At some point this week, the final scenes of As The World Turns will be filmed. The studio will close, and that final episode will play out on our screens in just three months.
It is the most clichéd cliché in all of clichédom, but it’s impossible to take that information in without realizing that it is truly the end of an era.
The end of over a half century of this show.
The end of P&G’s lengthy run as creator (and sponsor) of daytime programs.
The end to Irna Phillips’ legacy – an impressive legacy indeed, as it’s lasted for nearly 40 years after her death.
I haven’t written much about the current events on the show lately. Some I like, some I don’t, but it all seems so much beside the point.
This is very different than last year, of course, when nearly every post I made was about the last hurrah – and last days – of Guiding Light.
I think that seemed so much more intense because it was (despite years of rumors of cancellation) a stunning blow – CBS indeed would actually cancel their long running soaps, after all.
And I think all of us understood then that ATWT‘s clock was set to 5 minutes to midnight as soon as the news about GL came down. The only real surprise about ATWT‘s cancellation was that it was announced so early before its end.
I hold out dim hope that ATWT will end as well as GL did. (Yes, GL‘s final episode may have been somewhat of a mess, but the last few weeks of GL went as well as I could have possibly expected.)
It’s hard to get excited about where ATWT is story-wise, but what I can get very enthusiastic about is remembering the cast, the writers and the stories we’ve all loved. That’s what you’ll be seeing over the next weeks and months here.
A | THOUSAND | OTHER | WORLDS 