Zynga Kills Soaps

Audience shifts as viewers become gamers

Erica Kane survived a dozen marriages across 40 seasons, along with car accidents, parental abandonment, and even toxemia. But was she done in by FarmVille.

Kane, the iconic All My Children character played by Susan Lucci since 1970, will cease to be this September when ABC plans to cancel both that show and One Life to Live, leaving just four soap operas on the air.

While the soap audience has been shrinking for decades, driven by more women in the workplace and a 200-channel universe, the genre's decline appears to have accelerated over the past few years with the meteoric rise of social gaming.

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