1937-2009: Saying Goodbye to Guiding Light

This story was originally published on Sept. 13, 2009. It was updated on July 18, 2010.

Sadly for some, one more bit of Americana has joined the endangered species list: the soap opera. Last year, CBS canceled "Guiding Light," the longest running soap in broadcast history. This September, "As The World Turns" will spin no more.

For over half a century, the shows served up an endless menu of torrid love affairs, heartbreak, infidelities by the score, double crosses, kidnaps, suicides, sin, sex and salvation.

As we reported in September, Guiding Light - the oldest of the two - was done in by that all too familiar villain: low ratings.

It's a bittersweet time, these last days, as hardcore fans and the show's entire staff turned up for the taping of the final scenes.

Guiding Light has always been a loving reflection of America's morals, manners and marital mayhem, where actress Tina Sloan and many others have worked together for over a quarter century.

Asked if they were surprised when the show was canceled, Sloan told correspondent Morley Safer, "The pink slips stunned us, all of us. Even though we were on life support and we knew we were on life support we just couldn't imagine anyone would pull the plug on their watch on a show that's been so historic."

More about Guiding Light:
Photo Gallery: Guiding Light Signs Off
Meet Irna Phillips, the Mother of Daytime Drama

It started on radio in 1937, and made the transition to television in 1952. And through the years and into a new century, Guiding Light chronicled family life in the mythical town of Springfield. Everybody, it seemed, had a dark secret.

It was a place where even the good guys often had a lurid past. Take the character of Josh Lewis, played by actor Robert Newman.

There was planting evidence, bribery and blackmail.

"And all this done by a former preacher?" Safer asked.

"Yes," Newman said. "And your point would be?"

For the better part of a quarter century, Newman and Kim Zimmer have played Springfield's star-crossed lovers Josh and Reva, marrying and divorcing each other three times. And that's just for starters.

"He married my sister, when I was dying of cancer," Zimmer explained.

"And she married my father and my brother. Are we really going to have this conversation now?" Newman joked.

Asked how many marriages she's had, Zimmer told Safer, "I believe I just had my ninth."

She once survived driving off a bridge in a fit of post-partum depression; he once had her cloned. On the soaps, the weird and the wonderful are routine and everyone has his or her very own miracle.

"I did a menopause story. And then four years later I was pregnant on the show," Zimmer recalled.

Also, her character was presumed dead three times, and even died once. "I flat-lined on a Friday. Woke up on a Monday. And walked out of the hospital on a Tuesday, yes," Zimmer explained.

In the surreal world of the soaps, missing characters presumed dead routinely turn up again.

And the medical help is somewhat dicey. Peter Simon and Michael O'Leary play the Bauers, father and son doctors.

"I started May first of 1983. Started the show on a Friday, I was an orderly, changing bedpans. Monday I was doing brain surgery with my father," O'Leary said.

"Was it successful?" Simon asked.

"No. The first of 38 deaths," O'Leary joked.

"You are renowned as a doctor who keeps losing these patients, yes?" Safer asked.

"Regardless of whether it was a strep throat or whatever it is. It doesn't matter, if they die, they die fast," O'Leary explained.

The very longevity of the show blurs the line between fiction and reality. To many fans, some of the crises may hit very close to home.

"What makes you people so real to so many people?" Safer asked.

"Because they've watched, oftentimes, our birth, our marriage…and then our deaths," actress Beth Chamberlin said.

"And rebirths," Tina Sloan added.

We got a crash course on the Byzantine history of Guiding Light from veteran actors Ron Raines, 15 years on the show; Beth Chamberlin, 20 years; Tina Sloan, 26 years; and Grant Aleksander, a 27-year soap veteran.

"There are these great stretches that the audience will grant you. You're allowed to send a child off at the age of 12 and bring them six months later fully grown…," Aleksander said.

"Or even the next day, possibly," Chamberlin joked.

"They will accept those things. They won't accept if you take a character and write it in a way that is completely inconsistent with what they have come to accept," Aleksander explained.

Tina Sloan's character, for instance, is the saint of Springfield who has survived breast cancer and countless other crises. And she slipped up just once.

"One time, in the entire history of my 26 years here, I slept with someone who was married to my best friend. And she died as a result of this because she was so upset she drove off a snowy cliff. And people have still not forgiven me. And this was 20 years ago," Sloan explained.

There are no minor crises in these families. "Something dramatic always happens at a big dinner," Raines explained. "Family sitting down. At a wedding. At a funeral."

Indeed, funeral scenes are commonplace on Guiding Light, with all the characters who've met mysterious deaths or been written out of the plot or simply succumbed to Dr. Bauer's ministrations.

For the actors, though, taping one memorial hit home: a requiem, in a way, for the program itself.

"I'm 54 years old. I will never have a job like this again, ever in my life. Nothing this steady and this stable and this wonderful," Zimmer said.

The backstage story of Guiding Light is a rich one. On the show's 70th anniversary, the actors recreated the radio version from the 1930s.

The original focus was inspirational, featuring a minister whose Guiding Light attracted the down and out, the lonely and the troubled.

In their heyday on radio, producing soaps was like printing money.

They got their name - "soaps" or "washboard weepers" - by delivering the soapmaker's dream, a captive audience: women across America, stuck at home with the laundry and the kids.

But times have been changing. "They've been going one by one. I worked on a show called 'The Doctors' once. Does anybody remember that?" says former network executive and television historian Tim Brooks.

Brooks says the soaps hit their peak in the 1970s, when the networks were running 16 of them; the passing of Guiding Light and As The World Turns will leave just six.

How come?

"It's that the world has changed," Brooks said. "The world has turned, so to speak."

Aside from women leaving home for the workplace, soaps are facing more competition from talk shows and reality TV. Also, despite the casting of many younger actors, the number of younger viewers willing to sit for an hour a day is dwindling.

"The audience has gotten older," Brooks explained. "And as the soap operas have attracted more and more 50-plus, 60-plus audience, they've become less attractive to the soap manufacturers."

Seeing the handwriting on the wall, Guiding Light's executive producer Ellen Wheeler did everything she could to postpone the inevitable.

She's a whirlwind on the set, where time is money, hustling cast and crew from scene to scene.

"It's great to work at that speed," Wheeler told Safer. "If it was really good, we don't have time to pat ourselves on the back. But if it was really bad, we don't have to think about it either, because we gotta move on to the next one."

She cut costs by using smaller crews and smaller sets. For instance, she turned a basement storage room at CBS into Springfield's mini-mart.

Though writer Jill Lorie Hurst and producer Wheeler knew the end was coming, accepting it was another matter.

"We still have so many stories we would love to tell," Lorie Hurst said.

"We have to say goodbye to the characters. And we have to say goodbye to the town, the whole town. We have to say goodbye to each other. Our working relationships are over," Wheeler added.

That means not just the actors, but the production staff responsible for sorting out the thousands of details involved in doing an hour show Monday through Friday, soldiering on through the last few episodes.

"It's sad. It is sad," said actor Frank Dicopoulos. "The thing I'm gonna miss the most are the people. This is a family. This is my family away from my family."

As Dicopoulos notes, it's a tight-knit group, on-screen and off. He has played the same character - a Springfield cop - for 22 years.

The thousands of actors who have passed through Springfield over the years include Calista Flockhart, Angela Bassett, Hayden Panettiere, Jimmy Smits,Taye Diggs, Allison Janney, and Kevin Bacon, a teen with a drinking problem.

"Some amazing people have worked at Guiding Light," Jill Lorie Hurst noted.

"Amazing. To be at the end of that amazing group of people is quite an honor," Ellen Wheeler said. "It puts a lot of fear in your heart. You want to be true to all the things they created. And all the love and hope that they gave to generations of people."

Asked what last show is going to be like for the cast and crew, Beth Chamberlin told Safer, "I think it won't sink in for maybe a month later that we're actually not going back. We're not just light on story right now, there is no story to be told."

"We're just all so lucky to have each other, all of us…," Sloan added.

And so they taped the final TV episode, number 15,762. Add to that roughly 4,000 radio shows, and you get, over the course of the program's life and death - 20,000 snapshots of Springfield.

And now, time to look for work.

"You go out there and do what actors do," Dicopoulos said. "They audition, a role has come up. And, you know, that's the nature of the beast."

Produced by David Browning