and PINK LADY. However, they did launch HILL STREET BLUES, SHOGUN, DAVID LETTERMAN, CHEERS, ST. ELSEWHERE, FACTS OF LIFE, etc. He revitalized NBC's news which yielded TODAY and NIGHTLY NEWS. He put together a corporate team & those people stayed in place when Silverman left to start his own production company. One of them was Brandon Tartikoff who later took NBC to be #1. He got the peacock back into the NBC logo & it was used that way until 1986.

Vice President of Daytime Programming, Earl Greenburg, 1981-1983. He was the co-creator of the game show "Fantasy" with Merrill Heatter. It aired on NBC from Sept. 1982 to Oct. 1983.

Senior Vice President of Daytime Programming, Susan D. Lee, 1983-2000. Began in 1983 while having second-in-command vice presidents working alongside of her throughout her tenure with NBC Daytime. In 1996, there was uproar when "Another World" killed off the character of Frankie Frame. Word had it that both Susan D. Lee and then-Executive Producer Jill Farren Phelps chose Frankie as the next victim in the show's Fax Neuman serial killer storyline while then-head writer Margaret DePriest ran with the idea and crafted the gruesome, excessively violent murder on camera for Frankie. Susan D. Lee, in April 1999, gave soap opera "Sunset Beach" a 6-month extension taking them to the end of 1999. She canceled "Another World". She mounted NBC's last new soap, "Passions" in July 1999. She did that even though "AW's" ratings were higher than "Sunset Beach's". "Another World" was owned by P&G. "Sunset Beach" was jointly owned by Spelling Enterprises & NBC. "Passions" was wholly owned by NBC. 

Brian Frons, Vice President of Daytime Programming. 1983–1991. He canceled the long running daytime version of "Wheel of Fortune" (1975–1989). He also added a new soap opera "Santa Barbara" (1984–1993). NBC offered Bridget & Jerome Dobson a sweetheart deal to create it & built them a studio & budgeted more money than had been done before. Dobson/Phelps won 3 Best Show Daytime Emmys. He canceled "Search for Tomorrow" in December 1986, after it was on NBC for 4 years. Frons previously canceled "Search For Tomorrow", while working as the head for CBS Daytime. Frons appeared as God on "Santa Barbara" in a dream sequence involving Mason Capwell (Lane Davies). He brought the short-lived half-hour soap "Generations" (1989–1991) to midday NBC. Immediately after it was canceled BET network licensed it & rebroadcast it several times. "Generations" was a landmark show in that it was two families, one African-American & one white. Created by Sally Sussman-Morina, it was owned by NBC.

John Rohrbeck, Vice President of Daytime Programming, 1991–1996. Gave "Another World" another shot to improve ratings and offered them an extension on their contract and instead first, "Generations" was canceled in 1991 and then "Santa Barbara", 2 years later in 1993.

Don Ohlmeyer, Vice President of Daytime Programming, 1996–1999. Ohlmeyer was one of the masterminds behind NBC’s “Must See TV” lineup, which included programs like "Seinfeld", "Friends", "ER" and "Law and Order". Famed Television Producer, Executive Don Ohlmeyer Dies at 72 (adweek.com)

Sheraton Kalouria, Vice President of Daytime Programming, 2000–2005. Appointed in the spring of 2000 to replace outgoing longtime Senior Vice President Susan Lee. Kalouria had previously worked at ABC Daytime. Kalouria's new job with NBC Daytime was to head development and strategic planning for "Days of Our Lives" and "Passions".

Jeff Zucker, President of Daytime Programming, 2000–2007. Canceled the soap "Passions" and sent it to Direct TV's 101 Channel in 2007. Made a now infamous statement about "Days of Our Lives" in 2007 that the show would most likely not "continue past 2009".

Annamarie Kostura came from being the "One Life to Live" Casting Director to join NBC in 1990 as Director of Daytime Programs & Casting. In 1995 promoted to Vice President of Daytime Programs & Casting. Ultimately promoted again in 2005 to have supervision over both "Sunset Beach" & "Passions", Vice President of Daytime Programming until June 2007.

Bruce Evans, Senior Vice President of Daytime Programming, 2007–2021. Promoted to Senior Vice President on Monday, February 4, 2007. Mr. Evans had already been working at NBC in different positions for several years by the time of his promotion. Mr. Evans previously served as Vice President, Current Series, since July 2000. Among the shows he oversaw included "Heroes", "Law & Order", "Medium", "Crossing Jordan", and "Just Shoot Me". He served as a Director of Primetime series since July 1998 and a manager of Primetime since August 1997. In August 1996, he began his program executive career at NBC as an Entertainment Associate after his job as a coordinator in the same department. In his new position, Evans handles many of NBC's current series as well as having responsibility as head of the daytime programming that is included under Current Series, while also serving as a liaison for Paula Madison, Executive Vice President, Diversity, NBC Universal & Company Officer, General Electric, and her staff as they look to increase diversity in front of as well as behind the camera on NBC's shows. At the time of his promotion, NBC was a month away from deciding on whether to keep or drop "Days of Our Lives", however the opportunity was seen as the ticket to installing new life in the show. "Days" was renewed. As part of a content restructure, Bruce Evans was let go from NBC in February 2021.

The daytime division was folded into current programming under the supervision of Jeff Meyerson, President of Scripted Content.

(Recently someone mentioned not knowing NBC leadership at a given time. I created this document. Sources: my own notes, my own essays, "Her Stories" by Elana Levine, both "Soap Opera Encyclopedias", an article on Soaps She Knows, an article on AdWeek & Wikiwand. Wikiwand had some errors which I corrected. Specifically it had Ohylmeyer canceling AW, etc. which is wrong. Susan D. Lee did all of that in April 1999.)  

[j swift]

Allow me to go back in time to 1979 and make the fanfic pitch to expand Another World to 90 minutes, as I think it might have been proposed.

We've tried two spin-offs of Another World in order to engage our audience to stay on NBC throughout the day.  Somerset in 1970 and Lovers and Friends in 1977.  With Somerset, we tried a direct spin-off and initially called it Another World II, but multiple changes in the cast and writing staff meant that the tone began to differ too much from Another World, and they no longer seemed to exist in the same universe, or attract the same audience.  With, Lovers and Friends we established a tenuous connection between the Cushing and Cory families, and tried to maintain Harding Lemay as a head writer, but the work proved to be too much for him and the new writing staff could not maintain his quality.

So, what if rather than giving the time back to the affiliates, or try to make another new soap, we just expanded the current cast of Another World and make it into a 90-minute show?  We won't need to pay for another production staff, because we can use the camera men, editors, and post-production team that are already in place.  WGA-East has not yet formed, so we don't need to worry about labor costs for the writers.  Most households are loyal to one network because remote controls won't become standard with new TVs for two more years.  And we can entice the audience to stay by book ending their favorite performers at the beginning and the end of the episode.   

We'll start with some special episodes, expand the cast slowly, and be able to tell stories about a broader array of ages and economics. 

In my mind, that's always how I believed they pitched it.

Edited July 25, 2023 by j swift

[Xanthe]

I came across a commercial from 1989 for NBC SoapPhone. It was a 1-900 number ($1 for the first minute and $0.45 for each additional minute) and promised updates from different characters from different soaps. 

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I was a bit confused to see Genie Francis but then I remembered she had been on Days.

Does anyone remember this? Did you ever call it? 

[Contessa Donatella]

Yes, Diana Colville, cub reporter & romantic interest for John Black! 

Sorry, no, never knew about it. Clever idea. 

[Broderick]

Fanfic answer to the inquiry:  

Thanks for your proposal.  However, after much consideration, we feel that if the writer was unable to handle the crafting of storylines for a 60-minute serialized drama and an accompanying 30-minute serialized drama, the writer will likely be unable to produce quality storytelling for a 90-minute drama.  

While we appreciate your progressive suggestion, but we respectfully decline your proposal.   A 90-minute serialized drama seems too far removed from practicality to be considered any further. 

Please write again with any additional proposals you have. 

Declined.   

[Contessa Donatella]

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[j swift]

LOL - well at least it was respectful, I'm off to CBS...

[Broderick]

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( I intended to add at the bottom:

CC:  Mr. Harding Lemay )

[TVFAN1144]

Why did AW fall so hard during this time period around 1978 to 1979?   The writing was still strong I think.  It was successful in early 70s and after it expanded to an hour 

 

Was it competition from General Hospital and Guiding Light?

 

Maybe they could have tried moving AW to 2:30 followed by a new 1/2 hour serial like Texas or The Doctors