Further, Somerset slowly moved away from the traditional soap opera format, and started telling stories that dealt heavily with the Mafia and other types of crime, not unlike CBS's The Edge of Night which Slesar also wrote.

After the departure of Slesar, several other writers attempted to bring the show's ratings up with varying mixtures of the two previous formats, each of them slowly removing nearly all of the original characters.

NBC and packager Procter & Gamble Productions first launched Somerset as an extension of the mother show, adding the locales to each program's title.

Airing in a time slot prone to affiliate pre-exemption (4:00/3:00 Central) caused Somerset to struggle throughout the whole of its 6¾-year history to gain a foothold in the daytime pantheon.

Perhaps the nail in Somerset's coffin came when ABC acquired The Edge of Night from CBS in December 1975 due to CBS' expansion of As the World Turns to an hour in length, itself a response of sorts to NBC eleven months earlier expanding Another World to a full hour and its NBC sister soap Days of Our Lives likewise three months later, with both expansions being successful.

Although Somerset's ratings had improved during its final year, under the guidance of new head writer Robert J. Shaw, they were ultimately not enough to save the program from cancellation.

Somerset, along with ABC's The Best of Everything and A World Apart, marked the last time that more than two American network daytime serials premiered on the same date.