Can the Soaps Stay Afloat? : Ratings Prompt Revamping of Aging Prime-Time Vamps

The soap king is dead. Long live the soap.

Such is the cry of network executives and television producers these days, who all tend to slough off the notion that the demise of “Dynasty” last spring and the faltering ratings of CBS’s three remaining prime-time soap operas foretell the imminent death of the genre.

Only a few years ago, four of TV’s 10 highest-rated shows, including the top two, were prime-time soaps, and imitators were springing up faster than those corner mini-malls. Today, all the imitations are extinct and the top finisher among the four old warriors last season, “Knots Landing,” ranked 25th. “Dallas” was 26th, “Falcon Crest” came in 47th and “Dynasty” was tied for 58th.

Nonetheless, television insiders argue, the “nighttime serial,” as some producers prefer to call it, is far from washed up. Witness:

* “Knots Landing.” Though cursed with a tough time slot against “L.A. Law,” this sexy series actually improved its rating last season over the year before. “This is the one soap that has a chance to run forever,” said David Jacobs, the creator and executive producer of the show, which begins its 11th season tonight.

* “Dallas.” Granted, the popularity of the granddaddy of the current crop of prime-time soaps, which has three No. 1, two No. 2 and seven Top 10 finishes in its 12 seasons, has plummeted, losing more than 25% of its audience in the last two years alone. Still, it won its Friday night time period throughout last season.

* “Falcon Crest.” It’s no secret that this series has faded badly--its characters and plot lines growing as stale after eight seasons as an open bottle of Thunderbird Red. But a radical revamping designed to infuse it with new life is in place for Friday’s season premiere. It has several new stars, new producers, new music, a whole new attitude. “It is now a hybrid of a nighttime soap and an action show like ‘Miami Vice’ or ‘The Equalizer,’ ” said co-executive producer Joel Surnow.

* ABC and NBC. Both networks are still eyeing the genre hungrily. ABC has a new soap, “Twin Peaks,” in the works for a mid-season rollout sometime next year. And NBC, the network that built its commanding ratings lead without ever begetting a winning prime-time soap, is at least talking about getting back in the game. “The soap kings are dead and that represents an opportunity for us,” said Warren Littlefield, NBC’s executive vice president of prime-time programs. “The form is the staple of daytime television and it is a legitimate component of prime time. With the traditional soaps clearly on the fade, the audience probably has an appetite for a new one.”

Even if the networks never again hit with a traditionally styled soap, the continuing story line pioneered by “Dallas” in 1978 thrives in more serious-minded dramas such as “L.A. Law,” “Wiseguy” and “thirtysomething.”

“Night-time soaps have never been more alive,” Surnow said. “ ‘thirtysomething’ and ‘L.A. Law’ are soaps. Today’s audience today just wants a little more reality with their soaps.”

Before “Dallas,” most TV episodes were self-contained. What happened one week had no bearing on what would happen the following week. TV heroes such as Kojak or the Bionic Woman never changed. But the prime-time soaps, building on the kind of character development first seen on “The Waltons” and “Family,” succeeded in offering characters--albeit exotically rich, greedy, sex-crazed and villainous ones--who evolved from week to week.

Then shows like “Hill Street Blues” and “St. Elsewhere” came along and usurped and transformed the soap formula by casting it in a more realistic hue--setting it in a police station or a hospital instead of a luxurious Texas ranch, and peopling it with hard-working lawyers or housewives rather than the likes of Joan Collins’ Alexis Colby on “Dynasty.”

None of these more realistic dramas use spectacular cliffhangers such as the infamous “Who shot J.R.?” episode of “Dallas” to lure viewers back to the screen each season. But one of the downfalls of the traditional soap, one producer said privately, is that “after you do ‘Who shot J.R.,’ what else is there? How can anyone top that?”

Jacobs, who also created “Dallas,” concedes that the soaps are more melodramatic than this new generation of serialized dramas. “Knots Landing” will have burglars hold the entire cast hostage, while “thirtysomething” will depict the bankruptcy of a small business. But Jacobs said that his show also started out telling “reasonable stories” and was forced to move toward sensationalism to keep it exciting. He expects the producers of “thirtysomething” to run up against the same problem in a year or two.

The only notable difference between the two genres, Jacobs said, is that shows like “L.A. Law” win truckloads of Emmys while avoiding the demeaning “soap opera” tag. But he applauds them for adapting the form and offering the sort of entertainment that differentiates network television from everything else.

“We can’t compete with cable when it comes to action shows,” Jacobs said. “We don’t have the money to do ‘Midnight Run’ every week. We can do a sexy show, but we can’t compete with Kim Basinger’s exposed breasts in ‘9 1/2 Weeks.’ So we have to give the audience something they can’t get anywhere else. And that’s continuing drama, continuing involvement with characters that evolve and change. That’s the lasting contribution of shows like ‘Dallas’ and ‘Knots Landing,’ even if the audience is bored and tired of them after all these years.”

Though none of the existing serials will ever score the kind of ratings they chalked up in their “Who shot J.R.?” heyday, CBS still believes in its three old gladiators. David Poltrack, CBS’ senior vice president of planning and research, said that all three have made “midstream corrections” away from the “ ‘Dynasty’-like” infatuation with fantasy-driven characters and story lines and have given their viewers more “identifiable and empathic relationships.”

It is also cheaper to retool a floundering soap such as “Falcon Crest” with new characters and direction, Poltrack said, than to take the “high risk” alternative of introducing a new program.

Jacobs believes that “Knots Landing” has the best chance of surviving because it is the most realistic of the three. He said the show has made a comeback because of what he calls the producers’ “Friday morning beauty parlor meetings, where we try to figure out what we can get them talking about in the beauty parlor that will make people who didn’t see the show sorry they missed it.

“We did a flashback to when Abby (the show’s ruthless vixen, played by Donna Mills) lost her virginity in the hope that people might say, ‘Oh, they showed Abby’s first love,’ and maybe grudgingly they will tune us in again.”

“Knots Landing” will have to survive this season without Mills, who left the show at the end of last season. But even without its sexiest actress, it is still the sexiest soap and perhaps the sexiest series on television. One episode last season featured two characters playing a saucy game of “strip croquet” and another found Michele Lee’s character dressing up in revealing lingerie and then flashing her husband in his office.

“Falcon Crest” has portrayed its own share of sex over the course of its eight seasons, and its new producers have no intention of denuding it of the requisite bedroom romps. But the show has been revamped, Surnow said, because ratings were plunging.

“The perception was that it was campier than ‘Knots Landing,’ but that perception will change,” said Surnow, who formerly produced “Miami Vice” and “The Equalizer.” “We look at it now as if we were doing ‘The Godfather’ as a soap.”

Gregory Harrison, the former star of “Trapper John, M.D.,” has joined the cast as what Surnow describes as a greedy “Gordon Gecko-Michael Milken” type character.

Surnow also said that one of the failures of the soaps in recent years was that they took too long to tell their stories. “Falcon Crest” will still present continuing threads from week to week, but Surnow said the audience will see a “pay off” at the end of each episode.

As for the future of the prime-time soap, NBC’s Littlefield said the networks must find fresh programs to fill the void as these old ones slowly die off. Though he refuses to volunteer any specifics, Littlefield contends that the time is ripe for a new soap--one NBC could broadcast “30, 40, even 52 weeks a year” to help combat the audience erosion plaguing the networks during months of summer reruns.

“But you won’t see a bigger, brighter, richer ‘Dynasty,’ ” Littlefield said.

“There was a time in America, in terms of the Reagan era, that ‘Dynasty’ was able to exploit wonderfully,” said Ted Harbert, executive vice president of prime time at ABC. “But the nation has moved away from that infatuation with the rich and famous, and now it’s time to do a different kind of soap.”

ABC has something different in mind with “Twin Peaks.” Created by “Blue Velvet” director David Lynch, it is set in a northwestern city where, TV critic Tom Shales of the Washington Post has written, “mists rise eerily from forests primeval and bad boys thrown into jail howl like wolves in the night. . . . Whatever else is true of ‘Twin Peaks,’ it is daringly, perhaps insanely, different. . . . It is one of the most intoxicating combinations of grimness and giggles ever made for television. But is it the kind of thing America wants to watch?”

Shales doubts it. Littlefield says, no way. Harbert says, “If I had a nickel for every time the competition or a reviewer said people wouldn’t watch something, I’d be rich man.”

Long live the soap.