Fun in the Sun: More marvelous Midwestern moments

Continued from old thread (please fill that one up before posting here)

[quote] Alan keeps wandering down to the nude beach. He must be bored down there, since it's only a bunch of guys.

I haven't been this confused since I overheard Henry Chamberlain talking about "poppers."

Fun in the sun? St Croix? You've got to be kidding.

Chris Bernau was very handsome in those days.

That Brunette is especially beautiful.

I thought this was interesting-this is from Fred Silverman’s interview for the Television Academy Archive (I think it is from the late 90s/early 00s).

He talks about his tenure as head of CBS Daytime in the 60s, specifically about the schedule changes made to several P&G soaps; the expansion of GL and SFT to 30 minutes; and the creation of Love is a Many Splendored Thing and working with Irna, which was developed when P&G refused to expand ATWT to an hour in the 60s.

I wonder what took them so long to expand GL and SFT. Both were in the top 3 forever, with GL being #1 for two years. Not sure about SFT, but they both deserved to be expanded along with ATWT to 30 mins.

R7, are you old enough to remember 15 minute shows?

I'm 66 and have some pre-school memories of (T)GL. I wonder if they were 15 minutes. A few years later I remember Search for Tomorrow as a cue to head back to school after lunch. By then it was 30 minutes. And that show in the mid -late '60s was immensely popular.

I remember when the actress who played Marge, Stu's wife, died. We regret the passing of... Our whole house went silent.

I came to love Search's new theme music. I especially love the pipe organ version.

In hindsight, none of the shows should have been expanded to an hour. When you watch old soaps on YouTube, those 30 minute shows really moved and got a lot of stuff done. The first couple of years after soaps started expanding to an hour, were awful.

I will always wonder why they never put GL and ATWT to 30 minutes before canceling them to try to see if ratings improved.

r10 SAME

It doesn’t cost double to produce a 60 minute show vs 30. Some costs like studio space are the same amount.

But, a 60 minute show does generate double the revenue vs 30.

If the economics of keeping a show going at 60 minutes aren’t viable, then 30 minutes will be even less viable. Half the ad revenue…

Then why wouldn’t they have expanded bold and beautiful to 60 minutes since for the last 15/20 years it’s been pretty highly rated especially in the young demo.

International distribution contracts

I get what R12 is saying but there's also the fact that we're now in a streaming era and people want shorter bites. I think somehow having more viewers for a shorter episode could outweigh what the old framework was for production costs.

R13 Bell-Phillip owns B&B, and Bill Bell hated the hour-long format, saying the half-hour was the perfect production model for soaps. He would not go along with that production change for B&B. He resisted taking Y&R to an hour for as long as he could, but co-owner Columbia Pictures (now Sony) wanted to do what the network was pressing for and forced him to. They apparently even gave him some kind of ultimatum, that if he didn't want to write an hour-long Y&R, they'd find someone else who would. By the time Bell retired (got ill) soaps were already starting to lose viewers, so any kind of expansion after that point was becoming something of a non-issue, and Bradley Bell would see the wisdom in his father's direction, and go along with keeping things as they are. Plus, in B&B's case, the show's foreign market works better with the half-hour format as well.

It would have been good to have an ATWT/GL hour

Agnes Nixon was similarly resistant to expanding AMC to an hour.

In June 1975, just five months after AW expanded to an hour, ABC persuaded her to do a week's worth of hourlong AMC episodes, just prior to the debut of Ryan's Hope. At that point AMC was airing at 1 p.m., but Ryan's Hope took the 1 p.m. time slot upon its debut and AMC moved to 12:30 p.m. So, they had week of the hourlong AMC airing from 12:30 to 1:30 p.m. to subtlety prep views for the new time slot.

AMC went back to 30 minutes with Ryan's Hope's debut. But that week of 60 minute episodes also convinced ABC the hour was the way to go. Also show Agnes she could do the hourlong episodes.

ABC kept pressuring Agnes that it wanted the AMC to be an hour. ABC was sold on the hourlong format.

If I recall correctly from the Ryan's Hope book, there was also some talk of expanding Ryan's Hope to an hour.

Agnes finally relented and AMC went to 60 minutes in April 1977 while Ryan's Hope stayed at 30 minutes.

ABC

R18, weren’t AMC and OLTL 45 minutes for a bit before they expanded to 60?

I think that was OLTL and GH

GH and OLTL expanded to 45 minutes each in July 1976, They then both expanded to 60 minutes in January 1978.

AMC was never 45 minutes in length.

Thanks, R21!