I used to watch General Hospital when Luke and Laura were getting married. I gave up on soaps for a couple reasons. The way they milked out the story lines for weeks and months. I could not watch it for months and nothing had changed.
Also they ran out of story lines. They had all been married to eachother or slept with eachother, they had all been blackmailed, etc. Last I heard they had werewolves on GH???
It’s all been done before syndrome.
Probably because their wives got off the couch and fussed at them because they couldn’t watch their stories. So the men called to get peace back in the house. 
The point is, with media expanding so much, people have more choice than they used to. If a limited number of channels all carry some kind of flavor or soap opera, you’ll probably have your favorite and follow it, and talk to your friends and neighbors about it because you’re probably all watching the same shows.
Today you have a much more vast menu that can cater to your tastes. So a soap opera is going to have to be really good, really well-written, and innovative, much more so than back in the 1970s, because now they are competing in a much more diverse market. You don’t have the captive audience that you used to and you no longer have just soap opera vs. soap opera slugging it out in a ratings war for a handful of channels.
But as choie pointed out–some people really did like them. People got as into them as they would later get about primetime dramas like 90210 or reality shows today like Project Runway or Real Housewives. It’s really all the same formula, just a different format.
I think it will be interesting to note–will reality shows last or will in say, twenty or thirty years, people be looking at these shows like we are looking at soap operas now? Will the idea of people obsessively watching the Bravo reality shows and “Watch What Happens Live” and all the endless housewives reunions be considered kind of cheesy? (OK, they’re cheesy NOW, but they are bringing in huge sums of money and people.)
Sure, Swallowed My Cellphone, you’re right there. Definitely no disputing that the competition for eyeballs is much fiercer, as many of us have already said. But that’s not the point you made in your original post, which is what I was responding to. You were refuting the idea that people watched because they enjoyed soaps, using your own experience as a sick young 'un being forced to watch 'cause there was nothing else on until the cartoons came on. And in turn, I was refuting the notion that your experience was particularly indicative of the majority of viewers who made soaps so popular in the '70s and '80s.
What’s bugging me a little is that we’re seeing responses here from people who would never watch a soap unless their arms and legs were broken and their remote/mouse had no batteries and their books burned to ashes and their mind turned to pudding leaking out through their earlobes rendering them thus devoid of capacity to entertain themselves via the circus of their own imaginations. Then, and only then, might they be forced to watch one of these insipid soap operas – which, of course, are merely the opiate of silly, bon-bon-eating housewives who freak out when their stories aren’t on and must shrewishly demand the Man of the House call big bad DirectTV for them. (For no real man would be caught dead watching a continuing serial with lots of sex and/or outrageous elements to it! (Lost, 24, Buffy, Six Feet Under, Desperate Housewives, Mad Men…, well, they’re different, of course! ;))
Which is fine, and all, but that’s not answering the OP’s question. The people who hate soaps aren’t the audiences who faded away. What happened to the viewers who were so hooked on soaps a couple of decades ago? Did we all die out? Were we all really just forced to watch because nothing else was on?
I don’t think so. The competition / diminishing quality arguments are more relevant than “well soaps suck and they always have” comments. That’s the only point I was making.
Yes and yes. Is this really that surprising?
Hell yeah! I am actually pretty damn surprised to find out I only watched because I had no other options … oh, and I’m dead, too! Yipe!
Seriously. The people who made Luke and Laura household names in the late '70s/'80s are in their forties - sixties now. Most of us (knock wood) are alive, and weren’t forced to watch. Is that really so surprising?
We get it. Most of the Straight Dope can’t fathom anyone else liking soap operas because they’re beneath contempt. I feel the same way about Survivors of the Amazing Real Housewives of America’s Next Top Apprentice. Many others are flummoxed by the fandoms for Lord of the Rings, Star Wars and Firefly. But that’s taste for you. I don’t really think there’s anything wrong with enjoying some outrageous melodrama. I just personally prefer the fictional kind.
Yes it is. You keep ignoring that were no other choices for daytime TV back then. I have no doubt that people like them (hell, my grandma lived for her Young and the Restless in the 80s/90s), but I don’t doubt that many watched because that’s all there was. With more choice nowadays it shouldn’t be surprising that people don’t watch something that is, by your own admission, pretty crappy today. Going back to my grandma, that’s why she stopped watching: “It got stupid.”
To use another example, my mom watched soaps because there was nothing else on. After she went back to work in the early 90s she used to tape 1 or 2 of them to watch when she came home, but that stopped after about a month.
Also, the people who watched Luke and Laura in the late 70s/80s are today 50 at the youngest. It’s likely the average viewer is even older (as I’d wager it’s also unsurprising that soap opera viewers skew older, as Wikipedia states GH’s did at the time).
I started watching soaps the summer before I went to college. Since nothing important had happened by the time I left, I stopped.
Missed the edit:
This article says the average soap opera viewer was 37 in 1991 (the farthest back date I can find). That would put the average Luke and Laura fan at 69 today. Not dead, but not young either.
Part of it could be that telenovelas are much more fun.
Aren’t the telenovas more like a mini-series in that they run for a while and then have an ending?
I keep ignoring? I spoke in my first post about the increase in competition! I’m not talking about that – no one is disputing that there’s much more variety now than there was then. But to say that no one, or even most people, only watched because they had no other choice is to ignore the addictive nature of these shows. Soap fans were hooked. They weren’t just shows you had on in the background.
So I never said some people didn’t have any other choice. (Which really wasn’t true, by the way. There were afternoon movies and gameshows even back then.)
I never said I was surprised by any of this. In addition to being a fan, I dealt first hand with the fans when I worked at CBS, and sat in on focus groups for one of the two shows in the East coast’s purview (ATWT and GL) where the audience members explained the reasons they were disappointed in the state of the show. I’m well aware of why people aren’t watching today, which is what my thesis of a post tried to express. So I think you’re misreading what I’m saying, or perhaps I’m just not being clear.
Again I am shocked to learn I’m 50! Holy crap. Well, it’s better off than being dead. (I’m actually 43.)
No seriously. I’m not talking about “average” soap viewers. I’m talking about the teens and college kids who flipped over Luke/Laura, and later Days supercouples Bo/Hope and Jack/Jennifer in the eighties and early '90s. GH was “appointment television” after school for many teens back then.
I’m trying to explain / figure out the reason why those of us who were avid fans back then faded away – and preferably without stock answers like “because soaps suck and always have!”
If we were hooked on Luke and Laura’s love story, why did we stay with these soaps after tuning in as young teens? Many of us learned to love the rest of the GH canvas because writers skillfully wove the other characters’ plots within the Luke/Laura stuff and crafted “umbrella storylines” that encompassed a variety of characters and storyline types. One set of characters might focus on their love story, another would be dealing with a mystery, yet another would face some secret involving their family or a career crisis – and each of these seemingly disparate stories would turn out to be interrelated, bringing the cast members in and out of each others’ plots.
Today’s soaps don’t have this kind of interaction between multiple characters because the cost-cutting producers require writers to focus on a much smaller set of characters. Stories move more slowly yet have become more shallow. In short (too late!) the reason the competition is winning is because the soaps have declined in quality, not just because the competition exists.
That’s all I’m saying.
Shouldn’t you have been in school when you getting hooked on soaps at the tender age of 11 (that’s a joke)? But I get it, my sister got hooked on The Bold and the Beautiful for awhile when she was a teen. It didn’t last. I think that it lasted with you is the exception and the ratings of the shows today prove that.
Honestly, I think that’s because you’re too close to the soap world. Ratings for everything have dropped in the last decade. Maybe they’re a little worse off, but they didn’t change so much that people started watching them and then pulled away. They never started in the first place because for most teens nowadays, reruns of The Golden Girls have more relevance than the soaps do.
ETA:
I was a teen in the early 90s, I think you’re mistaken in how popular GH was with teens back then.
Yes. And sometimes they get rerun.
Heh. When Luke ditched his wedding to mob princess Jennifer and he & Laura fled Port Charles hiding from the mob – their first big storyline as a couple – I was fourteen. Prime teenybopper age for getting hooked on their wild love story after school! The only other soap I watched at the time was Edge of Night, which was on after GH at 4:00 - 4:30.
My fandom only lasted until the mid-1990s (1993 to be exact!), which is when the big changeover in storylines began. That’s when they lost most of us and started courting the kiddie set. In those days it was normal for teens to grow up with their mom/relative’s soaps and turn into fans themselves. Soaps didn’t court teens except during summer months. In the '90s that changed, and the older crowd were no longer the prime audience; the nets tried to court the young audiences all year long. The weirder storylines, the better. It was awful.
Because nothing grabs them. And even ignoring teens, my whole argument is that the people who had been watching them during the peaks (my generation) would’ve been a good solid audience to keep the industry through the valleys. Instead of trying to maintain their grasp on our eyeballs, or trying to get us back once our loyalty dwindled, the industry kept desperately whoring itself out to the youngies, who – as you rightly say – just aren’t going to start out of nowhere.
One of the most common ways that young people start watching a soap is because their parents (usually moms) watched it. If Days (for example) had kept me and others on board as fans, we’d be more likely to pass on the affection for the Hortons and Bradys and Deverauxs to our kids. They didn’t, and we don’t. There are no longer any legacy viewers.
OH no, no, that’s not the parsing of that sentence. I was saying that GH was popular in the ‘80s, and later it was Days’ supercouple-heavy canvas that was more popular with the collegians. And IIRC, All My Children was pretty hot too, though that may have been still later.
What’s the one soap to maintain relatively decent ratings? The Young and the Restless. Why? They always highlighted their veteran cast members, actually had African Americans in significant roles (until the 2000s, anyway), and remembered the show’s history.
The other soaps haven’t done that. I’m not really too close to soaps now, except for writing an online version. Now I’m just cynical and bitter and bitching about a genre that once captured my affection but tossed me aside for younger bimbos! Looks like I’ll have to develop a split personality or discover an evil twin in order to get any attention.
choie, I don’t doubt that you know what you’re talking about, but it seems like this, as a criticism:
Is at pretty direct odds with this:
So…what happened? How did the soaps suck you in as a teen, but not the teens ten years later? Were they just trying too hard? If so, wouldn’t that place the problems back on things like writing, directing and acting, like we’ve already said?
If you think about it, though, isn’t the soap format still alive and well, just in primetime, especially for teens? I’m thinking of Beverly Hills or Dawson’s Creek, Party of 5, Buffy, Gossip Girl. Or more “adult” fare, like Melrose Place, Desperate Housewives, etc.
No, that was my evil twin.
Or possibly my good twin.
Just stay away from my brains, you, you…ZOMBIE!
I’m glad to hear soaps are dying, then again, as a red-blooded hetero male, I was never in the target market anyway
As a child/teenager, when I was stuck at home, sick with the flu or something, and before we got a VCR (we were late-adopters) the worst part of being sick is that NOTHING was on but the smegging soaps (old 12-channel rotary dial TV, at least it was in color…)
It got me started into heckling TV shows, paving the way for my love of MST3K