Posted on 09/22/2009 6:48:24 PM PDT by billorites
Guiding Light, television’s longest running soap opera, ended a 72-year run on Friday, closing a chapter of American media history long after its mainstay audience of housewives had moved on.
The show began as a 15-minute radio programme on NBC Radio in 1937 and was one of the few programmes that thrived in its transition to television on the CBS network by 1952.
The show was considered ahead of its time by confronting heady social issues: alcoholism, rape, disease. By the 1980s, the template of the soaps – the intermingling of the public and private lives of its characters, big cliffhangers and long narratives – spread across television on hit shows such as Hill Street Blues and St Elsewhere.
The formula’s success proved to be its undoing, said Ron Simon, curator of television and radio at The Paley Center for Media. The fragmenting of viewership, now split among hundreds of cable channels, online video viewing and mobile phone entertainment further eroded daytime soap audiences.
Created by Irna Phillips, Guiding Light, a programme designed for women living through the Depression era, followed Reverend John Rutledge, a preacher in the fictional Chicago suburb Five Points. The show took its name from a lamp in the reverend’s study that became a sign for the people in the neighbourhood to find help.
Guiding Light’s story was about how the actions of one person affected the lives of the town, explained Mr Simon. “At its core, you get involved in a community outside yourself,” Mr Simon said. “They fall in love, commit adultery, get married. It’s another family for you.”
Guiding Light enjoyed several golden periods, entrancing viewers through never- ending plot twists, many of them wacky. When viewership slipped in the late 1990s, one character, Reva Shayne, thought to have perished in a plane crash, was resurrected as a clone named Dolly.
Reva once drove off a bridge in Florida and was washed ashore on a Caribbean island. “I became the princess there,” Kim Zimmer, who played Reva, told CBS News. “I married the handsome prince. Then the bad brother threw me back into the water from whence I came, and that’s when I floated up to Amish country, and I became Amish.”
Procter & Gamble, the show’s producers, told the New York Times earlier this year that they hoped the show would find a new home off broadcast television.
Perhaps like Reva, who also once leapt off a suspension bridge into icy waters only to be rescued by a mysterious stranger, Guiding Light may yet enjoy a second or third or fourth act online.
My Mom was a huge fan of Guiding Light, shes sorry to see it go, but all of these soaps are going down the drain. I watch All My Children and Days of Our Lives, Days especially has sucked the last few years, that is probably the next show to go
“Mobile phone entertainment”?
Just more proof that the end of world 2012 prophecies are correct!
LOL
and now Guiding Light.
When i was a kid, I would get off the school bus and rush in the house to watch “General Hospital”. I had a crush on “Jessie” the nurse all through third grade.
I left it all behind by fourth grade.
LOVED King Of the Hill. Hank Hill is my kinda guy
How come?
Yeah, dogs and cats living together...
I liked the really bad one called Texas. It had a couple of ditzes that unleashed some kind of monster or something. They were funny. Rby & Lerlene I think were their names.
I watched it from junior high through college. Sad to see it go.
The days when one television show would garner a big portion of the American public are over.
I am not sure I have ever seen the TV show but can remember it being on radio when we lived in Panama City, in the early 50’s.
I don’t think anyone in our family really kept up with it but it was on the station we usually tuned it to. I can still recall the organ music. Also another one called “The Edge of Night”, during the same period.
Guiding Light and General Hospital are the only two soaps that actually deal with reality, maybe All My Children, but my soap, days of our lives, its gone down the drain completely. I can miss it for months and start watching again, and its the same garbage. It’s a shame, I used to enjoy soaps when they were actually enjoyable to watch. Don’t know what happened
I never watched soaps when the kids were growing up. But when my daughter was in high school, she started in on
All My Children. I wasn’t the least bit interested — altho I knew who and what an Erica was. But when DD went off to college, she asked me to watch it for her until she could arrange to get into it again. She wanted me to give reports on the story line. So I did -—— and was caught!
You know what broke me of the habit? The internet and Free Republic!! I always seemed to be busy, on-line, when it was on, so I started to tape it. But guess what -— the unwatched tapes just added up, and all of a sudden, I was out of the loop.
I should go back to see if there are any familiar faces still there.
Once upon a time, I used to watch Genital Hospital. That was back in the Luke and Laura days. I worked nights bartending.
My favorite “soap” from my after school days though was “ Dark Shandows “.
“As The Stomach Turns”
or that spellbinding science fiction series,
“Voyage to the Bottom of the Garbage Can”
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