Soap operas are not like their characters. When these shows die, they don't come back.
"Guiding Light," the 72-year-old daytime staple, is concluding its historic run Sept. 18. Its ending wasn't breathlessly revealed between star-crossed lovers in a clandestine fit of forbidden passion; nor was news of its demise delivered histrionically in a hospital waiting room. But fans of the show, the winner of 69 Daytime Emmy awards, can be forgiven for feeling like jilted lovers or grieving relatives.
"These are people you see every day, pretty much every week," says magazine designer Tony Garcia, 35. "It's almost like they are a part of my family."
"The Guiding Light" debuted on NBC radio in 1937. The 15-minute serial was created as a vehicle to pitch soap to housewives, hence the "soap opera" moniker (the show is still produced by a soap maker — Procter & Gamble). At age 19, creator Irna Phillips focused the original "Guiding Light" on a minister named John Ruthledge and his neighbors in the fictional Chicago suburb Five Points.
Today, the one-hour television drama is set in fictional Springfield and focuses on three families: the well-to-do Spauldings, middle-class Lewises and working-class Coopers. In September, however, as the longest-running scripted program in TV history calls it a day, Springfield's movers and shakers will just be, well, movers.
The show's fans remain dedicated ... there are just so relatively few of them. Soaps have been shedding viewers for years; the genre's decline in popularity can be traced to the exodus of women — soaps' core audience — out of the home and into the workplace in the '60s and '70s. The programs enjoyed a renaissance of sorts by achieving cult status among college viewers in the '80s, but then came the primetime soaps — shows such as "Beverly Hills 90210," specifically engineered to siphon off those younger viewers.
The reason the slide continues is partially economic, according to James H. Wittebols, a professor of political science at Ontario's University of Windsor. Wittebols is the author of the book "The Soap Opera Paradigm: Television Programming and Corporate Priorities."
With their large casts and daily episodes, "these shows are very expensive to produce," Wittebols says. "They only run once, as opposed to the nighttime dramas, which can be repeated. And if the audience is shrinking, advertisers won't pay." The soaps have tried to level the playing field by cutting corners, but Wittebols says the shows' lower production values result in more lost viewers.
"Guiding Light" took drastic measures last year. The show dropped its old sets and fixed cameras in favor of more modern sets, hand-held cameras and portable lighting and sound equipment. This enabled more location shooting and added a sheen of hip realism to the show, so it more closely resembled the edgy nighttime dramas to which it was losing eyeballs.
In the end, it was too little too late and, with just 2.2 million viewers, "Guiding Light" has become the lowest-rated soap on TV. Wittebols argues that reality television, sports programs and even the evening news have co-opted the storytelling techniques of soap operas to attract viewers and, as a result, former soap junkies are getting their fix elsewhere. Take the health care debate.
"Most of the discussion of health care on television in the United States is 'he said, she said,' " Wittebols explains. "You don't hear about the issues as much as you're shown interpersonal spats and contests of power. In other words, it's the fight, not the issue itself, and that attracts people who relate to news in a personal way."
"Personal" is the watchword of soaps. Like Tony Garcia, many of the "Guiding Light" fans who contacted us began watching the show as children in their parents' and grandparents' homes. The sheer longevity of the habit, along with the proximity to their loved ones, helped viewers forge a personal connection with soap characters.
Claire Bray, a 62-year-old, retired Austinite, has been watching the show since she was a child in the 1950s.
"My mom worked a lot and my grandparents lived with us," Bray remembers. "My grandfather had Parkinson's. Back then there was no medication to help the tremors, so he couldn't hold a book to read. He sat. Of course, there was no cable so he watched what was on daytime TV; he watched the soaps. He was a sweet and wonderful man, very sentimental. And he would sit there and some poor character would die or whatever and he would have a tear running down his cheek."
She still talks about soaps with her mother.
"We'll have a conversation ... 'Did you see what happened to so-and-so?' " Bray laughs, "and my husband and my son will say, 'Are those real people or soap opera people?' "
Jeri Lindell, 74, was introduced to the drama when her mom listened to its original incarnation on the radio. "My mother loved 'Guiding Light,' " Lindell recalls. "In fact, she was with hospice when she died and 'Guiding Light' was on." In turn, Lindell brought her own daughter Cindy Smith into the fan fold. "She was born in '55 because of 'Guiding Light,' " Lindell offers.
Because of the show?
"Charita Bauer, who played Bertha Bauer , was pregnant with her oldest son, and it looked so romantic that I thought, 'Gee, I'm ready for another child,' so that's how she came."
Lindell has been a fan for 65 years. "My daughter said, 'Mom, I was in high school before it dawned on me why we could never go anywhere before 3 o'clock.' And finally it dawned on her that 'Guiding Light' was over at 3, and it still is," she laughed.
Bray also makes time for "Guiding Light."
"If I'm going to the grocery store, I'll postpone it till 3 instead of going at 2," she says. "I don't plan my day around the soaps, but if I'm home, they're on. I like background noise."
More than anything, Bray, who learned French from dubbed versions of the show while living in Paris, appreciates the programs' humor.
"Switched babies are very big," she deadpans. "People disappear a great deal. People get amnesia much, much more than the rest of us do. Pregnancies last either a year and a half or six weeks, depending. It's hysterical. It's a lot of fun. You have to laugh."
Garcia, who wrote a high school research paper on the social relevance of soap operas, agrees. "Sometimes I have seen other shows and they always try to be so serious, so — I guess — cold in a way. And with 'Guiding Light' I've thought there's always been a great balance of humor mixed into it along with the serious aspects of life and death and family interaction and all that."
He appreciates, too, the diversity in casting he's seen through the years. "It was never a big thing for me that I needed to see a Hispanic in a soap. All I cared about was that the character was somebody I was interested in. And if the story lines were great, it could be anybody, really. But I'm glad they were able to incorporate some as the years went on."
The characters were also a big draw for 77-year-old Charlene Trochta, until the summer of 2008 when she'd decided she'd had enough. "It got so bad," she laments. "They began to mess up the couples and they lost the story line. The ages of the couples didn't make sense; I didn't know where it was coming from. 'Guiding Light' always had values and family and love stories that were love stories."
But that all dissolved into a series of what Trochta calls "trite" story lines. "It seemed like when two people like Gus and Harley were happy, they couldn't just let them be happy."
Still, Trochta plans to start watching again as the show winds down, "to see if they're going to bring back any of my old friends."
"I think people, when they realized it was ending, suddenly figured out, 'Well hey, I'm going to miss this,' " Garcia says of fan campaigns to save the show. "It's always been around, you know. Even if people watch it really focused or if it's just background noise, you don't miss something until it's gone."
There has been half-hearted chatter about Procter & Gamble trying to find another venue for "Guiding Light," perhaps online. But that seems a poor fit.
As Bray says, "Is my mother going to be digging out a laptop and watching it somewhere? No."
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