Entertainment for Ladies

 

Radio entered American homes about a century ago. It changed life everywhere. It transformed rural life most of all, giving listeners a tenuous, vital connection to the wider world. At first it offered morning farm market prices, news, prayer, and a separate evening session of music before signoff, which in most of the country came early. Once most local stations were wired into national networks, big advertisers made more lavish programs possible, and what we now call old time radio flourished. Relatively few women worked outside the home in those days, so the afternoon became the traditional time for radio sponsors to reach and entertain them. Women, generally being more sociable than men, were especially glad to have radio’s substitute companionship during long hours of housework. Serial dramas with appealing and/or hissable characters instantly became popular.

Being a homemaker has always been a tough job, but 70-100 years ago it required physical labor to a degree that few of us lucky moderns realize. Hanging the wash, keeping an anxious eye on the clouds, and bringing it in were tiring enough, but the washing was also done by hand, scrubbing on a washboard. Variety had a once-amusing, condescending 1920s term for daytime drama, which it continued to use for three decades: “women’s washboard weepers.” That general line of midcentury wit is where the term “soap opera” comes from.

Now-commonplace appliances like refrigerators and washing machines were luxuries in the ’20s, and for many people, the Depression kept them coveted right up through the ’30s. It was the woman of the house who kept fires going for cooking, and hot water for cleaning. Up until then, meat, eggs, and produce had to be brought home fresh and cooked that day or the next. Big, general-purpose supermarkets didn’t fully catch on until after the war. More American women had drivers’ licenses than in any other country in the world, but few families of the FDR era were well off enough to have a second car for the wife’s daytime use. That would come later.

There were more children at home. Families were bigger than today’s, with no day care or kindergarten. Kids scuffed up their clothes and grew out of them. The sewing basket and its pile of needed mending was something that could be worked on while listening to afternoon radio’s extravagant tales of honest, true-hearted women confronting daily dramas of unrequited love, obedience to duty, and selfless devotion.

Daytime’s rules permitted twice the number of commercial minutes that evening radio did. Back then, sponsors actually owned the programs, with far fewer rules about blatant on-air “plugs.” Ads were relentless with endless pitches to buy Borden, Armour Star meats, Reynolds aluminum foil, Kellogg’s, Jell-O, and a thousand other products.

In the ’50s, audiences for daytime radio drama held up better and longer than the evening shows, which began to suffer crippling ratings losses to television. Most of the nighttime radio entertainment schedule was off the air by 1955, and all but one show was gone by 1960. Television soaps like CBS’s “The Guiding Light” (1952) and “Search for Tomorrow” were slower to displace their radio counterparts. One obvious issue compared to radio was you had to watch TV to follow what was going on, so it wasn’t as useful a companion for housework. Another was a semi-fact flatly declared by one of the dads in a “Back to the Future” scene set in 1955: “Nobody has more than one TV set.” That one set was in the living room, not the kitchen. There wouldn’t be small TVs suitable for a kitchen countertop until the late ’60s.

But as the ’50s rolled on, that was okay, less and less of a handicap, because things like clothes dryers, dishwashers, electric rotisseries, television as a babysitter, and great postwar advances in marketing prepared, instant foods like Minute Rice and Swanson TV Dinners made it possible for moms to spend less time doing housework.

By the ’60s, new hits like ABC’s “General Hospital” were attracting audiences and advertisers. The newer shows, many of them created by writer Agnes Nixon, maintained a dignified, ladylike tone, but they were more realistic than radio’s daytime dramas and touched on more up-to-date issues like divorce, broken families, and remarriage.

And that brings up one strong comparative advantage of TV: The guys looked as good as they sounded. Women have always been unfairly judged or dismissed because of their looks, but if there’s one field of entertainment where women have always had it their way, it’s daytime drama, where male roles are cast on looks alone. Anyone can be a movie star, but the term “matinee idol” refers only to a man. Traditionally, who goes to weekday matinees? Women. Napoleon once sourly noted that he would not permit his wife to go to the theater in the afternoon because he wanted to know that all her children would be his. Afternoon television became the home of matinee idols.

When I moved to California, one of my early days co-workers had a lucrative side job working for one of the young actors on “Y&R,” “The Young and the Restless.” She wrote personalized answers to his voluminous fan mail, responses as formulaic as today’s send-me-money political emails and texts, always with the objective of getting his often lovestruck fans to write letters directly to CBS, demanding more of him in Y&R plotlines.

By the late ’70s, soaps were getting a little racier, paralleling similar changes in romance paperbacks like Harlequin and women’s magazines. It wasn’t just Ms. and Cosmo; by then, even the covers of McCall’s and Redbook were earnestly talking up the goal of perfect sex. This was a messy transitional time, piously aware of sexism but unwilling to stop exploiting it. TV Guide, a covert cultural conservative in those days, actually agreed with lib/left/les magazines like Ms.: An awful lot of daytime’s hunky men were acting on screen like real bodice rippers, not the metaphorical ones of Harlequin covers, and this might not turn out to be healthy in the long run.

Show producers prudently toned it down a little, for a while. The controversy was one of the few times when daytime soap operas became a mainstream news story. Occasionally, a rare phenomenon like “Dark Shadows” (1966) would be featured in Time or Newsweek. When Luke and Laura got married on “General Hospital” in 1981, it attracted a now-incredible 30 million viewers. Susan Lucci being snubbed by the Emmys was a subject of late-night comedy. But mostly, soaps stayed under the cultural radar.

Of course, the soaps weren’t the only female-friendly shows on daytime. Talk shows had always been around. In radio days they were often nondenominational religious or self-improvement talks that were meant to be uplifting. There were practical shows about cooking and housework. And even back then, there was a type of woman-oriented, high-minded public affairs program about polio or child poverty that would be recognizable to any NPR listener today. These traditions carried over to television, just as the soaps did. Daytime hosts like Mike Douglas were like friendly uncles who did a lighter, sunnier version of late-night shows.

This all changed with the arrival of Phil Donahue. He had on the same singers and bestselling authors and visiting performers as the other shows, but Donahue was more provocative, especially about sexual relationships, and he had an immediate effect of changing women’s TV. Rob Long once wrote a column about it, and he was right. Men came home from work, heard their wives talking about onstage homosexuality or open marriages in Sweden, and wondered where the hell did that come from?

Donahue led to Oprah, and from there Sally Jessy Raphael, Ricki Lake, Queen Latifah, and Ellen. Gradually, the soaps began to lose out. New genres like courtroom shows attracted daytime audiences. After generations of being able to keep transforming in ways that kept women tuning in, daytime drama was reduced to 60-90 minutes per Big Three broadcast network, in informal rotation so no soap was competing with another. Even in their weakened states, the afternoon lineup of women’s washboard weepers is still one of the best places to sell cereal, fabric softener, diapers, back to school supplies, cosmetics, or discount shoes.

Male readers may ask, “What about us guys? In the great daytime battle of sponsors seeking eyeballs, where do men stand?” Well, what kind of man is watching weekday TV midday? Grouchy old retired guys whose wives do most of the shopping. (They toss us baseball games and reruns of “Mannix.”) Or younger men who attract ads for for-profit vocational schools teaching job-winning skills or for drug and alcohol rehab centers; attorneys who specialize in drunk-driving defense or winning custody battles for dads. From an advertiser’s point of view, rarely desirable demographics, let’s face it.

Have you ever heard of a TV director named Lela Swift? Me neither, and after decades of reading television history, you’d think I would have run across her before. Starting way back in 1950, when she was only 31, she directed more than 1,400 television shows, rarely drawing critical or public attention. In a rare interview in 1953, she said, “Above all, don’t let anybody tell you it can’t be done. I did it. You can, too. What’s it like for a woman to do a man’s job such as directing? Well, I don’t rightly know, because I don’t think about being a woman when I do my job. I work with actors, stagehands and technicians as artists and artisans, not as men and women.”

“When you go into the business of television, expect the exhilaration of a difficult job well done, the agony of a carefully planned effect ruined by an on-the-air accident, the happiness and the heartache that goes with show business everywhere. Expect to care about everything a great deal. Expect to love it. I do.”

Lela Swift died only six years ago, at age 96. You’d think an industry that’s become obsessed with documenting pioneering women would have noticed or remembered her, but after all, she only worked in low-prestige daytime. Even to today’s women in the industry, it’s like she never existed.

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  1. Randy Webster Inactive
    Randy Webster
    @RandyWebster

    Stad (View Comment):
    And once TV sets started appearing in bedrooms, it was “Goodbye large families.”

    I’ve never allowed more than one TV set in the house.

    • #31
  2. kedavis Coolidge
    kedavis
    @kedavis

    Percival (View Comment):

    Judge Mental (View Comment):

    Gary McVey (View Comment):
    Only fanatics would rush out and buy a DVD boxed set of Santa Barbara or One Life to Live.

    All 13,000 Episodes!!

    Oh, man. The big drawback to soaps was that nothing ever happens. Lars Bogard’s Nazi past took forever to get anywhere.

    Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
    Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
    To the last syllable of recorded time;
    And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
    The way to dusty death.

    – Macbeth Act V, Scene V

     

    Nothing ever happens, until something happens way too fast.  Like, Promising High School Kid goes off to Medical School and 2 months later he’s a Doctor at the Hospital.

    • #32
  3. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    The soaps take timeless laments and give them new twists. Husbands are heroic or despicable or, seemingly just as bad, indifferent. If unmarried, their boyfriends are conceited and self-centered, with the constancy of a cloud. Their teenage and grown children are lazy ingrates who are squandering everything that the family took generations to build. A woman’s friends are her anchor, her heart and her fortress against a cruel world. That is, unless they turn against her with treachery and deceit, especially where men are concerned. If there had been radio 2000 years ago, the women of Rome would have recognized most of the plots. 

    The soaps just jazz it all up with bouts of amnesia, hitherto-unknown identical twins who steal husbands, scheming gold-diggers trying to alter the old man’s will, mysterious births overseas twenty three years ago that evidently resulted in a daughter who is now a beauty queen out to destroy her father’s new wife, etc. 

    • #33
  4. kedavis Coolidge
    kedavis
    @kedavis

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    The soaps take timeless laments and give them new twists. Husbands are heroic or despicable or, seemingly just as bad, indifferent. If unmarried, their boyfriends are conceited and self-centered, with the constancy of a cloud. Their teenage and grown children are lazy ingrates who are squandering everything that the family took generations to build. A woman’s friends are her anchor, her heart and her fortress against a cruel world. That is, unless they turn against her with treachery and deceit, especially where men are concerned. If there had been radio 2000 years ago, the women of Rome would have recognized most of the plots.

    The soaps just jazz it all up with bouts of amnesia, hitherto-unknown identical twins who steal husbands, scheming gold-diggers trying to alter the old man’s will, mysterious births overseas twenty three years ago that evidently resulted in a daughter who is now a beauty queen out to destroy her father’s new wife, etc.

    Don’t forget Satanic possession.

    • #34
  5. Jimmy Carter Member
    Jimmy Carter
    @JimmyCarter

    Gary McVey (View Comment):
    The soaps just jazz it all up with bouts of amnesia, hitherto-unknown identical twins who steal husbands, scheming gold-diggers trying to alter the old man’s will, mysterious births overseas twenty three years ago that evidently resulted in a daughter who is now a beauty queen out to destroy her father’s new wife, etc.

    And dreams…. lots of dreams.

    • #35
  6. kedavis Coolidge
    kedavis
    @kedavis

    • #36
  7. Mad Gerald Coolidge
    Mad Gerald
    @Jose

    My father was born before radios were common and he remembered the first time he ever encountered one. It was sometime before his 10th year at a friends house during the 1920s.  He was so impressed he even remembered the program that was playing – Amos and Andy.

    • #37
  8. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    Mad Gerald (View Comment):

    My father was born before radios were common and he remembered the first time he ever encountered one. It was sometime before his 10th year at a friends house during the 1920s. He was so impressed he even remembered the program that was playing – Amos and Andy.

    In the early Thirties Amos and Andy were so popular that many movie theaters would schedule films to provide a break when it was on, and they’d pipe it into the auditorium. 

    • #38
  9. Percival Thatcher
    Percival
    @Percival

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    Mad Gerald (View Comment):

    My father was born before radios were common and he remembered the first time he ever encountered one. It was sometime before his 10th year at a friends house during the 1920s. He was so impressed he even remembered the program that was playing – Amos and Andy.

    In the early Thirties Amos and Andy were so popular that many movie theaters would schedule films to provide a break when it was on, and they’d pipe it into the auditorium.

    Water systems in some towns underwent water pressure loss during Amos and Andy commercial breaks.

    • #39
  10. Stad Coolidge
    Stad
    @Stad

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    Bryan G. Stephens (View Comment):

    I remember being home sick and lots of game shows.

    It was worse for us. You’re a generation younger than me. For Boomer kids, especially boys, the dreariness of daytime TV was a built-in penalty for being out of school that day. In pre-cable days, once morning cartoons ended around 9, there was nothing but old, old movies, game shows, and ugh, ladies sitting around a table talking.

    Thank goodness our local ABC station ran action seriels and old movies in the afternoon.

    • #40
  11. Jim McConnell Member
    Jim McConnell
    @JimMcConnell

    Percival (View Comment):

    Judge Mental (View Comment):

    Gary McVey (View Comment):
    Only fanatics would rush out and buy a DVD boxed set of Santa Barbara or One Life to Live.

    All 13,000 Episodes!!

    Oh, man. The big drawback to soaps was that nothing ever happens. Lars Bogard’s Nazi past took forever to get anywhere.

    Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
    Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
    To the last syllable of recorded time;
    And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
    The way to dusty death.

    – Macbeth Act V, Scene V

     

    Bringing Shakespeare into a discussion of soap opera? Sacrilege! 

    • #41
  12. Percival Thatcher
    Percival
    @Percival

    Jim McConnell (View Comment):

    Percival (View Comment):

    Judge Mental (View Comment):

    Gary McVey (View Comment):
    Only fanatics would rush out and buy a DVD boxed set of Santa Barbara or One Life to Live.

    All 13,000 Episodes!!

    Oh, man. The big drawback to soaps was that nothing ever happens. Lars Bogard’s Nazi past took forever to get anywhere.

    Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
    Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
    To the last syllable of recorded time;
    And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
    The way to dusty death.

    – Macbeth Act V, Scene V

     

    Bringing Shakespeare into a discussion of soap opera? Sacrilege!

    Bill is inevitable and inescapable.

    So there!

    • #42
  13. EJHill Podcaster
    EJHill
    @EJHill

    Percival: Water systems in some towns underwent water pressure loss during Amos and Andy commercial breaks.

    Apocryphal. But germane to the thread! 

    Amos’n’Andy was, in the very beginning, a soap opera. It ran, first in syndication and then on NBC as a 5-nights a week 15-minute continuous story line serial that consumed 4,091 episodes. America was not collectively holding their bladder for 15 minutes.

    By 1943 the show’s audience had changed and Campbell’s Soup, their sponsor at the time, wanted to reformat the show as a weekly half hour situation comedy where the racial stereotypes the show is remembered for really took hold. Campbell’s also made another momentous decision by moving the show to CBS where they had other programs. William Paley, intent on keeping it on his network, bought it from the creators in 1948 for $2.5M. (Today’s dollars? $28.3M.)

    When someone tried to syndicate the previous five years of programs, CBS sued. Radio broadcasts were not covered under the copyright laws at the time and the courts ruled that CBS could only claim ownership of anything that was created after the purchase date. In effect, A&A is in the public domain for anything before that and that was reaffirmed in the 1980s when someone tried to revive the show as a broadway musical. (I can’t find any evidence that the play was ever produced. The financial drain of battling the network may have derailed it. A black theater in Harlem did do a show based on the characters around 2012.)

    By the way, in case you were wondering… and even if you’re not… very few of the serial episodes of the show still exist. When they were in syndication before the move to NBC, the recordings that stations ran had to be returned so the syndicate could destroy them. It remains the holy grail of collectors that someday someone is going to find an early run of the series in a barn somewhere. If NBC/CBS recorded anything between 1930 and 1943 the discs were most likely destroyed during the war to recycle the aluminum base of the recordings.

    • #43
  14. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    There’s a common belief that TV’s Amos and Andy is “banned” or “outlawed” today, but was uncontroversial and warmly received in its day, 1952-’53. Neither is exactly true.

    Nobody’s shown A&A reruns in nearly sixty years, true, but the show is not literally banned. After the civil rights era, no station wanted to be associated with it. Nor was it considered hunky-dory seventy years ago. The NAACP and other organizations protested the airing of TV’s version, and tried to organize a boycott of their main sponsor, Blatz Beer. Things had changed since the war, and it wasn’t a hit on CBS television. The “fondly remembered” part was mostly a holdover from the wildly popular radio show a generation earlier.

    Some things that changed from radio to TV: the actors were Black. This took away some lingering resentment of the fact that two white performers had always done the radio shows. On the other hand, it made the TV show more literal in ways that made “Negro groups” uncomfortable. Oddly, or maybe not, race never came up. There were only a few scattered whites in the show, and even authority figures like police and judges were Black. The plots now revolved around George “Kingfish” Stevens, a con man, a basically likeable rogue who was sort of a Black Bilko. His get-rich-quick schemes always fell apart. Some minor characters were memorable, like ambulance-chasing lawyer Algonquin J. Calhoun.

    Nonetheless, our local station, New York’s WCBS, reran the show in daytime right through the end of the Fifties. There was also a comedy about a maid named Beulah, and that’s all the Blacks got in the way of show toppers in those days. The Italians had “Life With Luigi”, the Jews had “Meet Molly Goldberg”, the Irish had “The Life of Riley” and “The Honeymooners”.

    EDIT: The show was, improbably, used as the basis for a cartoon series in the early Sixties, “Calvin and the Colonel”. The racial element was gone; instead, “C&C” transposed the human roles to animal fables. Andy was a hulking, trusting bear; Amos was a wise owl; Kingfish was a sly fox.

    • #44
  15. kedavis Coolidge
    kedavis
    @kedavis

    Stad (View Comment):

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    Bryan G. Stephens (View Comment):

    I remember being home sick and lots of game shows.

    It was worse for us. You’re a generation younger than me. For Boomer kids, especially boys, the dreariness of daytime TV was a built-in penalty for being out of school that day. In pre-cable days, once morning cartoons ended around 9, there was nothing but old, old movies, game shows, and ugh, ladies sitting around a table talking.

    Thank goodness our local ABC station ran action seriels and old movies in the afternoon.

    Why wouldn’t an ABC station run the ABC soaps?

    • #45
  16. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    Bryan G. Stephens (View Comment):

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    Bryan G. Stephens (View Comment):

    I remember being home sick and lots of game shows.

    It was worse for us. You’re a generation younger than me. For Boomer kids, especially boys, the dreariness of daytime TV was a built-in penalty for being out of school that day. In pre-cable days, once morning cartoons ended around 9, there was nothing but old, old movies, game shows, and ugh, ladies sitting around a table talking.

    There was a hole, after The Price is Right, went off the air at 11, and only soaps and news. At 1, TBS (or what it was before that) started showing old shows like Dick Van Dyke. Long 2 hours when you are sick.

    I weep for you as a boomer Gary. But not much, as let’s be honest, everything wrong with America today is the fault of the boomers. :)

    You know, I never thought about the fact that if you’ve been in Georgia most of your life, you might have seen the earlier days of WTCG, home base for Turner. I saw some of them too, but at a much greater distance. In late 1978 I was visiting friends in northern California. I was amazed that one of the channels they received was “Channel 17, Atlanta, Georgia”.

    The Superstation concept may be unknown to some of the young’uns, but when cable networks were starved for content, some independent stations put their everyday signal on satellite, where cable operators across the US could pick it up. Back then it had long been normal for TV shows, especially news shows, to be relayed in from all over the country, but you couldn’t actually watch live, 24 hour television from other cities.

    “Our” own Superstation, New York’s WOR, channel 9, made its appearance on Los Angeles cable, but it was one of the weakest independent stations in the city, whereas Turner, the man and the company, were just brimming with national, hell, global ambition. 

    WOR had been owned by RKO, so they still had the RKO film library. They had the Mets. It was halfway decent, cartoon-wise, for children’s hours. Their late night “The Joe Franklin Show” was a legendary cult favorite, one of those so-bad-it’s-good things that everyone my age laughed at, thought with some affection for the harmless old host, the speed of whose line delivery made Joe Biden sound like Robin Williams in his prime. On any given 11:30, Johnny would have James Coburn and Liza Minnelli; Regis would have the on-stage star of a new revival of “Hello, Dolly”; CBS would have “The Magnificent Seven” on The Late Show; and Joe would be doing a rambling introduction of “Vittorio, my good friend, the headwaiter at the Villa Marbona, on 10th Street, and he’s seen them all, the stars I mean, from, well, and including, uh, my guests this month, and lemme tell you, if you’re looking for a fettucine alfredo like they make in Italy, then stop on by, the, you know, the restaurant”. 

    • #46
  17. Judge Mental Member
    Judge Mental
    @JudgeMental

    WTCG – Ted’s Cable Giant

    • #47
  18. Stad Coolidge
    Stad
    @Stad

    EJHill (View Comment):

    Percival: Water systems in some towns underwent water pressure loss during Amos and Andy commercial breaks.

    Apocryphal. But germane to the thread!

    Amos’n’Andy was, in the very beginning, a soap opera. It ran, first in syndication and then on NBC as a 5-nights a week 15-minute continuous story line serial that consumed 4,091 episodes. America was not collectively holding their bladder for 15 minutes.

    By 1943 the show’s audience had changed and Campbell’s Soup, their sponsor at the time, wanted to reformat the show as a weekly half hour situation comedy where the racial stereotypes the show is remembered for really took hold. Campbell’s also made another momentous decision by moving the show to CBS where they had other programs. William Paley, intent on keeping it on his network, bought it from the creators in 1948 for $2.5M. (Today’s dollars? $28.3M.)

    When someone tried to syndicate the previous five years of programs, CBS sued. Radio broadcasts were not covered under the copyright laws at the time and the courts ruled that CBS could only claim ownership of anything that was created after the purchase date. In effect, A&A is in the public domain for anything before that and that was reaffirmed in the 1980s when someone tried to revive the show as a broadway musical. (I can’t find any evidence that the play was ever produced. The financial drain of battling the network may have derailed it. A black theater in Harlem did do a show based on the characters around 2012.)

    By the way, in case you were wondering… and even if you’re not… very few of the serial episodes of the show still exist. When they were in syndication before the move to NBC, the recordings that stations ran had to be returned so the syndicate could destroy them. It remains the holy grail of collectors that someday someone is going to find an early run of the series in a barn somewhere. If NBC/CBS recorded anything between 1930 and 1943 the discs were most likely destroyed during the war to recycle the aluminum base of the recordings.

    I remember one episode where Amos or Andy (or both) bought a house, but it was really a Hollywood prop – only the front of a house.  When they couldn’t get in the front door, they went to try the back door and couldn’t figure out how they got behind the house so fast.  It was funny watching them try to figure out what was happening.  They eventually figured out they’d been hoodwinked.

    Update:  It was Andy and Lightnin’ (minute 8:50):

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmpm3Hr-jGA

    • #48
  19. EJHill Podcaster
    EJHill
    @EJHill

    kedavis: Why wouldn’t an ABC station run the ABC soaps?

    Money! Depending on the market they may have been making more money with cheap syndication and keeping all the commercial inventory. 

    Before the late Fred Silverman was hired in 1975, ABC was the perpetual red-headed stepchild of broadcasting. They had the lowest program clearance rate of the three networks. One thing that Silverman did was install the first woman to oversee the network’s daytime operations. Not that there was incompetence in the office before. ABC Daytime was overseen by the likes of Leonard Goldberg (Starsky & Hutch, Charlie’s Angels, Blue Bloods), Harve Bennett (Star Trek) and Michael Eisner (Disney CEO 1984-2005). Since Jackie Smith took over in 1977, six others have had the job and all but one has been a woman. That man, Brian Frons, cancelled All My Children and One Life to Live. The position is currently unfilled and is overseen by Disney directly.

    The economics of television has done a 180° since we were youngin’s. It used to be that the networks paid the affiliates to carry their schedule. Now the affiliates pay the networks. And that is due primarily to the NFL. The rights to professional football are so enormous that it forced that river of money to start flowing backwards.

    Now, in some markets, advertising is the 2nd largest generator of broadcast income. Numero Uno are retransmission fees that stations negotiate with third party carriers such as cable, satellite and streaming services.

    • #49
  20. Jim Kearney Member
    Jim Kearney
    @JimKearney

    Gary McVey: Entertainment for Ladies

    Maybe call it Entertainment for the Female Demographic. Less punchy, but more accurate.

    Sure, polite masters of ceremonies called all female contestants “Ladies …” back in the day, but out of respect for the genuine article, let’s briefly consider the word. Remember that John Sebastian song “She’s A Lady“?

    Internet lookup gives us “having etiquette, self-respect, class and appreciation.” The ladies of the houses I’ve called home fit that description. None of them ever watched daytime soaps. Hell, my wife mutes the volume whenever promos come on for “reality” soaps like Growing Up Hip Hop and Love After Lockup. (The mute button is a lady’s best friend.)

    We don’t hear the term “lady” much anymore. God forbid putting someone you like on the wrong side of The Class Struggle. Class is no longer a celebrated virtue. Can you imagine anyone telling Rosie O’Donnell “you’re not being very lady-like”? Pow! 

    My mom was a lady. People regularly complimented her style on the Fifth Avenue bus well into her 90’s. “I love the city and the city loves me back.” In the mid-1950’s and through the 1960’s her radio listening centered on the genre we now call The Great American Songbook. Those were the tunes she hummed around the house. Decades later she listened to Jonathan Schwartz and, sorry folks, NPR. She cared for family, painted and crafted, dressed up for Sunday Mass in Jackie O’s parish, read Louis Auchincloss and The New Yorker, shopped for bargains on Canal Street, and loved and appreciated the lady I married.

    • #50
  21. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    Jim Kearney (View Comment):

    Gary McVey: Entertainment for Ladies

    Maybe call it Entertainment for the Female Demographic. Less punchy, but more accurate.

    Sure, polite masters of ceremonies called all female contestants “Ladies …” back in the day, but out of respect for the genuine article, let’s briefly consider the word. Remember that John Sebastian song “She’s A Lady“?

    Internet lookup gives us “having etiquette, self-respect, class and appreciation.” The ladies of the houses I’ve called home fit that description. None of them ever watched daytime soaps. Hell, my wife mutes the volume whenever promos come on for “reality” soaps like Growing Up Hip Hop and Love After Lockup. (The mute button is a lady’s best friend.)

    We don’t hear the term “lady” much anymore. God forbid putting someone you like on the wrong side of The Class Struggle. Class is no longer a celebrated virtue. Can you imagine anyone telling Rosie O’Donnell “you’re not being very lady-like”? Pow!

    My mom was a lady. People regularly complimented her style on the Fifth Avenue bus well into her 90’s. “I love the city and the city loves me back.” In the mid-1950’s and through the 1960’s her radio listening centered on the genre we now call The Great American Songbook. Those were the tunes she hummed around the house. Decades later she listened to Jonathan Schwartz and, sorry folks, NPR. She cared for family, painted and crafted, dressed up for Sunday Mass in Jackie O’s parish, read Louis Auchincloss and The New Yorker, shopped for bargains on Canal Street, and loved and appreciated the lady I married.

    That’s the New York City I grew up in. Your mother was indeed a lady, and the world was a better place for having women like her who kept up the tradition. 

    Back in the days before the city effectively took over the private bus routes, Fifth Avenue Coach lines was the aristocrat of NYC buses. They had a distinctive red and gold color scheme that made them a cut above. 

    I shopped for bargains on Canal in the late ’60s, for electronics parts that had moved north from Courtlandt Street after the street was taken over as a construction site for the World Trade Center. 

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  22. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    Something I should have put in the OP: to some degree, the loss of audience due to women joining the workplace was balanced by the arrival of VCRs. Now, you could come home from work and rewind Ryan’s Hope or The Bold and the Beautiful at your leisure.  

    This might have also contributed to a minor addition to soap viewership from the ’80s on: gay men. IIRC, they weren’t as keen on following every plotline, but enjoyed the florid, overheated drama, which they played for laughs. 

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