This Thursday, the ABC TV daytime serial drama All My Children will introduce a character who was born male and is being "transformed into a woman" through hormone treatments, surgery, and psychological retraining.
This is believed to be the first time an American television show has had such a "transgendering" character. Some programs in the past have had fully "transgendered" characters in the past, but you probably wouldn’t remember them given that nobody watched. The L Word, on the Showtime cable network, has a character who is going the other way, from a woman to a "man."
According to the Associated Press,
"All My Children" was looking for something new, and knows its audience is always interested in anything to do with sexuality, said Julie Hanan Carruthers, the show’s executive producer.
Like most daytime dramas, the program’s ratings have been dropping, falling by almost 2/3 since the early 1990s.
Pardon me for thinking that this isn’t going to improve the show’s performance.
Great point, Joe. The proportion of women employed in the paid workforce increased from 48 percent in 1980 to 57 percent in 2001–but most of the increase came during the 1980s, not the ’90s–the number was over 54 percent in 1990. Hence, employment was probably not a factor in the big decrease of soap opera audiences in the past decade. I think that an increase in alternative programming has contributed to the decline, but mostly it is indeed probably attributable to the increasing sexualization, vulgarity, and outlandishness of the soaps themselves. Soap operas have always been a bit goofy, but they have gone way beyond that, it appears, and sloughed off much of their audience.
My Polish immigrant mother used to watch All My Children from when it was first broadcast. I remember as a kid writing plot summaries to tell her when she came home from work. She hasn’t watched the show for a number of years now since it became a little too sexual for its own good. This will certainly not lead her back to watching it. Maybe that’s why “soap operas” have been losing their audience the past few years, the championing of new sexual attitudes, while the traditional value of marriage is treated like so much used underwear (although another reason can be that more women work outside the home these days).