Search for Tomorrow is a TV
soap opera which started airing on Monday,
September 3, 1951 on
CBS. The show was moved
from CBS, its original broadcaster, on Friday, March 26, 1982, with
NBC picking it up on the following Monday,
March 29,
1982. It
continued on NBC until the final episode was aired on Friday,
December 26, 1986. At the time of its final broadcast it was the
longest-running, non-news program on television, lasting
thirty-five years. However, this distinction was short-lived as
these records were soon eclipsed by
Guiding Light.
The show was created by
Roy Winsor and
was first
written by
Agnes Nixon (who was then known professionally
as "Agnes Eckhardt") for thirteen weeks and, later, by
Irving Vendig.
Transition to tape
Search aired as a fifteen-minute serial from its debut in
1951 until 1968. The show's first sponsors were "
Joy dishwashing liquid" and
Spic and Span household cleaner. As the show's
ratings increased, more sponsors began buying commercial time. Both
"Joy" and "Spic and Span" continued to be the primary sponsors of
the show well into the 1960s.
The show switched from live broadcasts to recorded telecasts in
March 1967, went to color on September 11, 1967, and expanded to a
half-hour on September 9, 1968
[70801]. At the time,
Search and its
sister show
Guiding Light,
which had shared the same half-hour for sixteen years, were the
last two fifteen-minute soap operas airing on television. (As a
result of the expansion,
Search gained the entire 12:30 pm
ET timeslot and
Guiding Light moved to 2:30 pm.)
In 1983, both the master copy and the backup of a
Search
episode were lost, and on
August 4, the
cast was forced to do a live show for the first time since the
transition sixteen years before. After the event,
NBC was accused of lying about the tape being misplaced
in hopes that the noise generated by the accident would create a
ratings jump for the show. It was thought that this situation
mirrored a similar one in the 1982 movie
Tootsie.
Title sequences
Search for Tomorrow title card, first used in black-and-white from
1951-1967.
Throughout its entire thirty-five year run,
Search's
opening titles featured of a shot of clouds floating through the
sky. In fact, they consisted entirely of that until 1981. The only
noticeable change was the slightly altered "S" in "Search" upon
switching to color (note the first two title cards). In 1981 they
switched to a glitzy new videotaped opening sequence beginning with
a shot of a seagull flying over the ocean, followed by a helicopter
shot of the clouds in the midday sky (see the third title card). In
the show's final months, the titles featured a montage of cast
clips, bookended with sky shots.
The theme music for the early years sounded a little like "Beyond
the Blue Horizon" to some, which would have seemed quite
appropriate for this show given the opening visuals. Upon switching
to color, a theme titled "Interchange" by Bill Meeder was used for
the opening, and later on in 1974, a short-lived theme titled
"Signature for Search for Tomorrow" by Ashley Miller (by then, it
was still using in-studio organ accompaniment).
From November 1974 to February 1986,
Search used a pop
ballad theme: "We'll Search for Tomorrow" by Jon Silbermann, Jack
Cortner, and John Barranco. This followed a trend initiated by
The Young and the
Restless for using pop ballads for soap theme tunes.
Several arrangements were used during its 12-year run: the original
version, a more orchestral version, a Latin disco-flavored version,
and a vocal version for closing credits.
The final months' title sequence was accompanied by a new
"techno-rock" theme by
Bill Chinnock
called "Somewhere in the Night".
Announcements
For much of the show's run on CBS, the announcer was
Dwight Weist, who years earlier had narrated
several short subjects for
MGM.
The common structure of his announcements went like this:
- Black and white years and possibly early color
years: "Search for Tomorrow"...Brought to you by
(sponsor). The closing, on credit days, ran the credits (as flash
credits) then Weist would say: "Search for Tomorrow is brought to
you by (sponsor)." In two surviving 60's episodes available on
video, a promo card for The Guiding
Light was shown.
The following sequences were used in the 70's and possibly to the
end of the series:
- Opening titles: "This is Search for
Tomorrow. This portion brought to you by (name and description
of sponsor)".
- Mid-program break #1: "This portion of
Search for Tomorrow was brought to you by (name and
description of sponsor). Our story will continue in just a
moment."
- Mid-program break #2: "And now, the second
portion of Search for Tomorrow." On days when the second
half was officially sponsored, the announcement continued,
"...brought to you by (name and description of sponsor)."
- Lead-in to next-to-last commercial break: "Our
story will continue in just a moment!"
- Closing titles: "This portion of Search
for Tomorrow has been brought to you by (name and description
of sponsor)", or on non-sponsored days, either "Join us each
weekday for Search for Tomorrow", or, if no time remained,
"This has been Search for Tomorrow, this program was
recorded." Before the title change in 1981, Weist would tell
viewers to stay tuned for the next program, either As The World Turns, The Young and the Restless or
The Guiding Light. TGL had a title
card shown, while YR did not. Credits at this time were flash style
(one episode confirms this). They may have used a crawl for the
full cast and crew. After 1981, credits were done in a crawl. The
final episode had screen shots of the cast and the production
credits were done flash style. Mary Stuart got top billing at the
start of the credits throughout the show's run.
When Weist retired to found his own public relations/casting
company, former rock disc jockey
Alison
Steele assumed the announcing duties with similar announcements
as above. Her job carried over into the first few years of NBC's
run until
Hal Simms (former announcer for
The Edge of Night) took
over in 1985, after which
Don Pardo
(announcer for
Saturday Night
Live) assumed duties for the remainder of the series. Both
Simms' and Pardo's announcements were limited.
Show History
1950s
For the show's duration,
Search was centered on a
midwestern housewife named
Joanne
Gardner (played for the entire run by
Mary Stuart) who lived in a fictional
town called Henderson. In the earlier years, Joanne's friends and
next-door neighbors, Stuart and Marge Bergman (played by
Larry Haines and
Melba
Rae) received much screen time as they commiserated with
Joanne, usually over a cup of coffee at the kitchen table. At the
beginning of the series, Stu and Marge had a young daughter named
Janet (originally played by
Ellen
Spencer).
Most of Joanne's dilemmas, in the early years, were due to her dead
husband Keith Barron's overbearing parents – they (most especially
her mother in-law, Irene,) never liked her and were quite content
with seizing Joanne and Keith's daughter Patti (played longest by
Lynn Loring) from the widow.
After Keith (played by
John
Sylvester White) died in 1952, Joanne started managing a hotel,
The Motor Haven Inn. Local thugs in town saw Joanne as
soft because she was a woman, and they attempted to take over the
business as a front for
Mafia dealings.
Joanne's friend Rose Peabody (
Lee Grant,
Constance Ford, and
Nita Talbot), who was selling information to the
Mafia, tried to poison a pot of soup that Joanne made, so her
credibility would be tarnished. In the end, the scheme did not work
and it was Rose who perished. A man named Arthur Tate (
Terry O'Sullivan) helped Joanne with
financial backing for the Inn. Arthur's Aunt Cornelia gave him the
inheritance money but insisted on meddling in his affairs as she
hated Joanne. Eventually, Arthur and Jo fell in love and were
married.
1960s
The show was one of the highest-rated soaps in the 1950s, but
Search was losing out to newer soaps as the decade drew to
a close. When the show was in a ratings slump in 1960,
Western-themed drama writers
Frank and Doris Hursley were hired
to write the show. In 1963, with the ratings staying stagnant, the
duo decided to write out Joanne's baby (written into the storyline
a few years previous while she was pregnant with son Jeffrey) by
having him run in front of a speeding truck and die upon impact.
Miss Stuart was unhappy with the decision and, in the book
All
My Afternoons, Stuart was paraphrased as saying that she
played the grief scenes with so much conviction that even the
makeup lady could not bear to watch her to see if her makeup was
right. In the end, the ratings did not rise, and Stuart threatened
to quit the show unless the Hursleys were fired. The duo left the
show and created the serial
General
Hospital for
ABC the same year.
As the show progressed, Joanne's sister Eunice returned to town and
seduced Joanne's second husband, Arthur Tate. When a woman named
Marian Rand came to town and sued Arthur for paternity, the stress
surrounding this dilemma, coupled with personal troubles and the
guilt of sleeping with Eunice caused him to have a fatal heart
attack.
Joanne's daughter Patti grew into a teenager and got involved with
drug-dealing gang members (incorporating a scathing viewpoint
regarding America's counter-culture of the day). Joanne's friend
Sam Reynolds (who was, ironically, Arthur's archenemy) proved his
worth to Joanne by saving Patti when she was held at knifepoint.
They were going to be married, but alas, it was not to be. Actor
Robert Mandan, who played Sam, did not
renew his contract with the show.
1970s
In 1970, Joanne lost her eyesight, and Dr. Tony Vincente (
Anthony George) helped her get it back. They
fell in love and were married in 1972. In 1974,
Mary-Ellis Bunim was appointed executive
producer of
Search for Tomorrow. As a result of Bunim
wanting to take the show in a more youth-oriented direction, fewer
stories involved Joanne. In 1975, Bunim was rumored to have the
writers of
Search for Tomorrow kill off Joanne (after the
death of Tony), which ended up not happening after vocal dissent
from Stuart in the press. While the ratings took a slight dip when
the series focused on younger viewers, the impact wasn't as heavy
as was expected. Despite the show moving in a more youth-oriented
direction, the character of Joanne embarked on a long-running story
when she earned a foe in the ambitious schemer
Stephanie Wilkins (
Maree Cheatham).
In 1971, Stu and Marge's daughter Janet returned to the series and
served as a peer to which Joanne's daughter Patti can relate. Early
in 1972, Marge's sudden death was written into the storyline
(actress Melba Rae had died late the year before). Stu later
married Ellie Harper (
Billie Lou
Watt) and helped Jo run the Hartford House, a modern
incarnation of her old property, the Motor Haven Inn.
Examples of the "younger" stories included the maniacal
Jennifer Pace (played by
Morgan Fairchild); Jennifer shot and killed
Joanne's sister Eunice after a vision of Eunice's husband John
Wyatt (
Val Dufour), whom Jennifer was
having an affair with, told her to do the murderous deed. Another
popular story on the show was the budding romance between the
characters of Steve and Liza Kaslo (
Michael Nouri and
Meg
Bennett).
1980s
The show was doing fine in the afternoon ratings (the show
consistently ranked #4 in the soap ratings throughout most of the
1970s) until the decision was made to move the show to 2:30 p.m.
(
Eastern Time) in 1981
(the show had aired at 12:30 p.m. since its first episode thirty
years before). Procter and Gamble considered expanding
Search
for Tomorrow and reducing
As
the World Turns to 45 minutes in length (as they had made
the expansion to 60 minutes six years earlier) and eliminating the
time that most local stations aired newscasts. The final decision
was to not expand these two shows and to move
Search for
Tomorrow to a later timeslot despite P&G's lack of
enthusiasm for the switch. The show still had many fans, but the
ratings weren't near the level they had once been. Faced with the
ratings drop and the insistence of Procter & Gamble to return
Search to its early afternoon timeslot, CBS decided not to
renew
Search when it came up for renewal in 1982. Procter
and Gamble was not willing to give up on the show yet, and began
searching for another home for it.
Switch to NBC (1982-1986)
The final episode aired on CBS on March 26, 1982, with the show
moving to
NBC three days later. The move to NBC
also saw a return to the 12:30 pm timeslot the show had grown
accustomed to having. However, since
Search was now going
up
against the hit
The Young and the Restless on
CBS instead of being part of a lineup that included it and that,
while not as prone to preemptions as a 12 PM slot would've been,
affiliates were airing other programming in the 12:30 slot,
Search's ratings began to plummet even more so than they
had when the show was moved to 2:30 PM a year earlier. When
Search first moved to 2:30 in 1981 the show was still
pulling in fair ratings, enough to rank eighth in the season's
final totals. In fact, when CBS cancelled
Search its
ratings were at a 6.8, which was half a percentage point higher
than they had been to end the previous season. The move to NBC, in
turn due to the situations described above, caused a catastrophic
drop in ratings that ended with the show becoming the second-lowest
rated soap opera on television with a 3.4 rating. (A similar time
slot switch plagued another former hit Procter and Gamble-produced
serial,
The Edge of
Night, ten years earlier. Coincidentally, both shows were
moved into the same 2:30 PM slot and both would end up leaving CBS
for other networks; by this time
Edge was airing on ABC in
a late-afternoon slot.)
Even in markets where NBC affiliates did not preempt the noon
timeslot for a newscast,
Search's ratings were not helped
due to NBC's particularly weak lineup of lead-in programs to the
soap. In fact, the only somewhat successful program to air on NBC
in that 12 PM slot was
Super Password, which
shared the hour with
Search from its premiere on September
24, 1984 until
Search's demise. Prior to that
Search was paired with a seemingly revolving door of
low-rated series, which included the low-rated veteran NBC soap
The Doctors
(which, coincidentally, had been moved to the noon slot so
Search could join the NBC daytime lineup) and a string of
low-rated game shows including
The New Battlestars,
Just Men!, and
Hot Potato.
One scenario that never came to pass, as reported by
TV Guide in June 1979, was
Search
moving to 3:30 PM (then used by daytime reruns of
M*A*S*H).
The Young and the Restless
was to originally expand to an hour in Fall 1979 from 12:30-1:30,
with
As the World Turns
and
Guiding Light still at
their 1:30 and 2:30 start times, respectively. Despite these plans
Search stayed put,
Y&R simply expanded its
1:00 timeslot to 1:30 on East Coast stations, and the other two
were bumped up to 2:00 and 3:00.
Although the soap had switched networks, it was still produced at
the CBS Broadcast Center at 524 West 57th St. in Manhattan until
August 1982. By September, NBC relocated the production to the
Reeves/Teletape Studio on Broadway and West 81st St., the former
home of
Sesame Street (which
themselves had relocated to the former WNET-TV studios at 9th Ave
and 55th St.). It remained there until March 1985, when they moved
to the former
Edge of Night studios, the EUE/Screen Gems
Studios at 222 East 44th St., where it remained for the rest of its
run.
In an advertising campaign called "Follow the Search", the stars of
the show wished for its loyal viewers to follow
Search to
NBC. However, CBS only allowed the advertisements if Procter &
Gamble did not name the network to which the show was moving in
their advertisements (also decreed when
The Edge of Night moved to
ABC in 1975). At the end of
the final CBS episode, veteran actors Mary Stuart and Larry Haines
told the audience to start watching the show as it moved to
"another network", and asked the viewers to locate them in their
television listings.
The ratings stayed 50% lower than they had been on
CBS, even in the 2:30 slot. By this time, Joanne's final
marriage to Martin Tourneur (
John
Aniston), which had taken place while the series still called
CBS home, did not interest many viewers, and the show was chastised
for preposterous storylines: in one heroine's case, she gave birth
to a baby just three months after conception.
Search
finished second to last in the ratings again at the end of its
first full season on NBC, finishing ahead of the struggling
The
Doctors and actually finishing in a tie with
Texas, which failed to make it
through the season.
By 1984, the show mainly focused on two new families: the Kendalls
and the McClearys. The McCleary family was headed by Malcolm
Mccleary (
Patrick Tovatt), Kate
McCleary (
Jo Henderson, later
Maeve McGuire), brothers Hogan McCleary
(
David Forsyth), Cagney McCleary
(
Matthew Ashford), Quinn McCleary
(
Jeffrey Meek), and sister Adair
McCleary (
Paige Hannah, later
Susan Carey Lamn). The Kendall family was
headed by Estelle Kendall (
Domini
Blythe), Lloyd Kendall (
Peter
Haskell, then by
Joe Lambie, later
Robert Reed), and Mike Kendall (
Thomas Sullivan), brothers Alec Kendall
(
Robert Curtis Brown), Chase
Kendall (
Kevin Conroy, later
Robert Wilson), Steven Kendall (
Phillip Brown,
Steve Lindquist), and sister Theresa Rebecca
(T.R.) Kendall (
Jane
Krakowski).
In a newspaper interview during this period (The Videot) Mary
Stuart complained, "They have created a new program and they're
calling it
Search for Tomorrow." She said she believed she
was being eased out by the Kate McCleary character. Whatever the
intentions of the writers were, they were not benefiting the show
in the ratings. At the end of the 1983-84 season
Search,
which had been a solid top-five series for CBS just a decade
before, hit bottom and finished last in the ratings with a 3.2.
Search was able to climb out of the ratings cellar at the
end of the following season, but this was largely due to the
continuing struggles of
The Edge of Night (which was
canceled at midseason) and
Search returned to the bottom
of the ratings list with an anemic 2.9 rating for 1985-86.
The show was canceled in 1986, but only after a memorable attempt
to bring up the ratings: The whole town of Henderson was washed
away in a flood, and in a display of reverence the only buildings
left standing afterward were Joanne's residence and business.
On December 26, 1986 the final episode ended with senior characters
Stu Bergman and Joanne Tourneur talking about the future. Stu asked
Joanne what she was searching for, and she answered "Tomorrow, and
I can't wait." This was followed by a taped piece in which the cast
thanked the show's viewers for their loyalty over the past 35
years, ending with a slightly-tearful Mary Stuart saying "Thank
you...thank you all. They were wonderful years." and saluting the
audience goodbye. The show also ended with the song
We'll Be Together Again by
Lou Rawls (
Love of Life also closed out its run with
the same song, but used a version by
Tony
Bennett).
The series was replaced by the Tom Kennedy game show
Wordplay, which aired until
September 4,
1987.
As had been the case in two of the previous three season,
Search ended its 35-year run last in ratings with a 2.5 at
the time of its cancellation.
Location Shooting
Like many other soap operas,
Search featured segments of
location shooting in the 1980s.
In 1981 the show went to
Hong
Kong
, and later that year, to Jamaica
, to showcase
a romantic rendezvous between the characters of Garth and
Kathy. In 1982 prior to the
switch to NBC, a storyline involving Travis Sentell took the show
on location in St.
Kitts
. In
1984 the show did a
lot of location shooting to show the wilds of Henderson.
In the
final months of the show in 1986, they went to
Ireland
to film a storyline with the McCleary brothers, who
by that time occupied most of the storylines.
Ratings history
Search for Tomorrow was among the highest-rated soaps of
the 1950s and 1960s, but by the early 1970s it had slipped to the
middle of the pack. However, during that decade the show gained
renewed popularity and peaked at 4th in the ratings, a spot last
reached in 1976. Starting then, the show's popularity began to
slide, but the show was still a solid top-ten soap.
In 1981, CBS wanted its newer serial
The Young and the
Restless to lead off the afternoon soap lineup and moved
Search For Tomorrow to 2:30 p.m.
ET time between
As the
World Turns and
Guiding Light. The show still got
decent ratings- in fact, at the time it was cancelled
Search 's ratings were half a point higher than where they
were at the end of the previous season (6.8 vs. 6.3)- but Procter
and Gamble, who owned the show, wanted the show back at 12:30 p.m.
In March 1982, P&G moved the show to NBC at 12:30 (bumping the
low rated soap
The
Doctors to Noon) with disastrous ratings results. When
Search left CBS, the show was pulling in a 6.8 rating,
which was good enough for eighth in daytime. By the end of the
year,
Search was fourteenth in the ratings, just .1 ahead
of where
The Doctors would finish the year. In fact,
Search's ratings had dropped by half in the nine months it
was on NBC, falling from the 6.8 that they had achieved at CBS to a
3.4 by the end of the year.
Part of the reason for the slip was that many NBC affiliates
already pre-empted
The Doctors that had been airing at
12:30, and continued to do so when
Search moved into the
slot-- meaning, in some instances,
Search would disappear
altogether from some markets when it left CBS for NBC.
Search's ratings continued to drop as the show went on.
The following season the show finished with a 2.7 rating, tied with
outgoing NBC soap
Texas
for twelfth in the ratings. In three out of its remaining four
seasons, the show would finish dead last in the ratings, the only
exception coming in 1984-85 when the equally ratings-challenged
veteran
The Edge of Night
finished behind it in what would turn out to be its final season on
ABC.
Search finally was cancelled halfway through the 1986-87
season, finishing with a 2.5 rating. Its last episode aired on
December 26, 1986, putting an end to its then-record 35 year run on
television. NBC would not give the 12:30 slot, or the 12:00 hour
for that matter, back to the local affiliates until 1991, and would
also take back the hour for five months in 1993. In that time,
Wordplay,
Scrabble,
Generations, and
Scattergories all aired in
the same slot
Search had, and three of the four series
were eventually cancelled due to low ratings (
Scrabble,
the only one that wasn't, was moved from the 12:30 timeslot after
nearly two years there and was eventually cancelled in 1990).
Generations proved to be the most successful of the
post-
Search slot holders, airing for nearly two
years.
Capitol, the show that
replaced
Search for Tomorrow on CBS, aired its last
episode on March 20, 1987, lasting only a few months longer than
Search for Tomorrow's run on NBC.
Before they were stars
Many well-known film and television actors appeared on
Search during its 35 year run:
Reruns
From 1987 until summer 1989, reruns aired in late night on the
USA Network. The network aired episodes
from the first three years of the NBC run.
In 2006, Procter & Gamble began making several of its soap
operas available, a few episodes at a time, through
America Online's AOL Video service,
downloadable free of charge. Reruns of
Search for Tomorrow
episodes began with the October 5, 1984 show and ceased with the
January 13th, 1986 episode after AOL discontinued the P&G Soaps
Channel on December 31, 2008.
External links
Wikis
Quiz
Map
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