Guiding Light - Broadcast History

Broadcast History

Unlike most attempts made by popular radio serials to convert to a television version, Guiding Light did not have any difficulty holding onto its old listening audience and making new viewers simultaneously. This was made easy by the fact that neither ABC nor NBC broadcast programs on their respective networks at 2:30 p.m. Eastern/1:30 Central, where CBS first placed Guiding Light. Six months into the run, however, the network moved the serial to a timeslot that gave it great popularity with its housewife audience, 12:45 p.m./11:45 a.m., where it ran for the next 15 years and eight months, sharing the half hour with its sister Procter & Gamble-packaged soap, Search for Tomorrow. Guiding Light handled the competition breezily, even legendary shows such as Queen for a Day on ABC (briefly in 1960) and NBC's Truth or Consequences. Usually, Guiding Light ranked second in the Nielsen ratings behind another P&G serial, As the World Turns.

By 1968, however, changing viewership trends prompted CBS to expand its last two 15-minute daytime dramas, disrupting long-standing viewing habits. Search For Tomorrow took over the entire 12:30–1/11:30–Noon period, with Guiding Light returning to its first timeslot, 2:30/1:30, albeit in the now-standard half-hour format, on September 9. This also caused the dislocation of The Secret Storm and the beloved Art Linkletter's House Party, as well as the cancellation of the daytime To Tell the Truth. It would not be the last time, though, as the next 12 years would bring several shifts around CBS' lineup.

The 1970s saw Guiding Light's popularity dip somewhat, largely from the competition posed by younger-leaning serials such as The Doctors on NBC, but it still garnered decent ratings. After four years, CBS bumped its timeslot up by a half-hour to accommodate P&G's demand that Edge of Night move to 2:30/1:30, a move that led to the end of that show on CBS three years later. In the meantime, Guiding Light stayed steadily on course against NBC's Days of our Lives, another soap favored by younger women, and ABC's The Newlywed Game. In late 1974, ABC replaced Newlywed with The $10,000 Pyramid, which went on to garner strong ratings, but not greatly at GL's expense. Meanwhile, by fall 1975 (at this point, the show had officially dropped the word "The" from its title. although it was still referred to as The Guiding Light on air for several years after), the impending departure of Edge and CBS' planned expansion of As the World Turns affected Guiding Light by pushing it back to 2:30/1:30 in December, where NBC still ran The Doctors and ABC had a short-lived hit the next year with an updated Break the Bank. To complicate the picture further, ABC opted to make its first show expansions, that of One Life to Live and General Hospital, in July 1976, each occupying one-half of a 90-minute block until November 4, 1977.

With this in mind, ABC and CBS acted to give a contending chance to both General Hospital and Guiding Light by expanding them to an hour in length on November 7, 1977, strategically keeping their start times different in order to dissuade viewers from turning to the other networks. This gained particular importance when ABC finally added 15 minutes to One Life to Live on January 16, 1978, so that Guiding Light straddled those two programs, as well as the first half of sister P&G show Another World on NBC. Despite General Hospital surprising all observers by skyrocketing from near-cancellation to the top place in the ratings with the Luke and Laura storyline, Guiding Light, holding its own while in direct competition with General Hospital, still hit an upswing as the decade ended.

On February 4, 1980, CBS bumped Guiding Light down again, to 3pm/2c, in the midst of a major scheduling shuffle intended to give The Young and the Restless (itself now expanding to an hour length) a shot at beating ABC's All My Children. It remained in this timeslot for the rest of its run, facing General Hospital and NBC entries such as Texas, The Match Game-Hollywood Squares Hour and Santa Barbara. none of which made significant impacts upon Guiding Light. Furthermore, General Hospital eventually petered out by the mid-1980s as well.

Overall, the first half of the 1980s saw a revival in Guiding Light’s popularity, with a top-five placing achieved in most years, and, for a brief period, it even managed to dethrone then-powerhouse General Hospital from the #1 ratings spot for three consecutive weeks. As the decade progressed, however, the ratings slipped a bit, although it was still performing solidly. In 1995, beginning with CBS flagship station WCBS-TV in New York, Guiding Light began airing at 10 a.m. Eastern time in several markets. The show's solid performance began to crumble by the mid-1990s, when the show's ratings sunk as low as eighth place out of eleven. However, during the controversial clone storyline in 1998, the ratings experienced a brief resurgence. Nielsen reported Guiding Light had 5 million viewers in 1999.

Up until its finale in 2009, stations in a number of markets aired Guiding Light in the morning either at 9 or 10 a.m. local time: Miami, Chicago, Baltimore, Boston, Detroit, New York City, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Orlando, Fort Wayne, Ind., South Bend, Ind., Portland, Me., Albany, N.Y., and Scranton-Wilkes Barre, Pa.. Guiding Light aired at 12 noon local time in Honolulu, Hawaii. In Savannah, GA, it aired at 4:00pm local time.

Before 2004, stations that aired Guiding Light in the morning were always one episode behind those that aired the program at its official timeslot of 3:00pm (ET). This changed in March 2004, during the first day of the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament, in which stations that aired Guidng Light at 10:00am were able catch up with stations that aired Guiding Light at 3:00pm. Starting in 2006, stations that aired Guding Light at 9:00am were also offered a same-day feed to catch up with the rest of the network. As a result of this, daily episodes for the remaining years of GL were the same on all stations regardless of timeslot.

Guiding Light maintained strong ratings in Pittsburgh, despite being moved to 10:00 AM in 2006. According to a 2006 article in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, Dr. Phil hadn't been able to pull in the same numbers that Guuding Light did in that time slot a year prior, while Guiding Light was maintaining its audience share.

Two CBS affiliates did not air GL. One was KOVR-TV in Sacramento, California. KOVR had become a CBS affiliate in 1995. Despite its affiliate status, KOVR did not air Guiding Light. Before CBS affiliated with KOVR, it had been affiliated in Sacramento with KXTV. KXTV had dropped Guiding Light from its schedule in 1992 and never aired it again. As such, Guiding Light has been preempted on the Sacramento area since 1992. WNEM-TV in Flint/Saginaw/Bay City, Michigan also did not air Guiding Light. They initially ran the soap before they dropped it in 1996 because of disappointing ratings. In the fall of 2006, WNEM began running Guiding Light on its digital channel My 5 at 10am, airing there for the remainder of it's run.

In Canada, Guiding Light was available directly through CBS from the 1960s until the show's ending in 2009. However, Guiding Light also made it on several Canadian television stations over the time. The first Canadian station to broadcast GL was Atlantic Satellite Network (ASN), as a supplementary service to its ATV system of CTV affiliates exclusively for Atlantic Canada, which aired the program simultaneously with the CBS feed from 1983 to 1984, then the broadcast was moved at 12 noon until 1985. Also in 1984, TVA, a Quebec privately owned French-language television network, rebroadcast in translation episodes 12 months behind for a short period. In the early 1990s, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) briefly aired the P&G serial nationally at 3:00 p.m. in each specific local time zone, but dropped it in 1991. After an hiatus on Canadian stations for many years, the series came back on CHCH-TV, exclusively for the province of Ontario market. In September 2007, Global picked up the show nationwide after CHCH-TV dropped it, claiming Passions’ former time slot. Guiding Light returned to CHCH for the rest of its run when Global decided to air The Doctors.

Internationally, Guiding Light currently airs in Iceland, Italy, Hungary and Serbia. It also aired September 3, 2007 to August 26th 2011 in the UK on Zone Romantica /CBS Drama, series was pulled at the point where the outside location filming was due to begin. Last screened scene in the UK was Cassie hiding out with troubled son Will – just as the rest of the family were discovering that he had actually killed his father Alonzo.

60 Minutes featured a segment on the cast and crew of Guiding Light discussing the show and its eventual cancellation. The segment was re-broadcast on July 18, 2010.