Wesley’s Week (Jan. 15-21, 2007)

by Wesley

Does anybody really want to watch four hours of Today?

I am not asking if you can watch four hours of Today every Monday through Friday morning, just whether you would want to watch it. You see, I am practically floored by the idea that any series would have such a long running time, even if it is one that I use to start the day myself.

Yes, I confess, Matt Lauer and Meredith Vieira are the ones who wake me up in the morning when I turn on my TV, mainly because I get up around 7 a.m. and their first half hour is the one that has the best amount of hard news among all the television morning shows, in my opinion. But my gosh, have you ever watched it in the later hours, particularly since it went to three hours a couple of years ago? The segments are usually so inane by 9 a.m. (and Meredith is gone too, due to her contract for taping Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?) that I feel like I am dropping a few IQ points. Which is why I find NBC’s plan of adding yet another hour of it by the fall of this year absolutely ridiculous.

What’s more, to make room for it on the schedule, NBC will have to cancel Passions, which is a good news-bad news situation. On the plus side, Passions deserves the axing, having started as the lowest-rated daytime soap opera when it debuted in 1999 (replacing Another World, which had been on since 1964) and remaining at the bottom of the heap since that time. It is not hard to realize why it remained a ratings loser – outlandish storylines such as a doll that came to life by a witch and bad acting by a cast of mostly unknowns who will remain that way made the old campy Dark Shadows serial look like a William Shakespeare play in contrast. It only has stayed on the air due to the fact that virtually all of its viewership has been in the advertiser-friendly demographic of women ages 18-34. (Indeed, good luck to you if you can locate a Passions fan over 35 years old.)

But those women, like the rest of the population, have been watching less daytime TV over the years due to increased entertainment options, to the point where last summer there were some weeks when Passions struggled to achieve a record-low rating of 1. With that small an audience, sponsors became less willing to spare so much money for so few potential consumers. Add to that the higher costs it takes to pay actors, writers, directors, etc. for a soap versus that of a news/informational show like Today, and the cancellation of Passions became a no-brainer for NBC executives.

The downside of this situation is that come September, NBC will have only one daily soap opera, or for that matter, only one other show beside Today to air weekdays – Days of Our Lives. And according to this item at TV Guide the days in its life on NBC appear to be numbered too, with the network indicating it will not continue carrying the show once its contract with it ends in 2009. Given that Days of Our Lives is barely breaking even for NBC right now, its lack of any accompanying soap opera on the network’s schedule and NBC’s general attitude of disinterest toward daytime serials, especially compared to ABC (which has three) and CBS (which has four), I would doubt it would try to create another one to fulfill the void, thus making NBC the first network to be without a daytime soap opera since 1949, when ironically NBC debuted the first afternoon weeper with These Are My Children.

Maybe NBC will not replace Days of Our Lives with anything either and just give the time back to its affiliates to fill, as it did when its other losers went off the air in the 1980s and 1990s (NBC has not been first in daytime since the 1970s). It could happen – the network is in fourth place in the ratings, and thus its stations are in a more powerful position to demand more airtime to fill using their own local advertisers. That would mean NBC would just have Today as its only network show airing before the nightly news, a barren setup that last occurred in 1947 when the network inaugurated daytime programming with the classic Howdy Doody Show. For a network that gave us such big daytime hits as Concentration and The Hollywood Squares, this is an embarrassing development in its history, and a sad indicator of its decline as a major broadcaster.

NBC used to boast that it was “Proud as a peacock.” With its latest moves, I would say it is dumb as one instead.

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