Having lived there at the time, I can say that placing GL in the 4pm slot in Savannah (WTOC) actually helped the series. WTOC put a talk show in the 3pm slot to counter-program the much-higher rated General Hospital, and the 4pm airing of GL allowed more young students getting home from school and adults getting home from work to watch. GL was also a better lead-in to their local newscast at 5pm than the talk shows that had aired previously. It was said that GL's viewership was about equal to Oprah Winfrey, which aired at 4pm on WSAV (the NBC affiliate). Obviously soaps in general were much more viable in the 1990s (look at those numbers above!), but the cracks were definitely showing. Putting the show on at 10am sounds ridiculous, or at least the act of someone who had given up on the show and was just putting it out to pasture, but the 4pm time shift in Savannah actually helped the show in that market.
A lot of ink was spilled over the years trying to define how "OJ killed the soaps," but one aspect no one has brought up yet was how one never knew what would air from day to day. The three networks were torn between covering the trial and sticking to their regularly-scheduled soaps. A viewer hoping to see their soaps had to turn on the TV every day (or set their VCR) and hope that Judge Ito wasn't blathering onscreen instead. But there just was no consistency. I recall instances where they would be conducting the trial and spontaneously call for an early recess (say, at 2:30pm). The networks had no advance warning, obviously, and since all three networks' had individual soaps which started at 2pm, they would just air the second half of an episode, or sometimes would air some half-hour game show or something else to fill the slot. If they 'jipped' an episode (Joined In Progress), they made no effort to re-air the parts that no one saw. So the viewer got bits and pieces of continuing stories and felt lost. The coverage of the trial took precedence over every other consideration, and the viewers justifiably felt jerked around. And once they realized that their lives could go on without that daily visit to Bay City, Llanview, or Springfield, a lot of people just stopped seeking them out. By the 1990s there was a relatively solid soap press that provided synopses of episodes and coverage of what was going on, and of course a nascent internet providing information to the more technologically-minded. One could "wean off" a soap addiction much easier in 1994 than 1984, and of course it became easier every decade since then.
Of course the confused and idiotic decisions being made in the network offices were all about the money. Soaps obviously had their commercial breaks baked into the cake. Covering the trial meant limited commercial interruptions, interruptions often made by split-second decisions of programmers. If there was a "five minute recess" or some delay in court, they'd try to drop in all the commercials they could, but if they had a long, involved series of testimony or procedures, the networks were losing boatloads of money by not being able to interrupt. They also had NO idea how much to charge these companies for the ads time since the ratings were not being measured the way they were when airing during soaps. I'm sure there were lots of refunds being sent out to various companies who had paid a certain amount to have their product advertised to an audience of a certain size and certain demographic and didn't get the results they expected. But the only other option was to drop coverage of the trial and resume normal programming, which was basically NOT an option. No one wanted to be "the one who isn't covering it", since so many decisions were made in "the heat of competition". For those of us who had little to no interest in the OJ Trial, I would have welcomed at least one slate of soaps to watch, even if they weren't my "usual" soaps.
