Remember, Oprah Winfrey said she didn’t want the ABC soaps. She sent out a YouTube video last year telling her fans why soaps were dead and she wasn’t interested in buying “One Life to Live” and “All My Children.” But then a funny thing happened. Oprah, looking for ratings, bought Tyler Perry’s “The Haves and Have Nots.” Perry’s prime time soap pulled bigger ratings than anything ever on OWN.
Last week “The Have Nots” pulled 1.77 million total viewers– a million more than Oprah’s own show on the network. And the network doubled its order for episodes. Suddenly Oprah needs more soaps. Soaps work. What a surprise. So now, for relatively nothing, she’s bringing “AMC”and “OLTL” to OWN on July 15th. If they work, and I think they will, the shows will stay on OWN– and Oprah will look for more soaps they can add to their line up. Maybe she can convince Procter & Gamble to revive the shows they carelessly killed off.
