Sean

3 hours ago, slick jones said:

VYTO RUGINIS

 

ANOTHER WORLD       Daniel, a john     Unknown Year

AS THE WORLD TURNS      George Patelli    1988-89

ALLY McBEAL    Mr. Goodman     1999

 

and....

STYLE AND SUBSTANCE   Bobby    1998

CITIZEN BAINES   Tony Keaton   2001

PRESIDIO MED      Tom Roback   2002-03

ER        Wright     2006; 2007

NCIS: LOS ANGELES  Soviet Representative Arkady Kolcheck   2009-Present   (recurring)

He also had a recurring role on Ryan's Hope from 1982-1983 during Mary Ryan Munisteri's time as headwriter. He played Ace Landis, a serial killer targeting sex workers who also murdered Mitch Bronsky.

40 minutes ago, Faulkner said:

James Wlcek is and always has been gorgeous.

The show definitely seemed to enjoy showing off his attributes. 

On 11/18/2020 at 9:56 PM, amybrickwallace said:

I'm still surprised that with most of the former soaps getting the virtual reunion treatment, RH hasn't gotten one yet. I could see Ilene Kristen doing one, for sure.

Looks like you made it happen, @amybrickwallace!

Ah, very much looking forward to this! The SoapNet reunions tended to emphasize the early years of the show (understandably), so it will be interesting hearing from some of the actors from the later years. I don’t think I’ve heard much from Geoff Pierson about his time on RH (aside from a brief SOD interview back in 2003) so I’m looking forward to that especially. I believe he’s still married to Cali Timmins so I wonder if there’s any chance she’ll make an appearance.

Ash Adams seems to have a lot of positive memories from his time on the show and would occasionally post reminiscences on his Instagram. Ilene Kristen recently posted a photo of herself with Ash in NYC on Facebook. I enjoyed their mother/son chemistry on the show, and it's nice to see they've stayed in touch over the years.

On 11/20/2020 at 12:40 AM, amybrickwallace said:

Thank you, @victoria foxton. Do you think the problem with Goldie was more on LS or the writers? Wasn't LS also on the AMC writing team around this same time?

I think Louise Shaffer wrote for AMC a while later, around 2000-2002. 

She started her first soap writing gig pretty much right after her stint as Goldie ended, joining the staff of Ryan's Hope around November 1987 and staying with RH until its cancellation.

Apologies if this has been mentioned already, but in looking through newspaper archives online, I was surprised to come across a reference to several soaps that ABC announced as being in development in the summer of 1985. I'd seen a reference to the Labine project elsewhere, but this was my first time reading about the others.

ABC plans innovations for daytime schedule

Several programming innovations, designed to strengthen ABC's daytime schedule and "change the face of daytime television," were unveiled to the ABC Television Network affiliates by Jacqueline Smith, vice president, daytime programs, ABC Entertainment. Ms. Smith said both game shows and dramatic programs are being developed for future broadcast.

One of them, the "soapcom," is based on a format new to daytime, Ms. Smith said. The program is a "cross between a serial and a comedy, perfect for the morning," she said. "It doesn't have a laugh track, but it does have sitcom humor, combined with the continuing stories of love and jeopardy associated with serials," she continued. Ms. Smith noted that two "soapcom" stories are in development.

"Fitzgerald and Fennelli" is the story of two young working women who pursue careers and romance in New York City. It will be written by Ann Marcus, the creator of "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman." "Love on Trial," a series set in family court, examines the lives of the people behind the scenes as well as families in crisis. It will be developed by veteran daytime - producer Lin Bolen. 

Another "daytime first" will be a serial based on an unusual novel, titled "Single." The series will explore the lives of a "family of the '80s," four women bound by the ties of friendship and set in Southern California. It is being developed into serial form by Claire Labine, creator of ABC's "Ryan's Hope." Harriet Frank, co-writer of the screenplay for "Norma Rae," is the author of the book.

The "ABC Bestseller Playhouse," another series in development, will feature stories based on 12 bestselling books in a monthly miniseries format, Ms. Smith said. ABC has options on several books for the "Playhouse" series, including Father Andrew Greeley's Cardinal Sin, Norma Klein's Girls Turn Wives, The Fire Island Quartet by Burt Hershlield, Texas Rich by Fern Michaels, and the Robin Cook thriller, Godplayer. "These books and authors bring built-in audience approval," Ms. Smith said. "With romantic stories revolving around women in jeopardy and in exotic locations from Rome to Monte Carlo, 'Bestseller Playhouse' brings a whole new look to daytime."

Some other Ryan's Hope actors who come to mind who spent significant time (2+ years) on that show:

• Malcolm Groome (Pat Ryan #1, 1975-78, 1983-88, 1989)
• Marg Helgenberger (Siobhan Ryan #3, 1982-86)
• Catherine Hicks (Faith Coleridge #3, 1976-78)
• Karen Morris-Gowdy (Faith Coleridge #4, 1978-83, 1989)
• Grant Show (Rick Hyde, 1984-87)
• David Sederholm (Bill Hyde, 1983-85)
• Jason Adams (John Reid Ryan #2, 1986-89)
• Gerit Quealy (Jacqueline Dubujak, 1983-85, 1987)
• Thomas McGreevy (Tom Desmond, 1977-79)
• Hannibal Penney, Jr. (Clem Moultrie, 1975-78)

11 hours ago, safe said:

I thought they would have had Kim land a role on The Proud and The Passionate. 

That would have been rich given Seneca's involvement with Barbara Wilde - it's fun to imagine what kind of chaos Kim could have wreaked behind the scenes. Given her propensity for drama, she strikes me as more the type to aspire to being a soap diva than an off-Broadway starlet.

56 minutes ago, j swift said:

Roger is truly a character that one would never see on a soap today because (a) his age (and his hairline) would be considered too niche, (b) his caddish nature would be considered undesirable, and (c) his complexity would never have been given time to develop.

He's definitely one of the show's more distinctive and under-appreciated characters in my book, and one of the personalities that's hardest to pin down. I loved the glee with which he observed and commented upon the various moral shortcomings of the morally superior Ryans (with the caveat that he could be so frustratingly sanctimonious with Delia during their first marriage). I loved seeing the more sincere side of him as well, which tended to come out with Faith and Jill as well as in his friendship with Rae. In the 1979 episodes I've been rewatching, he's been a great sounding board for Rae as she anticipates the impending implosion of her engagement to Frank - as he puts it, what does a wealthy, intelligent, mega-successful woman like Rae need with an unreliable man like Frank Ryan?

One of the more unforgivable aspects of the show circa 1984-85 was how both Pat Falken Smith and later Taggart/King decimated his character - first with the near-rape of Maggie and his attempted bludgeoning of Frank with a two-by-four, and later with his complicity in nearly wiping Katie Thompson's memories as an accessory to one of Maggie's schemes. Thankfully they course-corrected in later years and gave us the great Maggie/Roger/Delia triangle as well as his flirtation with Diana van der Vlis's Sherry Rowan.

4 hours ago, DRW50 said:

 

I would have paired her up with someone age-appropriate, like the drunk teenager Faith counseled who disappeared after the strike. (the strike people actually tried to give Faith something interesting to do...we couldn't have that!!!) Everything that Labine and Mayer gave Kim to do tended to gross me out. 

That felt like the direction the scab writers were going in with Craig (Paul Carlin), but that abruptly ended with the conclusion of the strike when Kim ran off with baby Arley. I think his last episode involved him encountering Kim at the Crystal Palace, and Kim then inviting him to come back to Ryan's to meet Arley (Kim was crashing with Johnny and Maeve by that point). Carlin was listed with the contract actors but made all of nine appearances before vanishing.

One of the (many, many) reasons I'd love to see more material from 1982 is that they do seem to try to move Kim into different territory - initially she continues to terrorize Seneca and Rae by staging a fake kidnapping and then engaging in a protracted custody battle over Arley, but her finding an actual father in the form of Kirk seems like a potentially rich development given her, ahem, daddy issues with Seneca. I'm also intrigued by the Kim/Pat/Amanda Kirkland triangle that Mary Ryan Munisteri developed, though perhaps that would have felt like a Delia/Pat/Faith redux if it had been allowed to continue.

In terms of the specific timing, I believe Michael's death happened about a week into the strike in May 1981 - the writers' names had just disappeared from the closing credits.

I got SoapNet in 2003 in the middle of the strike material, and I found the murder investigation basically impossible to follow as a new viewer. It was evident that the scab writers were coming up with it on the fly, and that they were having to contort the whole plot in order to get Kim off the hook. The concurrent (and sometimes intersecting) storyline in which Joe ruins Jack's life was similarly convoluted, though Roscoe Born and Michael Levin were better able to sell that.

Speaking of Joe, over the summer I began re-watching episodes of the show on YouTube starting from June 1979 right before Richard Muenz shows up, and it's striking to think just what a strange signature coupling Joe and Siobhan turn out to be, particularly in terms of casting - by my accounting, no combination of actors playing Joe and Siobhan lasts more than a year before one or both of them is recast. Not to mention that initially Joe and Siobhan are very much an afterthought to the forbidden pairing of Jack and Siobhan, which the show spends much of Sarah Felder's run on the show building up. They really did an about-face when Roscoe Born shows up and suddenly they're endgame. 

I got lost down a Google wormhole recently, and I was surprised to come across this blurb about a possible Kim recast in a Jon-Michael Reed column from March 1982:

JOINING “RYAN’S HOPE” as money mogul Hollis Kirkland is actor Peter Haskell, who enjoyed a short-lived success in the nighttime soap, “Bracken’s World,” several years ago. Kelli Maroney returns to the role she originated, Kim Beaulac, on the same show. Kelli was dropped from the cast last summer. Since then ABC has auditioned a score of actresses with “more maturity” than acting neophyte Maroney. Obviously, none of them was considered as acceptable as the original performer. There may be something to be learned from this “return of events,” however bizarre it seems.

Given her popularity during the Rae/Michael/Kim/Seneca storyline, and keeping in mind that the show also recast Pat, Siobhan, and Delia during this same timeframe, it makes sense they stuck with a tried-and-tested quantity like Kelli Maroney. It's fascinating to think what they could have done with the character and the Kim/Rae dynamic if they'd brought in someone new who was a little less green and more versatile, though.

Considering how much pressure the show was under from ABC during this time, it's head-scratching that they would go out of their way to dump first Michael Corbett and then Kelli Maroney. Neither of them were ever the reasons I wanted to watch the show (though I did enjoy Kim's torturing of Rae), but it's clear ABC thought of them as major draws - both figure heavily in promos from the show during this time, and they appeared on (separate) covers of People. Their departures bookended the writers strike, so I'm curious if they were primarily instigated by producer Ellen Barrett, who at least in Michael Corbett's telling did not seem to like him very much. (For what it's worth, she's also the same producer who supposedly fired Sarah Felder after pressuring her to cut her hair.)

On 9/5/2020 at 10:06 PM, slick jones said:

As I update the profiles here, I update  them on my fb page.  Louise Shaffer had a nice story about DVDV.........

 

Louise Shaffer

Loved her. She played my sister on Heart and she was wonderful. Years later, when I was trying to sell my first book we'd lost touch -- but she read it immediately, took it to her husband Roger -- he was running Little Brown -- and he got me my first agent. The book didn't go anywhere -- neither did the agent --but my second one was published and even though Diana wasn't well at that point, she came to my book party. She was just that kind of person and friend.

 

What a fantastic story! I wish it were possible to see them work together in Where the Heart Is.

I loved Diana van der Vlis in both her roles on Ryan's Hope. Along with the Jack/Mary romance, Nell's story was the highlight of the show's first 6 months on-air for me. Her work as Sherry was markedly different but equally fantastic. Sherry was such a delicious force of nature - loved seeing her go up against Ilene Kristen's Delia. In fact, she wasn't that unlike Louise Shaffer's Rae... too bad they didn't overlap at all except for the final episode. (By the way, in terms of dates I think Sherry first appeared in either November or December 1987, right after her politician husband was murdered. DvdV is in one of the December 1987 episodes on YouTube.)

2 hours ago, will81 said:

For Love of Life. I have articles naming both Loring Mandel and Christopher Bell as head writer during the 72-73 season. Bell is mentioned both in a September 72 article on the show and around Apr/May 73 as well. Loring is only mentioned as a nominee for the Writers Guild for that season. So maybe Loring wrote the show up to September 72 and was still eligible when Chris Bell took over. I think Claire Labine and Paul Avila Mayer probably took over Aug/Sep 73. This is the first mention I could find of them and is in line with the idea that they took over after the strike.

I just read this 1975 interview with Labine and Mayer on one of the vintage soap tumblrs this week, and it states that they became the headwriters of Love of Life in September 1973, remaining with the show through May 1975.

2 hours ago, j swift said:

Was Robin or Randall's debut timed to coincide with the opening of the Crystal Palace?

 

Also, did RH ever have a Studio 54-esque disco, because they all felt a bit too young to hang out at a Rainbow Room-esque establishment?

As @gimmetoo mentioned, the Crystal Palace opened in May 1980 when Randall was in the role - she'd been on the show for over a year at that point. It closed around February 1983, at which point Ilene had been back on the show for nearly a year.

Your post did remind me of the great scene when Delia shared the dancefloor at the Crystal Palace with Michael Pavel at the New Year's Eve 1981 celebration, with frequent cutaways to both Kim and Rae watching and stewing:

3 hours ago, amybrickwallace said:

 

I assume that's when Vicky Dawson was brought in as Dee, after RE declined their offer. How was Franc Luz on RH? I've enjoyed his work on TD in the Retro TV reruns, as well as in various primetime episodics and films.

He was fine from what I've seen, but Steve Latham wasn't an especially interesting or complex character. He was mostly there to share love scenes with Robin Mattson's Delia and to try to convince her to leave her husband; we were never really presented with any sense of him outside his role in her story. It sounds like he became more explicitly nefarious at the end of his run with the revelation that Steve had a long history of seducing rich married women and then blackmailing them, but that happened within his last week or two on the show.

34 minutes ago, gimmetoo said:

In later years, Maggie felt like Delia 2.0.  Vulnerable, manipulative, spoiled...but you rooted for her.  

Definitely agree with this, and I think it's one of the elements that made the Maggie/Roger/Delia triangle work so well. Both Delia and Maggie were trying to bring down a version of themselves before ultimately forging an uneasy peace.

And while I love Ilene Kristen, I started watching the SoapNet reruns during Randall's time in the role, and I'll always have a major soft spot for her even if I acknowledge Ilene is the definitive actress in the part.

15 minutes ago, John said:

Randall's stint on ATWT after RH was that always as a fill in?

 

Did people like Robin Mattson better than Robyn Millian's take on Dee?

According to the soap columns at the time, Randall Edwards was brought in as a temporary fill-in for Julie Ridley (either due to pregnancy or illness?). When Ridley chose not to return, they asked Edwards to remain in the role, but she declined (presumably for the same reason she left RH).

To me it's hard to compare Robyn Millan to the others since she was around for such a short time (5 episodes). However, she did have the advantage that the writing for Delia was consistent in that period. The issue with Robin Mattson wasn't just that she was not the right fit as a performer, but the writing for the character also felt off-kilter during that period. Her Delia was disconnected from the character's history, and it didn't help that most of her story was with two actors who were also new to the show (Franz Luz and Harve Presnell, both of whom were jettisoned when Mattson opted not to renew her contract).

On 5/23/2020 at 9:37 PM, BetterForgotten said:

It was a beautiful and fitting finale. My only gripe is I wished they had aired the full end credits on its final episode instead of the abbreviated end credits. I feel that way about all finales, just list everyone who worked on the show one last time...

Strangely enough, if the episodes posted on YouTube are any indication, they didn't run the full credits at all the final week the show was on the air - Claire Labine must have been really squeezing every second out of the airtime ABC allocated them.

1 hour ago, John said:

when did Robin Mattson start as Delia?

She debuted on June 15, 1984, and stayed with the show through early December. Here's two promos for her debut:
 

There are three episodes featuring her on YouTube, from July 27, November 21, and November 22. The episodes posted by the freeflyur, shessoweet88, and MHTV PCNYSTATE accounts originated from a set of 80s RH tapes collected and distributed by a SoapNet poster named Wanda back around 2005, and that set actually included a bunch of episodes with RM as Delia from June and July 1984 (including her debut), but for whatever reason those have never made it to YouTube (perhaps the quality made them difficult to digitize). I used to have a set of them on VHS, but I'm pretty sure my parents junked them at some point--unfortunate as I would've tried to post them to YT myself otherwise. 

Not that this is saying anything new, but it's remarkable how divorced RM's Delia felt from what either Ilene Kristen or Randall Edwards brought to the role.

51 minutes ago, John said:

With Roscoe's return on RH in 1988, was Walt's Joe not really Joe after all?

They didn't alter that when Roscoe returned to the role in 1988, but it's my understanding that they dropped any references to Joe having undergone reconstructive facial surgery. I'm assuming they thought the inconsistency was worth it in order to wrap up the character's story with Roscoe back in the role.

By the way @slick jones, my notes have Walt Willey appearing as Hawk on RH in 1985. David Purdham also appeared as Father Emmerich on RH in 1985, officiating the wedding of Siobhan Ryan and Max Dubujak. I'm not sure if he appeared in the intervening years, though.

1 hour ago, DRW50 said:

 

I don't think Andrew and Nana were on at the same time. I do wonder if the lack of chemistry was more of a factor than Dirty Harry. I have a hard time believing daytime viewers were that big on the film to the point where they couldn't accept him. 

My impression from interviews with Claire Labine is that the Dirty Harry factor was really just a hangup among the higher ups at ABC and that they eventually won that battle, perhaps because he wasn't resonating as much with the audience as they would have liked.

Sign me up as another fan of DHK, though the show got lucky with its Franks (at least post-Michael Hawkins).

The same Facebook account that has been posting episodes of Loving recently shared an episode of RH that originally aired on December 28, 1984: https://www.facebook.com/DaytimeTVPreservationSociety/videos/550670625576817/.

I still wonder sometimes why Clem vanished without a trace and then they didn't have any other black characters until the last few years of the show.

Yeah, there was definitely a surprising paucity of black characters until the late 1980s. Minor recurring characters like Miriam George and Nell Carter's Ethel Green (and later "Flash," a worker at Greenberg's Deli) aside, the show didn't have a major black character until the introduction of Tracey Ross as Diana Douglas, a DA with whom Frank was involved while Jill was with Dakota Smith. Diana's father was against her involvement with a white man; once Frank reunited with Jill, Diana stuck around for a few months before being written out. The show also introduced Irving Allen Lee as Dr. Evan Cooper around the same time; he ran the Riverside Clinic with Pat and became involved with Chris Hannold (Lydia Hannibal). Neither one was especially prominent, though; after departing in 1988, they both returned for the final episode but didn't have any lines, which tells you a lot about how important they were to the show.

I did love Tichina Arnold as Zena, though. She was great on her own but also played well off Michael Levin.

So did Faith and Jill make up in 1982 and then they were close until Faith left the show?

Faith and Jill made up after Faith almost died during the Meritkara storyline. They remained close until the end of 1983. Jill moved back into the Coleridge house and brought Frank and John Reid with her, as well as her newly discovered mother Bess and half-sister Maggie. Understandably, Faith felt a bit suffocated, especially considering that it had been a kind of silent agreement among the Coleridge siblings that Faith had control over the majority of the brownstone, Roger's downstairs apartment aside. Faith ended up leaving without saying goodbye to either Jill or Pat (her last scenes were with Roger and Bob, who took her to the airport). Over the years, there were a lot of references to Faith that made it clear that she had reconciled with Jill; Pat also mentioned having spoken to her shortly before he married Melinda Weaver. When Faith returned during the last two weeks of the show, she got along fine with Roger and Jill.

Who were your (or anyone reading this) favorite actors for each recast role?

Mary: Definitely Kate Mulgrew. No one else came close, though Mary Carney was my favorite of the fauxMarys. Kathleen Tolan = worst recast the show ever had, easily.

Delia: Ilene Kristen. I loved Randall (she was my first Delia) and everything she did with the character, but Ilene remains my favorite. She did some stellar dramatic work during her first stint and was great portraying the more comic Delia of the show's final years.

Siobhan: Sarah Felder. After she left, the character really became watered down. Marg Helgenberger and Barbara Blackburn were both really good but didn't quite achieve the same heights as Felder. Ann Gillespie was mediocre. Carrell Myers was bland and forgettable.

Pat: Malcolm Groome, whose Pat was one of my favorite characters. John Blazo and Robert Finoccoli were too wooden. Haven't seen enough of Patrick James Clarke to judge him.

Nancy: Nana Visitor, though that's not saying much. I found every actress in this role forgettable and the Nancy/Pat relationship dull.

Faith: Catherine Hicks, who was the only Faith I truly loved. I didn't have much of a problem with Karen Morris-Gowdy, who was admittedly icier than Hicks. Faith Catlin was painful and Nancy Barrett wasn't around long enough to make an impression.

Frank: Daniel Hugh-Kelly, but this was a hard one to pick. Geoff Pierson and John Sanderford were virtually just as good, IMO. Sanderford had great chemistry with Nancy Addison. Andrew Robinson was fine but started out very wooden, though even in the beginning he wasn't nearly as bad as Michael Hawkins.

Joe: Richard Muenz. I thought Roscoe Born was fine but I've only seen the first year of his run, when his character became too despicable for me to ever really care about. Michael Hennessy was a nonentity in the part, and Walt Willey just wasn't Joe.

No doubt she was under a mandate from ABC to GH the show, but her efforts were taken too far to the extreme. There was simply no heart to the show under her...the blowing up of Ryan's Bar has to be one of the most unforgivable acts ever in daytime drama.

There definitely wasn't any heart to Smith's conception of the show. No one ever seemed happy and everyone was at everyone else's throats.

I also hated the way she broke up Jack and Leigh after Labine set them up so beautifully together. Labine and Mayer had them face some obstacles before they were fired, but I loathed how Smith had Jack suddenly cheat on Leigh on an impulse (and then Leigh stayed on for another year and a half simply waiting to see if Jack would reunite with her).

Thanks Sean, for all that info. I really appreciate it. I haven't quite gotten the, for lack of a better word, courage to watch most of the post-1982 episodes yet. I know I should, but I was already becoming so annoyed by the changes in the show in 1980 and 1981, I can't imagine what would have happened later on.

I can understand that, though I enjoyed the 1980-81 episodes (not to the same degree as what came before, but... ). There's not much out there from 1982, though it's essentially a continuation of what came before. 1983 was a banner year for the show -- the focus was squarely on the Ryans and Coleridges and the Charlotte Greer storyline was a classic.

1984 and 1985 were both pretty horrendous and don't have much in the way of compelling storylines (though I did find the Dakota storyline intriguing, and that began in October 1985). Things really did pick up once Ilene Kristen's Delia returned in the fall of 1986. The Maggie/Roger/Delia triangle was pretty golden, though the Operation Overlord storyline with Max, Carrell Myers' Siobhan (very bland), and Walt Willey's Joe was going on concurrently and was not very good (though that may be because of the actors involved).

Once Labine returned in February 1987, the show solidified the quality it had started to pick up during the last days of Taggart and King. Granted, it was not necessarily the Ryan's Hope of old, as there was an entire new generation of characters at point - but it was consistently well-written and well-acted with attention returning to the Ryans and Coleridges. And I loved how so many people came back during the last month and a half the show was on-air.

I don't think Teri Keane played Norma in Norma's original run, did she?

Ruth Jaroslow played Norma from 1977 through 1979. Sally Ann Golden played her for one episode in 1980.

Was Lem's still around later on?

I'm not sure how long it was around based on the tapes I have, but Mrs. Lem does make an appearance in the 1984 St. Patrick's Day episode. I'm not sure if she was still being played by the original actress, Mary Mon Toy.

Thanks Sean! So was Ryan with Chaz at the end? I remember some kind of cringeworthy scenes from a late St. Patrick's Day episode when Ryan was throwing pots and pans in the kitchen and someone said, "She's just like her mother" (which I thought was odd as Mary never did anything like that). I can't remember who she was with at that time.

By the end of 1988, Chaz and Ryan had broken up, and Chaz was pursuing a relationship with Nancy Don Lewis. During the show's last week, Ryan and Chaz reunited, and Nancy Don ultimately decided to follow Ben Shelby to Australia.

Do you think it's true what some say that the Dubujaks were a burden to the show? Someone once told me that the Dubjuak sister or daughter was the worst character ever on the show. I think you'd have to work hard to beat Kim for that honor though.

I'm only familiar with the show's post-1982 run from tapes I got on the SoapNet board (most of which have been posted by someone else on YouTube), but I loathed the Dubujaks. From roughly early 1984 to mid-1985, they took over the show to a much greater degree than the Kirklands ever did.

Max Dubujak (played by Daniel Pilon from 1983-1987 and briefly in 1988) was the easiest to bear, but the writing for the character was very inconsistent. Smith wrote him as someone who was undoubtedly a bad guy before Taggart and King came in and reformed him via his romance with Siobhan only for them to later revert his character back to the way he was originally conceived.

But yes, his daughter, Jacqueline (Gerit Quealy), was awful. Easily worse than Kimbo, IMO. Utterly pointless and nothing but a shrew.

The other Dubujaks -- Max's ex-wife Gabrielle (Susan Scannell) and his mother Chantal (Marisa Pavan) -- were also a waste of time, and their storyline (with Max and Siobhan) really dominated the show in mid-1985. Scannell played out a storyline in which her character had been locked up in a French sanatarium for years against her will. It turned out that Max and Gabrielle had gotten into an argument during which she hit her head. He thought she was dead; Chantal ushered her away and locked her up against her will for 20 years. Chantal later hired a double to impersonate her and secure the money that had been left to her in Max's father's will, only for the real Gabrielle to escape and wreak havoc. [unrelated fact: I believe Pavan was the only actor on contract to receive special billing -- she was always listed at the end of the credits with 'and' before her name.]

I wonder why Falken Smith did a bad job on here, as she did well elsewhere. Then again she wasn't that popular at GL either.

The biggest problem with her tenure was the way she mistreated the show's core characters, either completely rewriting their personalities or putting them on the backburner.

Jill, Frank, and Roger really suffered as characters. Jill and Frank as a couple became unbearable. Frank constantly tried to hook up with Maggie, Jill's half-sister, while Jill frequently flirted with Max. They would then endlessly yell at each other about one another's perceived infidelity. When Taggart and King came onboard, they backburnered the two for a few months before giving Jill amnesia.

Smith reverted Roger to an alcoholic and had him attempt to rape Maggie. He then also attacked Frank with a two-by-four.

Maeve and Johnny were both heavily backburnered. For most of Smith's tenure, Ryan's simply didn't exist; it was bombed by the mob in January 1984 and didn't reopen until Thanksgiving. Pat basically served no other purpose than to have someone for Frank and Siobhan to confide in. Seneca and Bob served similar purposes, and both simply disappeared.

What did you think of Dave Greenberg? Did they ever show Ida Greenberg or was she gone by that time?

Dave wasn't bad, though I didn't find him particularly interesting as a lead character. I never totally bought his relationship with Maggie (the writing for her was also very schizo under Smith), and there wasn't much passion in his relationship with Katie Thompson, either.

Norma Greenberg (played by Teri Keane) did appear on the show in June 1985, as both she and her husband Saul (Sam Gray) returned for Dave and Maggie's wedding. They stuck around long enough to see Katie admit her love for Dave at a party celebrating a production Dave and Katie put together.

Who was Ryan with after her marriage to Rick ended?

Was Siobhan with another mobster at the end?

After Rick and Ryan's marriage ended in August 1987, Ryan was primarily involved with Chaz Saybrooke (played by Brian McGovern), a yuppie-in-training of sorts who was introduced via his aunt Emily Hall, a social worker who dated Jack Fenelli. Mark D'Angelo, a journalist like Ryan, was also interested in Ryan around the same time, but it was very one-sided.

Siobhan married Max Dubujak in 1985. Max was a mobster who also happened to be Joe's former father-in-law and was also the man who ordered a hit on Joe that forced Joe into hiding. Max had supposedly reformed by the time he married Siobhan, but, when Joe returned in 1986 played by Walt Willey, she became aware of some of his more nefarious dealings. A series of events led to Max plummeting over a cliff, and Joe and Siobhan re-married and left Riverside in 1987. When Siobhan and Joe (now played again by Roscoe Born) returned in 1988, Max revealed himself to be alive and broke into their apartment, only to be killed by Joe. Unbeknownst to Joe and Siobhan, Max planted a bomb in a music box in their apartment; it ultimately killed Joe. In the final two months of the show, Siobhan found herself gradually falling in love with detective Fenno Moore, the man who had helped Joe and Siobhan investigate Max upon their return in 1988. In the show's final episode, Siobhan - after a heart-to-heart with Maeve - accepted Fenno's offer to be his partner.

It's a shame SoapNet never aired episodes past-1981. Virtually everything written by Pat Falken Smith (from November 1983-March 1985) is admittedly god-awful with lots of awful plots centering around hastily introduced characters as well as a lot of veteran characters being written completely out-of-character, but there are a lot of wonderful stories that followed the end of Smith's tenure. Tom King and Millee Taggart's tenure had a pretty shaky beginning, but they eventually got the show back on track. And Claire Labine's returns -- in 1987 as well as in 1983 -- boasted some great stories.

Marland was the show's HW through at least November 1984 - I have an episode from that month on tape (tried uploading it online, but the video is too jumpy) which credits him.