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| GH's Robin and Patrick Drake (Kimberly McCullough & Jason Thompson) |
Dear ABC Daytime Execs,
I know you folks are paid lots of money to make big decisions and I am a mere blogger in Ohio, but you are really screwing daytime.
I've been a loyal fan of soaps ever since I tore ligaments in my foot as a kid and I had nothing better to do than to watch soaps during the time I was stuck in bed.
From Jessie and Angie on All My Children to Luke and Laura on General Hospital to Bo and Hope on Days of Our Lives and to Sharon Newman and well, everybody on Young and Restless, I am proud to say I am a soap fan.
So it is quite alarming to hear how quickly Katie Couric's new talk show will be shoved into General Hospital's current time slot at 3pm slot on September 10th.
No offense to Ms. Couric, but ever since she left the Today Show, her ratings hasn't been the greatest, but if you believe in her and her talk show that's fine.
So with Katie Couric coming in, The Revolution's ratings going down faster than the"Titanic" and GH's ratings actually steady around 2.3 million, I have an idea to help save the last daytime drama on ABC:
Either use Katie Couric's allegedly suggestion to move General Hospital to 2PM to give her a stronger lead-in than The Revolution or shift GH to ABC Family.
Since I don't have Katie on speed dial, I'll talk about my ABC Family idea.
Let's face facts, most of ABC Family's night time is built on soap operas.
"The Lying Game" and "Pretty Little Liars" are pure soap through and through, some of the cast members of these shows actually came from ABC soaps,( ex. The Lying Game's Alexandra Chando (As The World Turns) and Christan Alexander (GH) as well as Pretty Little Liars's Natalie Hall (AMC)).
So wouldn't it be wise to add General Hospital to your stable of soaps and fortify the ABC Family schedule?
The audience is already built-in and you can add new wrinkle like webisodes to enhance the GH and ABC Family's brand.
GH could air at at 4pm on ABC Family so it wouldn't interfere with ABC daytime shows or kick off ABC Family's night programming at 7pm, (with a repeat showings after 11pm and/or weekends.)
Either way, its a win-win for everyone.
ABC soap fans will still have at least one of their beloved shows on the air and think about the advertising you can reap from the 2.3 million viewers that tunes into the show.
For cable television, 2.3 million is a respectable number, it falls in the middle of the pack of the top 25 cable TV shows, somewhere around behind Spongebob repeats and ahead of Oprah's Next Chapter. (Maybe Oprah shouldn't have discounted the idea of putting All My Children and One Life To Live on OWN, as the network continues to struggle to land viewers).
I know running a daytime soap opera is quite expensive and I think most fans would be OK with some tweaks to make the show financially solvent. But in a 2012 TV era where the hottest new shows on ABC are basically soap operas with the addictive "Revenge" and the campy "GCB", isn't it time to help one of the last show's on your network that help launched this genre?
Sidebar: Forbes' recently had an article entitled, "ABC Announces Katie Couric Start Date and Possible End of "General Hospital". In the piece Forbes said that Anderson Cooper should be co- hosting Live with Kelly Ripa. This move is clearly #2 on how to save daytime list. Come one Coop, make it happen with Pipa! You two could be the Regis and Kathy Lee of the Twitter generation!
Read: ‘The Revolution’ Pulled? ‘General Hospital’ Moving to 2:00 PM?
Read: Layoffs and restructuring at Oprah Winfrey's beleaguered OWN channel
Read: Will Katie Couric Save General Hospital?
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