As the World Stops Turning

CBS, which cancelled Guiding Light earlier this year after a 72 year run, has now decided to put an end to As the World Turns next September, by which time it will have been on the air for 54 years.

The writing on the show has been so terrible for so long now that it became increasingly obvious that the powers that be didn't want to save it. If they had, the low ratings and atrocious writing would have lead to a shake up behind the scenes some time ago. Instead, they let things continue as they were and I will always believe that they wanted to bring about the end of the series.

This is a huge loss, not only because the show has an incredibly rich history, but also because it has what I truly believe to be the most talented cast in daytime TV. Their talents have been greatly wasted over the last few years, yes, but all it would take is a head writer and an executive producer with some talent and things would have turned around instantly, at least in terms of quality, and rising ratings could have followed.

As The World Turns, as bad as it has been these past few years, did give us the first gay male character from a core family, and it also gave us daytime's first gay male supercouple in Luke and Noah. Their story was rarely, if ever, well written, but they were a trailblazing couple in a groundbreaking story that saw daytime's first kiss between two men. There would be no Kish without Nuke having lead the way.

I haven't managed to keep up with the story over the last couple of months, but I still feel very invested in Luke as a character, thanks to the talent of Van Hansis. The coming out story back in 2006 was the best thing I'd ever seen to that point, and as much as I wish the romance with Noah could have played out differently overall, it did provide many wonderful moments between the two.

Daytime as a medium will be down to just six soap operas. The usual hype about finding the show a home somewhere else is starting up, but we heard the same thing for Guiding Light, Sunset Beach, Another World, and probably just about every soap that was ever canceled. In recent years, only Passions found another home post-network cancellation, and that was short lived.

It would be a tiny bit less painful if the networks were at least replacing canceled soaps with new ones. Back in the day, the cancellation of one series always meant the beginning of another (which didn't, of course, endear the new series to the fans of the old one!) but it has now been a full decade since any new soap started and it seems increasingly unlikely that any new soaps will ever be launched on network TV again.

I'm glad the show at least has until next September to wrap things up, but Nuke fans- and I still include myself in that group- will never really get over losing Luke and Noah.