Brox Sisters Listening In. Courtesy: Library of Congress Online Prints & Photographs.

Post by Shawn VanCour, New York University

This is the twelfth post in our “Honoring Hilmes” series, celebrating the career and legacy of Michele Hilmes on the occasion of her retirement. 

This series has offered much well-deserved praise for Michele Hilmes as a scholar, professor, mentor, and colleague, detailing her profound impact on her department, students, and field. I heartily concur with these sentiments but for the present post shift from a concern with “Hilmes” the person to what we might call the “Hilmesian” – by which I mean a certain set of observable tendencies in historiographical technique. I use the word “technique” here in the sense of a regularized set of formal devices deployed toward consistent ends within and across a body of work. What are the defining techniques of Hilmesian historiography, and to what end do those work?

In an effort to open this line of inquiry, I will focus on the technique of the “historical closeup.” For sake of space, my examples are limited mainly to the pages of Radio Voices, although the technique is by no means limited to this work (nor to the work of Hilmes alone). The questions I ask here are twofold: 1) how does the historical closeup work in Hilmesian historiography, and 2) what does it do?

Well-worn cover of Radio Voices. Courtesy: Kathleen Battles.

1. Ghost Stories (History as Spectrology)

One of the most telling passages of Radio Voices comes at the end:

Historians must continue to investigate the boundaries between what is known and what has been excluded from knowledge, what is heard speaking loudly in our largest public forums and what remains pushed to the sidelines, silenced or muffled in our historical accounts – and must continue to analyze the purposes and effects of such selections [. . . .] History is always ideological . . . . written by historians whose training, purposes, and basic assumptions and selections intertwine with present-day needs and preoccupations, and it finds a readership based on similar affinities (RV 288).

We are to listen, then, to the margins of history, to the voices silenced in existing accounts. Elsewhere in Radio Voices, this is cast as a strategy of Foucaultian reversal, or looking past the “smooth face of consensus” in the dominant discourse to recognize “the ruptured and seamed lines of tension and resistance that consensus seeks to conceal” (RV xvii). Equally important, we are asked to question the ideological underpinnings of our own, revisionist historiography: under what conditions may alternative histories be written, what forms may they take, and what modes of solidarity can they foster?

Radio Ghost. Painting by RovinaCai (2014).

While written under the sign of Foucault, there also lies within Hilmesian historiography a trace of a Derridean spectrology – an asking after what haunts our speech and clings to it as its very condition of possibility. What we are listening for here is not the voices of those who speak from a space “outside” the dominant discourse, but instead those who exist as absent presences within it, whose “silencing” or “muffling”  is the condition for the dominant speech to itself be heard clearly. We listen for the murmurs of ghosts.

The goal here is not simply to restore these spectral voices to a past from which history has erased them, but rather to help their speech find a place within the dominant discourse of the present, creating conditions in which they may both speak and be heard. In Derridean terms, “[the scholar] should learn to live by learning . . . how to talk with [the ghosts], how to let them speak or how to give them back speech, even if it is in oneself . . . in the other in oneself: they are always there, specters . . . even if they are no longer, even if they are not yet” (Specters 221). This closing element of futurority (the “not yet”) is critical: the ghosts of history cannot, by nature, fully arrive within the present – they murmur, indistinctly, and it is the task of the historian to help find a place for their stories.

2. Dirty Optics (The Historical Closeup)

What, then, is the historical closeup, and how can it help us bring the ghosts of history into full presence? Here we may turn to Siegfried Kracauer’s book, History: The Last Things Before the Last, which he frames for his reader as the continuation of a line of inquiry first opened in his earlier book on film theory:

Recently I suddenly discovered that my interest in history . . . actually grew out of the ideas I tried to implement in my Theory of Film . . . . I realized in a flash the many existing parallels between history and the photographic media, historical reality and camera-reality (History 3-4).

First among these parallels was a tension between what Kracauer described as the “realistic” and “formative” tendencies, or competing needs to both respect and rework the reality documented by the camera or historian. However, as he was quick to note in his film book, “Objectivity in the sense of the realist manifesto is unattainable” (Film 15). The rendered reality was instead always inescapably shaped to some degree by the photographer-historian’s own subjectivity and larger concerns of his or her time. There is no possibility of a pure optics in Kracauer; there is no innocent or uncontaminated historical gaze.

New perspectives: Galileo’s telescope. Detail from painting by H. J. Detouche (1754).

The second major tension negotiated by both the filmmaker and historian, for Kracauer, is that both “must . . . move between the macro and micro dimensions” (History 122). In his film book he had pointed toward “Griffith’s admirable non-solution” of alternating between long shots, which offered subjects and actions in context, and closeups, “which do not just serve to further the action or convey relevant moods but retain a degree of independence” (129). For historians, the closeup retained this same power to deform the larger totality of which it was a part:

As I see it . . . [we should] concentrate on close-ups and from them casually . . . range over the whole, assessing it in the form of aperçus. The whole may yield to such light-weight skirmishes more easily than to heavy frontal attack (History 134-35).

The goal here is political, challenging received histories to gain critical insights on the present. This aim is achieved not just at the level of content, but also of form, exploiting the disruptive power of the historical closeup.

3. The Hilmesian Closeup

Who or what forms the subject of these closeups in Radio Voices? They are multiple, including particular programs (from Amos n Andy to Real Folks and An Open Letter on Race Hatred), performers (from Samuel Rothafel to Wendell Hall and Jack Benny), writers and producers (notably, below, Irna Phillips, Anne Hummert, Jane Crusinberry), and advertising agencies (J. Walter Thompson). In some cases, these are familiar figures whose examination in closeup serves to denaturalize the dominant narratives in which they have been traditionally inscribed, letting them begin to speak otherwise. In other cases, they are spectral presences, the muffled voices of those whom history has erased, invited back into the picture to say their piece.

1930s Magazine ad: Super Suds brings you NBC’s Clara, Lu & Em.

As an example of the Hilmesian closeup in action, we may look to Chapter 6 of Radio Voices, titled “Under Cover of Daytime.” As with most chapters in this book, we open in long shot: whereas the early 1930s saw shows like The Goldbergs, Myrt and Marge, and Clara, Lu and Em running alongside more general-interest programming in the evening, as network radio expanded, women’s programming assumed a more “subordinate position” in daytime hours and was widely disparaged by critics for its sensationalism and crude commercialism (RV 151). From here we move into an even wider shot, as Hilmes discusses early twentieth century consumer culture’s production of what advertising historian Roland Marchand calls the “feminine mass,” seen as over-emotional, easily manipulated, and lacking in taste. At this point, an initial thesis is advanced: the relegation of more “feminized” and overtly commercial programming to daytime hours served a double containment strategy of 1) controlling women’s voices and 2) reconciling network broadcasting’s competing mandates for private profit and public service (152-3).

L-R: Irna Phillips, Anne Hummert, Jane Crusinberry.

Three successive closeups of soap producers Irna Phillips, Anne Hummert, and Jane Crusinberry complicate this picture and work in dialectical tension with the opening long shots, showing how the daytime containment strategy at the same time created a space in which women and women’s issues could achieve greater public visibility and cultivate the solidarity needed for the formation of an effective “counterpublic” (RV 159). A closing return to long shot moves back to the previously posited daytime/nighttime division, the intermediary passage through a series of closeups having now challenged what at first appeared to be a strategy of subordination. What lies “Under Cover of Daytime” is not just the persistent commercialism that formed the seedy underbelly of network radio’s surface-level public service commitments, but also the creation of a protected public space in which women could build solidarity and begin to mount challenges to a dominant discourse that had traditionally excluded them. The voices of radio were not just those of male-dominated evening dramas and comedy/variety shows, but also those of daytime women’s programming, which are no longer forgotten or dismissed but now recognized for the serious cultural work they performed.

Nearly every chapter in Radio Voices follows this structure: a “big picture” presented in long shot with larger cultural contextualization leads to the formation of an initial thesis that is then strategically unsettled or modified through the technique of the closeup. The closeup becomes a means to resist or challenge the master narratives and sweeping views to which cultural history might otherwise be prone, a means of politicizing the telling of history at the level of form. It is a technique, I would suggest, that we also find deployed across other works by Hilmes, as something properly Hilmesian, though importantly, not the exclusive property of Hilmes. The historical closeup remains a vital tool for a critical cultural historiography that aims to restore the voices of those silenced in the past and create a space within the present in which they can be heard. Its Hilmesian deployment offers a valuable lesson in how to rewrite history, change the dominant discourse, and begin to make room for our dead.

Post by Elana Levine, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

This is the third in a series of posts on my use of digital tools for a television history project. See part 1 and part 2.

Many of the digital research and writing needs I have been discussing in previous posts might apply to any historical project. Anyone who is grappling with thousands of sources in multiple formats might find data management and writing software useful to their task. But the work of managing audio-visual sources is more specific to media history. Television historiography, in particular, can be especially challenging in this regard, for series television includes episode after episode and season after season of programming — a lot of material for any researcher to take on.

In the case of my history of American daytime television soap opera from its beginnings in the early 1950s to the present, I face a task even more daunting than most TV history, for the genre I am studying has run 15-minute, half hour, or hour long episodes each weekday, 52 weeks a year, with individual series continuing this schedule for more than 50 years. Of course there is no way to watch all of it, or even to sample it in some representative way. Much of it no longer exists, for all soaps were broadcast live initially and many of those that started to be shot on video in the 1960s did not preserve the episodes — producers erased the tapes on an established rotation schedule. As far as I know, no public archive anywhere has all of the episodes of any US soap, although some of the shorter-lived ones do exist in complete form in the hands of media distribution companies or fan collectors. Fan archivists have preserved and uploaded to user-generated streaming video sites a massive amount of their private collections, taped off-air from the beginnings of the home VCR era to the present — there is more than one researcher could ever consume from the post-‘80s era alone.

But my point here is not to marvel at the voluminous output of soap creators and soap fans (although, wow!), nor to lament the disappearance or inaccessibility of so much of this crucial form of American popular culture (although, what a loss!). Instead I’d like to explain what I watch and, more specifically, how I watch, for that is entirely dependent on digital tools.

For the past 7 years, I have been integrating the viewing of past soap episodes into my daily routine. My choices of what to watch have been directed largely by availability. Other than episodes I have been able to see in museums and archives, my viewing has been focused on the limited numbers of soaps I have access to otherwise, of which I have tried to watch as many episodes as are available. Because I have been a soap viewer since the early 1980s, I have been less concerned with seeing programs from my own viewing history, although I am gradually integrating more material from the user-generated streaming archive over time. Instead, I have focused on the one soap that has been released in its entirety on DVD, Dark Shadows, and on soaps that have been rerun in recent years on cable channels, mostly the now-defunct SOAPnet, and on the broadcast network, RetroTV, which is carried primarily by local affiliates’ digital sub-channels.

In addition to daily reruns of just-aired soaps, SOAPnet reran select past episodes from a number of programs, but also aired a full run of ABC’s Ryan’s Hope from its 1975 debut through 1981 (the show aired originally until 1989). It also reran several years’ worth of Another World episodes from the late 1980s and early ’90s, and Port Charles’ telenovela-style 13-week arcs of the early 2000s. There have been other such instances, as in Sci-Fi’s rerun of Passions’ first few months in 2006. These repeats began airing around 2000, so I started recording them well before I was actively working on this project. As these repeats aired, I saved them first to VHS and then, once I abandoned those clunky old tapes, to DVD. DVD is a poor archival medium. But when I started doing this there were not the digital recording and storage options we now have. As with many other technological tools, what I did worked for me so I kept doing it.

I’ve watched much of this material over the past 7 years and am watching more every day. The recent addition of RetroTV’s rerun of the Colgate-Palmolive NBC soap, The Doctors, beginning with the late 1967 episodes, has further contributed to my archive. But how I do my viewing is where I employ digital video tools.

The author’s two-screen work set-up.

Because most of my episode archive is on DVD-Rs I have burned over the years, my process is to convert these DVDs to mp4 files. Software like Handbrake accomplishes this on my Mac, as did the now-defunct VisualHub. For content I access through user-generated streaming sites, I use downloading software, some of which is available for free online. I also use iSkysoft iTube Studio for its ability to download from a range of different such sites, and to convert those files to iPad-ready mp4s. Managing the files through iTunes, I transfer them to my iPad in week-long viewing chunks, moving them off my limited-capacity first generation iPad after I watch. This multi-step process can be a bit cumbersome, but it achieves some key goals that have allowed me to watch a lot of content over time.

One goal was that my episodes be viewable in an off-line and mobile capacity to increase my ability to watch any time and anywhere (such as airplanes and my community fitness center gym, which did not have wifi until the past few years). Another goal was for the episodes to be on a screen separate from my main computer screen not only for portability but so that I could multitask as I watch. My pattern for years has been to watch three episodes of half-hour soaps or two of hour-long soaps each working weekday. Skipping commercials, this means spending 1–1 ½ hours of my day watching. I rarely take the time to do that in a concentrated way. Instead, I watch the episodes each day while dealing with email or other lower-attention work tasks, and in a host of other times when I find pockets for viewing — doing my hair, making dinner, cleaning a bathroom, waiting for a kid to fall asleep — these, I assure you, are all excellent times to watch soaps. I also watch at the gym and occasionally in the living room, with earbuds, when someone in my household is watching something else (e.g., Teen Titans Go!) on the “big” TV.

I take notes on the shows when I notice revealing moments (in DevonThink), but daytime soaps were not made for one’s full attention at all times. They are excellent at using audio and video cues to signal narrative significance. When I was watching Dark Shadows (perhaps the slowest of the soaps despite vampires, werewolves, and time travel) I knew exactly when to pay close attention because of the predictable music cues. Each of the soaps I watch has its own such patterns, which I have picked up through my regular viewing.

The work of television historiography is distinct in multiple respects, but surely the volume of content one might consider is especially notable. While watching the programs one studies is a central part of our research, cultural studies has helped us to understand that processes of production and reception are equally significant. Still, this de-centering of the text may be puzzling to those more accustomed to traditional forms of cultural analysis. For my soap research, my often-partial attention to the text has become an unintentionally revealing experience. I’ve come to understand my viewing as the 21^st century digital version of the 1960s housewife glancing back and forth at the set as she irons, starts dinner, or moderates between squabbling siblings, an experience hilariously portrayed in a 1960 TV Guide Awards sketch. There may be no more fitting research strategy for a TV genre that has long served as a daily companion to its audience’s lives.

Jack and Kristina Wagner, stars of General Hospital, in 2004.

Here I am, about to start writing this column, when the news arrives. Frisco Jones! Back on General Hospital! Secretly shooting as we speak! If you find this half as exciting as I do, you just may have spent the 1980s in a bedroom wallpapered with photos of GH actors and/or as a charter member of the Jack Wagner fan club.

Jack Wagner’s imminent return to General Hospital is the latest in a long string of actors reprising their roles on ABC’s sole remaining daytime soap. Over the past year, an ongoing stream of GH favorites from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s have appeared on screen, some in short-term runs, others in long-term contract roles. That these characters were part of General Hospital’s heyday, the period from the late 1970s to the early 1990s when the program achieved high ratings and reaped major ad dollars, is reflected in the fan excitement that attends each of these returns. But the rejuvenation of General Hospital is not just about the appearance of popular actors. Since former One Life to Live executive producer Frank Valentini and head writer Ron Carlivati took over in early 2012, the program has mined its own rich history, as well as that of ABC Daytime and the soap genre more broadly, to tell stories rooted in the long on-screen lives of its characters, referencing story events from as far back in General Hospital history as the 1970s, and bringing into the diegetic world characters and events from defunct ABC soaps, as well. These returns and references have made forward-driving contributions to new and ongoing stories and have remained true to most fans’ understandings of the characters.  Most importantly, they express an unabashed love and respect for these on-screen worlds, the daytime soap genre, and viewers’ life-long commitments to these programs.

Duke Lavery (Ian Buchanan) returning to General Hospital in 2012.

Between 2009 and early 2012, things looked very dire for the U.S. daytime soap opera. In that period, four of the genre’s eight shows were canceled, including CBS’s Guiding Light, a carry-over from radio, and As the World Turns, the longest running TV soap to date. Also in this period, ABC canceled two of its three remaining soaps, All My Children and One Life to Live, in a single blow. Yet something curious has happened over the past year.  In this time, the genre has seen something of a revival both economically and culturally. The remaining four soaps seem relatively secure in their network berths, and the production company Prospect Park has put into place in recent weeks the production of both All My Children and One Life to Live for their web-based The OnLine Network. News coverage and fan buzz about soaps has been positive and hopeful of late, a 180-degree turn from just over a year ago, when despair, cynicism, and dismissiveness reigned.

We might explain the rejuvenation of this scaled-down genre in multiple ways. For one, the broadcast networks can much more viably manage the economics of one (or two, in the case of CBS) daytime soaps on their schedule than they could the multiple programs of the recent past, helping the remaining four broadcast soaps achieve a new kind of stability. In addition, the intensive investment of soap fans and our culture’s enthusiasm for new media innovations are bringing Prospect Park’s online revivals some heady buzz, even if their long-term viability remains uncertain. Such developments suggest that shifting soaps into niche-targeted slots within the broader media landscape, as opposed to expecting them to retain mass hit status amidst universal audience fragmentation, may be the key to sustaining the genre’s economic viability.

Actress Lynn Herring, who started out on General Hospital and later appeared in Days of Our Lives and As the World Turns, also returned to GH in 2012.

But soap viewers have long known that many of the problems the genre has faced were as much about the substance of the shows themselves as they were about changes in TV economics or a mismatch between the genre and contemporary women (a view Oprah Winfrey, among others, endorsed). Soaps were often victims of mismanagement, of network interference in the creative labor of writers and producers, and of some of those creative forces too readily buying into the argument that soaps no longer resonate with the needs and interests of their primarily female audience. Over the past twenty years, the genre’s basic principles, its respect for narrative history, its concern with the travails of strong women, and its ability to weave complex narratives out of a multi-dimensional, multi-generational array of characters, were too often abandoned. But in the past year, spearheaded by the remarkable final weeks of One Life to Live, viewers of some soaps have witnessed a return to such principles, buoyed by faster-paced storytelling and the paired emotional experiences of laughter and tears that had been a trademark of the ABC soaps in particular. With this resurgence of respect for the genre and its viewers, the present moment has become one of the more exciting and promising in U.S. daytime soap history.

Then again, maybe the show just seemed more spot-on due to the confluence of its fiction with actual snafus in the ramp up to the Games. In that regard, the scheduling decision to split up the second series and air its final three episodes in the weeks leading up to the Opening Ceremony was a stroke of genius, as the confluences have compounded with time growing short, leading to a flood of articles praising the show for its prescience and enabling Twenty Twelve writer/director John Morton to direct a clever jeer at the real planners: “Why can’t they make up their own problems?” For me, the pleasures of Series 2 are rooted more in mockery of language than events (a single word: Jubilympics). But whether the catalyst was actually in script or newspaper pages, Twenty Twelve vaulted in critical esteem from “not as amusing as what it’s trying to send (a little bit) up” in its early episodes to “a perfectly played and painfully close-to-home satire” in its final ones. No mockumentary has benefited more from how the reality of its subject matter coincided with its airing.

It’s also striking that the BBC, responsible for bringing the Olympic Games into British homes, albeit not organizing them, has been eager to present mockery of Games planning and bureaucratic incompetence at a time when its own oversight structures are perilously up for debate. But this seems suitably British. Slate’s June Thomas describes, “Pessimism is as ingrained in the British character as a craving for steak and kidney pie…It’s as if Britons believe they can inoculate themselves against disapproval by bad-mouthing themselves earlier and more viciously than any outsider would dream of.” Of course, Twenty Twelve isn’t all that vicious, and committee head Ian Fletcher is actually pretty good at his job (after all, he’s Lord Grantham). But fittingly, Fletcher’s primary talent consists of papering over real problems with meaningless words, as displayed in the Telegraph this week, yet another venue for the real and the fake to come together.

But for all the whinging Londoners have done about the Olympics, another BBC show this week unearthed the sincere excitement and pride Britons are apparently fostering underneath those layers of pessimism. It was announced in December that on the BBC’s flagship soap opera EastEnders, the oft-beleaguered character Billy Mitchell would be an Olympic torchbearer, with actual London 2012 chairman Sebastian Coe speaking of him and the fictional borough of Walford as if they were real. Then on Monday night, EastEnders inserted a live segment into an otherwise pre-taped episode depicting Mitchell carrying the torch to its next bearer, with the start of the live portion signaled by Mitchell’s portrayer, Perry Fenwick, winking at the camera.

http://youtu.be/Hlm-4Ttks28

This was yet another form of the scripted and real coming together, as the image shifted from polished soap aesthetics to liveness connoted by the unsteady, distant camera, while fictional Walford residents cheered on Mitchell/Fenwick as he ran with an Olympic flame. It was almost a disaster, of course — Billy was trapped on the Tube as his allotted time neared — but the problem wasn’t caused by organizing committee incompetence or a transport breakdown; it was just Billy Mitchell’s usual bad luck augmented by standard soap opera delay drama. In other words, it was good TV. And the tweets from British viewers watching the episode indicated its effectiveness:

Lovely, uplifting TV there on #EastEnders. Well done everyone! You should be very proud. #EElive — David Brown (@MrDavidEBrown) July 23, 2012

still trying to work out why Billy with the Olympic torch was really really moving. oh brain. you work so weirdly. #eastenders — Grace Dent (@gracedent) July 24, 2012

Umm..I just watched the Eastenders live Olympic torch ep.. And cried.. Could be the rum or the fact that Eastenders is the best soap ever! — kaya scodelario (@kayascollywogs) July 24, 2012

Watching eastenders from Monday when Billy carried the torch made me more excited than when I saw it in denham the other day! #GOBILLY— Ellie Druce (@Elliedruce) July 25, 2012

I’m calling it. Live #Eastenders was a f**king triumph. — Lisa Moran (@Lisa_Moranio) July 23, 2012

There were still cynics, inevitably (see the comments section here, if you must). But I sense that a significant majority of the nearly 8 million British viewers watching this segment genuinely enjoyed the unifying live experience of a real international ritual carried out on some of the country’s favorite fictional streets. In both this case and Twenty Twelve, the real and the scripted blending together made for compelling entertainment, whether it celebrated patriotic joy or colossal failure.

______________________________________

– Twenty Twelve‘s final two episodes air on BBC America Saturday night at midnight Eastern Time.
– It should be noted that the visit to the EastEnders set wasn’t part of the official Olympic Torch main route
– Olivia Colman is an incredible actress. That is all.

As I’ve reread debates about whether and how soap opera and melodrama are inherently “feminine” forms (this writing is notably pre-Butlerian), I’ve thought of how the authors couldn’t have possibly imagined Sons of Anarchy’s (SOA) melodramatic depths that are paired with just about every imaginable signifier of patriarchal masculinity. SOA is fascinating as a story set in a male, homosocial, largely patriarchal context but which centrally relies upon drama created by family conflict and secrets.

This season, SOA has utilized most every narrative strategy that defines soap opera and at the same time turned them on their head by refusing other aspects of daytime soap related to drawing out action over long periods of time. Despite the fact that many episodes feature motorcycle chases or firearm fights that offer physical action, the aspect of the storytelling that has me on edge of my seat—yelling at television, “tell him, tell him”—is that the real action has been about the process of disseminating or withholding information—straight out of the daytime playbook. The viewers know most all the secrets (or so we think), which inflects scenes with rich nuance as we try to ascertain what characters might know or suspect, just like in daytime serials.

But at the same time, SOA has used the pacing of a weekly serial, burning through narrative at a rate similar to The OC (the last show I can think of that developed and resolved major plotlines and subplots that would span seasons in most shows in just a matter of episodes). Here we have a hybrid storytelling strategy that allows and delivers conclusions within the span of a few weeks or at least the course of a 13-week season, very much contrary to the perceived source of women’s soap enjoyment of never-ending serial complications.

Categorizing SOA is difficult. In many ways, it is a family drama. Its deepest conflicts are personal and deal with the negotiation of competing loyalties; its cumulative narrative seems to be Jax Teller’s journey of deciding what kind of man he will be and dealing with the implications of that choice on those he loves and who love him. Of course this family drama takes place in the fictional, small, rural town of Charming, California on the backs of motorcycles, amidst plotlines of illegal guns, drug trade, and porn shoots, albeit with a more complicated gender politics than non-viewers might assume. I’m pretty sure John Fiske would be at a loss in trying to apply his categorizations of “feminine” or “masculine” television, and it makes me wonder a lot the scholarship of the era and continuing assumptions of gendered spectators and genre/narrative strategies.

More recently, as ABC has signed Katie Couric to a syndicated talk show deal, the network’s only remaining soap, General Hospital, appears all the more vulnerable. (Couric’s show is scheduled to air in GH’s current time slot on ABC’s owned & operated stations.)  ABC president Anne Sweeney declared a survival of the fittest competition between GH, The Chew, The Revolution, and Couric, a contest GH seems poised to lose.  While president of ABC Daytime Brian Frons has pitched the cancellations and replacement series as responses to audience demands, there is no question that the main motivation is that the binge-and-purge “lifestyle” pairing can be produced much more cheaply than a soap, and thus can draw a smaller audience and still allow the network to come out ahead.

Yet these developments have been accompanied by some promising high points, steps that offer fascinating illustrations of new industry/fan interactions.  These shifts have exposed and magnified the tensions between network management, the soaps’ creative talent, and audiences, and have suggested that management might be taking viewers’ perspectives into account in a way they have not for many years.  ABC is clearly allowing AMC and OLTL some budgetary leeway in wrapping up their shows, as every day brings announcements of former cast members returning to the screen as the programs conclude.  Here, at least, fans and the soaps’ creative teams are being afforded the chance to have a proper send-off.

Even more intriguing are the behind-the-scenes developments at General Hospital.  Perhaps because there is nothing left to lose, soon after the cancelation announcement, ABC fired GH’s long-running head writer, Bob Guza, a man that fans perpetually blame for the serial’s decline in quality over the past fifteen years.  These complaints are not centered around unpopular couplings or preposterous plot twists; instead they are protests against the program’s male-centered, even misogynist, storytelling, with male mobster characters and their ever-faithful female love interests skewing the program’s moral compass in disturbing directions.  Replacing Guza is a staff writer, Garin Wolf, who wrote the show during the 2007-2008 Writers Guild strike in ways that met with fan approval (along with many other soap writers, Wolf worked under the Guild’s fi-core status).  Among Wolf’s many admirable qualities, in the eyes of fans and former fans, is his respect for and investment in the history of the on-screen world, as well as his privileging of female characters and commitment to romance-centered storylines.

At a time when the future of the show is in grave doubt, ABC finally seems willing to attend to audience complaints. (NBC’s Days of Our Lives is also making major changes behind the scenes, so this may be an industry-wide trend.) Almost none of the discourse on the end of the soaps has considered the content of the shows themselves, seeing such developments as the expanding media universe, the fragmentation of audiences, and the rising numbers of women in the workplace as explanation enough.  Yet many viewers (and former viewers) insist that the problem with the soaps is that they are just not as good as they used to be, and that they would gladly watch more, or return to watching, with some different kinds of storytelling.  To see the networks and production companies giving some credence to that theory as they make these backstage changes is quite remarkable.  The recent wave of cancellations has no one optimistic about the big picture future of the genre.  However, the industry’s newfound investment in heeding viewer concerns may help to make whatever time is left truer to fans’ desires for classic soap storytelling.

Disney’s announcement that it will be replacing cable channel SOAPnet with a new preschool channel has generated serious concerns for U.S. soap viewers.  When television institutions such as the CBS soaps Guiding Light and As the World Turns are getting canceled and ratings across the 7 soaps currently on air are averaging a 2.33, any change in the soaps’ distribution is worrying news.  But the impending disappearance of SOAPnet (which is still 18 months away) is a loss in a number of other ways, as well.

SOAPnet began in 2000 as a way for ABC-Disney to repurpose the broadcast network’s three daytime soaps.   The channel also included original programming (such as Soap Talk) and reruns of defunct daytime and prime time soaps.  In an era before the widespread distribution of TV on DVD, a cable channel willing to rerun such fare as Dallas and Knots Landing was a rarity.  Even more rare was SOAPnet’s airing of past daytime soaps, notably ABC’s Ryan’s Hope (SOAPnet has aired every episode from the 1975 debut to early 1981) and NBC’s Another World (the channel reran a swath of episodes from the 1990s).  In addition, SOAPnet would occasionally air retrospective episodes of current soaps.  In these ways, SOAPnet helped to preserve and perpetuate one of the most obscure of television’s archives, as daytime soaps are never rerun and never released on DVD.

SOAPnet’s archival contribution may have been its most significant offering for a soap historian like me, but for the broader public the channel offered an alternate venue for keeping up with the soaps, not only those on ABC, but also NBC’s Days of Our Lives and CBS’s The Young & the Restless, which struck deals with the channel to carry same-day and weekend repeats of currently airing episodes. These cable repeats have become many viewers’ chief mode of soap viewing and their loss will surely create a gap in those viewers’ TV experience, as many are attesting in light of the news.

In announcing the channel’s end, Disney executive Anne Sweeney explained that the rise of DVRs and multiplatform distribution have made SOAPnet a less crucial space for soap viewing than it once was.  This is no doubt true, as all of the currently airing soaps can now be streamed online, although this is a relatively recent development for some.  In fact, I long suspected that ABC was hesitant to make its soaps available online in an effort to protect SOAPnet’s ratings.  Of course, many soap viewers may not have DVRs or access to streaming video, so they may be lost entirely.  But the SOAPnet ratings were never part of the broadcast network ratings picture, and thus the loss of SOAPnet viewers should have no real effect on the broadcast numbers.

In addition, many soap viewers have long found SOAPnet to be a disappointment.  In recent years, the channel has moved further and further away from its daytime soap roots, picking up repeats of more and more prime time dramas and importing original fare from Canada as well as venturing into reality shows.  ABC executive Brian Frons has gotten a lot of flak from soap fans for his remarks about expanding the definition of “soap” in ways that seem to equate “soapy” with repeats of exploitation-level made-for-TV movies and cheap reality shows.

Still, SOAPnet has delivered a number of soap-related treasures over the years and for these I, for one, will sorely miss it.  From the original, prime time General Hospital spin-off GH: Night Shift (the second season of which I, and many others, loved) to repeats of such prime time rarities as Fox’s Pasadena (including many never-before-aired episodes) and such gems of daytime’s past as the 1970s Ryan’s Hope, SOAPnet offered something unique.  Its disappearance may not be any more deadly to the daytime soap genre than the many other challenges soaps are facing.  More troubling is the loss of SOAPnet’s potential—both as a player in the TV business and as an all too rare space for soaps to get their cultural due.

Speculations contributing to the waning viewership for daytime soaps has been circulating for a while now. Changing societal norms, like the increasing number of women entering the work force, the growing popularity of (coincidentally cheaper) fare such as judge and talk shows, the overall variety of viewer choice, and migration to other media platforms during daytime hours have all been identified as factors effecting “sudsers'” ratings. Though in the case of ATWT, fans of the series have other ideas.

Prior to the series finale of Guiding Light, soaps have made valiant attempts to cut costs and attract audiences. Series have tried to reinvigorate the format by changing shooting techniques (use of hand held digital cameras on ATWT and other programs), incorporating fan produced scripts, or signing Hollywood talent for limited runs.

When Guiding Light was canceled a few months ago, it was replaced with the less costly revival of Let’s Make a Deal. However, the suds, like the characters that populate them, are often resurrected. Following NBC’s cancellation of Passions in 2007, the network went into immediate negotiations of the sale of the show to Direct TV. Although, loyal audience members and casual viewers might be currently mourning the end of the series, judging by past post-cancellation soap deals, the probability of the narrative continuing in some vein on cable, satellite, or online seems relatively high.

In any case, ATWT series finale is approaching, giving the show’s producers about 9 more months to either tie up lose ends, incorporate more cliffhangers, or go out with a bang — which in soap opera terms could be anything from split personalities and incest, to orangutan nurses and killer clones. So, stay tuned for the end, as the world stops turning September 2010.

But with the ever decreasing millions of viewers, the current economy, the viability of soaps on other media platforms, and the increased ratings for the game and talk shows that replace them in their time slots — what does this mean for the future of the daytime soap? And what does it mean for the networks that cut them lose?