Other shows like The Price is Right which is likely the most watched show on CBS don’t have enough 18-49 viewers to make the list that Bill uses to produce this data.

The View is there because the data comes from the ABC press release AND it does (mostly) enough 18-49 viewers to make the list.

The decline in daytime is very likely terminal. There’s not much promotion for the soaps anymore, there’s hardly any way for anyone to know whether anything’s happening anymore unless they happen to stumble upon it while home one day. Days’ late 90s success was a blessing and a curse. The show was increasingly close to being canned in the early 90s before James Reilly took over writing. It was the only soap to gain viewers during the OJ trial, but once he left, the show was totally ruined. All the realism and good writing Days had before was lost and the show’s now an empty carcass of what it used to be. Worse, daytime’s desperation to emulate anything that gets a marked ratings jump meant that everyone became a DAYS clone just like everything became a GH clone in the early 80s. So now all the writing and acting are terrible and people are tuning out. There’s no future for these shows unless someone does something dramatic and radical across acting, writing, production AND promotion to get these shows back to the forefront. IMO ATWT missed a huge opportunity by not promoting the recent kiss by their gay couple, especially with the grassroots campaign by fans when they hadn’t kissed in 7 months. Say what you will of the pairing and gays on TV whatever. They totally dropped the ball there.

There’s no way people will tune into a show unless there’s a buzz. If no soaps are generating buzz and the ratings continue to fall, by the end of the decade, we’ll be down to 3 CBS soaps and GH.

1. All soaps but Y&R and B&B are cancelled within the next 3-4 years.
2. Y&R remains an hour, but most others are bumped down to 1/2, with huge cast cuts
3. Y&R and B&B are left as is, but several other soaps are integrated (AMC and OLTL, which sometimes cross over, for example).

No matter which way it goes, we can safely expect that next season is the last season we’ll see soaps in their current format on the air.

I don’t think that the proliferation in other options can fully explain the drop in the ratings of soaps, especially when you see that Days has plummeted 75% in women 18-34 in the past 6 years, its key demographic. I think you can tie it into the mega-hit relationship dramas that have proliferated in primetime during that span – GA, DH, etc. These shows are basically primetime soaps and have done extremely well, and it’s made the poor quality of daytime soaps stand out like a sore thumb. So those in the 18-34 demo, a well-known fickle one, easily switch off Days because not only is it ridiculous, but it’s also poorly made. And as the last 15 years have shown, once those viewers are gone, they’re gone for good.

During its peak, Passions used to eclipse a 3 rating in teen girls during the summer, an unheard of number even for soaps at that time. Last week, Days led with a 0.5 rating. In Canada, Global TV (our Fox) was not counted in the national ratings until 2002, so final nations were not avaliable. Local markets were though, and at one point Passions was drawing more female teens in Toronto alone than the top rated series was nationally. Then it went down the tubes and the balloon burst.

As for Passions, between seasons 2 and 5, it did extremely well for NBC and in the summer would usually be in the 2.2 to 2.5 HH ratings range. It was still 9th overall, but it did huge demo numbers, peaking at a 4 rating in women 18-34 one week in 2001. Outside of Will & Grace, it was the highest rated series in that demo on NBC for that week. I used to run a ratings website myself and dug these numbers up from the archives: (week ending May 31, 2002, with comparisons made to the week reported above)

Households
RTNG SHR Comp
Young & The Restless 4.6 16 -17%
Days Of Our Lives 3.6 12 -44
Bold & The Beautiful 3.6 12 -25
General Hosptial 3.2 11 -31
As The World Turns 3.1 11 -29
All My Children 3.0 10 -37
Guilding Light 2.7 9 -33
One Life To Live 2.7 9 -29
Passions 2.0 7
Port Charles 1.5 5

Women 18-49
RTNG SHR
Days Of Our Lives 2.9 20 -52%
General Hosptial 2.2 16 -32
All My Children 2.1 15 -43
Young & The Restless 2.0 14 -15
One Life To Live 1.9 13 -32
Bold & The Beautiful 1.7 13 -23
Passions 1.6 12
As The World Turns 1.6 12 -19
Guilding Light 1.4 8 -21
Port Charles 1.2 8

Women 18-34
RTNG SHR
Days Of Our Lives 3.9 26 -74%
Passions 2.3 16
General Hosptial 2.0 14 -45
One Life To Live 2.0 14 -55
All My Children 1.8 13 -62
Young & The Restless 1.6 11 -37
Bold & The Beautiful 1.6 11 -50
Port Charles 1.4 10
As The World Turns 1.0 7 -30
Guilding Light 0.8 4 -37

The drop in women 18-34, now that’s research it, is astounding. These are the future soap viewers, and in the past 6 years, more than half of them have disappeared.

Daytime is effectively dead.