OJ Death: How the trial affected Soap Ratings

[Planet Soap]

With the news of Ole Orenthal's passing, how much can we attribute the decline of the genre to preemptions during his trial, and the appetite for reality television that the trial began?

[titan1978]

It was a cumulative effect that gets lumped under the trial IMO.

The rise of talk TV that leaned into more sensationalistic material, filling an appetite that COURT TV and the constant coverage had created. Plus you could miss a talk show and go right back the next day.

The habit of soap watching was broken, and soaps thrive on habit. Once that more casual audience stops watching it’s hard to win them back.

Network execs not adjusting to how more options during the day for people to watch thanks to an explosion of cable had changed their industry. Instead they kept trying to recapture numbers like the early 90’s and 80’s, and the audience was fundamentally different now. So they decided they should have more input, more story control, and more stunts.

Also in the late 90’s we started to see no more investment in training a new crop of show runners and writers in daytime, and women were no longer running shows like they had been forever.

Shows like Y&R and DAYS were still thriving because they were stabile- you saw the same characters and the stories moved incredibly slow. Even the older characters were still in major play. As wild as DAYS was, all those Reilly stories were about romances.

Y&R seemed to capitalize on the fact that there were many Black people watching daytime and nobody was telling real stories with those characters. In the 90’s, to me, Drucilla, Neil, Malcolm and Olivia were just as important as Nina, Cricket, Paul, Sharon, etc.

And finally, a bunch of EP’s formed a committee because they didn’t like how their shows were marketed at awards shows, like it was all sex and no depth. This was also the height of AIDS. So some of them almost became neutered. Wendy Riche was one of the ringleaders of wanting that image to change of soaps being too sexy.

[Contessa Donatella]

The shows were so slow to react. It began with a preliminary hearing. And, you could tell from it what the trial was going to be like. The shows should have tried soap news at 5 of the hour from jump. Instead that idea took forever. And, the idea of broadcasting at 1 am also was a long time coming. I remember on Prodigy & on Delphi Digest trying to get ideas from the fans. 

[kalbir]

I pointed this out in the ratings thread, but I think the real issues began in the late 1980s with Iran-Contra, Nielsen people meters, and 1988 writer's strike, and everything culminated in the aftermath of OJ.