OWN to air soap episodes

McClatchy Newspapers

The journey from broadcast TV to online has been a rocky one for “One Life to Live” and “All My Children,” including a reduction in the number of episodes made each week. But it has been even rockier for many longtime fans of the soaps who either did not have online access or had not mastered the whole TV-on-the- Internet thing.

Those viewers will get at least some short-term relief beginning Monday — if they have cable or a dish, and their channels package includes OWN, the Oprah Winfrey Network.

The channel will offer telecasts of the first 40 episodes in the online version, which began in April on Hulu, Hulu Plus and iTunes.

For the next 10 weeks, “All My Children” and “One Life to Live” will air Monday through Thursday on OWN.

There’s been a little confusion about telecast times. On Monday and Tuesday of next week, three episodes of “AMC” will air from noon to 1:30 p.m.

The third episode will then repeat at 1:30 p.m. “OLTL” will follow, with three episodes airing from 2 to 3:30 p.m. Then the third episode will repeat at 3:30.

Then, beginning Wednesday, “All My Children” will be at 1 p.m. and “One Life to Live” at 3 p.m., and those will be their time slots on Monday through Thursday for the rest of the shows’ OWN runs.

Monday is the 45th anniversary of the premiere of “One Life to Live.” “All My Children” is almost as old, having begun Jan. 5, 1970. When ABC decided in 2011 to drop the two soaps, an executive said, “Viewers are looking for different types of programming these days.”