Death of Soap Operas...in Daytime? (Nov 22, 2008)

Maybe NBC should transform Days of Our Lives into a weekly series and retain Deidre Hall and Drake Hogestyn as cast members.

Face it. There are so many reasons why soaps continue to hemmorage viewers. More women joining the workforce. College students not getting into the habit in this age. 300-channel cable and satellite TV systems.

Generally, the daytime soap operas are designed for women viewers and were designed for the housewives in the 30s (originally as radio serials) to enjoy while their husbands were working.

There were some odd exceptions. Back in the late 50s, CBS used to air "The Edge of Night" at 4:30pm on the Eastern time zone, early enough for viewers getting out of school and work to watch the show. The odd part? The audience was more than 50 percent male.

In the 50s, the soaps existed as a minor genre alongside with the more dominant genre of game shows, prime time show reruns, variety, and information shows.

In the 70s, baby boomer college students turned the genre up loud and made the newer soaps such as "All My Children" and "Young and the Restless" hits. Before the 80s came, soaps were expanding into 60 minute shows (Another World expanded to 90 minutes in 1979), while the games and reruns went into the background.

At one time, "AMC" had about 40 percent male viewers during the early 80s, along with "One Life to Live" and "General Hospital" also getting a large share of male viewers, thanks to VCR taping.

Nowadays as the decades wore into the 90s and 00s, cable systems got bigger and bigger, while back then, there were mostly 24-channel cable systems during the 70s when boomers were in college dorms. Today, the males are more likely to be viewing a cable sports network than to see what the aging Erica Kane is up to on AMC. Watching reruns, movies, anything else simply cuts a share of the audience away from the major networks.

As we get into the 10s, it may be time to transform the daytime soap franchises into a weekly 22 episode series and end the now expensive daytime serial as a programming idea. With the costs of producing shows rising while the audience gets smaller, there is no potential lucarative DVD market for the 260 episode seasons, which would make them too expensive to produce and generally nobody would buy them.

Maybe someday, ABC could offer edited episodes of the 1981 General Hospital season featuring the Luke and Laura adventures on DVD. It wouldn't be easy work to edit down 260 hours into a more sellable 40 hour package.

Just in: End of Days For Hall (Midnight Nov 20, 2008)

Looks like a fifth hour of Today is in the works for the fall of 2010. Anyone agree with me on this? NBC is running out of gas in prime time, and their daytime lineup is almost down to nothing.