Old Scratch got his and I kind of feel sorry for him. Brian Frons is no longer President of ABC Daytime. I’ve been watching the ratings on the new show “The Chew” and although numbers are higher they’ve lost that key group they want the 18-24 and 25-34 year old women. Their numbers are only slightly higher than AMC in general. The article I read did not mention the viewership on SoapNet or the Web numbers combined with the standard 1pm slot AMC once held.
Walt Willey aka Jackson Montgomery blogged about the failure of Prospect Park to cultivate AMC/OLTL for the web like they had initially wanted so now that project is dead as well. I personally didn’t thing this would come to fruition due to the scale of the project and costs. As Walt points out in his blog post it cost roughly 50 million dollars to produce AMC. The numbers just aren’t there. Perhaps if they had done the show on a small-scale with fewer players things would have worked out better. They might have merged the two shows for a nice online format with a smaller cast. But that dream is over.
I’ve been one of those people who was not a fan of Brian Frons. Although I know he was a fan of the shows as much as we were he just tried too hard and made too many bad decisions for the shows that it led to the ultimate demise of our favorite fictional towns. My largest complaint against him was he was he seemed to be micro managing the Soap Business and not focusing on the matters at hand…namely…ABC Daytime.
So much could have been done over the last 5 years that would have saved our shows. Things like cutting the format to 1/2 hour shows or trimming the cast to major principles with extras like they did back in the early days. Instead his great plan was to spend 10′s of millions of dollars to relocate AMC to California only to have it die off.
I have never wished ill will to Mr. Frons and I am sorry he lost his job. But as Charles Dickens wrote in the beloved Christmas Carol….”Old Scratch got his.”
