Precious Purse Strings
I've often wondered about the credibility of producers and network executives who cry poverty when it comes to shelling out money necessary to deal with aspects lacking within the industry. Yes, it is absolutely true that money is a lot tighter in daytime television if for no other reason than daytime drama is no longer as lucrative as it used to be. Other daytime programs are a lot cheaper to put on and get higher ratings. For example, even on a day when the grand showcase on The Price is Right over fifty thousand dollars, it is still at least half of the wardrobe budget on a soap. And for that pittance of money, The Price is Right's ratings sometimes are higher than the ratings of all of the soaps! Meanwhile the highest rated soap has less than five million viewers while five soaps average around two million viewers!
And that is just when it comes to the basic financial reasons not to invest millions of dollars in soap production. The actual cost of production has risen as the economy has suffered. In the eighties, when the rich got richer, not only was it much cheaper to send the cast to Italy, the cast was cheaper, and networks had plenty of money to go around. It may have taken over a million dollars just for As the World Turn's scene where Frannie and Sabrina came face to face in a London church, but that was a bargain then. Nowadays, not only would it probably be triple the cost, but also networks would never bankroll the first million with only an average of three million viewers a week. So on the surface, I can understand why soaps had to veer away from location shoots, cut costs when it came to wardrobes, sets, recycle bad daytime executives, and even these days, hire talent who have no knowledge of how to write a soap. And I can even understand that when it comes to budgets, those who are hired to focus on the bottom line have trouble focusing on quality.
In fact, while many producers overstep their boundaries when they try to dictate actual storyline, I believe the reason they get away with it is because they keep cost down. Heck, if The West Wing's creator, writer, and producer can be kicked out of his own series because of extreme costs without high ratings, then with the much smaller budget for daytime, I can only imagine how little leeway soap producers get. And yet, after giving all of this benefit of a doubt to producers, I'm still left with one question: They can't be *that* poor can they?
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