Online Exclusive: Anne Sweeney Talks About the Future of Daytime TV

September 26, 2011 World Screen
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PREMIUM: The soap opera All My Children ended its run last Friday and Anne Sweeney, the co-chairman of Disney Media Networks and president of the Disney/ABC Television Group, talks to World Screen Newsflash about the changing economics of daytime television.

WS: The economics of daytime network television have changed to the point where now you are replacing some beloved soap operas with other kinds of shows. How has that landscape changed?

SWEENEY: Yes, it has changed really dramatically. We’ve been watching the ongoing evolution of viewers’ appetite and quite frankly this evolution brought a lot of challenges to our established schedule. We made many attempts to adapt to the challenges. We moved All My Children to Los Angeles. We cut budgets back. We did everything to try and preserve these great stories, but in the end, the audience for daytime dramas had diminished dramatically and they just weren’t at a level where we could sustain that kind of programming. We looked at the success of The View and we did a lot of research about what viewers of daytime television really want. In an independent study that was done in 2010, three topics were identified that people are most interested in seeing on daytime TV: current events, a combination of food and cooking and another combination of medical and health. So we shifted our daytime business accordingly and have developed programming that we believe will help viewers have a path to a better life. Some new shows like The Chew and The Revolution focus on food and lifestyle, taking control of our health, taking control of our eating and really becoming our best self.