On the heels of announcing plans for a new soap, CBS confirmed ‘The Talk’ will wrap up its chat by year’s end.
When CBS’s daytime talk show, The Talk, begins its 15th season this September, they’ll go in knowing it’ll be a very short season. The network confirmed late last week that the show would go off the air some time in December.
The announcement provided one of the last missing details about the network’s plans for its morning lineup. Earlier this year, CBS announced it was planning a new soap opera.
The new show, The Gates, and will focus on a Black family that lives in a posh, gated community. What makes the show unique is that it will be the first soap to focus on Black families since NBC’s Generations premiered back in 1989.
A ‘dying’ genre?
Then there’s the notion of a new soap opera at all. The last new soap to premiere was NBC’s Passions. That was back in 1999. When The Gates debuts in January, it will be the first new soap in more than a quarter-century. I’d hate to go back and count up how many have signed off since then. The most notable, of course, would be Guiding Light. That show started in radio in 1937. It premiered on CBS back in 1952. When it signed off in 2009, it had amassed a run of 72 years in broadcasting. That made it the longest-running story in broadcasting; I think it’s safe to wager that’s a record no program will beat.
Since the 1950s, there were dozens of soap operas over the decades. In fact, looking back at soap ratings, the 1969-1970 TV season listed a whopping 19 soaps that season. Titles included As the World Turns, Search for Tomorrow, The Doctors, One Life to Live, Love of Life, The Edge of Night and Dark Shadows.
The current broadcast TV season only has three soaps left: CBS’s The Young and the Restless and The Bold and the Beautiful and ABC’s General Hospital. NBC’s Days of Our Lives, which now is available only on the streaming service Peacock, is still going, but is off the broadcast TV lineup.
CBS is partnering with the NAACP and Proctor & Gamble, which produced soap powerhouses for decades.
We don’t know how well the show will be received. But if it does perform well, it could at least temporarily quiet the long-running speculation that soap operas as a genre are finished.
No dates for ‘The Talk’s end or ‘The Gates’ beginning
CBS hasn’t given a firm end date for The Talk. We only know, so far, that it will go off the air in December. It likewise hasn’t given a firm start date for The Gates. The network has said, however, that The Gates will premiere in January.
If we look at the calendar, we find that New Year’s Day hits on a Wednesday this year. That could mean that The Talk could air its final show on Tuesday, Dec. 31. CBS typically has some New Year’s Day programming, which means The Gates could premiere that Thursday or Friday.
If The Talk ends before New Year’s Eve, we’d have to wonder what CBS would put in temporarily to fill time until the premiere of the new show.
On Monday’s show, the first since CBS announced the cancellation, co-host Natalie Morales told the audience that CBS had announced the show would return for its 15th and final season in September. With the crowd’s cheering, it was easy to miss the “final” part. She also said, over more loud cheering, that they looked forward to celebrating the rest of 2024.
Thank goodness for closed captioning!
The one cast member I’ll miss on that show is comedienne Sheryl Underwood (pictured above). I had the chance to meet her when she was on a promotion tour for a comedy show. She’s funny in person and walks in without a huge entourage. In fact, she struck me as being so real and genuine that she put everyone around her at ease. She’s the kind of person you feel like you could go have a drink with.
That’s always a nice thing to see with celebrities when they can pull off that level of authenticity.
I hope the network finds another vehicle for her.
As for The Gates, it’ll be interesting to see whether it finds an audience.
