One Life to Live rises above 3 million for final week

ABC soap One Life to Live rose above the 3 million mark during its final week on-air.

The ABC soap bowed out on Friday 13th January despite being the network’s top-rated soap consistently beating General Hospital. In fact OLTL was the third most watched soap in America but its strong performance was enough to save it as ABC were determined to keep it cancelled in favour of cheaper life-style programming. Ratings from the final week that OLTL was on-air reveal it saw a surge of viewers with an average of 3.12 million viewers. How does that compare with the All My Children finale in September? Well in terms of ratings OLTL rated slightly higher in its final week on air but it didn’t manage to push The Bold and the Beautiful into second place which AMC did.

As for the other soaps The Young and the Restless averaged 4.7 million viewers while fellow CBS saga The Bold and the Beautiful had 3.3 million viewers. As stated above OLTL had 3.1 million viewers while General Hospital lagged behind with 2.5 million viewers. Not far behind but at the bottom of the charts never-the-less was Days of our Lives with 2.4 million viewers.

With the finale of OLTL there are just four daytime soaps left on-air in America and the futures of Days of our Lives and General Hospital certainly aren’t bright; the big fear amongst fans now is that NBC and ABC will both abandon the soap genre all together.