Go Towards the (Guiding) Light: As The World Turns is getting cancelled

After 54 years and more than 13,000 episodes, ATWT is done in September.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/tv/la-et-world-turns09-2009dec09,0,5309736.story

Are we seeing the end of the stories? The Young and the Restless is doing pretty well at 5 million viewers, but with fewer shows to keep it company and a constant influx of cheaper talk shows to fill the gap, we might be hurtling towards the end of an era.

 

My mom's gonna be so pissed.

 

Abe Vigoda outlasted another one.

 

This is the one soap my mom can't stand.

 

Just the one?

 

Ha. You is funny.

 

The end is definitely near. At least in my market, "As the World Turns" gets significantly better ratings than "General Hospital," "One Life to Live," "All My Children" and "Days of our Lives." Which isn't saying much, because the numbers for those are all horrible. No one watches anymore.

 

Broke the heart of my sister, who apparently should have been a stay-at-home Mom in 1977.

I think the shows that are rebroadcast later in the day on SoapNet will survive: Young & The Restless, General Hospital, One Life to Live, All My Children and, maybe, Days of Our Lives. The latter has been on the edge of cancellation for about 10 years now, in addition to being the worst fucking show ever created. Bold & Beautiful will last as long as Y&R b/c it's a spinoff in which actors go back and forth from the shows (last I knew anyway, in the '90s).

As for SoapNet...my guess is those re-airings bring more eyeballs to the advertisers and that SoapNet pays $$$ to re-air the shows, which lessens their costs, but that's just a guess. Maybe PCLL or someone in the industry can confirm or disprove that.

 

I wonder if SoapNet has the money/clearance to pick up Guiding Light or ATWT as a first-run series? You'd think the liberated broads would still have time to watch their stories at night.

 

Would have to be better than their other original series, which are unspeakably bad.

Don't think they have the budget to do it every day though. Would have to be a more traditional weekly prime-time serial.

 

Watched about 3/4 of the final episode Friday.

ATWT was my mom's favorite soap -- the only one she regularly watched, from 1956 until her death in 1994. When I was living at home (or coming back with any regularity), I kept up with some of the Oakdale festivities.

But I really hadn't watched more than a handful of episodes since she died, so when I clicked on my hand-me-down tube Friday afternoon, it was like parachuting into a foreign land.

Probably half the characters I didn't recognize at all -- new write-ins into the story line over the last decade or so.

Probably a quarter of the characters were names I recognized, but with new actors in the roles so I still had no clue as to who they were supposed to be.

But, they did have a few of the old, OLD reliables: Hughes Family patriarchs Bob and Kim, Barbara Stenbeck and Oakdale's version of Darth Vader and Cruella De Vil, John Dixon and Lucinda Walsh, who were happily marrying to fade off into the sunset.

They really didn't make a big deal about the final episode -- no celebrity alumni appearances like Meg Ryan or Marisa Tomei. I was half-expecting the B-52's to reprise their hilarious 1982-83 appearance.

 

I'm sure I haven't seen a single second of it since about 1985 or 86, but I remember getting home from school just as The Guiding Light came on and watching it with my mom as a kid. Those are good memories.