the air for sixteen months, ending on a Thursday (the 1:30–3:00 p.m. block on NBC was preempted the following day for a 90-minute special, First Ladies' Diaries: Rachel Jackson). The Monday after, Days of Our Lives expanded to an hour and assumed the vacant half hour left in NBC's daytime schedule. How to Survive a Marriage thus holds a rather dubious distinction as not only the first soap opera to become a victim of the first daytime serial, its sister NBC soap Another World, expanding to a full hour, but the second one as well, Days of Our Lives. Numerous other existing serials on ABC and CBS would expand to 60 minutes daily over the next five years or so, cutting down on the number of open 30-minute timeslots available, meaning few if any serials could be launched. This was a strategy employed to minimize risks of new 30-minute shows like How to Survive a Marriage failing to develop an audience in a timely enough manner to suit the networks and advertisers; several other serials had been canceled over the previous several years due to that issue, including How to Survive a Marriages two predecessors. Cast Fran Brill is now best-known for her work on Sesame Street, where she performed Muppet characters, including Zoe and Prairie Dawn, from 1970 to 2014. Other cast members included Ken Kercheval (Larry Kirby #2), F. Murray Abraham (Joshua Browne), Armand Assante (Johnny McGhee), and Brad Davis (Alexander Kronos). Awards and nominations The serial won Best Sequence at the third annual Afternoon TV Writers & Editors Awards, for "The Death of David Bachman." Fran Brill also won an award from the Afternoon TV Writers & Editors for her portrayal of Fran Bachman during the same award-winning sequence. References External links American television soap operas NBC original programming 1974 American television series debuts 1975 American television series endings English-language television shows