Soaps In Depth Executive Editor Calls For General Hospital Fans to Boycott Good Afternoon America!

i LOVE the Kardashians!!!

The_Moustache, NOW YOU'VE GONE TOO FAR!!!

Team Rousey! (Last night, at The ESPYs.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGYjf5SaJbc&feature=player_embedded

I am a Soap Fan & I will not wath ABC anything but GH. Anyone who does isn't a tru soap fan. Thank you for the article. We will continue to fight. BOYCOTT!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It would be interesting to track the demographic numbers through the years to see how many are leaving and how many are dying.

people said they were going to boycott CBS and NBC for cancelling their soaps and yet they're thriving more than ever.

idk if a boycott is even worth it.

LOL. I used to skip my 1:30 class so I could make it home by 2:00 to watch Santa Barbara live. Which was odd, since I was taping it anyway, as well as Another World at 1:00.

I'm tired of the constant daytime chatter. It's boring. No GAA for me.

J Bernard Jones - I watch General Hospital live 5 days a week but I also tape it to rewatch on weekend afternoons when there's nothing else on I care to see. And if I happen to miss it live during the day, then I watch it on SoapNet later that night.

How many times a week do you watch it live?

I am not going to watch GAA,or any Talk show. ABC is losing viewers every day... People are not amused with Reality and talk shows. They're nothing but a waste of my time. Arguements and fighting. Gives me a headache. What are these network programs telling our young, It's okay to make a fool out of yourself. Where's dignity? Really! I just turn off the TV after watching General Hospital.
If ABC removes GH, well I predict that ABC will have to file bankrupty. No body will be watching there programs.

I hate you are not a real soap fan unless you support this or that agenda, soaps are a form on enjoyment nothing more nothing less it does not hold that much importance in my life where I need to boycott other shows on abc that gives me the same enjoyment or where I need to help keep an actor/production/crew employed (especially when I don't see this people at marches to save my job), or keep a magazine running.

I am sorry but in this business sometimes shows are cancelled, magazines have to end, etc... My life will go on and something else will feel the void.

So I guess I am not a true soap fan, so be it.

I only watch GH sporadically and Scandal which is on hiatus I don't care for the Disney Corporation haven't done Disney in years. I'm not a Katie Couric fan I don't see what is the big deal about her but I commend her for getting her cheddar.

Good for Soaps In Depth! They're finally breaking the silience and saying what's really going on here. This is why I think it's so pointless to complain about the OLTL characters coming to GH. It's time to put that stuff aside and fight to save GH! I'd lik,e to think the even if I wasn't an OLTL uber fan and it was *my* soap with a bunch of new chacters coming in, I'd feel the same way.

Thank you so much!
GAA is a great show and since it's cheaper to produce I wont blame ABC if they cancel GH and give GAA the 2pm time slot permanently. I've watched GH for over 42 yrs now and the quality absolutely stinks.
Cartini have turned the show into a cartoon. In my lifetime I've watched over 12 soaps across the network dials. But all of their quality have crashed and ratings and demographics prove that viewership is at an all time low. The daytime serial format on network TV is archaic and not cost effective.
I don't blame networks for getting out of this declining business.
If fans are still so rabidly connected to this genre they need to create a demand for a specialized Cable channel. Daytime serials are a financial liability for broadcast networks today. Whether Richard Simms likes it or not this is the truth. And its very immature and ridiculous to call boycotts against a network for maximizing their profits and cutting their losses. That's what good businesses do to survive! SMH.

Boycotting is dumb. TV is a business. If you get good ratings, you stay on the air, lousy ratings, you get the ax. That's the business!

Cartini ( Frank V and Ron C) are tanking GH just like they tanked OLTL. Their ridiculous take on serial drama set the genre back years!
You may enjoy it, but there are millions of us who dont appreciate it. I started watching soaps as a small child back in 1969 beginning with GH.
From that time I branched out to watch 15 soaps on every network.
I started One Life in its's classic 70s days long before Cartini.
In my opinion Cartini and their stories reduce serials down to slapstick comedy and plots that insult viewer intelligence and make not even the slightest pretense of being adult or socially relevant( with a few small exceptions along the way).
That being said I was somewhat encouraged when I heard they were coming to GH. I watched the last 6 months or so of One Life. And despite all of the lame characters and stories like the Ford Brothers, Jess,tess, bess and wess, I at least admired how Cartini brought back old faves and mined the history of the show.
I thought they would do the same with GH before it faced the ax.
But what have they done? They've given watered down GH's history and Frank V wants to create a One Life/GH Hybrid show! This is so unprofessional and not fair at all to long time GH fans who didnt watch One Life.
Believe me they have pissed off a lot of GH fans and the ratings reflect it. In it's last month on the air One Life's ratings finally rose and topped off at over 3 million. GH today sits at under 2!
I fully expected GH's ratings to rise under Cartini and they havent!
Again you may like what they're doing at GH and that's all subjective.
But to make you understand the other side. Imagine if Cartini had brought on GH characters and stories during One Life's final days. How would you feel about them stealing precious air time from your faves during they show's final hours? I dont think you wouldve liked that.
GH is in dire danger now.
Good Afternoon America's ratings have been a modest success-no where near as low as The Revolution or the Chew.
And GAA costs a lot less to produce than GH. So if GH's ratings dont rise, guess what....ABC will have the excuse to do what theyve wanted since they gave AMC and OLTL to ax, cancel the show and replace it!
SMH.

No you are a person who thinks with your brain instead of sentimentality and fluff. Television is a business. Genre's die and shows are cancelled. Richard Simm's is just concerned that if soaps keep getting canned his magazine and livelihood will become irrelevant which it practically already has done so!

Who actually buys soap mags anymore in the age of the web? Get real. Business is business, if shows cant cut the ratings mustard and best the competition they go off the air, plain and simple!

Soaps are dying, I've watched them since age 5 and Ive watched 15 of them on every network, but life goes off. Time to grow up and face reality.

transfigutationjc21, just a friendly note. You need to identify the person you're addressing with each post. You can do that by hitting the edit key (just so we're all clear). Welcome aboard.

To be brutally honest, soaps today are no better than reality shows. Reality shows are soaps just without the script! Get real-cat fights, adultery, money?
That's soaps. Sadly soaps have fallen far from their original premise which was to be family driven romantic fantasies that included socially relevant issues.

One Life to live was the show that featured a black woman passing for white in the late 60s, a sexually addicted housewife prostitute in the 70s, a gang rapist and gay teen in the 90s and a realistic gay couple in the 2000s.
But Cartini reduced it to slapstick comedy and ridiculous split personality plots and cartoon villains.
Jess, tess, bess, and wess. The gay pornish Ford brothers wrestling in steam rooms all day. Excessively convoluted back from the dead Zombie plots. Give me a break!
Soaps are not mature, family driven dramas anymore they are escapist, mindless entertainment today just like The Real Housewives Franchises and Jersey Shore.
And sry to jump on you but what are soaps telling are young ppl today?
Starr on OLTL gets knocked up by her BF and they turn it into a summer romance! Leslie Lu on GH seduces a practical stranger (Dillion Q) on a boat house floor like a common whore and then kills her baby in abortion! Starr shacksup with half naked men on GH as "room mates."
Give me a freakin break, what every happened to cautionary tales for the youth?
Soaps across the dial exploit blatant lust and perversion in their story lines. We have rampant homosexuality, characters living together and getting it on out side of marriage or even a rudimentary commitment left and right. Female legs are spread from Genoa City to Port Charles!
I'm sry but I am a soap expert having watched 15 them for over 42 yrs now. Soaps today are nothing but trash! They are no better than any reality show! You dont have a leg to stand on in your criticism! Not one limp leg!

That being said I still appreciate the legacy of daytime serials because in the past they have been socially relevant. But in today's entertainment climate they are not! They are mindless, escapist fluff.
As for ABC going bankrupt over the loss of a few soaps whose combined viewership could barely muster 3 million viewers thats ridiculous.
First of all ABC is owned by a multimillion dollar conglomerate which is Disney. And their majority stockholder is APPLE Computers- a multi-billion dollar conglomerate. Bankruptcy? I dont think so!

Yes, they do, just as real life does. These are the family-driven, socially relevant issues of the day. If this is trash, how does it differ from the "sexually addicted housewife prostitute in the 70s, a gang rapist and gay teen in the 90s"? Certainly, some people considered that trash back then.

How many times a week do you watch it live?

None. I watch GH on my iPad via the ABC app, at 11:30pm EST when it becomes available after its SoapNet airing.

In many ways, I prefer this method of watching GH, both as a viewer and from a business point of view:

• Since it is the official re-broadcast via the app, my individual viewership — though not as valuable to advertisers — is directly counted by the network.

• There are 2 30-second ads between segments that one cannot skip through; while many people would prefer no ads at all, it is better than the 4-5-6-7-8 ads that one has to endure during regular broadcast. Because advertising actually PAYS FOR THE SHOWS & MAKES THEM VIABLE FOR BROADCAST (a fact that many fans bizarrely seem to dismiss), this is a small price to pay.*

• Though I'm time shifting my viewing, I'm being a "loyal viewer." By not chopping up the show, watching some bastardized edited version on YouTube, downloading episodes via torrent sites, I'm getting what I want (GH) while not undercutting ABC (which, despite the ire of many fans, actually does own and produce the show).

• Plus, I can watch GH anywhere I have my iPad and a wifi signal/internet connection; this would be equally true if I watched via laptop....but I haven't taken my laptop out of the house in 2 years...LOL. Not only am I not limited by time, I'm not limited by location.

So, that's how I watch GH.

*Most of the ads are from ABC promoting its networks' shows, although there are other traditional advertisers as well.

transfigurationjc21 wrote

One Life to live was the show that featured a black woman passing for white in the late 60s, a sexually addicted housewife prostitute in the 70s, a gang rapist and gay teen in the 90s and a realistic gay couple in the 2000s. But Cartini reduced it to slapstick comedy and ridiculous split personality plots and cartoon villains.

So what do you make of that whole, oh, near decade (actually 1984 though 1991) where One Life to Live was regularly #3 or #4 in the soap ratings firmament under Paul Rauch, who introduced head snapping time travel, underground cities (along with costumes) that looked like a very bad Star Trek convention re-creation gone horribly wrong, a self-satire/parody soap-within-a-soap played for laughs, a Jim Jones-like religious cult, women skiing down mountain sides in wedding dresses in Moldavia...um, Mendorra, and sent people to Heaven after having given birth to children they didn't know had popped out of their womb?

Ibsen?

First of all ABC is owned by a multimillion dollar conglomerate which is Disney. And their majority stockholder is APPLE Computers- a multi-billion dollar conglomerate. Bankruptcy? I dont think so!

Two points of order: First, Apple Inc. (Not "Apple Computer," which it hasn't been for years) was and is not the majority stockholder of Disney. One Steven P. Jobs — the man, not Apple — was the sole INDIVIDUAL stockholder of Disney, with a 7% stake in the company and was also on the board of directors, following the sale of one of Jobs' companies — a little outfit called Pixar — to The Mouse House. The current largest Disney stockholder is Laurene Jobs, Steve's widow, last reported to control the TRUST for the $4.6 billion value of the Disney stock as of 2011.

Second, even if Apple were the majority stockholder, with Disney & its combined economic might, it would make no difference in terms of whether or not GH should/can/ought to survive. The facts are that in the 80's, ABC was purchased by Capital Cities, CBS was taken over by Laurence Tisch and NBC was purchased by GE, at which time the new owners of the networks broke up their various dayparts and made them self-sufficient. Since the dawn of tv time, every show has lived or died by its own ratings (and thus profitability, with only a few notable exceptions), the sea-change brought about by breaking up the divisions into self-sustaining departments in the 80's was the true beginning of the acceleration of the death of daytime as we traditionally refer to it (soaps but also game shows, which were a huge part of the daytime landscape until the mid-late 80's). Underperforming shows were easier to axe, newer shows were given shorter times to prove themselves (Generations, Port Charles, Texas, The City, et al) and budgets became more and more contentious over time.

Soap used to be the "cash cows" for networks, paying for or greatly offsetting the costs of prime time acquisitions and the operations of the traditionally unprofitable news operations. After every division was broken up (including the news divisions, which in the early days were nearly decimated by budget cuts, especially CBS News), the costs of producing a soap relative to its ratings during this era became of prime importance. In other words, the daytime division — and each individual soap — needed to pull its own weight. It was under Cap Ciities that ABC bought all of the soaps in its lineup (and owned and produced all the soaps that followed) that this paradigm shift occurred, and after Disney bought ABC from Cap Cities, it has continued to this day. Thus the corporate/conglomerate money is not stirred up in one big pot and doled out like sloppy a bowl of porridge to the Tiny Tim of soaps, as the sweeping generalization quoted above implies.

ABC always enjoyed an advantage over CBS & NBC in that they bought out and eventually owned all their soap offerings and thus had more nominal control of making sure their soaps aired in a solid block via the affiliates. But that also meant/means that ABC has to PAY for the production of those shows itself and, with falling viewership across the board, ABC was only delaying the inevitable. NBC, generally the lowest rated in the daytime mix (in soaps and games shows), was the first to get almost completely out of the soap game. CBS followed and now ABC is finally joining their ranks. And when you hear the news about soaps from the network side of things, roughly 1/2 to 3/4 of it seems to be about budgets vs. profitability.

The early 80's era when ABC was willing to throw money at GH and told Gloria Monty to do what she could are LONG, LONG ago in a galaxy far away. But what is always missed/glossed over: even THEN they took a gamble, because Monty only had a short period of time of 3-6 months to turn GH around, depending on various sources. If her experiment had FAILED and GH had remained in the ratings cellar, General Hospital would have been cancelled DESPITE the deep pockets of its owners, who after giving it one last shot weren't willing to throw even more good money after bad.