When The World Stops Turning

After more than fifty years on the air, As The World Turns has been canceled, it's last episode slated to air in September of 2010. The reason is viewer decline, from a high of more than six million to just around 2.6 million. A hard fall for a show CBS did not want to preempt even to make way for news of the Kennedy assassination. It is just the latest announced departure of a long running soap opera.

I think the reason these old soaps are leaving the air is they have become too artificially hip, modern, and sexy. The old soaps were certainly always formulaic-they were corny, old-fashioned, and unrealistic in their portrayals and dialogues. They seemed contrived and even pandering. Still, all of that seemed in an odd sort of way to just add to their charm.

Now, there is little in the way of character development that doesn't seem so obvious you just know the shows are written by committee. The characters have become shallow caricatures of real people, which is ironic in this day when every characters is supposed to be topical and relevant in some regard. Now, every character of note is a sex symbol, and the stories in some cases have veered from the banal to the bizarre. Where once the shows were plain but homey and comfortable, now they are all flash with no substance.

It could well also be that viewers have become ever more sophisticated, and will balk at so many unrealistic coincidences, unsatisfactorily explained returns from the dead, kids that go away for two or three years only to return as completely mature adults, and people in supposed financial straights that always manage to maintain a relatively comfortable lifestyle.

Plus, soap operas have unfortunately become soap boxes for social causes, and of course as you might expect, they are most generally outlets for the espousal of leftist causes. That is a sure fire way to alienate a large portion of your potential audience during the best of times, but now in particular might not be the best time to go down that road. Ironically, the woman in the clip below, Penny, was one of the original soap stars, having as a child been with the show from it's inception, and she was also one of the first to demand that one of her characters, on another soap in which she later appeared, oppose the Vietnam War.

In the following clip, featuring her and boyfriend Jeff, one of daytime serial television's first "power couples", Jeff sings her a song he has composed for her. Sometime later, in a storyline that would shock and anguish fans of the show, Jeff would be killed in a car accident which would for a while turn Penny into an amnesiac.