I was a big fan of soaps in the late '80s and early ‘90s. In fact, I wanted to write for soaps and eventually worked at CBS Daytime as an assistant to the director. I lost a lot of my affection for the genre around that time. Guess I should’ve paid attention to the ol’ “you don’t wanna know how sausages are made” warning.
Anyway, let me tell you why I loved soaps. Classic soap storytelling isn’t just plotty-plotty-plot crap. It’s about characters and watching them either grow or self-destruct. While obviously there were a plethora of traditional who’s-the-daddy and love triangle storylines back then, in those days the writers used those traditional beats as a jump-off point to dig into a character’s psyche and the multiple shadings of his/her relationships (not just romantic, but friends and family too). I know many people look down on soaps – hey, even those who avidly defend romance novels are looking down on daytime dramas 
– but it’s a shallow stereotype of the genre to say the only thing soaps have ever done is focus on phantom pregnancies and cheesy love triangles. Those often silly storylines were the vehciles for letting us examine the lives of some surprisingly complex characters. The slower pace, the depth of storytelling, the arcs that embraced a whole community of characters and showed how each person reacted in different ways to a single event… These were soaps’ strengths. But that’s not true anymore, and it’s sad.
I believe the reason for the industry’s downfall is multifaceted. It does, however, start with the migration of women to the workforce and the increase of daytime programming competition. Once ratings began to fade, soap producers and networks began to panic and flail. They decided that the solution was to court younger viewers. Assuming their older, longtime viewers would stay with them no matter what (exactly why, I have no idea: hubris, laziness, outright stupidity, I dunno), the production companies looked for something that’d grab young eyeballs.
Many longtime beloved characters – i.e. those older than forty – were backburnered for a plethora of muscle-bound would-be badboys and sex-starved nymphets. Stories became more bizarre and outrageous thanks to the brief trainwreck-like ratings bump gained from the mid-1990s Days of Our Lives’ infamous Satan possession storyline and other crap from the pen of hack-writer James Reilly and wannabes.
This desperate grab eventually alienated the people who’d been watching their serials for decades. The people who were now working but still tried to make the time to watch 3.5 hours of their soap a week didn’t find this stuff as compelling, especially when it involved so many new, uninteresting characters to whom they weren’t particularly drawn. In a vicious circle, producers with lowered ratings found they had to cut costs, so they fired beloved oldtimers in favor of cheaper newcomers, which cost them more viewers, which meant they had to cut costs even more. Production values plummeted, fewer cast members were used, and stories became insular in scope. More firings. More young characters.
In short, they broke faith with the late thirtysomething and older audience members and we fell away. (Where did we go? There are other continuing serialized dramas now found on primetime; they’re not quite the same, but they share a lot of qualities with the best soap tales and have higher production values, better directing, usually better acting (with noteworthy exceptions) and certainly tighter writing.)
Despite all these efforts to attain young viewers having failed, the producers still think a bird in the bush is better than the one that’s still in your hand. They continue to ignore their once-loyal viewers thinking that grabbing for the gold ring of teenyboppers and college kids will be their salvation.
This is pretty much par for the course with this industry. One thing I’ve learned over the years is that soap producers and networks are absolutely, pathologically unable to learn from their mistakes. They can’t do it. If a headwriter hack like James Reilly or Richard Culliton or Dena Higley fucks up one soap, they get fired. Great, right? Yeah, but what happens to them next? Do they turn to some other form of writing? Nope, they get hired by another soap! Same thing with producers. There are like ten headwriters and producers who get shuffled around, failing both downwards and upwards, bouncing from staff to staff and network to network like a live grenade. In real life, most people who saw other victims get blown up would refuse to take hold of that grenade next, wouldn’t they? Not in Daytime TV!. In Daytime, a network will give you another shot no matter how badly you stunk up another soap. It’s like Kenneth Lay immediately getting hired to run AT&T.
Believe it or not, networks and production companies continue to blame the freakin’ OJ trial for the loss of popularity. They refuse to look inward and see that they’re signing their own death warrant. I find it sad but inevitable since they just will. not. learn.
Whew, sorry about the dissertation. BTW, just to correct one thing mentioned earlier, there are seven – soon to be six – soaps remaining on the major networks:
CBS: As the World Turns (cancelled; will end in Sep '10), The Young and the Restless, and The Bold and the Beautiful
NBC: Days of Our Lives
ABC: All My Children, One Life to Live, and General Hospital