Sheila ducksworth biography children

As a student at Yale, Sheila Ducksworth often rushed home to indulge in two favorite guilty pleasures. She had grown up watching her stories. She saw herself in the characters, and she yearned for the minute show, ultimately short-lived , to be stretched into a daily hour like most other soaps. Ducksworth started a career in television production with the idea of one day producing a soap opera even as they began to disappear from the airwaves.

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In , with her treasured daytime serials still front of mind, she agreed to lead a new partnership between CBS and the N. That doggedness will result in something that has not occurred this century: a daytime soap debuting on a major television network. They lured, clutched and dangled the collective attentions of housewives, nighttime shift workers, children home sick from school and workers playing hooky.

And the Black audience has been very loyal to daytime drama for decades and decades and decades. The Black dollars are very strong and waiting to be spent. I think that this show is being provided for that constituency. Historically, soap operas did not just baptize lifetime viewers. Devotion was familial, passed down like genetic material, one generation to the next.

Allegiances were pledged and honored, similar to fandom for a preferred sports team. Did Erica Kane really just do that? Over time and with improved technology and new formats, viewership habits shifted and fractured. So-called reality trumped fantasy. Soap operas had presented what people always wanted to say but never could.