• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, May 17, 2013

There’s something interesting to be learned—maybe—from the revelation that fans of the new online versions of “One Life to Live” and “All My Children” can’t deal with the four-day-a-week schedule, and producers will, henceforth  just present two episodes of each soap opera per week.

Apparently it’s not that fans aren’t interested. But according to Rich Frank  and Jeff Kwatinetz, the two principals behind Prospect Park that produces the shows, online viewers just aren’t used to watching that much online TV on a day in and day out basis, or realizing that to keep up, they will have to power binge regularly.  

So now, both shows will only show two episodes a week, “AMC” on Mondays and Wednesdays and “OLTL” on Tuesdays and Thursdays . (I’d like to say, why, at that pace it will take forever for a story line to develop! But these are soap operas. That’s the whole point.)

Here’s part of a letter Frank and Kwatinetz wrote to explain the move (The Hollywood Reporter ran it in full.):

“In the past these shows had their vast majority of views within the first 24 hours. Instead, our shows are primarily consumed on different days then when they originally air. Primarily, fans have been binge viewing or watching on demand, and as a result, we feel we have been expecting our audience to dedicate what has turned out to be an excessive amount of time to viewing these shows. (As an example, for the substantial audience only watching on the weekends, we are currently asking them to watch five hours of programming to keep pace with our release schedule).

“On ABC the shows shared a large percentage of their viewers with each other. Yet, the majority of our viewers are watching one show or the other, not both, and they aren’t viewing the shows when they did before. Part of the reason for choosing between the shows may be that the largest viewing takes place either between 12PM and 1PM (when people generally can only fit one episode during lunch time) or between 5PM and 7PM (when the vast majority of competing shows are a half hour long). We are finding that asking most people to regularly watch more than a half hour per day online seems to be too much.

 “During their ABC runs, viewers watched only 2-3 episodes on average a week and picked up with whichever day’s episode it was. Our viewers seem to primarily start with the first episode and then continue forward episode by episode. Like with primetime serialized dramas as opposed to the traditional slower pacing of daytime, people feel lost if they miss an episode. People are starting from the beginning; the shows are designed for complete viewing from episode one. Yet starting from the beginning with the amount of episodes we are releasing is asking too much for viewers who need to catch up.”

This decision constitutes something like The Other Side of Bingeing. If Netflix revels in the fact that millions of fans marathon-watched “House of Cards” (apparently, anyway. I don’t think any stats are out), this decision suggests a logical limit to that idea. Reducing the weekly diet of these soap operas gives a viewer a chance to binge a little more delicately.

Though I’m not trying to make an apples-to-apples comparison, this might also be a little indicator of what will happen when many more episodic online videos (but longer than typical videos) begin popping up online, especially ones with a continuing story line. It might be that less is quite enough, at least at this stage.

It will be interesting to watch, since Prospect Park makes clear, it’s trying to make sure these soaps don’t die again, as they did on ABC in 2011. Which reminds me of the very first line of the resurrected “All My Children” when it debuted April 29. The scene opens with ANC Brooke English (Julia Barr, back again) napping on a couch, a scrapbook titled “All My Children” on her chest. She awakes startled, as if from a bad dream, and says, “Is it ever going to go away?”

We’ll see.

pj@mediapost.com