ABC woos soap fans from its Olympic rival

By Frank Ahrens
The Washington Post

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NBC's wall-to-wall coverage of the Summer Olympics — which began Friday night and extends across the network and its many cable channels — is forcing several adjustments to the network's regular programming, as it has during past NBC Olympics coverage.

But for the first time, NBC is suspending its popular and profitable soap operas, "Days of Our Lives" and "Passions," for the duration of the games.

ABC hopes the absence will allow the Walt Disney Co. network to steal away NBC's soap-opera fans, jonesing for a fix of daytime drama in the two weeks when their stories are interrupted.

It's a long shot — soap-opera watchers are intensely loyal to one or two shows, research shows. They rarely switch soaps and even more rarely expand to other networks. For NBC, it seems a relatively safe bet — Olympics coverage on NBC, Telemundo, USA, CNBC, MSNBC and Bravo will haul in more than $1 billion in ad revenue, which the network projects will more than offset any ratings drop in its soaps. But if ABC can steal some viewers, the network hopes to lock them into its long-running soaps, "All My Children," "General Hospital" and "One Life to Live."

ABC's plan to raid NBC's soaps "goes back to 20 years ago, when I was a baby exec at NBC," said Brian Frons, president of ABC Daytime. "ABC took their soaps off the air for the Olympics. Ratings for the other two networks went up for their soaps. Why believe the [contemporary] research? Why not believe that the old days are still possible?"

Network soap operas have chugged along fairly consistently since at least June 30, 1952, when "Guiding Light" debuted on CBS, making it the longest-running drama in television history. (The show began on radio in 1937.) The series are the most efficient and profitable of network shows. Though their ad rates are much lower than those commanded by prime-time shows — 30-second spots on soaps typically sold for an average of $22,436 last season compared with $147,040 in prime time, according to Nielsen Monitor-Plus — the shows, shot on videotape instead of film, are much cheaper to produce and generally are owned by the networks. For instance, prime-time one-hour dramas such as CBS' "CSI" series cost more than $2 million per episode to make. One-hour soaps can usually be made for less than $200,000 per episode.

The audiences are smaller than prime time, but not insignificant. For instance, 14 million viewers tuned into CBS' "CSI" on a recent week, while an average of about 5.8 million viewers per day watched CBS' "The Young and the Restless," the top-rated soap in the first half of this year, Nielsen said. But "YR," as it's known to fans, got more viewers than reruns of NBC's "Law & Order: Criminal Intent" and "Will & Grace" that same week.

For ABC, daytime has been an especially welcome bright spot, as the network's prime-time lineup languishes in fourth place in the ratings and has not hit No. 1 since the 1999-2000 season.

Fox is the sole major network to not air soaps. The network does not have programming rights to most daytime hours at its affiliate stations, and those stations generally choose to air talk shows and other syndicated fare.

ABC is spearheading its campaign to win over new viewers with an ad campaign called "Wide World of Soaps," parodying its "Wide World of Sports" franchise, in which Bob Guiney — former contestant on ABC's "The Bachelor" and "The Bachelorette" — interviews ABC soap-opera stars.

In one spot, Guiney pokes fun at a recent plot line on NBC's "Days Of Our Lives" in which a number of characters were killed, only to reveal to viewers later that the characters were, in fact, not dead. "There's a murder mystery that's going to unfold [on ABC's 'General Hospital'] and people are going to die," he says. "And they're going to stay dead."

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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