One Life to Live CLOBBERS Entire Premiere Week of The Talk!

i'm going to give the talk a chance if they could just bring some cast members on Y&R and B&B i mean i hope they would do this the ratings are not looKing good right now for Y&R

Good.

While I just love the people who write the ABC press releases, the truth is that OLTL lost nearly 100K viewers last week, tied its record low among women 18-49 and 18-34, scored a whopping 1.7 rating in HH to The Talk's 1.6, .9 in the demo to The Talks .8, and actually tied the Talk in the 18-34 demo. This is not good, especially since The Talk costs a lot less to make.

I'm very happy to read this...not just because I love OLTL, but because The Talk is so astoundingly bad. The worst things this week when Sharon Osbourne compared that Marie Claire editor (who wrote the 'no fatties' editorial) to Nazi Germany; and Julie Chen teasing on one day that she had been "bullied" a few years ago, and the next day revealed that it was at a movie screening when someone in the theater told her to stop texting while the movie was starting. (Really? That's her idea of being BULLIED?)

I feel so awful for Sara Gilbert, who is above this train-wreck she created. The ultra-obnoxious Leah Remini grabbed her for a couch-hug yesterday and it was so obvious she was dreading being with all of these vapid co-stars of hers.

CBS made the Light stop Guiding and the World stop Turning. They now desperately need to silence The Talk!

I hate to be a Debby downer. I think that it's wishful thinking to say that soaps have a future on broadcast television. I have had this feeling that soaps need to disappear from broadcast television until executives "rediscover" them like in the case of game shows. I say these soaps need to find a cable outlet and try to get edgier there.

If these numbers our any indication the talk is doa.Cbs made such a huge blunder cancelling "Guiding light".If preliminary ratings our any indication the talk should be cancelled soon.Cbs should have increased bold to one hour.

Cable couldn't afford a five-day-a-week soap...not with the dwindling revenues and rising production costs. GSN continues to make new game shows because they're cheaper, while SoapNet is shutting down...sad reality, but reality...

Well I wouldn't say that's much of a clobbering. Actually whenThe View started out, I remembered it had numbers like those. And The View now has some serious numbers - even though I dont think they are as good as when Rosie had a seat at the table. But anyway, I dont think CBS is going to see this as a lost. In a financially speaking, The Talk is just where it is suppose to be. If the numbers are the same as they are now in two years, then it would be safe to the say that the The Talk isn't worth much.

If these numbers our any indication the talk is doa.Cbs made such a huge blunder cancelling "Guiding light".If preliminary ratings our any indication the talk should be cancelled soon.Cbs should have increased bold to one hour.

LOL, GL pulled in 1.6 HH ratings all of the time, and a .8 in the demo was a high water mark for GL. The big difference is that GL cost a lot more to make, so CBS should be pretty happy with this.

You know people joke about GL but when they were at their worst they were pulling in 1.6 and 1.7's and thats the norm now for almost all the soaps. GL was expensive to make up until they switched production values. GL didnt cost much at all in the end but P&G wanted out. the talk demos have to look bad to the add buyers and thats what CBS also looks at.

To echo what others have already said, while the ratings disparity is a nice victory for Soaps, what is going to be more important to the equation is the "how much does it cost to produce" factor.

Grimm when I saw the headline her that was my question too.

Jamey, do you have any sense of what it costs CBS to produce The Talk per episode and how much for ABC to produce an epi of OLTL. I remember a while back there was an article here on DC that said DOOL costs 150K an epi to produce. I cant imagine they got Sharon Osborne on the cheap, so maybe the costs are closer than we are imagining.

One thing I wish TPTB would consider is how many live viewers stay on one network all day long. I watched GH back in the day and that led to watching AMC and OLTL. My grandfather watched Edge of Night which let to the tv being on ABC, which let to me watching GH. I know in the age of dvr that may not be as much of the case, but I have noticed that since I started to watch B&B for SJB I am now starting to get a little bit interested in YR because I am catching snippets of it when watching B&B live and sometimes when I am waiting for one of my ABC soaps on soapnet I catch pieces of it their too.

I am recording The Talk today.

I gotta see this slop for myself! Poor Sarah Gilbert!

It's funny how everyone has a different perspective. I just went to my Facebook page and saw an item from tvbythenumbers.com, with a less optimistic headline: "One Life To Live, All My Children, Young & Restless, General Hospital Tie Ratings Lows".

(sigh)

I don't think that CBS is crying in their coffee, the show has been getting at least 2 million viewers, so far, I think that's all they care about.

Despite what the press release said, how can TPTB at OLTL be happy about their show scoring only .1 rating point higher in households and the key demo than a show that costs a lot less to produce? The Talk did about the same numbers as the soaps.

(sigh)

That headline is true. Have you seen last week's ratings? Every show except Days recorded a loss, and every show is down in comparison to last year. Y&R is barely bringing in 1 million viewers in the demo, so it is in trouble too.

Double Post.

Talk shows are definitely cheaper to produce. I read once they are about half the cost to produce a soap each week, but soaps last saving grace has ironically become the very same people who sent them on a half-crazed, mad dash to get younger people to watch—Madison Avenue. According to a recent article in The Wrap, ad buyers are not happy with game shows like Let's Make a Deal and feel soaps provide more audience engagement for their brands. If Ad buyers prove unhappy with The Talk, it could buy the CBS soaps time, simply because it will prove soaps aren't as easy to successfully replace. Soaps would do well to go back to being heavily branded hours. Sure, fans would gripe about hearing Sam and Liz stop an argument on GH to talk about how awesome Palmolive makes one of their hands look, but that's the only way a soap can show ad buyers that their spots aren't being fast forwarded through.

The ratings were down for ABC and Y&R, however that makes The Talk an even bigger bust in my opinion. With all the promos, the full-page ads, the support of Les Moonves, it couldn't even best ABC's stepdaughter soap?

If Y&R is in trouble, the entire genre is in trouble.

The real villain here is not talk shows or game shows, in my opinion. It's those insipid (so-called) REALITY shows that have stolen away the soap audience. They are REAL soaps.

...except they're not... :-[

TV Gord wrote:

If Y&R is in trouble, the entire genre is in trouble.

The real villain here is not talk shows or game shows, in my opinion. It's those insipid (so-called) REALITY shows that have stolen away the soap audience. They are REAL soaps.

...except they're not... :-[

Those shows didn't steal soap fans, TIIC of the soaps did. When people started taping soaps, and realized that it only took them 10 minutes to watch an hour long show, or came to the conclusion that they could skip a week's worth of episodes, but not miss anything, they realized that they really didn't have to watch at all, and didn't miss anything.

A poster on another board pointed out that new technology like DVRs and Youtube have really allowed people to see some of the problems that exist with soaps. If someone likes a particular character or a particular storyline, it is much easier to watch just their scenes on youtube, instead of watching the whole show, and eventually, people will get to the point where they just become detached from a soap, and won't watch any of it.

In the end, the blame lies with us, the viewers. If people are FFing soaps or watching them on YouTube, they aren't watching commercials. That's the bottom line.

The thing reality shows have going for them these days is that people tend to watch the most popular ones live, so they are likelier to sit through the commercials. That's music to the ears of advertisers.

The soap opera model was invented for stay-at-home moms. That demo is becoming about as mythological as unicorns and Big Foot. Forty-nine percent of the workforce is now women. This first became a serious factor for daytime at the end of the 70's, but thank the Soap Gods, Gloria Monty and her disciples (Doug Marland, Thom Racina) taught daytime how to go after a new demo for daytime— the college student, with Luke and Laura.

What Monty did at GH (and most of the other soaps copied) gave them a second wind and a new demo for advertisers to covet. The advent of the VCR in the 80's and much later the sensationalism of "real soaps" like the OJ Simpson trial and scandals with peeps like the Menendez Bros and Amy Fisher in the 90's helped erode even more viewers.
 
Then several soaps lost their way by trying to copy the success of James Reilly's first run at DAYS. I think by the 00's a perfect storm was brewing. More and more women were working out of the home, computers were no longer a luxury item, the DVR, cable and satellite companies were waging war for our attention spans, not to mention iPods, Wii, etc.. Throw in burned out creatives, meddling network execs, major conglomerates who have wanted to be out of the soap production game for a long time, the Writers' Strike and the economy imploding and you have a recipe for why the P&G soaps are no longer with us. 

Now with only six left, someone is going to have to start thinking way out of the box to a.) produce soap operas that are much more cost effective b.) come up with new revenue streams and/or ways to entice media buyers c.) create a story bible so game changing, so epic, so watercooler that it gets everyone talking again.  

Y&R and B&B are definitely in trouble. Les Moonves wants out of soaps all together. DAYS, we already know, is also in trouble. ABC's soaps are likely the safest, simply because someone had the good sense a long time ago to sell them to the networks.

Amen Jamey.

Screw the Talk! OLTL lost almost 100k viewers last week. When are they going to do something with this show? It is not good.

Good grief come to think about it, the amount people watching these soaps/talk shows aren't even the entire population of Massachusetts. This is a sign that daytime tv isn't a money maker for the networks. They need to fill the airtime with something and because its not a money making airtime, Networks either prefer re-runs (such as House, etc) or talk shows. No big expense incurred when catering to less than 3% of the population. As it is right now, soap viewers only make up about 2.3% percent of the population and that's not encouraging numbers to a network.

Jamey I actually wouldnt gripe at all about a scene being interrupted for palmolive IF it was written right. Mad Men is IMHO the gold standard for how to do product placement (even though I readily admit they have it easy) if suddenly Spin was drinking Sunny D and Jason raises an eyebrow at it and then Spin says I switched to Sunny D because it still has the orange flavor I love but with a lot less sugar and additives that to me would be a sensible placement. If Sam and Lizard are fighting and suddenly one gal stops and says you know you have beautiful hands and then the other says I switched to Palmolive and then they go back to fighting then yeah I would call foul on that one. Now if Sam burns a dinner for Jason and she says thank god I have Dawn, with all the meals I burn I just have to go and let this pan soak of a few minutes and it will be good as new - that would make more sense. Or if Jax comes home with groceries and Carly asks him if he got the Totinos and says of course, I know thats the only one you like and she says Totinos has the best sauce, the rest all taste like cardboard - again that makes sense. Maybe your gal makes brownies for the kids Lucky comes in to pick up the kids and says - wow these are the best ones you ever made and she says really, because I didnt make them from scratch, I made Duncan Hines.. you get my point - if they work it in to situations that make sense for the characters and look for products that are a good match I wouldnt object.

Honestly, I think soaps became too homogenized. Seriously, aside from a medical drama like General Hospital (when it's actually about the hospital) and a sudser whose back drop is the fashion industry like Bold and the Beautiful, you don't really have anything that sets the remaining four apart; Children, One Life, Days, and Y&R are really the same set up, the haves and the have nots living in Smalltown, USA. I don't think anyone could have forseen but keeping the supernatural aspect of Dark Shadows, the political intrigue of Capitol, law and order meets CSI of Edge of Night, and the religious overtones of Ryan's Hope, might have offered a bit more of a mix to daytime to keep it interesting.

Other than talent type reality shows I don't watch any of the others and having them on during the day would make no difference to me. Still won't watch them! Watching The View and possibly Oprah is enough talk shows for me and I don't watch game shows either. So if they fill the days with talk shows, reality shows and game shows my tv will be off completely and I'll be playing music instead. And since my CD's don't have commercials it sure won't be profitable for the corporations and executives who just don't seem to get it!!