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ABC to axe two of its longest-running daytime soaps and replace them with ‘lifestyle’ programmes featuring reality TV stars All My Children has survived Vietnam, abortion, teen prostitutes, murder and cocaine addiction. Erica Kane, the soap’s biggest star, has seen off 10 husbands and once took on a grizzly bear while dressed as a nun. Now the 41-year-old show has met its match – in reality TV. ABC is to abandon All My Children and rival daytime soap opera One Life To Live, two shows that have been running for a combined 83 years, this summer. They will be replaced by “lifestyle” programmes starring hosts made famous in reality TV shows. Only four daytime soaps will remain, down from 20 in their heyday. The remaining programmes – General Hospital, The Bold and the Beautiful, The Young and the Restless and Days of Our Lives – are slashing costs as audiences desert them for increasingly popular reality shows such as Jersey Shore. Lynn Leahey, editor of Soap Opera Digest, said the news was “very painful”, adding that changing demographics were partly to blame. “Women are not at home in the same numbers they used to be … Mothers used to pass the soap-watching bug on to their daughters – that just doesn’t happen now. “Facebook is the new soap. It gives you that same sense of intimacy, of catching up with people’s lives, seeing their weddings, their children being born and growing up, that people got from soaps.” Kelly Ripa, one of the biggest US television stars, got her break in All My Children. She said she felt “heartsick” at the news. “All My Children was more than a job,” she said. “It was my family. It was there that I met my husband, it was there when my first two children were born, it was there where I met many of my lifelong friends.” Other stars showed their anger after they were reportedly told the news via texts and calls from journalists. “If you’re not an over-tanned guido who gets drunk and punches someone in the face where do you fit into television any more?” one star said on Fox News. Soap operas began in the 1950s as vehicles for advertisers, including soap companies, to pitch their wares to stay-at-home mothers. They had their heyday in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when their stars were some of the biggest names in the US, inspiring night-time successes like Dallas and Dynasty. When General Hospital’s “supercouple”, Luke and Laura Spencer, got married in 1981, 14 million people tuned in to watch. Hollywood heartthrob James Franco recently did an eccentric stint on GH, but even his star wattage could not drag the show out of the emergency room. It now averages between 2.5 million and 3 million viewers, while the latest season of Jersey Shore debuted with 8.45 million. Soaps as a springboard Footloose star Kevin Bacon, to whom everyone is related by six degrees of separation, got his big break as teenage alcoholic TJ Werner in Guiding Light, America’s longest-running soap opera, which was cancelled in 2009. Julianne Moore, fashion plate, constant Oscar runner-up and star of The Hours, The Kids are Alright, Magnolia, etc, played troubled sisters Frannie and Sabrina Hughes (both of them) in As the World Turns. The show was axed last year. Before Top Gun, When Harry Met Sally and Antonio Banderas, Meg Ryan was Betsy Stewart Montgomery Andropoulos in As the World Turns. Tommy Lee Jones, the Men in Black hardman and former Harvard pal of Al Gore, got his first lead role as the murderer, adulterer and blackmailer Dr Mark Toland on One Life to Live. Demi Moore played ace reporter Jackie Templeton on General Hospital in 1982. Just long enough for Hollywood to spot her and launch a career that started with St Elmo’s Fire and Ghost and ended with Ashton Kutcher. US television Television US television industry Television industry Soap opera Drama Dominic Rushe guardian.co.uk