TVSquad

Let's get the bad out of the way right at the top: no clips or retrospective?

It would have been nice to have a montage of past Guiding Light characters. After all, the show has been on TV since 1952, so why not take a little trip down video memory lane? It was fun to see all of the openings they've used over the decades at the start of the show (in reverse order), but it would have been good to see something at the end of the show to bookend it instead of a "The End" and then a commercial and the Tele-Next logo. Seemed kinda odd.

However, that didn't ruin the episode itself, which turned out to be everything that GL fans could have wanted and more.

Guiding Light ends this Friday. I'll have a full review up after the episode airs, but I thought this would be a good time to show not how it ends but how each episode began. Here are some of the many opening credits that the show has had over the past six decades.

The show started on TV in 1952 (from radio). Here's the 1953 opening:

Imagine if, at the end of the 10-year run of Friends, Rachel ended up marrying Paul Rudd's character.

Doesn't make much sense, does it? But that's pretty much what's happening these days on Guiding Light, as it heads toward its last episode ever next month. The long romance of Reva Shayne and Josh Lewis - something that has been simmering off and on for over 25 years - has pretty much been over for a while.

But I thought that, since the show was ending, they'd start wrapping up classic storylines and actually get Reva and Josh together forever, to please fans of the show. It doesn't look like that's going to happen.

In fact, the opposite seems to be in the minds of the writers.

You may think the soap world has thrown in the the towel because 72-year-old Guiding Light has been canceled, but think again. Daytime TV is buzzing along as usual, and that includes The Bold & the Beautiful snagging three-time Emmy winner Rick Hearst from General Hospital.

Hearst, who was facing the prospect of a demotion to recurring status (as opposed to a contract player), will return to B&B as Whip Jones, a character he introduced and played for a brief stint in 2002.

Yesterday - a day usually set aside for light-hearted pranks and various other yuk-yuks - will forever be remembered now as the day that CBS got rid of Guiding Light, the longest running drama on TV (it started on radio in 1937 and TV in 1952).

It's probably the starting gun for other networks to get rid of their soap operas. It's a dying genre, either gone forever or scattered here and there on the TV landscape. It's really sad. Fans can mourn the death of a long-running network show, but a big part of pop culture is dying too. I watched the show since the late '70s/early '80s, and while I drifted away a few years ago, I've been watching it again, so it's going to be weird that it's not on anymore. I'll be recording that last episode and grabbing the inevitable collectible issue of Soap Opera Digest.

So what will CBS do now that they'll have another hour on the schedule Monday through Friday? A look at some of their options after the jump.

To quote Danny Glover in every Lethal Weapon, I'm too old for this shit.

I never thought I could get hooked on another soap opera. I watched Guiding Light every single day for over 20 years, but got away from it when they stopped focusing on the Bauers and then went all crazy with the way they shot the show (I'm back now that Grant Aleksander has returned). And I watched All My Children and One Life To Live in the 80s, though I haven't watched either of those shows in 15 years and would probably be lost now. But I can at least imagine going back to that show because I know a lot of the characters and can figure things out.

But can someone explain to me how I'm suddenly hooked on a soap opera I've never seen before?

Many years ago, while trying to figure out some way to convince my mom that she should watch what I wanted to watch instead of her stupid soap operas, I got hooked on soap operas. My main soap (sorry, "daytime drama") was Guiding Light (which I've started to watch again since an old favorite returned yesterday), but I also watched One Life To Live every single day for many years too. And then, well, I didn't. I probably couldn't tell you what the hell was happening on the show if I turned it on today, though I'm sure many of the same characters and actors are still on the show.

Except two. This has been a bad week for the Buchanan family as two of the top former actors from the passed away within just days of each other.

Just a couple of weeks ago, all was fine and dandy in Days of Our Lives-world. Or so it seemed. The big fan shindig at Universal in Hollywood seemed to signal that the status quo was holding that the lone NBC soap still in production would be able to use the 18-month renewal granted by NBC to climb in the ratings and return to past glory. Now comes the shocking news that NBC has fired Days of Our Lives' two biggest stars, Deidre Hall (Marlena) and Drake Hogestyn (John). By the way, Deidre and Drake were at the fanfest. You think they knew the pink slips were on the way? Um, no.

This is all about money, folks, and instead of seeking other ways to trim costs, Executive Producer Ken Corday and company have used a hatchet and chopped off the top salaries. Don't be shocked to hear that more is coming. That could be Peter Reckell and Kristian Alfonso -- Bo and Hope -- the other iconic romantic couple on the show, right after Marlena and John.

There's a real problem brewing for the Daytime Emmys. The annual broadcast which has been switching off from year to year between ABC and CBS, may not make it to prime time because CBS has decided to skip its turn...and ABC is not ready to step up and take on the award show.

To some this is simply a symptom of the decline of interest in daytime dramas, which dominate the awards. If you check out my post from last year's show, my assessment is not that the broadcast is the problem, but rather it's the nominations. There are too many repeat winners, too many actors who are overlooked in the nominating process, and too much sameness. The Daytime Emmys problem starts with the awards, not the show.

Still, what about the foreseeable future and the 2009 awards -- will they be shown on TV?

If shows that are shown only once a week and have around 22 episodes a year are affected by the strike, then the soaps, which have new shows five days a week, 52 weeks a year must be even more affected, right? Right?

For some reason, not yet. The shows haven't divulged how many scripts they have stockpiled and how long they will last, but the soaps haven't gone into reruns, "classic episodes" or other programming yet. Most soaps have anywhere from six to a dozen a writers or more, and most of those writers are on the picket line. A few writers (though not all) on four of the soaps, CBS' The Young and the Restless and ABC's All My Children, One Life To Live, and General Hospital, have crossed the picket lines and returned to work on the show because of something called "financial core," which means financial need, another example of how I don't quite understand what's going on with this strike.

Fans of the NBC soap Passions who felt sad and neglected when the network announced that the show was ending after eight years take note: the show is going to live on!

The show is going to return this fall in a new home: DirecTV. NBC and the satellite system are about to finalize a deal that will keep the quirky soap opera (which includes, I believe, a character who is a witch, and used to have a character that was a doll brought to life) on the air for four days a week. They'll have to cut the budget, too, but at least the show will live on in some form.

This is the another move in DirecTV's plan to increase the amount of original programming they have.

I have this suspicion that, except for a couple of the mega-successful shows, the soap opera is on its way out.

NBC has canceled the bizarre soap opera Passions after 8 years. This is the show that included witches (Tabitha, played by Juliet Mills) and puppets that came to life. I know, I know, you're thinking, "why didn't someone tell me there was a soap like this on, I would have watched it!" It sounds like something that I could get into for a laugh or two, though I don't know if I could have gotten into it for the long haul, unless they really went over the top all the time and didn't include serious storylines too.

If you're wondering, the show is being canceled to make room for more of The Today Show, which is expanding to 9 hours in a few weeks.

I haven't seen a minute of General Hospital in over 10 years. In the 80s when everyone was talking about how great this soap was, I was busy watching Guiding Light, which I guarantee you was a better show (even though I only saw a few episodes of General Hospital). But Stuart Damon is a fairly well-known actor, and it's interesting to see he's being let go from the show in February (click here if you want to see how his Alan Quartermaine character will vanish from the show).

Damon has been with the show since 1977 (!) but he's been acting in TV and movies for a really long time, way back to the mid-60s. He's been in episodes of The Saint, UFO, Thriller, Space: 1999, Mike Hammer, Fantasy Island, Diagnosis Murder, and Strong Medicine, as well as movies like Star 80, so I'm sure he won't be looking for work for long. I bet he shows up on another soap.

Those of you who are a bit older than me might remember that in the late 70s and early 80s General Hospital began to get a bit, well, "weirder." Suddenly their were weird plots involving criminal master minds, aliens, and other wacky sci-fi stuff. I only know this because my mother watched General Hospital pretty religiously when I was growing up.

Well, Gloria Monty, the woman who was responsible for sending General Hospital in all those weird directions, as well as overseeing the show during the height of those steamy "Luke and Laura" years, passed away Thursday at the age of 84. Monty was called in as a producer in the late 70s when the show was experiencing a sag in ratings due to more women working outside the home. Her solution was to target younger audiences, thus the show got stranger. The producer character in the movie Tootsie was also based on Monty.