There's no tuning in tomorrow for longtime soap's fans

If you run across people wearing black armbands today, they're probably soap-opera fans.

Guiding Light, the longest-running serial in TV history, airs its final episode today - after 57 years and more weddings, paternity suits, and deep, dark secrets than you can shake a remote at.

Soap operas, like heroin, are a tough habit to break.

"It's heartbreaking," says Tracey Smeltzer, a teacher from New Derry, Pa., who has been watching Guiding Light for 30 years. "Come Monday morning, there is going to be this enormous void."

The cancellation of CBS's antediluvian soap (it started on radio in 1937) is sending shivers through the world of daytime drama.

The seven remaining series are desperately trying to make over their stripes to blend into today's fast-twitch entertainment jungle.

Shuttering the fictional town of Springfield was an emotional call for the network because of GL's extraordinary heritage.

"It was a decision that was years in the making, one we tried very hard to avoid," says Barbara Bloom, the senior vice president of Daytime Programming at CBS.

But money talks, and the lack of it screams.

Guiding Light was the lowest-rated daytime drama on broadcast television, averaging just over two million viewers this season. That's 18 percent fewer than As the World Turns, the second-lowest.

"It didn't go off the air because it's the oldest - although that makes it sadder," says Lynn Leahey, editorial director for Soap Opera Digest and Soap Opera Weekly. "It's been trending downwards for years."

"If you have a show that hasn't won its time period or its key target demographic in 20 years," says Brian Frons, president of ABC's Daytime Division, "from a cold business point of view, you think: 'Why didn't it get canceled earlier?' "

At this juncture, it's survival of the fitter for all the soaps as they struggle to retain their audiences. Based on Nielsen figures, tune-in for these shows is 43 percent less than it was a decade ago.

As surely as the restless follows the young, that decline has resulted in diminished revenue. Advertising dollars spent on network soaps in the first six months of this year are down 14 percent from the same period last year, according to research by TNS Media Intelligence.

"All soaps are being asked to do more with less," says Bruce Evans, NBC's senior vice president of Drama Programming. "The market is very tough, financially."

The legacy aspect of daytime fandom has clearly been disrupted.

"When I was 9 years old I would come home from school and while my mother was making dinner she would have it on," says Smeltzer, describing a common initiation. "I started watching. Alan and Hope were stranded on an island, and I became hooked.

The torch is no longer being passed, judging by the precipitous drop in 18-to-24-year-old women viewers: 73 percent in the last decade, based on Nielsen data.

Curiously, male viewers in the same demographic, while still making up a fraction of the overall audience, have grown by 67 percent over that same 10-year period.

Numerous theories purport to account for the genre's audience erosion.

Many fingers point at O. J. Simpson. His lurid murder trial drove soaps off the daytime schedule for 10 months in 1995, supposedly breaking the mesmerizing grip soaps held on viewers.

The soaps' predicament is often ascribed to the increased number of women in the workplace. But according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the ratio of employed women has risen by only 12 percent since 1979, when daytime dramas were enjoying record ratings.

"Daytime's decline is more explained by seminal shifts in the culture than by changes in the workforce," says John Rash, senior vice president of Media Analysis at Campbell Mithun Advertaising.

"Specifically, soap operas are no longer confined to daytime. In fact, soap themes are the back and often the front story of reality TV, in particular on relationship reality broadcasts, from The Bachelorette to cable's more coarse relationship shows like those on VH1 and MTV."

Romance and betrayal have always been essential ingredients on soaps. Reality shows, while less artful, provide the same elements with raw intensity at a fraction of the cost. [Disclosure notice: David Hiltbrand was a staff writer for two years on ABC's All My Children.]

In an increasingly competitive market, soaps have been at a disadvantage. The same conventions that made them distinct - large casts, nonstop production schedules, and tantalizing stories - now make them expensive and cumbersome.

"The days of having 30 actors in the cast, of doing five shows a week, 250 days a year - it's not sustainable," says Michael O'Leary, who has played Dr. Rick Bauer on GL on and off since 1983.

In the past, blessed with a captive, almost shut-in audience, soaps could get away with plots that simmered for months without resolution. That glacial development has come to seem archaic.

"How do you take a model that was developed for a five-channel universe and a stay-at-home audience and keep it relevant?" asks CBS's Bloom.

The primary solution has been to crank up the pace and the plots.

"Twenty-five years ago, we could tell a story a little slower," says O'Leary. "Now there seems to be eight to 10 plot points all going at the same time."

The shows also have broken free of their traditional parlor ambience and embraced more natural, outdoor settings.

But the biggest change has been a radical shift in tone - from melodrama to action. As soaps have turned up the sizzle, the serial philanderer has given way to the serial killer. The evil twin might now be part of a terrorist cell.

As the shows grow more cinematic, graphic and violent, they run the risk of alienating loyal viewers who savor the sentimental family moments.

No one did warm and fuzzy like GL, which revolved around strong clans like the Coopers, the Bauers, the Lewises, and the Spauldings.

So, how do you resolve a saga that would have exhausted Scheherazade? What does the final hour hold?

"We wanted it to be fan-satisfying," says Jill Lorie Hurst, GL's co-head writer. "They'll be left with a fairly clear idea of where these people will go in the next few years of their lives. We wanted our families to be safe at the end."

After nearly 16,000 episodes (a record that likely will never be broken), the citizens of Springfield deserve at least that much.

See clips from television's

longest-running serial at http://go.philly.com/guidinglightEndText