ET TU, ABC?
By Alina Adams

I got my first VCR in 1984. As a result of my mother trying to kill me. (In her version of events, she wasn't technically trying to kill me. But, when you put suntan lotion instead of sunscreen on your very white child and second degree burns result, the ensuing guilt warrants the purchase of a VCR, nonetheless.)

Back in those dark days, boys and girls, you couldn't program a VCR to stop and start. You could pick one start time, one end time, and one channel.

So, in 1984, I simply recorded the entire ABC line-up from beginning to end: Ryan's Hope, Loving, All My Children, One Life to Live, General Hospital, The Edge of Night.

And I watched them all as soon as I came home from school. (Well, after finishing my homework, of course - my mom reads this blog, that was officially our deal.)

Four and a half glorious hours of soapy goodness.

Ryan's Hope and The Edge of Night were both gone (though I saved their final episodes on tape, natch) by the time I came to work at ABC Daytime in 1995.

Loving was also on its last legs, but, right before it morphed into The City and Lauren-Marie Taylor (Stacey) hosted a week's worth of retrospectives featuring Corinth's serial killer, I got to write her intros, earning my WGA union card in the process (I was a real TV writer now! As my father said, "Who knew all those years you wasted watching soap operas would ever turn out to be useful!").

Check out the Figure It Out promo, below:



So why am I taking this trip down memory lane today?

Because, Ryan's Hope is gone, The Edge of Night is gone, Loving and The City are gone, CBS is down to two soaps, NBC only has one, and now comes a report that either All My Children or One Life to Live is on the chopping block.

Et tu, ABC?

***

Alina Adams worked at ABC Daytime from 1995 to 1997 and Procter & Gamble Productions from 2001 to 2010. She is the author of "Oakdale Confidential" and "The Man From Oakdale" and the co-writer of "Jonathan's Story."