Another Soap Off the Air..

Welcome back everyone, this week’s blog is going to look into CBS’s recent decision to pull the plug on their epic soap “Guiding Light”.
Shows go on and off the air all the time, but they aren’t always daytime epics that have aired for decades. They are usually shows that no one watches or don’t have as good of a plot line as they had originally expected.
April 1st it was announced that CBS’s “Guiding Light” would air its last episode on September 18 of this year. CBS’s daytime soap is the longest-running television drama, it started its 72-year run in 1937. The show began as a 15-minute radio serial and then moved to television for the last 57 years. Their reasoning for pulling the show was their loss of 13 percent of their viewers and ranking last among other daytime soaps. As of right now, they are searching for a new home for the show, but no news as of now.
“For many of us, it was the first show we ever watched,” said Lynn Leahey, editorial director of Soap Opera Digest. Unlike prime-time shows that came and went it was constantly in people’s lives. “It really is heartbreaking to see something like this go away.” (Courtesy of baltimoresun.com)
Soap operas in the last few years have been losing popularity in a slow decline, the main reason for that is that the women that were dedicating their time to their soaps are no longer at home during that hour of the day. They are out working, and they are finding the experience that the soap gave them elsewhere in their life.
The show has this year, averaged 2.1 million viewers (since September), with in comparison to last year has a drastic drop. Last year’s viewers were 2.4 million. According to Nielsen, a New York-based TV researcher, the show “The Young and the Restless” is the number one watched soap opera with a viewing audience of 5.3 million.
One thing that may give “The Young and the Restless” a bigger fan base is the time of day it appears on television, it is closer to supper time, after people get off work and come home. I found “The Young and the Restless” an easier show to watch just because of the time it was on television. I can honestly say I’ve never watched “Guiding Light” therefore I don’t know how the show was, but with it being on the air for 72 years, it had to have been good and seeing it go is a great tragedy.