It's A Soapy Life After All

It looks like ABC's gambit to move All My Children to the West Coast to save $ didn't work.  The wild fire of cancellation talk is spreading across the net.  What does this have to do with us?

I never worked on AMC altho I did have an audition or whatever.  They didn't like my storytelling sense I think is how I would put it.  I'm not sure anymore.

I'm struggling to explain this in the larger context.  There's an interesting chatfest that went on between Joe Konrath and Barry Eisler that can be found in PDF.  It has interesting things to say about the collapse of publishing.  I think the same forces that now work against publishing are working against soaps (and network television).

There is an audience, diminishing is true but existing still, for daytime serials.  A vast young audience will not bother with them now.  They'd go to MTV with Skins or Teen Moms Who Land in Jail reality shows.  The audience the high mucky mucks of network programming have abandoned is the older audience.

Instead of telling stories that would appeal to those interested in family, community and tradition, the networks tarted and modernized and sexualized everything.  This is obviously a mistake.  Hey, if it wasn't, the numbers would be there.  I rest my case.

I can hardly follow OLTL anymore and when I can I'm screaming at the TV.  The guy who plays Robert Ford is adorable, this guy is really typey.  He's had a stupid storyline from the beginning, came on as a very unpleasant character.  Obviously the audience related to the actor well and very strongly which forced the producer/writers to clean him up. Now he's in a storyline that's sheer pain to endure.  And what happened to Todd?  Is he dead or did he survive the gunshot?  And as much as I like Robin Strasser, please, I do not want to see her kiss a guy who is probably 35 years younger than she is.  Nor do I want to see Brian Kerwin and Kim Zimmer (who I know from The Doctors) in bed together.  No.

When I was at OLTL the ratings were down and Paul Rauch insisted we go back to the well and do yet another Viki/Niki story.  I was appalled.  I was against it but no one was going to listen to me.  A couple decades later and they're going back to the Viki/Niki well again.  Don't do it!  You're lying to yourselves if you think the audience cares anymore.  We don't!

The storytelling stinks on ice.  That's why no one shows up.  The networks lost touch with their core audience.  They don't understand what we get or what we want from daytime television.

I admit that it is so hard to write a serial.  It never ends, it's 5 shows a week and thanks to Paul Rauch's ...............well thanks to him shows are an hour in length.  Writers can't manage an hour 5 X a week forever.  They can do a half hour.  At an hour the writers get burned out faster, write stupider stories because they can't/don't have time to think of anything else and everything suffers.

What do I keep saying?  Think about the story you're telling.  Take time with it.  There's no time for that in daytime.  They've pushed it as far as they can and being unwilling to change, shows are cancelled, hundred of people are out of work.

You must be willing to change in order to survive.  Know your audience.  Write to them.  Honor them with your best work.  Be sincere.  Believe in your story and your characters.

Set at Hope Memorial Hospital, I was the last headwriter for The Doctors.  I wrote the last show.  The last scene was between Matt and Maggie clinking glasses together on New Year's Eve.  "Here's to Hope," he said.  It gives me no joy whatsoever to have another show cancelled.

But I gotta tell you this-- Not Low Maintenance has sold 50 copies a day since Friday!  Yahoo!