The End of Daytime TV as We Know It

ABC announced today that it is canceling "All My Children" and "One Life to Live." I am not ashamed to admit that I have been an All My Children fan for about 35 of the 40 plus years that it has been on the air. The residents of Pine Valley were kind of like my friends...or maybe distant relatives that I didn't see very often but always kept tabs on what was going on in their lives.

In the early days, I ran the full gamut of soaps during the summer: Ryan's Hope (duh, Kate Mulgrew was from Dubuque!), All My Children, General Hospital, and The Edge of Night. After Ryan's Hope was canceled, I converted to The Young & The Restless. (The Young & The Restless is in Genoa City, Wisconsin. On the show, of course it's a huge city. I've been to Genoa City. It's about as big as Farley.) When you are a pre-teen or teen and are bored and full of teenage angst, and you live in the country and only get three TV channels, three months of summer vacation from school can compel you to do a lot of things for just a little bit of excitement. So, I suppose becoming addicted to soaps was pretty mild all things considered. I hated going back to school in August because I would miss all the action (pre-VCR days...I'm old).

In college, I would schedule my classes around the soaps. Everyone was caught up in the Luke and Laura drama/romance. And Tad Martin was the first "bad boy" I knew about. Now, Tad Martin is one of the oldest characters in Pine Valley. He's gotten pudgy and gray -- Tad, I feel your pain. 

I read that ABC will end All My Children in September and bring "appropriate closure" to the show. Well, I suppose that means that at least two or three people who we thought were dead will reappear. Somebody will find out they are somebody else's illegitimate child, and maybe somebody will finally kill David Hayward.   I'm going to miss that 37 minutes of mindless TV. (Of late, I had started to watch episodes online. Without commercials, a one hour episode takes just 37 minutes to watch.) There will still be the void of some of the great characters from that show who have passed away -- no more Phoebe Wallingford, no Palmer Cortland/Pete Cooney, no Myrtle Fargate, no Mona Kane.

I also read that one of the replacement shows will be something called "The Chew." Oh...another cooking show. I'm so over that. I was a Food Network addict about 10 years ago, but when the likes of Rachael Ray and Paula Deen starting coming out with 3-4 different shows, it was overkill.

Sure, soaps are mindless, but so is about 80% of the programming currently on TV. At least they tried to have a storyline, and they frequently spawned actors who went on to bigger and better things. Who remembers Demi Moore as Jackie Templeton on General Hospital?? And, the celebrity guests -- Elizabeth Taylor on General Hospital, Oprah and Carol Burnett on All My Children?

So long Pine Valley and Llanview. I, for one, will miss you.