Oh, the "Passions"!!!
This is tragic.
I think The History Channel should pick it up... Remember, Abe Lincoln was a featured character for a while...
Sob! So long,
'Passions,' so much fun
Tribute: The NBC series was over the top and goofy
By Toni Fitzgerald for MediaLife Magazine
Jan 19, 2007
When it debuted on July 5, 1999, NBC's "Passions" became the first modern soap opera. With its diverse cast, plots sprinkled with fantasy and horror, and references to contemporary events, "Passions" was unlike anything ever seen on daytime.
It was a soap that winked at the audience, saying, "We know this sounds ridiculous, but play along just for fun." It single-mindedly pursued the women 18-34 who saw daytime television as something their mom watched, worked to understand and appeal to their different tastes, and it made many of them into loyal viewers.
It was a valiant effort, but it wasn't enough. Too few of those younger women got "Passions."
On Wednesday, after years of low ratings and increasing fan outcry over slow-developing story arcs, NBC canceled the soap to make room for an expanded "Today" show. "Passions" will stay on the air through at least mid-June to wrap up its hanging plotlines.
NBC is hinting the show may live on on cable or online in a much leaner form, meaning a much smaller cast and perhaps a new head writer, charged with creating storylines built around those fewer characters and appeasing disillusioned fans.
Yet even if "Passions" lives on, its demise on broadcast speaks to a greater truth about daytime television: Fewer and fewer young women are drawn to soap operas, modern or otherwise, and there will be fewer still in the coming years. The broadcast networks will be challenged as never before to figure out just what those young people do want.
"Passions" was different from the start. In the very first episode, one of the characters delivered flowers to Princess Diana's memorial, breaking the bubble that traditionally separated soap characters from the real world.
Then things got downright odd. In its first few years, "Passions" introduced an orangutan nurse named Precious, a living doll and a witch, as its younger, ethnically diverse cast participated in the bed-hopping and the melodramatic doings of traditional soaps.
The show got away with such bouts of fantasy by acknowledging how silly it all was. "Passions" rarely took itself seriously, doing spoofs on Bollywood, the musical "Chicago" and "Pirates of the Caribbean."
Still, the show was always the lowest-rated of the nine soaps on the Big Three networks, and among its target women 18-34, ratings sank by double-digit percentages last year, increasing long-simmering speculation that it would be canceled.
On the web, news of "Passions'" demise spread quickly and inspired long and passionate posts on Soapoperacentral.com, more than 300 messages in just a few hours.
Wrote one poster, in a particularly insightful tribute: "I happen to think those of us who 'get' Passions are a great bunch of folks who appreciate creativity. RIP."
http://www.medialifemagazine.com/artman/publish/article_9607.asp