Soap Operas on the Ropes

It might be a crisis too messy to be stitched up at General Hospital, too complex to be solved by The Young and the Restless, too troubling to be soothed by a lot of Loving: The daily soap opera is in danger of being all washed up. Once the province of TV's raciest stuff, the high-strung, overheated network dramas that have dominated daytime for 30 years are now being outsobbed and outsexed by a glut of syndicated talk shows that are cheaper and easier to produce. In other words, the Bold and the Beautiful are being hung out to dry by the Loud and the Tasteless.

In the past decade, the networks have canceled seven soaps and launched only one successful one, CBS' The Bold and the Beautiful. That brings the nets' soap total to 10, and there are no plans for more. By contrast, 19 daytime talk shows are in the race, and most have entered in the last two years. Ratings underscore the soap distress: In 1969, before cable eroded network audiences, every one of the top 10 daytime soaps got higher ratings than today's top sudser, CBS' The Young and the Restless. In a mere five years, the soaps' collective ratings have sunk 14 percent (mirroring the earlier decline of game shows). Even Y&R draws 1.5 million fewer households than daytime's No. 1 program, The Oprah Winfrey Show.

''We talk about this often and we're worried about it,'' says Felicia Behr, executive producer of ABC's All My Children, the No. 2 soap. ''We're all hoping this is going to turn around. We don't want to see this culture die out.''

Symptoms of the soaps' slippage are most serious at NBC, which is down from its six-soap count of 22 years ago to two—and even those may be abandoned. ''The problem with soap operas is that if one slips, a replacement takes forever to build an audience,'' says NBC's new president of daytime programming (and, note, talk-show developer), John Rohrbeck. ''Stations just don't have the patience, especially given that a soap costs two to three times as much to produce as a talk show (which typically costs $200,000 per week).'' Last month his flagship station in New York City bumped the low-rated Another World into the deadly noon slot and moved its talk shows to earlier times to compete with the ABC and CBS soaps.

Born on radio in the '30s and transplanted to TV in the late '40s as somber confessionals set to organ music, soaps attained their greatest popularity in the early '80s with a potent mix of steamy sex and provocative, issue-oriented plots. A decade later, those story lines seem almost quaint compared with the relentlessly sensational topics that feed the hydra-headed talk industry spawned by Oprah, Phil, and Sally. The soaps' hoariest plot clichés—amnesia and evil twins, say—now pop up regularly as subjects du jour on the chat shows (see box below).

''People used to watch soap operas partly so they could say 'See, my life isn't so bad,''' says talk host Maury Povich. ''Now they can watch real people with problems.''