Pacing Problems Lead to Sleepy Sweeps
I honestly couldn't tell you when famous moments in soap history aired. With the case of a few soap moments I have logged by date, I have no idea when they happened. I couldn't tell you if it was May, November, or February. But some of daytime's biggest romances, revelations, deaths and disasters have happened outside of the all important sweeps period. There was still plenty left brewing for sweeps even with bigger events happening outside those three important months. Personally, while sweeps may be somewhat beneficial somehow in primetime, I've always felt it completely worthless in daytime. Unlike primetime, there is no hiatus, there is no summer break, and there are no reruns. The demand of keeping the viewers involved in stories goes on and on and on without end. A few national holidays and September 11th aside, this show runs every day of the working week. Why have a sweeps period for soaps? The splashy stunts primetime television makes to accommodate that ratings period are bad enough. Even if it primetime somehow benefits from that, it simply doesn't belong on soaps. And even if you could do it, that would require better advertisement of those big events. Judging by how CBS seems ashamed that Joan Collins is on Guiding Light, it's pretty obvious that even if one had something splashy enough to get people to flood in for sweeps, they wouldn't use it to their advantage (lord knows why).
Why some big things can't happen outside of sweeps is beyond me. Why writers can't properly pace things, however, is something I do understand. Once again headwriters are thinking with the cart before the horse. They worry about having some big event and so they plan one and then try to figure out how to make the story happen by sweeps. So in the meantime the show is usually pretty boring. If things were still alive and engrossing outside of those three little months out of the twelve that soaps air, people wouldn't be waiting for all of the good stuff to happen.
But nevertheless, because of sweeps, you could usually count on soaps to do something big, something interesting, something that causes a commotion. It could be a big splashy wedding, a big murder mystery, a beloved character's exit, a beloved character's return, or a supercouple reuniting. Truth is, a lot of these things have been done in the sweeps period, including some really tacky splashy things. But it falls flat. These stories are no longer umbrella stories, stories that involve the entire canvas and pick the entire show up with it. In fact some of these stories have an instant impact and fizzle immediately.
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