Characters I remember watching as little kids are now having teen pregnancy plots and Lord only knows how many times Erica has been married to Jackson.
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| I remember her bratty kid plots! Oh and her parents have been married and divorced 80 bazillion times! |
Why are these shows, which have been running for eons, being cancelled now? Where will infomercials and Dancing With the Stars find their semi-celebrities? I can't really answer the second question, but I can give you a pretty good idea of why these shows are dying.
Americans have a lot competing for their attention in a 21st Century world. We have the internet (and don't say we had that ten years ago because you know that dial up and streaming Kanye West faux pas are not the same!) We have smart phones. We have Netflix streaming movies directly into our homes without having to go to the store for a rental! More Moms are working during the day, too. So does America really have the time to commit to watching the same hour long show five days a week? We could be playing Angry Birds!
Then there's the cost of running a soap opera. These shows film enough episodes to run year round, five days a week. Their long time stars get millions of dollars or they quit and there has to be another convoluted plot twist to give them a new face or explain why Lucky, whose parents are both blonds, has black hair now (so I may have watched a good amount of ABC Soaps on sick days as a kid).
It's hard to come up with plot to fill 5 hours a week and it's hard to do complex camera work when your actors have to memorize the gist of it, do it, and move on. Actors write their lines on potted plants in soaps. That's why Sonny, the mobster on General Hospital (which will be ABCs only remaining soap), always looks like he's staring down. It's not a character nervous tick. He's reading.
Now, ABC Soaps, according to the Neilsen Ratings, are lower ranked than some of the other famous shows like The Young and the Restless. Oddly, the show being kept is the lowest rated of the ABC soaps and yet it's the only one remaining. I would chalk that up to the timeslot being at 3 in the afternoon. The soap audience is home from a shopping spree, having just picked up the kids from carpool. Dinner doesn't need to be started until after 4. It's still an ideal slot.
Americans have other sources for drama and shirtless men. Browsing Bellazon for shirtless male models takes less time and requires no DVR to do if you have a day job. Shows like One Tree Hill have much better written relationship drama that doesn't have to resort to desperate measures like the return of a now-grown aborted child (I KID YOU NOT!) to fill out five hours a week.
What's replacing these daytime staples? My mother complained that they would likely be replaced by talk shows (My mother, who is barely home to see them as she's always off gallivanting with the quilt coven or substitute teaching.) The shows being picked up are about food and lifestyle. I actually like shows that teach me things (I watched an awful lot of home improvement shows when I lived with my parents). As long as we don't fill it with two more hours of Rosie yelling at a conservative woman, I don't care because I don't have cable.
Whatever they run, if people don't like it they'll just turn to Hulu for reruns of Glee. That's the real danger broadcast television is facing these days. Soap Operas were too frequent to keep up with uploading them to the internet and if you missed an episode you had no time to catch up. I think we're going to find, going forward, that the shows that survive are the fresh types that air on cable as well as the web and the shows that shine will be the ones that become viral-- like clips from the Daily Show.
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