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I started watching ABC's soap opera "All My Children" when I was kid. Like so many
of my friends, I watched because my grandmother watched and my mother
watched. That was in the days of generational soap opera viewing. I've
since moved on to other shows and other past times, but I still have a
soft spot for what used to be appointment TV in our house. In fact,
soaps were "must see TV" long before some PR person came up with the
phrase.
That's why when ABC Daytime announced last week that "All My Children" will be moving from its original home in New York City to Los Angeles by the end of the year, I couldn't help but feel a twinge of nostalgia.
AMC's studio space in New York will be taken over by ABC's only other New York soap, "One Life To Live." It's a money saving move according to the network, designed to, among other things, give AMC a permanent home for their sets and allow AMC and OLTL to begin shooting in High Definition:
"The move to Los Angeles enables both 'All My Children' and 'One Life to Live' to dramatically improve the series production models and achieve significant efficiencies while enhancing each show," said ABC Daytime topper Brian Frons. "We had to examine every option on the table to combat current economic realities and rising costs of production."
The big question now is how many of its stars, especially native New
Yorker Susan Lucci will make the move with them. Contract players have
reportedly been given a week to decide if they're going.
Emmy award winner, Lucci who created the original daytime bitch on wheels, Erica Kane has often talked about her love of New York. Lucci appeared on Friday's "Live with Regis and Kelly" and said she hadn't made any decisions yet about whether she'll move with the show. She did however say that the move is "a huge vote of confidence from the network to say that "All My Children" is such a terrific show and they really want to now give us more space...everything will be expansive and that's terrific. But for everybody involved, big decisions have to be made."
The move will be a blow to the NY TV production community, what with CBS's "Guiding Light" set to go off the air in September.
New York City used to be the mecca for soap opera production with at least six being produced in the city when I was growing up. That included NBC's "Another World" which had a studio in Brooklyn not too far from my house.
But kind of like readers in the print world, soaps are losing viewers to the internet and really, after you've seen one evil twin come back from the dead, you've seen them all. Even the number one soap, "The Young and the Restless" though renewed by producer Sony Pictures for two more years, has not been immune to budget cuts.
What kept viewer loyalty all this time were the veteran characters and actors, people like Lucci and "Y&R's" Eric Braedon and Melody Thomas Scott. These, however are the actors who make the big bucks and the first ones the suits want to cut.
The problems and conflicts in the soap industry read almost like the script for---you guessed, a soap opera. And last week the blogosphere took notice.
Roger Friedman at Showbiz 411.com wrote an excellent post that puts the blame for the death knell of soaps, and AMC in particular, at the feet of bad writers and short sighted TV execs:
Moving "All My Children" to L.A. should be its death knell. Almost all the actors and crew live in New York. East Coast casting always tends to a more realistic kind of show. "AMC," set in mainline Philadelphia, certainly won't look or feel the same staffed with plastic west coast types.
Soaps never made much sense, and they were beautifully lampooned in the movie "Soapdish" some years ago. The plots were always outrageous, but recently on "AMC" an aborted fetus turned up after 20-odd years as a grown man. On "ATWT" one character just had to head to toe plastic surgery so he could fool everyone in town. What the soaps' producers don't get is that the viewers aren't stupid, and don't want to
