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The Lasting Power Of the Soap Opera Genre During The Writers Strike

While just about every medium in the entertainment field is being affected by the writers strike, there is one that can be considered the hardest hit, daytime soap operas. Most soap operas have a writing staff of at least a dozen to keep there rigorous programming schedule moving. Soaps run 5 days a week, 52 weeks a year, with no reruns. Currently soaps cover about 50 hours of television a week in the US. Writing for soaps can be considered the fastest paced and demanding writing job in entertainment. If so much time is devoted to soaps every week, and there is a writers strike, one might ask how they are still on the air?

There is a few ways. First, many of the soaps are still holding on to what is left of scripts that were written before the strike. For some soaps the writers have been granted what is called financial core status from the Writers guild, allowing them to cross the picket lines. While other soaps are relying on producers and other employees of the show to do the writing. It’s said that during the 1988 writers strike people from office assistants to directors to even the folks who ran errands, were promoted to “writer”. With writers being the absolute brain of every soap, it makes you question what kind of effect could this have on the future of soap operas. That’s tricky, because soaps weren’t doing so well before the strike.

Viewership has been lower than it has been in ages. Rumors have been swirling for the last couple of years that the networks were going to pull soaps all together and replace them with much cheaper reality & game shows. The soaps would continue to air on Soapnet, the soap opera network owned by ABC which already runs todays episodes tonight. Why is a genre that has ruled daytime television for 80 years facing such uncertainty? Well all you have to do is ask the people who truly make or break the soaps, the viewers.

Soap opera fans are the most diligent, loyal, and fierce of any other type of fan. And if you visit any of the hundreds of soap opera message boards over the internet, you would see one thing they can agree on is what’s killing their shows. On the message boards and soap opera magazines they are called “TPTB” (the powers that be). Otherwise known as, the writers. This genre that is so at risk because of the writers strike, was already at risk because of the very writers that are striking.

Then again, maybe this strike is the shot in the arm the soaps need. Maybe the writers need a break, or maybe an entirely new breed of writers will breathe some life back into daytime television. ABC powerhouse, General Hospital, has actually recycled the same hostage crisis storyline 3 times in the last 6 months. Could it be that these striking writers were phoning it in anyway? During the course of these same storylines GH also killed off 2 of its main characters only to have them reappear immediately thereafter as hallucinations of some sort. Could a writing staff made up of office assistants and gophers come up with some fresh storylines? Or is it too late for soaps? Either way, it seems based on ratings and viewers all over that these writers stopped doing their jobs long before the strike began.