The world of the soap operas never cease to amaze me. Passions was a slightly over the top soap, but had a pretty solid fan base. The first signs of trouble was when they announced that Passions was moving from NBC to a satellite only (Direct TV) feed.

Passions was intrinsically the quintessential ‘soap’, it had little of the script rooted in real life. This was Bewitched on steroids.

My wife was a big fan of this show, she knows more about the ‘soap world’ than should be legal! Maybe she needs a job? She was devastated when it moved from cable to satellite. I am sure she was not alone. There was a movement online to stop the change, but I guess NBC thought that selling Ginsu Knives, or extending the boring morning ‘Today Show’ to 23.5 hours a day was a good thing. The official reason for dumping Passions was that the Today Show was going to have another hour of air time (probably to sell more Ginsu Knives).

So Passions had to find a new home, well lets face it, the air waves are cramped right now, the average cable subscriber is awash with channels! I subscribe to some package with my local cable company, and I have something like 100. I have not checked, but I will bet that there is a channel dedicated to NASCAR. My theory on this very, very boring deal (it is not a sport) is that every 10 laps they have to hang a u-turn and go the other way around the track!

Passions moved to satellite for all the wrong reasons, this was a plan destined to fail. And fail it has. I have nothing against Direct TV, but they were stupid to try and run with Passions, the watchers were mostly people that did not subscribe to satellite.

The upshot of this is,a fine and harmless show has been canceled. Oh, and they are selling off the props. Get your bids in early.

Of course there is a little fallout from all of this, many viewers moved to Direct TV to be able to watch the show. And they are less then happy. As Soapcentral points out:

    As the news of Passions rumored cancellation made their rounds on the Internet,some fans threatened legal action against DirecTV.

    “I think they knew that they were going to cancel Passions all along,” said one poster on soapcentral.com’s Passions forum. “They just wanted to increase their subscriber base.”

   However, a DirecTV spokesperson refutes that Passions future is so cut and dry. Passions is not going off the air, the spokesperson insists. Well, at least not right now.

    “Passions just received [an order for] an additional 52-episode pick up,” states Caley Cronin, the manager of public relations for DirecTV. “We’ll see what happens after that.”

    It appears unlikely that Passions will move to another network, but there is scant hope that the show could end up on a cable channel such as Oxygen or as an Internet-only soap.

Simon Barrett

http://zzsimonb.blogspot.com