'Red Widow' Gets The Axe
Comedienne's Second TV Show Canceled This Year
ABC Gives 'One Life to Live' A Vote of Confidence
by Allison Waldman, posted Apr 29th 2010 9:08AM
It's been a tumultuous few months for ABC's daytime drama 'One Life to Live.' Recently, we reported that Tuc Watkins is returning, and they are bringing in a former scribe to be the associate headwriter, and the gay couple -- Kyle and Oliver -- were dumped. All that hubbub had us speculating about the future of 'One Life to Live' in an era when longtime soaps like 'Guiding Light' have been canceled and another legendary daytimer, 'As the World Turns' is ending it's run in September. Well, fans are concerned, too, especially after the story emerged last week about ABC Daytime developing a talk show for Tori Spelling. TV Guide went to the Jori Petersen, the head ABC Daytime PR, to ask if the Spelling show might threaten the future of 'One Life.'
"We want 'OLTL' to succeed and are doing everything we can to facilitate that. We want the show to be fantastic and robust. There are no plans for cancellation," she told the publication.
It's true that the ABC Media Productions banner, which is producing the Tori Spelling pilot, has other reality shows on the air on other networks, like SOAPNet's 'Southern Belles: Louisville' and 'Cha$e' for Syfy. So a Spelling talker wouldn't necessarily be taking over 'One Life to Live's' timeslot.
It would be an awkward fit there, too, because ABC Daytime would then have 'All My Children' at 1 PM and 'General Hospital' at 3 PM with Tori in between. That would ruin the flow of 'love in the afternoon,' if you recall that classic ABC soap pitch.
ABC Daytime is saying the right things about 'One Life to Live's' future, but the reality is that Nielsen ratings are down for all soap operas and the cost vs. benefit of the soap genre is being talked about at the highest levels of the networks. It could be that the time for soaps is drifting away, and a lot of that is due to competition.
In the days pre-cable TV, you watched soaps or syndicated reruns of sitcoms in daytime because there weren't 200 channels of alternative programming to entice you elsewhere. In 1971, there were 17 daytime soaps on the three networks; today there are seven ... soon to be six.
But ABC is in a unique position with the solid block of three soaps it broadcasts daily, and rebroadcasts on SOAPNet multiple times. The network would lose a lot by eliminating 'One Life to Live,' and inadvertently impact on the success of 'All My Children' and 'General Hospital.' A year from now, 'One Life to Live' will still be on the air, if you ask me, because it's better business for ABC. Beyond that, who knows...
55 Comments