After 54 seasons, long-running CBS daytime drama wraps End of ‘World’

June 30, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

NEW YORK

You can view the clip on YouTube: Dr. Bob Hughes lunching with a fellow doctor in a scene aired live on “As the World Turns” the afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963.

“Shall we get a menu?” Hughes says to his dining companion. “Waiter! I’d like to order. I’m kind of hungry.”

That scene was the last the TV audience would see of “As the World Turns” that day as CBS News seized the schedule for continuous coverage of President John Kennedy’s assassination.

The young, dark-headed actor who played Dr. Bob, as well as the rest of the cast, completed the show shielded from both the fact of its pre-emption and the terrible reason why.

Only after the episode’s final fade-out did they learn of the tragedy, as the actor portraying Dr. Bob, Don Hastings, recalled one day last week.

Now 76 and handsomely silver-haired, Hastings was in his dressing room between scenes at the Brooklyn studio the series has called home the past decade. He was still playing Dr. Bob — lately the head of Oakdale Memorial Hospital and, as always, endowed with a perfect bedside manner — just a few months shy of 50 years after landing the part.

But Hastings won’t get to reach his half-century milestone in October. On Sept. 17, TV’s oldest daytime drama (airing weekdays at 2 p.m. until then) will fold.

Last week, “ATWT” wrapped production forever.

“It’s been a job and a home and friendships for 50 years,” said Hastings, an avuncular, era-spanning presence as he pondered the series’ end. “I don’t think it’s hit me yet.”

The summer after CBS’ “Guiding Light” was cut down after 72 years on radio and then television, the doomsday scenario that has plagued soaps for decades has now claimed “ATWT.”

ABC’s “General Hospital,” which premiered in April 1963, will now inherit the title as TV’s oldest soap. But who knows for how long?

Used to be, at any given time there were a dozen or more daytime dramas on the networks. Soon there will be just six, with only ABC’s “One Life to Live” still originating in New York. The ratings for all of them are a fraction of what they once were and continue in a downward spiral. “ATWT,” ranked last, this season is averaging 2.4 million viewers, whereas in the 1991-92 season, it drew 6.7 million viewers, according to the Nielsen Co.

“This show was created in the 1950s, and now there are different viewing patterns, different economic models, and we’re all fighting a tough fight to stay in the business,” said Chris Goutman, “ATWT” executive producer since 1999. “Daytime has been in trouble for a long time, and we’re part of that bigger picture.

“But when was the time that I thought we were fighting a losing battle? Never. I always think we’re going to win the battle. But this time we didn’t.”

Last December, CBS made it official, a death decree that, paired with the demise of “Guiding Light,” marks the exit of the production arm of Cincinnati-based Procter & Gamble Co. from the soap-opera business. This, of course, is a company for which the term “soap opera” was coined in the radio era when it began deploying such shows to advertise its detergent and soap products. (“ATWT” took over the studio space where yet another Procter & Gamble soap, “Another World,” was taped until NBC canceled it in 1999.)

Like many soaps, “ATWT” is set in a bucolic but scandal-beset Midwestern burg — in this case, Oakdale, Ill. Having always centered on two families — the Lowells and the Hugheses — it premiered April 2, 1956, with mild-mannered Nancy Hughes voicing the words, “Good morning, dear.” She was played by Helen Wagner, who was among those seen on that fateful episode the day Kennedy died and made occasional appearances as recently as this spring. She died in May at 91.

Hastings and Eileen Fulton (who joined “ATWT” in May 1960 as the vixenish Lisa Grimaldi) are now the senior cast members.