An announcement today by NBC will ease two years’ worth of worry among fans of the daytime soap opera.
The network is announcing that it is renewing its sole soap, Days of Our Lives, for two more years, with an option to continue beyond 2013 if it remains popular.
Soap fans have been anxious about the future of the medium for years, but their worry increased in April of last year, when CBS announced that it was canceling Guiding Light after a 72-year run on radio and television, making it broadcasting’s longest-running series in history. This year, it announced that GL’s sister soap, the 54-year-old As the World Turns was also leaving the air.
That focused attention on the remaining shows on the air, and fueled speculation over which one would be next to go: the two most likely candidates were NBC’s Days and ABC’s One Life to Live.
Days got a lot of attention earlier this year when the show’s matriarch, Frances Reid, who portrayed Alice Horton since the show’s very first show 45 years ago, passed away. The episodes that dealt with her passing brought back some classic characters who had previously left the show’s landscape, which may well have attracted occasional viewers.
But the producers of the show are still getting much less for their product: NBC renegotiated with Corday Productions to drop the fee the network has to pay to run the program by 40% two years ago. This new contract carries that lower rate through for the next two years.
That cut prompted the show to cut two of its most popular actors, Deidre Hall and Drake Hogestyn, who had been on the show for a combined half-century. Even this shocking development, apparently, wasn’t enough to drive the show’s core viewers away.
There’s still sand in that classic old hourglass.
