ABC to Say Goodby to Docudrama

You won’t be seeing any more life stories of Liberace, Rock Hudson or the final days of the Challenger astronauts on ABC for a while.

The network is getting out of the business of making docudramas, those part-fact and part-fiction renderings of real-life events. “We’re going to move away from the headline-grabbing, sensationalistic docudrama,” Allen Sabinson, ABC executive vice president of motion pictures for television and miniseries, said at a press conference.

“It almost became a joke,” Sabinson said, “opening up the newspaper and reading the accounts of what we were doing . . . I think we just felt that enough is enough for us.”

Sabinson said ABC has several docudramas still in development, which it will complete and air as planned.