All My Children Comes To An End, After 41 Years

Soap was first to tackle gay marriage, abortion . All My Children ," which spent four decades introducing controversial issues like abortion, date rape, teenage alcoholism and gay marriage into daytime drama, wraps up its 41-year ABC run on Friday afternoon. AMC," which produced one of the all-time great soap villains in Susan Lucci 's Erica Kane and helped launch the careers of actors like Kim Delaney , Sarah Michelle Gellar , Kelly Ripa , Michael B. Jordan , Michelle Trachtenberg , Christian Slater and Jesse McCartney , joins the slow march of traditional soap operas to television's graveyard. It's possible the show itself will live in some other form. ABC sold the rights to the production company Prospect Park , which is trying to keep it alive on the Internet and also trying to sell it to a cable network. How much of the current cast would be involved is not clear. Cameron Mathison and Lindsay Hartley say they have signed up. Lucci said last week she is undecided. But as fewer TV viewers stay home during the daytime and the number of choices has exploded for those who do, broadcast networks are clearly shedding their soaps, which once anchored daytime programming with a dozen popular shows. In addition to "AMC," ABC is dumping "One Life To Life" as of January. CBS recently axed "The Guiding Light " and " As the World Turns . So daytime is now down to four major soaps: "General Hospital" on ABC, " Days of Our Lives " on NBC and "The Bold and the Beautiful" and "The Young and the Restless" on CBS. Ironically, soap-style and soap-influenced dramas are thriving on television these days. ABC's younger sister network, Family, has built its successful prime-time bloc almost exclusively on soap-style stories for teenagers, while networks like MTV and Disney also draw heavily on soaps for their teen dramas. Prime-time broadcast TAV doesn't have the sweeping soaps it had in the days of " Dallas " or " Knots Landing ," but it keeps getting new dramas like "Revenge," " The Playboy Club " and "Pan Am. All My Children" had much more traditional soap opera DNA, though it often dealt with subjects that had previously been shunned on soaps. AMC" actresses were arguing about the Vietnam war a year before Archie Bunker came to television, and Lucci's Kane was the first TV actress to have an abortion - shortly after the Supreme Court declared the procedure legal in 1973. Making it more controversial, she did it not for medical reasons, but because pregnancy could have hurt her modeling career. The core soap lineage of "All My Children," though, was firmly rooted in the radio dramas of the 1930s, which spawned the tongue-in-cheek phrase "soap opera" because the shows were sponsored by household product manufacturers like Procter & Gamble that wanted to reach stay-at-home women. All My Children" was conceived in the 1960s by Agnes Nixon , who was then writing "The Guiding Light. She moved on to "Another World," where she created a prototype for the Erica Kane character, and after she then created " One Life to Live ," ABC asked if she had anything else. That was "All My Children," which debuted Jan. 5, 1970, as a half-hour drama set in fictional Pine Valley, Pa. Nixon wrote the show's mission statement in the form of a poem, which read like something borrowed from the Bible: The Great and the Least, The Rich and the Poor, The Weak and the Strong, In Sickness and in Health, In Joy and Sorrow, In Tragedy and Triumph, You are ALL MY CHILDREN At first it foundered near the bottom of the daytime ratings, but by the late 1970s its edgier content had caught on. It expanded to an hour in April 1977 and was the No. 1 show in daytime for the 1977-78 season. While it spent most the 1980s in second place to "General Hospital," those are widely considered the show's golden years both for popularity and artistic creativity. Those are also the years when it started to become a running gag that Lucci would be nominated as best actress in a daytime drama and not win. Like many soap operas, "All My Children" had a number of celebrity fans who made guest appearances over the years. These included Rihanna , Oprah Winfrey , Ne-Yo , Carol Burnett , Celine Dion , Warren Buffett , Kathy Bates , Donald Trump , Montel Williams , Tom Wopat , Donna Hanover , Regis Philbin , Kathy Lee Gifford, Dick Cavett , Melba Moore , Ed Koch , Jimmy Buffett , Stevie Wonder , Aaron Neville , Gwen Verdon , Robert Morse , Cheryl Tiegs , Rosie O'Donnell and Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen . Like most long-running soaps, "AMC" had considerable cast turnover, but long-time fans were particularly saddened in recent years by the departures of veterans like Ray MacDonnell , David Canary and Julia Barr . The show also lasted long enough for several cast members to pass away, including Ruth Warrick , Eileen Herlie and James Mitchell . All My Children" was shot in New York for its first 39 years, moving to Los Angeles for the last two. Fan groups have been protesting ABC's cancellation decision since it was announced this spring, but the network has replied that a profitable audience just isn't there any more. The show has lately averaged around two million viewers a day, down 75% from its peak. ABC is replacing "All My Children" with "The Chew," a lifestyle talk show built around food. The network says it hopes "AMC" fans will find many of the same dramatic elements and friendly characters they have found on the soap. In recent months the show has brought back a number of alumni and alumnae for farewell appearances. But as of 2 p.m. Friday, ABC closes its "All My Children" photo album for the last time.