Weekdays, just before 11 a.m., Martha Torres would lean out the kitchen door of her modest Albuquerque home and beckon her two granddaughters: "It's almost time."
FOR THE RECORD :
Sony Pictures Television: An article in the Sept. 23 Calendar section about fan devotion to soap operas said that Sony Pictures Television produces three of the surviving daytime dramas. It makes only two of them: "Days of Our Lives" and "The Young and the Restless." Also, the story misspelled the last name of the co-chief executive of Insight Research Group; her name is Stacey Matthias, not Matthais.
It was the early 1980s. The girls would dash into the adobe-like house to join Torres, and her husband Joe, to catch the latest episode of "All My Children."
"That was our special time of the day," said Desiree Sanchez, one of the granddaughters. Now 32, she is a gymnastics coach in New York City and plans her workouts so she can watch the program while running on the treadmill.
"It was not just some silly show. It was so much more than that," she said.
On Friday, the ABC television network will end the nearly 42-year-run of "All My Children," which stars Susan Lucci as Erica Kane, the temptress of a fictional Philadelphia suburb of Pine Valley. The drama has been gradually losing viewers, and ABC was worried that it would soon lose money on the production.
Changing audience tastes, increased competition and challenging economics have diminished the soap opera, once a staple of daytime television. ABC's "One Life to Live" will end in January, leaving just four daytime dramas on broadcast television.
For avid viewers, the cancellations have been devastating. Fans have been preparing for Friday with the same range of emotions that accompany the death of a loved one.
"This is like losing my grandmother all over again," Sanchez said. "This show made me feel connected to the people whom I've lost, and the people who I am far away from. No matter what else was going on, you could always turn on the television and there was that one constant, that one comforting thing, particularly when the rest of the world seemed like it was in chaos."
Soap operas provoke a degree of devotion that is increasingly rare in the fragmented media world.
"There is no other genre that gets under the skin and gets into the DNA of viewers like a soap opera," said Sheraton Kalouria, an executive vice president for Sony Pictures Television, which produces three of the four surviving daytime dramas, including the top-rated "The Young and the Restless" on CBS.
Researchers have been struck by viewers' strong personal attachment to the shows. Fans become eager to learn what happens to their favorites as the writers judiciously parcel plot developments. They refer to the program as "my show," and consider the characters friends.
Viewership often is multi-generational. For example, in the Torres/Sanchez family, the women passed the ritual to their husbands, an uncle and daughters — stretching the dedication over three generations. The familial connection serves to intensify the emotional tug.
But the most crucial factor, researchers said, is the frequency of the program. Fresh episodes run five days a week, providing an intimacy that few shows can match.
"In many ways, soap operas were the first social network," said Stacey Matthais, co-chief executive of Insight Research Group. "For decades, people have tuned in every day to get an update on their favorite characters. The frequency of the connection is not unlike Facebook today."
What makes soap operas different from other scripted and reality shows is "this feeling that you are walking through life together with these characters," Matthais said. "These programs present an extreme version of what goes on in people's lives every day. It's like life concentrated."
When ABC announced last spring that it was canceling "All My Children" and "One Life to Live," furious fans peppered the network with hate mail, organized rallies and boycotts and erected Facebook pages, including one dubbed "Save Our Soaps."
"You want to preserve what you love," Gail Giordano, 52, said.
Source : http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-soap-devotion-20110923,0,4616376.story
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