SOAPIE'S CHOICE

by Kristen Baldwin (Entertainment Weekly)

Next, on As the Bubble Bursts: A mother is forced to kill one of her two children. Will it be her older gravely ill child? Or the young underachiever who has potential for a long, healthy life? Tune in tomorrow....

A new sudsy serial in the works? Sorta. This is a real-life cliff-hanger now unfolding at NBC. On July 5, the network will debut the tentatively titled Passions, a soap centering on four families in a small New England town, from former Days of Our Lives head writer James Reilly. To make time for it (as well as Later Today, now in development for the post-Today slot), NBC will most likely have to cancel one of its two struggling daytime serials: either the 34-year-old Another World, a soap grande dame that's showing its age, or two-year-old Sunset Beach, Aaron Spelling's glossy serial with a feeble last-place standing but a burgeoning teen fan base.

Hardly an easy choice, and there will be serious fallout no matter which sudser goes down the drain. If NBC cancels the Procter & Gamble-owned World, it will rankle one of the industry's largest advertisers, thus risking millions in revenue. Pulling the plug on Spelling's show also means losing money: NBC gets a cut of Sunset's lucrative foreign sales.

Such a daytime dilemma would have been unkthinkable in the '70s and '80s, when the genre was more robust. In 1986, daytime (including non-soap programming) accounted for about 17.7 percent of the three networks' profits. In 1997, the number was more like 12 percent, according to the Broadcast Cable Financial Management Association. Real-life sagas that regularly unfold on talk shows and cable's 24-hour news channels--not to mention the ongoing presidential impeachment drama--have hurt the networks' 11 soaps, which have lost a stunning 33 percent of their viewers since 1991. And the Internet continues to siphon off audiences--including young girls, who have traditionally gotten hooked on soaps as teens and stuck with them through adulthood.

"A lot of younger people are watching talk and court shows instead," sighs Bradley Bell, executive producer of CBS' Bold and the Beautiful, which is in second place (see chart on next page). He's right: There are 27 percent fewer women ages 18-49--the industry's lifeblood--watching than in 1994.

Which prompts the question: Is NBC (now in last place in the daytime race) insane for pouring about $10 million in start-up costs (plus shouldering the average per-episode price tag of $250,000) into an ailing format? Actually, no. "When you're looking for a female demographic, [serials] are still a cheap, attractive buy," says Lori Isola, a senior partner at J. Walter Thompson. In fact, the majority of daytime dramas still attract a higher concentration of women 18-49 than top-rated talkers Oprah Winfrey and Jerry Springer. "But it's incumbent upon us to improve," adds Mary Alice Dwyer-Dobbin, the executive in charge of production at Procter & Gamble, which also owns CBS' Guiding Light and As the World Turns.

In recent years, daytime execs have worked themselves into a lather trying to attract distracted younger viewers. Shows like The City (now defunct) and Sunset Beach went with expensive location shoots; others opted for bizarre story lines about human cloning and mind control. But now, rather than trying to reinvent a half-century-old genre (which only serves to anger mature soap fans), the industry is preaching a back-to-the-future philosophy. "We have to be able to offer more than glitz," says Angela Shapiro, president of ABC Daytime, which is No. 1 in women 18-49. "We have to offer substance. And substance is in the story."

Passions is the offer that NBC hopes viewers can't refuse. While creator Reilly is best known for his whacked-out satanic-possession story line on Days, Susan Lee, senior vice president of NBC Daytime, insists Passions will be rooted in staple soap themes--tales of multigenerational, multi-class families--rather than high-concept high jinks. Though it will debut in July with a front-burner tale of two young lovers, Passions wants to be your mother's soap. "A couple in their late 30s also have a strong kickoff story," says Lee. "So it's not exclusively for the kids."

The promotional push, meanwhile, will be aimed at the heart of NBC's teen target demographic. With Passions, the network is trying its first online soap-launch campaign, possibly featuring a site with maps of the fictional town, family trees, and background information. As Lee puts it, NBC hopes to "get people hooked before it even goes on the air."

For its part, ABC has test-marketed a 24-hour cable channel, All My Soaps. Last month, the network began an intensive yearlong "psychographic" study of soap viewers, the findings of which they will feed to their writers and producers, to help tailor the shows to the soap freak of the future.

CBS, the leader in daytime ratings but No. 2 in women 18-49, plans to narrow the demographic focus even further by targeting Hispanic females. Hispanics "are the fastest-growing population in the U.S., and they have a tradition toward telenovelas, so we need to attract them," says Lucy Johnson, president of CBS Daytime. "If there's a new man coming in, let's make him a sexy Hispanic guy. Or a new villainess, let her be Hispanic."

Meanwhile, back at NBC, the bake off is under way. The network gave Beach a tentative one-year renewal in October, but it plans to reevaluate the show's progress in April. Beach's producers are planning a splashy--and risky--play for ratings in March with a week of live shows. On Another World, Procter & Gamble replaced executive producer Charlotte Savitz in October in a last-ditch attempt to revitalize the serial. Still, recent story lines about a time-traveling hunk and a woman who kidnaps her sister in order to seduce her brother-in-law (got that?) haven't exactly goosed the ratings. "In the next six months, these shows are going to be showing us what they can do," says NBC's Lee, who concedes it's doubtful that both will survive.