Soap-Killing ABC Exec Announces His Departure

The man who carved out slices of many daytime-soap fans' hearts will probably never do it again.

Entertainment Weekly reports that ABC programming executive Brian Frons - who was instrumental in ABC's decisions to cancel "All My Children" and "One Life to Live" - has announced that he'll depart the Disney-owned network this January, as ABC merges its daytime and syndication units into a single entity called Time Square Studio.

Frons had held his position since 2002, and will be leaving voluntarily as his current contract ends, according to information from ABC. The new division will be headed by Fron's fellow ABC exec Vicki Drummer. She'll be overseeing the likes of "General Hospital," "The View," "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire," "Katie," "The Chew" and "The Revolution."

‘While my decision to try something new was not arrived at easily, nine years is a long time in television terms," Fron said. "I’m proud of the performance of ABC Daytime over that time, and of all of the accomplishments that our team achieved along the way. I’m especially pleased by the early results for 'The Chew' and excited for the launch of 'The Revolution,' which will be one more positive step in transforming ABC Daytime for our viewers. I’ll miss my colleagues and the wonderful talent that makes our shows, but know they are in very capable hands with Vicki going forward.”

Frons has caught Hell - perhaps deservedly - from soap fans over cancelling the two daytime institutions, and the wound probably gets a little salty over the fact that daytime gab-fest "The Chew" has averaged 500,000 viewers under what "All My Children" pulled.

According to EW, Frons claimed the decision was made to swap out the daytime drama for a talk show because he believed viewers would be naturally drawn more to something with more substantive content.

“People are really interested in multiple points of view, multiple voices," Frons explained. "Daytime viewers are also saying that if they are going to give us an hour a day, we need to give them something that is going to improve their lives…. All of daytime is learning to survive on smaller audience shares because there are so many choices. You can’t spend more money for less audience. That’s why you see people going toward programming forms that cost less to produce.”