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We are reviewing all the cancelled shows and renewed shows of the season.
And this year of axing shows left and right is taking with it CBS´longer running show As The World Turns.
As The World Turns gets cancelled by CBS after 54 seasons
As the World Turns (often referred to as ATWT) is an American television soap opera that airs each weekday on CBS.
Set in the fictional town of Oakdale, Illinois, the show debuted on April 2, 1956, at 1:30 pm EST. Prior to April 2, 1956, all serials were fifteen minutes in length. As the World Turns and The Edge of Night, which premiered on the same day at 4:30 pm EST, were the first two to be thirty minutes in length from their premiere.
At first, viewers did not respond to the new half-hour serial, but ratings picked up in its second year, eventually reaching the top spot in the daytime Nielsen Ratings by the fall of 1958. In 1959, the show started a streak of weekly ratings wins that would not be interrupted for over twelve years. In the year-to-date ratings, As the World Turns was the most-watched daytime drama from 1958 until 1978, with ten million viewers tuning in each day. At its height, core actors such as Helen Wagner, Don MacLaughlin, Don Hastings, and Eileen Fulton became nationally known. Irna Phillips created As the World Turns as a sister show to their other soap opera Guiding Light.
The show switched to color on August 21, 1967, and expanded from a half-hour in length to one hour starting on December 1, 1975.
The show passed its 10,000th episode on May 12, 1995, and celebrated its 50th anniversary on April 2, 2006. As the World Turns is the last remaining Procter and Gamble produced soap opera on television, as Guiding Light aired its final episode on September 18, 2009 on CBS. As the World Turns is also the longest running soap opera currently airing on television, succeeding the aforementioned Guiding Light.
On December 8, 2009, CBS announced that it would not renew As the World Turns and its final episode on the network will air on September 17, 2010. If the show is not picked up by another network, Coronation Street will become the longest running soap opera on television, having marked its 49th year on air in 2009.
Brian Cahill, senior vice president and managing director of current producers TeleNext Media Inc., said the company is actively seeking a new outlet to carry the show.
As the World Turns is notable for having been taped in New York City for all of its time on television (its first 43 years in Manhattan and in Brooklyn since 1999).
What is As The World Turns About? Plot
As the World Turns was the creation of Irna Phillips who, beginning in the 1930s, had been one of the foremost creators and writers of radio soap operas. As a writer, Phillips favored character development and psychological realism over melodrama, and her previous creations (which included Guiding Light) were especially notable for placing professionals – doctors, lawyers, and clergy people – at the center of their storylines. Phillips wrote: “As the world turns, we know the bleakness of winter, the promise of spring, the fullness of summer and the harvest of autumn–the cycle of life is complete.”
And so it was with As the World Turns, with its slow-moving psychological character studies of families headed by legal and medical professionals. The personal and professional lives of doctors and lawyers would remain central to As The World Turns throughout its run, and would eventually become standard fare on all soap operas. Whereas the 15-minute radio soaps often focused on one central, heroic character (for example, Dr. Jim Brent in Phillips’ Road of Life), the expanded 30-minute format of As The World Turns enabled Phillips to introduce a handful of professionals within the framework of a family saga.
One of Phillips’ innovations was to introduce a sort of Greek chorus to the stories. The primary purpose of characters such as Nancy Hughes (Helen Wagner) was to comment on the crises faced and decisions made by the town’s more dynamic residents. This technique contributed to the popularity of the show and continues to be widely used in other soap operas.
Phillips’ style favored gradual evolution over radical change. Slow, conversational, and emotionally intense, the show moved at the pace of life itself – and sometimes even more slowly than that. Each new addition to the cast was done in a gradual manner, and was usually a key contact to one of the members of the Hughes family. As such, the show got a reputation as being quite conservative (though the show did showcase the first gay male character on American soap operas, in 1988). During the show’s early decades, the content-related policies of its sponsor Procter & Gamble Productions may have contributed to the perception of conservatism. The soap-manufacturing giant typically balked at storylines in which adultery and other immoral behavior would go unpunished, and as late as the 1980s characters from the primary families were still generally not allowed to go through with abortions.
Are you sad that CBS has cancelled As The World Turns after 54 years?
[…] http://seriesandtv.com/cancelled-shows-2009-as-the-world-turns-gets-cancelled-by-cbs/As The World Turns gets cancelled by CBS after 54 seasons. As the World Turns (often referred to as ATWT) is an American television soap opera that airs each weekday on CBS. Set in the fictional town of Oakdale, Illinois, the show … […]
CBS what were you thinking????As the world turns is one of the best Soaps on TV!The only one I want to watch!