Monday, February 9, 2009

When Is It Okay To Interrupt Soaps?

The last 20 minutes of GUIDING LIGHT's heavily hyped "Phillip returns" episode was pre-empted here in New York today due to a press conference where hero pilot Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger III and his crew were given a key to the city. That made me start thinking about what is and is not acceptable reasons to break into our soaps. I have started a list below. Feel free to add in each category.

Acceptable
1. Significant Breaking News - Obviously a safety or crisis issue like 9/11 warrants a news interruption. That is a given.
2. Tragedy - A key public figure has died or was just killed.
3. Urgent Weather Update - If a tornado is hitting your town, a weather interruption is definitely warranted.

Unacceptable
1. Regular Weather Updates - It's raining, it's going to snow or it might be partly cloudy today are all things are we do NOT need to know during our soaps. We've probably figured it already ourselves.
2. Insignificant News - If the news report is not urgent or something viewers "need" to know about, it can wait. Most fall into this category.
3. Press Conferences - Unless a new President is being sworn in or something earth-shattering is happening, showing a boring press conference full of awkward moments and little meaty content is completely pointless.

For me, any significant news is already on CNN and the other news stations so I see no point in the same thing being on every channel. But I can understand the network affiliates wanting to show "breaking" events. But when the news can wait, and is available on news channels and online, I see no value in interrupting soaps and annoying your viewers.

Most of the "breaking" news I've seen over the years could have waited until the evening news, and the weather updates most definitely could have scrolled across the bottom of my screen.

It seems like the networks and local stations disrespect soap viewers because you see way more interruptions during soaps than you do in prime time or during sporting events or awards shows.

Of course if the President schedules a press conference in prime they, they re-arrange the schedule so that no shows are missed. We have no such luck in daytime. But luckily all the soaps are available online or on SOAPnet these days so we do have the ability to see what we missed. When I was growing up this wasn't the case, and many key soap moments were missed never to be seen again.

2 comments:

  1. I couldn't agree with you more, Roger. Except I'd argue that even when someone has died, barring any major leaders of the free world, this can wait. They'll still be dead once my show is over.

    It seems affilaites communicate their indifference toward soap fans by interrupting shows with benign happenings, ie, keys to the City. I'm sure they are not concerned with the emotional impact of interrupting this connection, or considering the feelings of the viewer.

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  2. Excellent Roger...I couldn't have said it better myself....it would also help if the network decides to re-run the episode at another time... like at 2:40 AM...to scroll this information at the bottom of the screen so I can set my DVR...of course...if SOAPNET carried all the shows we'd all have back up...just a thought...

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