Soaps' Big Bang Theory
Ratings are in the toilet; each soap is losing viewers by the millions. Stories that on the surface should have viewers swarming to their television instead have been botched so badly people instead flee. Killing sprees, over-the-top weddings, audience contests, and same-sex kisses have been shoved down the throat of the public. All, no doubt, in an attempt to get people tuning in to a soap.
This year it seems soaps have been awash in obvious attempts to get the ratings up for five minutes. Whether a casting switch or a controversial pairing, daytime executives apparently have decided that shocking an audience, no matter how illogical the twist, results in viewers pouring back in. Network executives are desperate now; they don't care how they get viewers in. They just want them in. They want the heydays of soaps back without all the hard work and expensive talent and if having two women kiss will do it, so be it. It's that "sweeps" mentality that works so well for primetime. Grab a viewer because of a shocking and gruesome storyline and maybe they'll stick around out of habit, or at least, that's the theory.
Then again, primetime has the luxury of short-term thinking that daytime executives don't. Of course whether in primetime or daytime, high numbers for one month that bottom out the next month and stay down until the next sweeps won't make any of the brass happy. And yet, soaps keeping trying over and over again to get a viewer's attention for one second in the hope of making a long time viewer out of them. Is my memory poor or did soaps not do this before?
Soaps have always given us a little something extra for sweeps; a long anticipated wedding, a paternity reveal, a bad girl getting caught, or a shocking death. That isn't new at all. What is new is the desperation in which soaps are trying to grab these ratings. What is new is executives who micro-managed soaps into the gutter wanting ratings to go up right away and are willing to pull any theoretically intriguing story idea out of thin air and put it on the air. What is new is having a soap clumsily put together a sweep-like story in five seconds, have play it out for two weeks, and then pout when the gasps from viewers don't result in higher numbers automatically and consistently.
A recent example of an attempt at a ratings spike is Sheila's return on the Bold and the Beautiful. In fact, B&B has become obsessed with quick ratings fixes as of late. Every time a story is working, the writers abandon it and come up with something much more ridiculous. The writers brought Macy back, but then didn't properly use her. So the writers threw Ridge and Bridget in our faces and we threw it back. But then they actually had some potentially interesting stories on the horizon.
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