For numerous cleaning soap opera followers, the daybreak of the brand new millennium 25 years in the past introduced a brand new strategy to watch their favourite reveals. On January 20, 2000, Disney launched SOAPnet, a fundamental cable channel dedicated to daytime dramas.
Whereas the decline of cleaning soap operas had already begun — the variety of daytime dramas on American broadcast TV was right down to 9 in 2000, half as many as had been on in 1970, per Advert Age — SOAPnet nonetheless served a helpful position for followers. The concept was that those that labored throughout the day might watch cleaning soap repeats throughout primetime and over the weekend.
“When SOAPnet launched, it was again within the videocassette-recorder days and you actually might solely document one episode at a time and also you needed to cope with all these cassette tapes,” cleaning soap opera professional Ed Martin defined to the Los Angeles Instances in 2013. “SOAPnet made it simple to observe a number of cleaning soap operas on the identical time.”
Initially, SOAPnet caught to soaps from company sibling ABC, together with All My Kids and One Life to Reside, however in time, it added sudsy programming from different networks, together with NBC’s Days of Our Lives and CBS’ The Younger and the Stressed. Then it added primetime soaps, too, together with hits from the Nineteen Eighties (Dynasty, Dallas), Nineties (Melrose Place, Beverly Hills, 90210), and 2000s (The O.C., One Tree Hill).
And SOAPnet even supplied unique programming, together with the discuss reveals Cleaning soap Middle and SoapTalk and the fact competitors I Wanna Be a Cleaning soap Star. One of the high-profile originals got here in 2007 with the premiere of the short-lived spinoff Normal Hospital: Night time Shift.
SOAPnet grew to become a “large moneymaker” for Disney, based on the Los Angeles Instances, because it attracted new followers, introduced in additional promoting income, and reaped programming charges from cable and satellite tv for pc TV operators. The channel ultimately reached 75 million houses and peaked in rankings within the 2008–2009 season with a primetime common of 353,000 viewers, based on Advert Age.
After almost half of U.S. households with pay tv began utilizing digital video recorders, nonetheless, SOAPnet fell out of favor with its company mother or father. In 2010, Disney introduced plans to interchange SOAPnet with Disney Junior.
“The launch of Disney Junior within the U.S. is the following step in our world preschool technique, which started 10 years in the past with the premiere of our first devoted preschool channel within the UK. The choice to in the end transition SOAPnet to perform this was not arrived at evenly,” Anne Sweeney, then the co-chair of Disney Media Networks and president of Disney–ABC Tv Group, mentioned in an announcement on the time, per Cleaning soap Opera Community. “SOAPnet was created in 2000 to provide daytime viewers the power to look at time-shifted soaps, earlier than multiplatform viewing and DVRs had been a part of our vocabulary. However immediately, as expertise and our companies evolve, it makes extra sense to align this distribution with a preschool channel that builds on the core strengths of our firm.”
Because it turned out, the transition from SOAPnet to Disney Junior took years, as cable and satellite tv for pc TV operators had been “loath to drop SOAPnet, realizing that it was a favourite among the many most devoted followers,” the Los Angeles Instances reported.
“SOAPnet had an important run,” Ben Pyne, then president of worldwide distribution for Disney Media Networks, advised the newspaper in 2013. “It served an viewers of super-soap followers. And when given the chance, all of our associates stored the channel up and working.”
However SOAPnet lastly went darkish at midnight on January 1, 2014, after one final rerun of Normal Hospital, per Cleaning soap Opera Community. A message on SOAPnet’s Fb web page — which stays on-line, greater than a decade later — thanks followers “for over 13 years of soapy drama.”
In a 2024 Reddit thread about SOAPnet’s demise, one viewer noticed that the channel was only a sufferer of fixing occasions, coinciding with the decline of soaps, the uptake of multiplatform viewing, and the appearance of on-demand streaming. “I preferred SOAPnet, too, however I additionally loved renting motion pictures from a [brick-and-mortar Blockbuster] retailer,” that viewer wrote. “Not all enterprise ideas are made to final without end.”