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.
Uh-oh, be careful dude. How do you think I got hooked on the ABC soaps ? I didn’t start watching them of my own accord.
Both Deidre and Drake were both fired from the show, due to lack of money. NBC is going down the drain and ruined a once great show. They are now starting to bring back old characters, they are even bringing back Carly Manning, remember her? they already have Justin back on the show. The only entertaining thing about Days now is having Stefano back on. He was always one of my favorites. Him and Kristen, wish they would bring her back
I remember that day as well.
I was in third grade and we were rehearsing the Thanksgiving Day pageant.
I played William Bradford or some Pilgrim and got to welcome Samoset and Squanto.
We all went back to the classroom and listened to the school principal on the PA system.
When I got home I found my mother crying which confused me because my family had voted for Nixon.
No cartoons on TV for five days.
Worse yet, no Captain Kangaroo!!!
(I was 4, that's what I remember upset me the most - & the horse with no rider)
Yeah, it’s usually the female stars that get you hooked. The g/f making you learn Portuguese ?
Yeah, Frances Reid is the matriarch of the show. A classy lady. I met her many years ago, nice lady. The show now is trying to reach out to the younger audience, what they don’t get is that young people are either in school or hanging out with their friends. They don’t sit around watching soap operas. Carly was around during the whole Vivian Alamein storyline where she put her in a well. that storyline lasted for months.
Sim. :)
OMG that show is 2 years older than I am...that puts it in the older than dirt catagory....
I stopped watching that when Alan and Hope were married...whatever happened to them?
Did you watch this one? I’ve never seen it once but it’s neat that it was on that long.
Once they were showing the 60’s era pilot episode of one of the long running soaps on Soapnet and I watched it to see what soap operas were like back then.
No, I never watched Guiding Light (perhaps caught it running in the background at some point if I had the station turned to it in the ‘70s or ‘80s, but I never willfully watched it). Funny that it started out as a religious-centered soap. It will be interesting to see if some of the actors from it move to the few other remaining soaps.
I do wonder how many of the other remaining soaps will fall in what order. If I had to guess, CBS’s The Bold and The Beautiful will be the next (The Young and The Restless is still strong). NBC has only one soap left, so I wonder how long Days has left. If I had to bet on the ABC soaps, I’d think One Life To Live may be the first of the remaining three to go, it seems like the weak sister of the bunch, so either All My Children or General Hospital will be the last one standing. But it’s all a matter of money. They don’t have the revenue they once did to support these shows. I think the fans would probably agree to it cutting back to 2 or 3 eps a week if the quality remains, 1 if quality and writing improve, to make it like the nighttime shows (although at that rate, they’d be drastically different shows). If ALL the remaining shows last another 5 years, let alone 10, I’ll be shocked.
I never could get into soaps. My Mom’s a big fan of them, and so is my Wife, but everytime I’ve watched one, I just couldn’t get past the hokey, over the top acting and plots so patently ridiculous that they were embarrassing.
To each his or her own, I guess.
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