One of the most surreal moments in daytime television was when quirky new Wave group, The B-52s (right) showed up for a few episodes in 1981, long before they had their first mainstream pop hit with “Love Shack.”

This show has been a part of my life for three decades. It was like a mental lunch break, a pause in the middle of the day (or later, if I recorded it) to follow the adventures of families like the Spauldings, The Lewises, The Bauers and The Coopers. The show certainly had some odd moments over the years. Writers come and go, and some of them have rocky transitions. Occasionally storylines were dictated by outside circumstance, like the sudden departure (or death or pregnancy) of an actor, and sometimes weird crap just happened.

Through it all, Guiding Light managed to carry on with a class and dignity that seemed to escape the other soap operas. They still conformed to the conventions of the genre: cheesy melodrama, implausible paternities, rapid-aging syndrome (children are shipped off to boarding school for a few months, then return as full-grown adults), but they seemed to just do it better than the other soaps.

The writing was better, the acting was always top-notch, and in recent years the directing and production style on Guiding Light was revolutionized and is on par with, or better than, most night-time dramas. Other soaps never quite worked for me. General Hospital was too campy, cheesy and glitzy. Days Of Our Lives was boring. The only soap that transcended the inherent cheesiness of the genre for me was Guiding Light.

Even when they’d delve into really bizarre storylines like cloning, time-travel, espionage or super powers (below) , the cast of the show managed to make the material believable. The show was not immune to dropping the ball on occasion–killing off popular characters for no reason sometimes, going off on tedious tangents other times, but the show was always enjoyable. At least it kept me watching since 1979.

However, that is not what killed Guiding Light. It wasn’t bad press, the Internet, the fact that CBS affiliates in key cities shifted the show to 10 AM so they could put Dr. Phil on at 3 PM (yet another reason to hate Dr. Phil) or the rise of video games that killed the show.

O.J. Simpson did it.

In the mid-90s, the O.J. Simpson trial was on all three broadcast networks all day long for months. Soaps were pre-empted for so long that most of them suspended production. There was an audience for the trial. People were obsessed, glued to their TVs. And during this time, the core audience of soaps, which in the 1980s numbered in the tens of millions, learned how to live without their “stories.” The habit was broken.

When people had to stop watching their soaps because of the O.J. trial, most of them never came back. Millions just learned to get by without watching. People couldn’t remember the storylines. Fans of “The Young and the Restless” thought O.J. had killed Nicki Newman. It was too long for the soaps to go off the air for them to sustain an audience. For decades soap operas never dared to go on hiatus or take summer vacations. Suddenly, most soaps were essentially off the air for months, and the audience never came back.

Ratings after O.J. were about a third of what they’d been at the peak of the soaps in the 1980s. And they’ve continued to drop since then. That’s why matters of budgets became so important. Wheeler’s innovations may have bought Guiding Light an extra year on CBS, but the writing was on the wall. Why spend money producing a well-written drama with a large cast when you can crank out a talk show for a tiny fraction of the money and draw pretty much the same ratings?

I’d love to see the show continue, especially now. The last few months of Guiding Light have been good enough to be mentioned among the greatest dramas in television history. Since the demise of the show was announced, they’ve pulled out all the stops. They seem to be accelerating to an unforgettable finale.

I can’t understand why no cable channel, or even My Network TV, haven’t swooped in and picked up the show. My Network has only one night of original programming scheduled this fall–Friday Night Smackdown!–and they could probably pick up the rights to new episodes of Guiding Light for less than they’re paying for reruns of “Law And Order.” They could put the show on five hours a week, over four nights, and syndicate it to stations in the US that still want the show, and overseas, where Guiding Light has been on in prime time for years. Even if it only drew the audience that it did on CBS, it’d bring in more viewers than most of what’s on My Network now. My guess is that it’d thrive at night.

But that will probably remain my guess. As I write this, no last-minute call has come to save the show. Some of the cast members already have deals to jump to other soaps–soap producers always tried to raid the cast of Guiding Light–and the sets will likely be demolished soon. The cast has already had their wrap party.

So we have three weeks left to say goodbye to an old friend. I’m sure that a lot of other soaps are going to be following in the coming months. The nature of daytime TV has moved beyond the classic soap opera model. It’s sad, but a fact of life. Nothng lasts forever.

Art Walking