Comments on: Salvaging the Sinking Soaps?

By: Kathleen Battles

Kathleen Battles — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 15:18:00 +0000

Thanks for this piece. I started watching soaps in the 70s as a kid – and I have long insisted that what has “killed” the genre is in fact clueless executive decisions about content. The OJ trial was certainly a blow, but their demise predated that. The shows tried too aggressively to go for the “youth” market by competing with the nighttime teen oriented soaps (BH 90210 and Melrose Place in their original incarnations). Or they tried to compete with their flashier (and ultimately emotionally stunted) nighttime cousins. I remember many years ago ABC selling AMC with a summer campaign focussed on the teen characters and thinking how incredibly short sighted that was. While demographic and market changes might have temporarily shaken up the soap world, certainly better planning and adherence to amazing qualities of the genre would have allowed producers to more fully take advantage of the current digital landscape to reinvigorate the genre and re-engage audiences. Economically speaking ABC might come out ahead in the short term – but in the long term I’m not sure this will be a wise decision.

By: Christine Becker

Christine Becker — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 14:49:15 +0000

While in London, I’ve gotten hooked on two British soaps, EastEnders & Emmerdale. Outside of sharing basic soaptastic plotlines with their American cousins (betrayals, break-ups, baby stealing), they feel quite different in being less sensationalistic, more focused on everyday issues and feelings (as much as baby stealing can be about the everyday). It’s revitalized my love for soaps, and so I really appreciate your point about a largely ignored element of US soap demise being content-related. I wonder if another outgrowth of the OJ and reality TV hits is that they detrimentally convinced soap headwriters they had to go bigger and bolder and more outlandish to compete. While I do like that in a soap (One Life to Live is often better the weirder it tries to be), that’s not really what most fans are into soaps for long-term, and it’s so refreshing now to be watching soaps that are just fundamentally about relationships and emotions. When I get back, I’ll do what I can to keep up with EE and Emmerdale and I suspect they’ll help me get over losing two shows I’ve been watching for 25 years.

By: Sarah Adams

Sarah Adams — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 15:51:33 +0000

It is sad to see this but I am curious if soaps will take a new shape in the form of webisodic television.

I am a long-time fan who has been fascinated by them since I was a kid.

Even with the sendoff, there is a destruction of legacy that can never be replaced and I think networks have failed to see this. They have long violated a rule that I read in a Douglas Marland interview many years ago, Respect the viewers. The concept of respect of the viewers was destroyed in the 1990s. This began in the 1990s, when the network executives, in power at that time, did not understand the genre and thus the decisions regarding production and writing harmed the genre.

To this day, I still blame OJ Simpson for destroying American Television.

On OLTL they actually ran a very tight ship and often came in under budget, yet put a very watchable product. Valentini, as a producer was shrewd and talented.

There is historical aspect to the soaps that many forget, in the 1980s, they were among the first shows outside of news broadcasts to do close-captioning. The first soap to be close-captioned was Search for Tomorrow.

I, for one, will not be watching the replacement programs and I am not a fan of Katie Couric.

It has been very interesting watching the developments at Days.

Time will tell if the ones that are left will survive, yet I see the fans preserving the soaps in a way that network big cats will never understand andyou are already seeing it in fanvids, fan fiction and fan art