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CBS Cancels ‘As the World Turns,’ Procter & Gamble’s Last Soap Opera

Procter & Gamble, the company that invented the soap opera and gave the genre its name, is no longer in the soap opera business.

CBS announced on Tuesday that it was canceling “As the World Turns,” the 54-year-old soap that is the last daytime serial owned by Procter & Gamble. The show chronicled generations of characters in fictional Oakdale, Ill., as they survived love and loss, but they couldn’t survive the harsh realities of modern television, where scripted dramas have become too expensive to justify dwindling ratings.

The demise of “ATWT,” as it is known to soap fans, means that the two most venerable examples of the genre have been given cancellation notices in the same year. “Guiding Light,” a CBS daytime staple, had been on the air through radio and television for 72 years. CBS informed Procter & Gamble of the cancellation “a couple of days ago,” according to Jeannie Tharrington, a spokeswoman for Procter & Gamble.

“It’s a part of our business that we will miss, and it’ll be hard for us to say goodbye to the show,” Ms. Tharrington said. Proctor & Gamble said it would try to find a new home for the series. Given the current economic climate, though, that is considered unlikely.

Soaps typically cost around $50 million a year to produce. CBS replaced “Guiding Light” this fall with “Let’s Make a Deal,” which costs about half that amount, and the network has seen increases in total audience and among the younger viewers that most advertisers seek.

“Is it the end of an era?” Leslie Moonves, the chairman of CBS, asked. “Sort of. Only the special soaps are going to survive. It’s certainly the end of the client-owned soap.” He added, “All good things come to an end, whether it’s after 72 years or 54 years or 10 years. It’s a different time and a different business.”

“As the World Turns” had the longest-running continuing character in television history — the family matriarch Nancy Hughes, played by Helen Wagner, now 91. Despite the conservative reputation of many Procter & Gamble soaps, the show featured a male couple, Noah and Luke, and the first gay kiss on daytime television.

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Don MacLaughlin and Helen Wagner in an episode from 1965.Credit...CBS

However, its audience, which exceeded six million viewers a week in the 1990s, has drawn less than 2.5 million so far this season, the Nielsen Company said. And the younger adult women viewers, which are favored by most advertisers, had shrunk even more.

The decline has been a continuing trend for the daytime genre. One CBS soap, “The Young and the Restless,” has posted slight gains of 3 percent total viewers and 6 percent among women 18 to 49. NBC’s last remaining soap, “Days of Our Lives,” has staged a small comeback this season. It is up 15 percent among total viewers and 10 percent among women 18 to 49.

But for the most part soaps these days are watched by older women. Every network soap now has a median viewer age over 50 and only “General Hospital” on ABC is under 53. “As the World Turns” has a median age of 57.8. That is older than most of the network averages in prime time, during which NBC’s programs have a median age of 48, ABC’s programs 51.4 and CBS’s programs 54.1.

The subtraction of the two shows means that network television, which once offered soap operas back to back throughout the daytime hours, will be down to only six serial dramas on three networks starting next fall.

For Procter & Gamble the loss is symbolic more than financial. The company, which has owned more than 20 soap operas in the past 80 years, now spends more than $7 billion in global advertising each year, making soap operas only a tiny portion of its business. Procter & Gamble said on Tuesday that it wanted to remain in the television production business and that its annual “People’s Choice Awards” will continue each year.

“The world has turned,” said Tim Brooks, a television historian and co-author of “The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows.” Ratings for soap operas have declined for decades because of “social changes,” he said.

“Women are working today,” he said, and fewer people are able to spend time every day watching soap operas.

The shows emerged on the radio in the 1930s during the Depression, he said, “and they seem to be ending in an era of economic downturn, too.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: CBS Cancels ‘As the World Turns,’ Procter & Gamble’s Last Soap Opera. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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