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Soap opera's waning warble
Sniff, viewership is off and death may be nigh
By Kevin Downey
Who can forget Stella Dallas?
A woman of humble roots who married well, she gave up her beloved and only daughter to her estranged husband, never to see her again, so the young woman could achieve the love and happiness her mother never found.
It was the stuff of great tear-jerker movies, and when "Stella Dallas" first aired on radio housewives wept across America.
It was just one of a number of soap operas to be serialized on radio, and many of them went on to air on TV in what became the era of the great American soap opera.
That era, lasting more than 50 years, may soon be coming to an end.
The America soap opera may well be in its last, fading embrace, following the fate of afternoon bridge clubs and PTA bake-offs.
Blame it on dwindling audiences, primarily.
Soap viewership is down, and it continues to decline despite various effort by the networks to prop it up.
In 1992, there were 11 network soaps, the best with a rating of 8.3, the lowest having a 2.7.
Last year, there were 11 daytime dramas, but the top show was down to a 6.6 while the lowest barely registering at a 1.6.
Today there are just 10 soaps.
Overall viewing to daytime has fallen somewhat over the years. In the mid-70s about 20 percent of all viewing was to daytime, now it’s 17 percent.
Moreover, of the two soap cable networks announced last year, one is sputtering along and the other has all but been scrapped.
Perhaps even more telling, readership of soap magazines is down, too.
"Soap Opera Digest" is down 18 percent in the past five years, to 1.1 million, and "Soap Opera Weekly" has tumbled 27 percent, to 350,000.
Partly to blame is the booming economy. More people are joining the workforce so there are simply fewer viewers around.
But that's only a part of the story. Soap viewership is declining faster than daytime viewing overall, which suggest deeper causes are at work.
Certainly, today’s homemakers are far better educated than in years past, and the supposition--not necessarily an accurate or fair one--is that soaps' strongest appeal is to undereducated stay-at-homes.
Another factor is that a growing proportion of American housewives--21 percent-- are either black or Hispanic. As a genre, soaps are usually about white middle-class women--the American housewife of yore--and as such hold little appeal for non-Anglos.
Then there is, lest we forget, the rise of the web and the increasing use of PCs, both at work and at home, reflecting just one of a number of distractions that discourage faithful viewing of one show five days a week at a set time.
The networks know this, and all three are looking for ways to capture viewers not around during the day. But, their efforts have so far fallen flat.
The latest effort is ABC and Disney’s cable network, SoapNet, which launched on Jan. 24. Starting out with about 1 million subscribers, the cabler is tiny compared to the major players.
SoapNet is slowly adding viewers. A recent deal with Charter Communications, Cox, and Cablevision will bring subscribers up to 3 million. And it will now be offered on DirecTV’s Family Tier plan.
By the end of the year, Anne Sweeney, president of Disney /ABC Cable Networks expects to hit their goal of 5 million.
While not great, it's a lot better than Columbia Tri-Star’s cable net.
Soap City was to launch in March, but that’s been pushed back until May, and the latest word is that it will not be a basic cable network but pay-per-view.
Considering that, NBC may be onto the best strategy for daytime. With only two soaps left, the peacock network has the least at risk.
NBC Entertainment senior vice president of non-fiction Linda Finnell is reportedly meeting with producers to get game shows on in daytime while that fire is still hot. Games worked some magic in primetime, so the thinking is it could do the trick in day as well.
Depending on NBC’s success with its daytime tinkering, the peacock might be laying out the template for things to come.
There are certainly huge dollars at stake for the top three networks, whichever course they take.
Even with their viewership declines, the top soaps still pull audiences comparable to "The Oprah Winfrey Show." And with $1.3 billion in ad dollars last year, up 18 percent since 1995, they remain an ad venue the big three desperately want to protect.
-Kevin Downey is a staff writer for Media Life.
