After 72 years (15 on NBC radio, then 57 years on CBS TV) and 15,638 episodes (as of last Friday), the plug has been pulled on The Guiding Light, the longest-running drama in television and radio history. CBS announced today that the final episode will air on September 18. The show has won 69 Emmy awards.
CBS’s press release is included here.
I think they should jump to the web and keep it going. They made the jump from radio to TV, why not jump from TV to web?
Whenever I catch glimpses of a soap opera, I wonder how they survive. To come up with interesting storylines day after day with the same cast of characters has got to be impossible. No wonder Erica Kane had (has) 35 husbands.
And what’s up with the casting? Do they EVER let an actor go? The other day I watched an episode of a soap I used to watch 20 years ago (seriously) and Ridge and Brooke were making out just like they used to do when they were 30. It was embarrassing on so many levels.
If they pay their actors based on longevity, I can see why they canceled it.
Very few Web series make a profit while paying the actors a living wage. (I’m being generous here - most don’t make any money or pay their actors anything.) Soap operas have huge casts, the series stars certainly wouldn’t be able to make what they’re used to. The younger ones would probably rather take their chances elsewhere and the older ones may be ready to retire.
I remember my aunt watching her “stories” while sewing some 40 years ago, and The Guiding Light was one of them. It was very important to her, which is why I posted this thread.
I’ve never seen Guiding Light, but an acquaintance of mine was an actress in a fairly major role* on it for over a year when she was in high school. When she left for college (where I met her), they just replaced her with a similar looking girl, and the other characters never mentioned any change.
*I just looked her up, and it seems that her character, Lizzie Spaulding, was a very big deal on the show. I had no idea my friend had such cred.
Soap operas work because they concern themselves with what must be the over-riding concern of 99% of the human race - paternity. There are side plots, and romance of course, but it seemed to me (when I watched them for a 3 month stretch one time I was able to view them) that more than anything else the plot revolved around who had fathered whose child.
Also, Maurey Povich’s show is to soap operas what pornography is to romantic movies. It cuts right to the chase and just shows “who’s the father segments” without any of the window dressing.
And they announced this April 1? :dubious:
Good point, bup, but it’s unlikely CBS would joke about this. And it didn’t just come out of the blue today either.
http://www.tvweek.com/news/2009/03/cbs_shopping_for_light_replace.php
From what I heard on NPR yesterday, P&G was the sponsor for GL and has not renewed the contract. That would explain the long notice.
I remember my mother and grandmother watching this every day. Mom stopped after she went back to school and got a job, but grandma watched it until the day she died.
Well, at least now they can rerun in syndication, or start on the DVD collection. :eek:
I too think that the era of soaps is coming to an end, and this is one of the more eloquent passings. 
I’ve never watched Guiding Light (which dropped The somewhere along the way), although I have recently caught an episode or two; it was, along with As the World Turns and The Edge of Night, one of my Grandmother’s favorite shows–she watched them faithfully every week day. It is also, or has been, one of the longest running dramas ever, with 72 years going back to radio. That in itself is a shame; the episodes that I watched (and that’s been in the past month or so) seemed very interesting to me but like many people I work during the day time and can’t watch a soap in real time. Their ratings come from folks who watch them real time, and the downhill point really, I think, goes back to the days of the O.J. Simpson trial when many networks pre-empted their daily schedule to show what was going on at the trial. Granted, there had been problems for years before that, but that’s when the most recent downturn started; it does not look good for the rest of them either.
The writers of the soaps are a small, elitist group that make the rounds from show to show–I don’t know how they get picked up by one show after ruining the previous one they wrote for (and probably getting -fired- for doing so!), but there you go. It’s like there is some underground plot to destroy the genre from within. Okay, that’s probably putting -way- too much into this, but seriously, if I was in charge of a show, I certainly wouldn’t hire someone who’d been fired from their previous position, as a -writer-, fired for doing a terrible job! It’s not just the writers, though; it’s the whole management of both the show owners and the networks, plus they are expensive, and year-round. sigh I’m afraid that my current one show that I do watch, though on a very occasional basis, is going to be next.
The show won’t rerun in syndication, unfortunately, although SoapNet might be able to get it. I’ve yet to see a soap put out a DVD collection, except maybe for Dark Shadows. We’ll see what happens. And oh yes, I do not appreciate that it’s very last day will be on my birthday!
End of an era.
ETA: Happy birthday, Tarragon.
Guiding Light is on at 2 pm where I live. I just scrolled ahead to Monday TV listings on CBS and guess what it was replaced by: The Price is Right. Did the TPIR move to 2 pm from 10 am? Nope, TPIR is still broadcast at 10 am.
Are we going to get 2 hours of TPIR from now on?
No, they’re bringing back Let’s Make a Deal.
That’s what my cable guide says. It also says that the one in Guiding Light’s old spot is a repeat.
This is my memory of Guiding Light from the late 70s. I also clearly remember a storyline from that era in which two characters crashed in a small plane into the ocean, but ended up surviving by using the wing as a raft. Mom wasn’t a big soap opera person, but this was the show she did follow occasionally.
I did not get to see the final episode - my local CBS station had already moved the showings to 10 AM - but it sounds like Guiding Light went out on a classy note. Well, at least on a note where there was some kind of closure. Plus many were given a happy outcome; although only a few minutes were shown, the viewers got a small glimpse of “Springfield’s” future.
Thanks for the memories.
Let’s Make a Deal returns next month. The *Price is Right *double-dips likely are placeholders.
http://www.letsmakeadeal.com/