Flashback: The World Has Turned More than 3,200 Times (1968)

Part 1 of a wonderful article in the New York Times in 1968. I'll post more as the week continues and ONE LIFE TO LIVE celebrates their 40th anniversary. The World Has Turned More than 3,200 Times... ... and 8 million people keep watching by Joan Barthel, New York Times September 8, 1968 THE STORY THUS FAR... Young Dr. Bob, who was blinded by flying glass in a lab explosion, faces eye surgery. The accident happened on the day his wife, Sandy, ran away from home. San ran away because she upset at having lost custody of her son Jimmy, who was born in prison while she was doing a stretch for having helped her ex-husband Roy rob a store. Sandy's flight was unnecessary, however, because Roy had decided to return Jimmy to her. This so upset Penny, Dr. Bob's sister, who had married Roy specifically to make a home for Jimmy, that she has gone off to New York. Dr. Bob's ex-wife Lisa has just had a child, Chuckie, out of wedlock. Chuckie's father is Dr. Michael, who was married to Claire, the alcoholic mother of Ellen, who has problems of her own. Ellen once had a child out of wedlock, who was adopted by Dr. David. When Dr. David's wife died, he and Ellen got married, but the child, Dr. Dan, has not been told that Ellen is his real mother. When Dr. David's housekeeper threatened to spill the beans, Ellen hit her with a statue. The housekeeper died, and Ellen went to jail for a while, where she met Sandy. Roy blames himself. "A soap opera is a kind of sandwich," James Thurber wrote 20 years ago in a memorable series of New Yorker articles. "...Between thick slices of advertising spread 12 minutes of dialogue, add predicament, villainy and female suffering in equal measure, throw in a dash of nobility, sprinkle with tears, season with organ music, cover with a rich announcer sauce, and serve five times a week." He was writing about radio soaps, but obviously, judging from the above synopsis of the recent beleagured status of just some of the folks on television's top-rated daytime program, "As The World Turns," the ingredients have remained the same. Only the size of the daily serving has increased. When soaps sloshed over from radio to TV, 15 minutes was deemed the audience's attention span (or threshold of pain). Then on April 2, 1956, "As The World Turns" became the first TV serial to run for 30 minutes (the race was close: the half-hour "Edge of Night" bowed on the same day, but in a later time slot). Since then, cued by its smashing success, all the new entries in TV's serial sweeps have come in at 30. On Sept. 9, the last two 15-minute holdouts, "Search for Tomorrow" and "The Guiding Light," will go half-hour. And not only that. "On that day, for the first time in the history of television, there will be three serials at 3 o'clock," says Fred Silverman, CBS vice president for daytime programs. He says it in an appropriately awed, what-hate-God-wrought tone, for the cynic may see the 3 o'clock stack-up only as an enormously sadistic Hobson's choice, to the networks it is vitally important in the continuing domination of the daytime. Once upon a time, CBS had the war won, partyly because of its cannily tailored-for-TV dramas like "As The World Turns," which has yet to be toppled from first place in the ratings, and partly because of audience loyalty it had built up in radio soaps. (As late as 1960, the network still carried seven radio serials, including the venerable "Ma Perkins." All seven were terminated in the momentous week of Nov. 23, 1960, when after years of unrelieved travail and consistent heartache, everything suddenly came up roses for everybody as storylines took a wildly benign, if somewhat vague, turn: "Ma...sees happiness ahead...") But NBC plotted and waited. The three TV serials it eventually brought forth - "The Doctors," "Another World," and "Days of Our Lives" - are the next-highest-rated serials in the latest list of the top 10 daytime shows, topping all sex of CBS's other soaps. ABC, accustomed but not resigned to trailing in the numbers race, has gamely come up with a brand-new entry, "One Life to Live," in the latest round of jousting for the jackpot. (And the daytime pot is brimming: in the first half of this year, the networks earned a total of $131,000,000 for the 10 A.M. to 6 P.M. period. The loot depends on the ratings; a one-minute commercial on "As The World Turns" costs about $16,000; on a low-rated show, only about half that.) That new show, "One Life to Live," is the brainchild of Philadelphia Main Line house-wife-writer, Agnes Nixon, who gets in a few licks of her own: "The newer, younger, more vital shows are coming along. I write a very young show, thought not hippie. CBS has just kind of coasted along. Their audience has been getting older; they were not reaching the people who buy Oreo cookies, peanut butter, Crisco, soap flakes, Band-Aids and baby powder. They have been getting the Geritol crowd." A pause. "'Edge of Night' demographics are very old," she adds cheerfully. So there she is, Mrs. America, sitting "target for the package goods," and numbers say she is mostly watching "As The World Turns." The program attracts eight million viewers a day which is about 50 per cent of the available audience, which is phenomenal. "We have that way-ahead feeling," Lyle Hill, the producer of the show, says happily. He is less happy, however about the idea of a magazine piece about his show, because Procter & Gamble has been offended in the past by snotty stories about soap opera, and Procter & Gabmle is his boss. Lyle Hill works for Young & Rubicam, the advertising agency that produces "As The World Turns" for P&G, which owns it. "Serials were created to accommodate advertising needs, so most of them are owned by the clients," says Roy Winsor, independent television producer whose two shows, "Love of Life" and "The Secret Storm," are owned by American Home Products. Of the 13 network serials currently televised, only five are not owned by sponsors. The arrangement is neat and extremely effective.