ABC Daytime - Executives

Executives

Name	Title	Years	Notes
Armand Grant		1960–1965
Harve Bennett	Vice President of Daytime Programming	1965–1967	Started as a producer at CBS. Became ABC Vice President of Programming (West Coast) in 1967. Left to return to producing. Produced several of the movies in the Star Trek franchise.
Leonard Goldberg	Vice President of Daytime Programming	1967–1970	Was Director of New York Program Development at ABC. During his tenure, he introduced such prototypical, highly successful shows as The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game, and Dark Shadows. A year later, Goldberg was named Head of All Programming for ABC, a position he held for the next three years.
Michael Eisner	Vice President of Daytime Programming	1971–1976	Introduced Family Feud and Ryan's Hope. Along with Procter & Gamble, bought The Edge Of Night from CBS and went to ABC where it stayed until December 1984.
Jackie Smith	Vice President of Daytime Programming	1977–1989	She planned a spin-off of General Hospital, "Young Loves of General Hospital", that was not picked up.
Jo Ann Emmerich	Senior Vice President of Daytime Programming	1989–1993	Was gunning for CBS Daytime, and had planned for several actors to reprise their roles on All My Children, One Life to Live and General hospital. Viewed The Young and the Restless as a "serious threat", and wanted All My Children to go head to head with its main competitor at 12:30pm. Viewed The Bold And The Beautiful as an "uninspiring, poor man's version of The Young and the Restless". She wanted Paul Rauch to leave sooner than he did, hired Wendy Riche and Linda Gottlieb.
Pat Fili-Krushel	President of Daytime Programming	1993–1998	Served until she resigned to join an internet company. During her tenure, the network published the 1995 New York Times bestseller General Hospital tie-in novel Robin's Diary and debuted the General Hospital spin-off Port Charles.
Felicia M. Behr	Vice President of Daytime Programming	1999–2002
Angela Shapiro	President of Daytime Programming	1998–2002	The co-founder of Soap Opera Digest who had been ABC's Senior Vice President of Marketing and Promotion since 1995. Assumed the position of President in 2000. Called "a champion of the soap fans," Shapiro is credited with adapting the prime time series practice of "refreshers" and "previews" — recapping the previous episode immediately before showing the current one and previewing the next episode at the end — and applying the concept to daytime serials. The idea is still in use today, and other networks have adopted it. Shapiro also utilized the established interconnection of ABC's three soap operas (General Hospital, One Life to Live, and All My Children) in a bolder synergy concept designed to "entice viewers to tune into soap operas that they might not have usually watched." Over the course of six months in 2000, Daytime Emmy Award-winner Linda Dano's character Rae Cummings crossed over among all four ABC daytime series. Shapiro also created ABC Super Soap Weekend, a fan event held at Walt Disney World Resort in Florida from 1996 (the year Disney bought ABC) to 2008. She left ABC Daytime in 2002 to head the ABC Family network,
Brian Frons	President of Daytime Programming	2002–2011	Joined in August 2002. In May 2006 Frons was promoted to President of Daytime for the newly-created Disney-ABC Television Group, an entity overseeing all ABC and Disney networks and SOAPnet. Cancelled All My Children and One Life to Live and replaced them with The Chew and The Revolution. In December 2011, Frons announced that he was resigning as president after nine years with the network.
Vicki Dummer	Vice-President of Times Square Studios	2011–present	Joined ABC in 1996. Cancelled lifestyle talk show The Revolution after less than 3 months on the air. Changed General Hospital's time slot after being at 3:00 E/2:00 C since late 1963.