As we’d known for almost six months, Guiding Light shone for the last time on Friday, after 72 years on radio and TV.

The show’s finale, and the dozen or so episodes leading to it, comprised a relative whirlwind of happy-ending stories, salted only by the sudden death of one of the show’s villains and the unresolved fate of one of its heroes (last seen in a high-noon shootout with another villain). This spate of happily-ever-afters, while out of keeping with the show’s tradition of complicated tragedy, was still in keeping with the show’s (and the genre’s) other tradition of deux ex machina improbabilities.

As overall TV viewership drifts downward, and the old-line networks’ market share is further eroded by cable and other alternatives, we’re reaching a point when original scripted dramas for one-time, daytime-only airing become fiscally unfeasible. As I’ve written here before, this would result in losing the only U.S. TV genre to feature open-ended storylines with no season breaks. The only other products in this country to offer that type of storytelling are certain comic books and comic strips. Online “webisode” dramas could adopt open-ended formats, but so far none have.