Could the cancellations of ABC 's "All My Children" and "One Life to Live" have been prevented?

[acroyear]

it's sad to see daytime drama being replaced by reality TV. Especially when you consider that - back in the 1950s, 1960s & 1970s - one of the main reasons that soap operas were so popular with housewives was because these shows then gave their viewers a break from their sometimes desperate realities.
[Jim Hill Media] Could the cancellations of ABC 's "All My Children" and "One Life to Live" have been prevented?
 

 

 

One of the great curses of reality TV is that it is, to the studios, the best of both worlds: insanely cheap but with insane ratings.  So the curse of moving to this is that when the ratings drop a bit, they can still keep profitable enough to keep going even as a dying program a lot longer than a show with real writers and real actors would be able to do.  Thus, we're stuck with the dregs a lot longer than we used to have been (which in turn continues the drive away from the networks and more towards cable rerun marathons, or just giving up broadcast TV entirely for netflix).