Posted on 12/08/2009 10:01:13 AM PST by Zakeet
CBS is canceling the soap opera "As the World Turns" after more than a half-century on the air.
CBS says the final episode will air next September, in its 54th year. Daytime dramas have been in a long-term ratings decline, and CBS ended the daytime soap "Guiding Light" earlier this year.
[Snip]
The cancellation will leave CBS with only two daytime dramas: "The Young and the Restless" and "Bold and Beautiful."
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
I remember Marlena get possessed by Satan And Roman Brady get kill by Stefano I am so patheric
Well, I'm glad I don't. (Never was a soap fan, I just read a lot about them by way of my interest in old-time radio . . . though I'm not above satirising a soap on my own radio show, as I did recently to The Guiding Light . . . )
I remember first time Stefano Dimera got kill off ROFL
They jumped the shark with the young homosexual boys sub-plot.
I'm still never sure whether the hoopla over The Mercury Theater On the Air's version of The War of The Worlds proved the ignorance of the great unwashed, proved the country was pretty vulnerable in an era of war-cloud panic (there were enough real breaking news bulletins about things like the Munich crisis at the time), or whether it simply succeeded beyond Welles's own wildest imagination. (It almost didn't, by the way: writer Howard Koch was still working on the script right up to a few hours before air time.)
But I do know that there were three disclaimers in the broadcast itself: a very clear announcement when the program opened that it was presenting the Welles production of the Wells classic; this announcement at the forty-minute break: "You are listening to a CBS presentation of Orson Welles and The Mercury Theater on the Air in an original dramatisation of The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells"; and, Welles' own closing to the broadcast: it had "no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be---The Mercury Theater's own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying 'Boo!'"
And, oh, by the way. Nobody died in the making of or the listening to The War of The Worlds . . . ;) However, there were a few bumps, a few scrapes, a few dozen lawsuits (against CBS), and at least one police raid---while the closing music was playing, the police stormed the place, confiscated scripts, isolated cast, and then sent out to face questioning from brainless reporters demanding to know how many deaths they'd heard of, the questioning implying before the facts came in (well, you know the press) that they (the reporters) knew of "thousands." Not to mention questions about a fatal New Jersey stampede . . . that never happened, as things turned out.
Probably both, LOL. The big thing I got out of the Brown book was the hysteria surrounding the King Edward/Wallis Simpson story. The public couldn't get enough of it, and it amounted to nothing more than a real-time soap opera. It proves the current fixation on the Tiger Woods story is nothing new.
The intriguing thing is that, if you're a genuine radio buff, The War of the Worlds---clever as it was---wasn't exactly the best The Mercury Theater On the Air had. Your mileage may vary, but my own call is that its presentations of Hell on Ice and My Little Boy were much more effective and interesting.
You know what in my area they show the Hills on one of local channel I think reality shows are today soap operas
Haven’t listened to very much old radio drama. But very interested in radio as a delivery system for news.
The big thing I got out of the Brown book was the hysteria surrounding the King Edward/Wallis Simpson story. The public couldn't get enough of it, and it amounted to nothing more than a real-time soap opera. It proves the current fixation on the Tiger Woods story is nothing new.
I'm not exactly sure I'd rate the story of King Edward in the same breath as the Tiger Woods story. A bachelor king provoking a constitutional and monarchical crisis over "the woman I love," even if she was a multiple divorcee in that time and place, isn't exactly the same thing---possibly more grave---than a golf champion with a birdie on every course and a wife back in the clubhouse, so to say. Say what you will about Edward VIII but at least he had the taste (if we can call it that) to do his womanising while he was still a bachelor. (On the other hand, Edward had a rather discomfiting taste for married women in the randy years before he met Wallis; indeed, his own father prayed he'd never marry or have children, the better to make sure the throne skipped Edward in favour of either his son Albert or his granddaughter . . . )
Plus Edward wasn't exactly facing that much world condemnation over it---there were many enough who thought it was one of the most romantic stories of the time, an honest-to-God king willing to throw it all away (most of it, anyway) for love, never mind that it made a rather reluctant king out of his brother George VI, and only later did the activities of the since-Duke and Dutchess of Windsor make them not romantic but controversial and even distasteful figures.
Yes, agreed. Somewhat more serious than Tiger’s woods.
However, Considering the times and Hitler’s rise to power and so forth, it still is interesting the public wanted to hear/read about someone’s love life rather than what was going on with the most important/diabolical individual of the 20th century.
I’m surprised this is the second cancellation of one of the last remaining soaps on the networks in a short period. I think, again, the main problem is they can’t afford the production costs of daytime (whereas before, when the nighttime shows were awash in high ratings and $$ revenue, they could subsidize the soaps with little problem). This will leave CBS with just 1 1/2 soaps (The Young & The Restless and its half-hour spinoff, The Bold & The Beautiful). Y&R will be the last to go on CBS, since it remains the highest-rated soap out of all the networks. I’m expecting NBC may axe “Days” before long. ABC has belt-tightened because of the actors agreeing to take pay cuts, and they’re already moving “All My Children” to Los Angeles (probably another cost-cutting measure) from NYC, where the soaps have usually been filmed.
Bring back Patch and Kayla, and see the ratings go through the roof. I blame that douchey guy with the dark hair who looked like Data from STNG for ruining the show in the 1990s.
I have to admit I watched then too (I worked nights). Who could resist Betsy? lol
They did bring them back, brought Patch back from the dead in 2006, 16 years after killing off his character (not long after the actor Stephen Nichols’s Stefan Cassadine character was killed off General Hospital). They dropped the characters earlier this year, apparently. I don’t think they made much of an impact, though. The actress playing their daughter (who remains on the show), Stephanie, is hot and on my FReeper page, Shelley Hennig (a former Miss USA).
I presume by “Douchey” guy, you mean Drake Hogestyn’s John Black, the worst actor in the history of Daytime Television. They fired both him and Deidre Hall (Marlena Evans) this past year (cost-cutting measures).
Considering the times and Hitler’s rise to power and so forth, it still is interesting the public wanted to hear/read about someone’s love life rather than what was going on with the most important/diabolical individual of the 20th century.Interesting and perhaps not all that surprising. It is in the very gravity of the scenario of the Depression, Hitler, the further rumblings in Europe, and the slowly swelling threat of another broad war into which the United States and others might be drawn, that allows for such a phenomenon as the Edward VIII/Wallis Simpson romance to take such hold. In the gravest of times we want to see and believe something real and romantic, never mind a few of the peculiarities involved, and in that era, when the British monarchy still signified something far different than it does today, the idea of a crowned king willing to surrender that station for love could only have taken a deep grip upon ordinary people who still wanted to believe in something romantic in the worst of times.
Throw in the factor of a kind of forbidden love (the Church of England then would have and did demur on the prospect of a congregant, never mind the King of England marrying a divorcee) and the romance factor is magnified tenfold.
John Black it was! Ruined the show almost as much as Ted McGinley ruined everything he touched.
John Black it was! Ruined the show almost as much as Ted McGinley ruined everything he touched.
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