A few months back when it was announced that ABC would be cancelling All My Children (which ended it's run in September) and One Life to Live (which ends in January), it looked like the shows would be spared a lethal injection after production company Prospect Park came in to save the day. The plan was for Prospect Park to air new episodes of both shows online, with key actors reprising their roles. But then there were recent reports that AMC was being put on hold temporarily so they could focus solely on launching OLTL. Well now rumors are circulating that OLTL may be in danger of heading to the daytime soap graveyard as well. Check out the official press release below...
“After five months of negotiations with various guilds, hundreds of presentations to potential financial and technology partners, and a hope that we could pioneer a new network for the future, it is with great disappointment that we are suspending our aspirations to revive One Life to Live and All My Children via online distribution. It is now becoming clear that mounting issues make our ability to meet our deadlines to get OLTL on the air in a reasonable time period following its January 13, 2012 ABC finale impossible.
We believed the timing was right to launch an Online TV Network anchored by these two iconic soap operas, but we always knew it would be an uphill battle to create something historical, and unfortunately we couldn’t ultimately secure the backing and clear all the hurdles in time. We believe we exhausted all reasonable options apparent to us, but despite enormous personal, as well as financial cost to ourselves, we failed to find a solution.
While we narrowed in on a financial infrastructure, the contractual demands of the guilds, which regulate our industry, coupled with the program’s inherent economic challenges ultimately led to this final decision. In the end, the constraints of the current marketplace, including the evolution and impact of new media on our industry simply proved too great a match for even our passion.
In our opinion, new models like this can only work with the cooperation of many people striving to make them happen, and we would like to thank and praise the numerous people who tried to help and showed us incredible support. We are extremely grateful to the fans and media who showed great support to us through this process, to ABC who did everything in their control to help, and we are especially grateful for the support and encouragement from many of the soaps’ cast and crew themselves.
We hope that our efforts are not lost, and that we somehow created a dialogue and movement on the feasibility of first run, network quality content online.
Of special note, we would like to thank Frank Valentini (Executive Producer), Ron Carlivati (Head Writer of OLTL), Agnes Nixon, many of the cast of OLTL including Michael Easton, Ted King, Kelley Missal, Melissa Archer, and of course Erika Slezak all of whom signed on quickly and did all they could to help, as well as our own Christine Sacani. Cameron Mathison and Lindsay Hartley also get our sincerest thanks for their support. We feel terrible we couldn’t come through for them and we were very much looking forward to working together.”
I know my mom and a couple of my lady relatives are huge fan of ABC soaps, but with the rise of reality TV giving a new generation of TV watchers all the drama they need to last a short attention span while, the days of soaps ruling households are numbered. Reality TV is easier and cheaper to produce, and as long as there is a hunger for that type of programming, soaps will continue to head to the daytime graveyard.
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