Last Updated on July 22, 2018
We may be slightly closer to losing the longest-running program in broadcast history.
At 72 years of age, it premiered when television was little more than a distant dream, during the Golden Age of radio.
By 1952, it made the leap to CBS television.  But a declining daytime audience bombarded with more and more choices by the day has taken quite a toll on the soap’s ratings over the years, and it has been the subject of cancellation rumors for years.
Last year, CBS and the show’s owner/producer, Proctor and Gamble, took the “drastic” step of redoing how the show was produced, electing to abandon the security of the traditional broadcast studio where longtime sets could be constructed and stored in between uses to building a set of similar sets in a large-but-cramped studio and taking the actors outside for many outdoor shoots in a New Jersey town that the show “adopted” to give the show a more “real-life” feel.
Unfortunately, this strategy also involved a lot more handheld cameras that give each episode a shaky feel.
A lot of filmmakers delude themselves into believing two important things about such shots:  first, that skakiness implies more of a documentary and, thereby, more realism.  And second, that such shots make people get into what’s happening faster and more intently.
Think of the last person you had a face-to-face conversation with:  when you were watching them do the talking, assuming of course that you, at some point, stopped talking long enough to allow them to get a word in edgewise, did you really observe what was happening around you in a shaky, “off-shoulder” style?  If you did, I have a piece of advice for you:  see a neurologist!  Something’s wrong somewhere.
The “skaky cam means more realism” argument doesn’t really work for a daytime soap, anyway.  There are scenes, such as a fight or a fire, where such tricks can work quite effectively.  But when you’re watching a scene with two women talking about how much they hate PMS, shaky cameras just don’t convey much of anything other than sloppy camera work.
And what’s realistic about soap operas?  Everyone, no matter how “into” the characters they are, knows it’s scripted drama.  Fiction.  Fake.
I don’t watch Guiding Light, and if I had been a casual fan of the show before the switch to the new “style,” that likely would have been enough to turn me off.
But still, it’s the longest-running program on the air, and it’ll be a shame for it to go one day.  Even worse is that among the fare being discussed as possible replacements are talk shows, which we don’t need more of, and game shows, which I’m becoming more convinced that today’s television execs no longer know how to produce.
Have you seen what they’ve done to The Price is Right?
Then again, all things must come to an end.  Sooner or later.
