All My Cancellations

Image via WikipediaABC is whacking two of its daytime dramas, "All My Children" and "One Life to Live", by the end of the year as the genre becomes more of an endangered species due to changing times.

After those soaps are gone, there will be four left:  "The Young and The Restless", "The Bold and The Beautiful" (CBS), "General Hospital" (ABC), and "Days of Our Lives" (NBC).  Most of them have been on the air since the 1960s and '70s.

It's not like AMC and OLTL have been around since the days of radio like "Guiding Light" was.  AMC was introduced in 1970, while OLTL began in 1968.  Both were creations of Agnes Nixon.

ABC is replacing both soaps with talk shows devoted to food and lifestyle, starting in the fall.  They should really be reducing their daytime presence and let local stations schedule what they want.

It's also no coincidence that SoapNet, which rebroadcasts the ABC daytime dramas at night for those who were working, is being replaced by another Disney-branded kids channel.

This means it's the end of the line for Susan Lucci, who as Erica Kane has been the face of AMC from the beginning.  Lucci is probably best known as the actress who was nominated multiple times for an Emmy award without ever winning one, much like the Minnesota Vikings never winning a Super Bowl or the Chicago Cubs never winning the World Series.  It became a running joke until Lucci finally won in 1999.

Have you ever watched a soap?  It's an alternate universe where characters with unbelievable names and backgrounds constantly remind themselves (and the viewers) why they're in the predicaments they're in.  Coupling is rampant, yet birth control is nonexistent.  Gays and lesbians, though rare, are a recent development.  And interracial relationships are handled as if everyone's color-blind.  In other words, the 21st century is barely acknowledged.

Women make up the majority of the audience in daytime TV, much like they do the rest of the day.  You would think that daytime dramas could have benefited from the Great Recession, with all the unemployed workers watching TV instead of pounding the pavement for their next job.  But that didn't happen.

Instead, viewers have been flocking to reality TV.  "Jersey Shore", "Real Housewives", "Keeping Up With the Kardashians", you name it.  Whether the producers admit to it or not, those shows are about as real as any of the daytime dramas.  Who needs amnesia, fake pregnancies and suddenly-grown-up children when you've got this?  And did we mention that they're cheaper to produce?

So the denizens of Pine Valley and Llanview are consigned to the scrap heap of video history.  They'll never be Lake Wobegon or Yoknapatawpha County, but there's been enough goings-on for the past four decades in those fictional burgs to fill a library's worth of novels.  And the long-suffering fans of "All My Children" and "One Life to Live" are about to find out how it's all going to end.