I think we can probably officially stick a fork in the American daytime drama genre - it's done. Although General Hospital has been renewed, ABC has announced the twin cancellations of All My Children and One Life to Life.
http://blog.zap2it.com/frominsideth...els-one-life-to-live-and-all-my-children.html
The former debuted in January 1970, the day after Jon Pertwee's first appearance on Doctor Who; the latter debuted during the summer of 1968, a year before man walked on the moon, just to put it into some context.
There might be one or two more soaps besides GH on the air in the US, but it does seem the writing is on the wall.
I've never been a personal fan of the genre, but I certain respect it. First, there's the extreme longevity of the shows. Not even Star Trek or Doctor Who can claim the decades upon decades racked up by soap operas. The Guiding Light, which ended a year or so ago, debuted on radio two years before Hitler invaded Poland, for heaven's sake. And we're talking shows that run 5 days a week - sometimes for an hour, or a half hour, with scripts to be written and learned and performed - up till the 1970s these things were done live, too.
Actors have lived their entire professional lives playing characters on soaps - some actors have gone from being strapping 20-somethings to being elderly and passing away from natural causes during the course of their time on shows like this. You wanna talk long form entertainment, think about that.
And many others used soap operas as a training ground. Tons of Star Trek actors, for example, started out on soaps.
And occasionally the genre mixed things up a bit and we ended up with stuff like Dark Shadows.
But I can see why it died. Its core target demographic was originally housewives and the retired who were home all day and needed entertainment while they did the laundry or sat in the rocker and knitted. But now you have two-income families, retired people are out volunteering or travelling, and the leftovers are more interested in watching Dr. Phil or Ellen - or they're watching reruns of CSI on Spike or a DVD or playing Wii Fit.
Plus when you're talking hundreds of episodes every 12 months, you ain't gonna see DVD releases. Dark Shadows is an anomaly as they did release that series to DVD, never mind you needed to build an addition to your garage to store all of the DVDs; it was worse in the 80s when the show was released to VHS, two episodes at a time, I kid you not.
Similarly, there's no rerun market for soaps. I know there are niche cable networks that do air soap reruns. But, really, putting the anomaly of Dark Shadows aside (because it was syndicated), you never saw Another World or General Hospital or the Guiding Light syndicated like you did, say, Trek or Get Smart reruns.
So RIP the soap opera. It was a unique form of entertainment that I'd frankly rather see than another variation on Dr. Drew's Celeb Rehab...
Alex
