How was General Hospital in the 70's before Marland/Monty?

[vetsoapfan]

There's an interview online somewhere in which the Dobsons discuss their career, but I don't remember the details of why they left GH.

 

Back in the 1970s, the competition among soaps was fierce; many of them were consistently engrossing with excellent writing.

 

In the 1973-4 season, GH had a rating of 9.2, and was ranked 5th among 16 soaps. In the 1974-5 season, it had a rating of 8.5, and was in 8th place out of 14. Not too bad, but a noticeable slide from the 1971-2 season, when the show was number two, with a rating of 10.4.

 

So yes, the ratings had slipped a bit, but I did not blame the Dobsons or the quality of the show; it was still fine entertainment. But AW and DAYS were on fire at that point, and ATWT was still a solid number one. Even SFT was going through a stellar period of strong storytelling and high ratings. Something had to give, and even well-written series like GH and TEON did not get/keep the audience they deserved. Heck, with Claire Labine at LOVE OF LIFE and Rick Edelstein at HOW TO SURVIVE A MARRIAGE, both those shows were brilliantly written in the mid-1970s, too, but you wouldn't know it from their weak ratings.

 

The problem in the 1970s was, we had TOO MANY great soaps to watch! With writers like Agnes Nixon, Henry Slesar, Claire Labine, William J. Bell, Rick Edelstein, the Dobsons, Harding Lemay, Pat Falken Smith, Ann Marcus, etc., producing the best work of their lives...the audience was spoiled.

[BetterForgotten]

Yep, I've always said the 70's and not the overrated 80's was the golden era of American soap opera.

 

Obviously, it's great that the Dobsons ended up at GL, as I consider that their definitive writing tenure and loved almost everything I've been able to see of their GL. 

 

 

[vetsoapfan]

Yes, some younger viewers and fans of camp look bad fondly on the 1980s, but to me, that is when the genre fell apart.

 

After years (or decades) of character-driven, well-written stories about interpersonal relationships and family strife, most shows started to follow GH's unfortunate lead of featuring painfully stupid, campy science-fiction and fantasy garbage. I watched in horror as Mr. Big invaded ATWT, as the Dreaming Death and The Ghost in the Attic contaminated TGL, as The Ice Princess froze the minds of GH viewers, as underground cities, trips to heaven on spaceships, space aliens, time travel, and other nonsense sent the shows into the toilet.

 

The genre never recovered from the dumbing-down of the writing.

[quartermainefan]

This analysis of GH pre and post Monty isn't really accurate or fair. The videos exist on YT showing just how slow, tedious and humdrum GH was in the early 70s, pre modern era. That changed overnight. in the late 70s. There is this assumption in the discussion here that non-science fiction is somehow inherently superior to science fiction. That is ridiculous. Neither is better than the other.  

We can point to two soaps that reached beyond being mere soaps and became noteworthy pop culture items:  General Hospital and Dark Shadows.  One had spies, the other had vampires, and the public responded to both.    

[vetsoapfan]

Of course, watching snippets of storylines on youtube cannot compare to watching complete episodes of a serial on a daily basis over a period of years. It's like opening up WAR & PEACE and reading a handful of paragraphs from different pages, and intoning that the work is worthless. Modern critics may deem Irna Phillips' ATWT, William J. Bell's DAYS and other vintage soaps to be slow and tedious but these shows kept their audiences riveted to the screen with intriguing characterization and engrossing interpersonal relation dramas for decades. Were there space aliens, clones, mad scientists, and trips to the old west to satisfy action viewers? No, but it wasn't necessary, for other media could, and did, present science fiction and action storylines in a superior way, with time and budget allowing them to do a better job than soaps ever could. Soaps excelled at family drama and romance, and millions of viewers loved them for it.

 

Science fiction is not "worse" than other forms of storytelling, just different, and not suited for all media. One would not take UPSTAIRS, DOWNSTAIRS and inject the Great Gazoo into the mix; it would not be appropriate. Having DOWNTON ABBEY'S Mary hatch a clone of her late husband and then fly off into the heavens on a spaceship would only bring scorn onto the show from an audience that was not invested into the series for such material.

 

Sure, GH briefly became a pop phenomenon during the early 1980s, but careful analysis of why will lay the attraction more in Luke and Laura and their romance, which thrilled audiences, than the sci-fi material, which burned out after a few years. Likewise, DARK SHADOWS briefly gained attention for its breaking the mold and being different...and then died when when the novelty wore off. The same with PASSIONS. A certain type of audience responded, and then quickly moved on. THE GUIDING LIGHT, on the other hand, proved for many. many, many  years how well realistic storytelling could satisfy a huge audience of  traditional soap fans.

 

 

[titan1978]

The scifi plots faded but the action adventure stuff did not.  But the show was still always about relationships.  I think people forget just how good Monty was at spotting and developing chemistry.

And pacing has changed in all television so many things that worked in the 1960's and 1970's just don't work today, and soaps had to modernize too.

I can judge a show from select episodes.  While slower, 1970's AMC, DAYS, Y&R, OLTL, RH, all of them are still compelling.  Clips of GH from the same era are not.  The entire show was dated in a way its peers were not.

[vetsoapfan]

Well, action and adventure have been part of the soap opera genre since the radio days of STELLA DALLAS and the like. Science fiction has not. It all depends on how a story is told, of course, but so many of the sci-fi plots inflicted onto the audience were dreadfully written. We did not have Madeleine L'Engle or Gene Roddenberry guiding the ships, alas.

 

Of course pacing in television has changed, but that does not negate the fact that when slower-paced, character-driven storytelling on daytime was the norm, many shows excelled at keeping their audiences enthralled even with the glacial pacing.

 

I've had folks tell me that they could judge a film's merits based on its preview trailer, or a book's value based on its dusk-jacket description. I won't contest their belief, but I personally prefer to experience a work fully, rather than just select snippets, before I judge it. I remember how many critics deemed ATWT to be boring and outdated as it reigned supreme at the top of the ratings for 20 years. If only they knew what they had missed!

[SweetPea36]

I'm loving this! I've read it three times now and laughed at different parts each time.

It's also absolutely true.

[vetsoapfan]

Thank you, SweetPea36.

[quartermainefan]

I agree, It was awful.   Every clip on YT of pre-Monty GH is borderline pathetic.  Edge Of Night clips from the 70s are not however.   The question was really about GH, and using every way to measure the show GH improved under Monty.  The prod values went up, the pace quickened, the stories became more interesting, the quality of acting improved--and the ratings hit levels never seen before or since.   They say the show was on the brink of being cancelled.   GH could have clung to the old soap theories of having Mary the wife cry in her coffee to her best friend Sally about whatever marital problem she was having, but that was getting GH nowhere.   People didn't like Monty introduced Robert Scorpio and spies?   Millions did...many more millions than watched Labine's conveyor belt of misery or Y&R's pause laden Bill Bell written yawnfest.

[vetsoapfan]

Yes, when Douglas Marland and Gloria Monty became the show's headwriter and producer, everything changed for the better. Marland worked miracles from the writers' room and Monty worked miracles from the producers' office, vastly improving the technical aspects and look of the show. A few years before their arrival, GH had collapsed into a tedious, poorly-written and weakly-produced mess and was hard to watch from 1975 to 1977. Tom Donovan (1975-77) was not a strong producer, and his  revolving door of writers, none of whom clicked, had made the show quite a mess. There were valid reasons why Donovan and the writers got the axe in favor of Monty and Marland. That doesn't negate all the quality material produced during the 1960s and '70s, from writers like the Hursleys and Dobsons, and producers like James Young (who worked on the show from 1963 to 75) however. Before Donovan's reign, the series' strong ratings like 10.4. 9.7, and 9.2 in the early 1970s showed that GH was clearly doing something right.

 

Later, after Marland and Monty came aboard, the ratings had already soared again, long before the sci-fi material began, thanks to the human drama and romance. I daresay that the audience tuned in more to see what would happen to Luke and Laura's relationship than they did to find out about how the dorky Cassadines would freeze the world. The traditional soap basics, as written by Marland and Falken Smith and DONE WELL, had revived the show, just like such material had helped warhorses like ATWT enjoy ratings of 11.9, 13.7, 10.6, 15.4, 14.5, 13.9, 12.4, 11.1, etc., during its heyday, by telling stories based on human interaction rather than camp.

[ChitHappens]

Wow! This post is polluted with great information.  I really enjoyed reading it. 

[vetsoapfan]

Thank you, ChitHappens.

[BetterForgotten]

By the end of the 80's, GH was losing viewers and Y&R and AMC were on the rise. GH's dominance in the early part of the 80's seemed like a fad and temporary distraction for the masses. It faded, and the daytime audience went back to wanting something more traditional and realistic.

 

If Monty's GH was so sustainable and that's what the daytime audience wanted, a show like Y&R wouldn't have had such a long run at #1 in the ratings since the late 80's. 

 

[YRBB]

It had a distinct 70s vibe, I'm sure!  

The same ones who wrote DYNASTY?