Should Disney Get Horny? Sexing up the Soaps to Boost Sagging TV Ratings

The venerable Ad Age reports that Disney’s ABC Television Network is launching a series of new campaigns to try and revitalize their flagging soap operas. To boost ratings a variety of actors and performers will do what we hope are humorous promos, urging viewers to tune back into their favorite and, arguably, venerable Soap Operas of the days gone by. The promos are cross platform, meaning they will run in print, on cable, and presumably the Internet.

Will they work? It’s hard to say, looking of the line up of promo celebrities, or whatever they are, I wouldn’t think so. Soaps need to be sexy and modern, sizzling and bristling with emotional tension. With some exception, this crew doesn’t look they could convey that all that easily. If it were my promotional campaign, I would be making different choices.

Soaps have fallen on tough times since the O.J. Simpson Trial. Real life was much to provocative and the same old same old was eschewed in favor of the bumbling courtroom administration of Judge Ito and the prosecution team. Viewers were compelled to wonder what hairstyle lead prosecutor, Marcia Clark, would favor that day and whether or not the jury could actually spell DNA. Then there was the matter of guessing whether the guilty man was innocent or guilty and whether justice would be served or merely served up lukewarm on an old drive-in burger stand tray. The Simpson trial was a soap opera and a circus all rolled into one. You can’t ask for more than that.

People did, and when the television networks wouldn’t give it to them in the soap operas, the viewers went somewhere else. No one is really sure where they went, actually, but they went somewhere. No longer was the hallowed family tradition of passing incomprehensible interest in these wooden characters passed down from mother to daughter. People bailed, maybe even to the telenovellas on the Spanish Language Channels.
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Telenovellas are cool. Not cool, really, In fact they smolder. They are a product of Mexico, Central and South America. If you think people showed loyalty in watching the American Soaps, it was more like a passing interest when compared to the avid viewing of telenovellas. Telenovellas are something else, considering their origins are from largely Catholic based countries. I guess it takes a good sense of the holy spirit to better get a grip on sin and redemption and focus mainly on the sin, with the redemption part serving more like the berries on a rich parfait, rather than as the main attraction.

With telenovellas you get to see stuff and not just hear about it from characters who allegedly performed these sexy adventures off camera. Telenovellas can illustrate a more lasting impression of what heated passion is all about. Rather than hear about it from puppet mouths reciting tepid lines, in telenovellas you get to see why sex, sin, adultery, life and death and everything else in between can make people so crazy. You come away from watching telenovellas feeling that you gained something, maybe even learned something. You come away wanting more. And to better illustrate their effect, they can rampage your ruminations, even if you don’t know a word of Spanish.

So ABC and all the other networks should can the semi-cutesy promos and take a lesson from telenovellas. Stir up the emotions a little and give the public what they are craving. After all, if you are home in the middle of the afternoon lusting after invented people, you are looking for something in life that will supplement your…well…yearnings. So write the networks and tell them you want to see your soaps as telenovellas. Hey, if all the illegal immigrants can get more fun in their lives, then why can’t you?

Author: Gordon Basichis

Gordon Basichis is the Co-Founder of Corra Group, specializing in pre-employment background checks and corporate research. He has been a marketing and media executive. He is the author of the best selling Beautiful Bad Girl, The Vicki Morgan Story, a non-fiction novel that helped define exotic behavior in the late twentieth century. He has recently published The Cuban Quarter, The Blood Orange, and The Guys Who Spied for China, dealing with Chinese Espionage in the United States. He is the author of The Constant Travellers. He has been a journalist for several newspapers and is a screenwriter and producer.