All My Shadows

I don't think it's a reunion for them to sit and talk about their specific storylines as much as it's all of these people with a shared experience (all of whom were on the show with at least half of the others) coming together to discuss the legacy of a show that made them all famous and that they all remain very connected to.

RIP!!! The Rifleman has long been my favorite western, and the father-son chemistry between Chuck and Johnny was so strong and heartwarming. I hope they are reunited.

3 minutes ago, Skin said:

 

I remember someone used to compare soaps to comic books, and I agree with that statement. They have a long history and canon that just dwarfs that of typical television series. Soaps have 30-40-50-60 years of history and continuity that they have to keep straight, and they often can't. Which is why they play fast and loose with the rules. The problems soaps have, are the same problems comic books have had for awhile now. 

Yes, that's a better comparison because of the longevity factor. Comic books, and even just the daily newspaper strips. I remember being a kid on the internet and learning how detailed the history of For Better or For Worse was, down to characters aging as the strip went on for 25+ years, new characters coming in and out, dramatic storylines, etc. If you don't know that that world exists, you're just shocked when you discover it. I'm starting to see that most of my friends who are my age feel the exact same way toward soaps. We're just old enough to have grown up with grandparents and others who watched, so they'll always mention how so-and-so is "still" on the show, but they really have no clue the magnitude of the genre.

I'll never forget when I was in my high school US history class, we were learning about the early days of radio, including soaps, and my teacher (a man I truly loved and admired and is the reason why I now teach high school history) said that GL was "the first soap" and that Y&R had began on radio. I tried to correct him, but he assumed I didn't know what I was talking about and even tried to one-up me by mentioning Edge of Night, I guess bc it had been off the air for over 20 years then and clearly my 16-year-old self had never heard of it. Truly hilarious because I was spending so much time here on SON and at WoST at the time. Of course I knew Edge of goddamn Night, bruh. But my point is that this man, who was in his early 50s and literally grew up through the heyday of soaps as niche entertainment then mainstream and was a history teacher, was adamant that Y&R had begun on radio in the 1930s. It's ludicrous for us to even think about because we just KNOW a million reasons why that makes absolutely no sense. But literally anyone else under the age of 40 would have never questioned it.

14 hours ago, FrenchBug82 said:

There is no reason soaps abroad can be thriving while dying here. The structural issues like streaming and stuff are the same in Europe than they are here. Something these producers should ponder.

The difference has always been and will always be daypart. Even in the UK, the daytime soap Doctors gets peanuts in comparison to the primetime heavy-hitters. Emmerdale didn't get a whole lot of attention in the 70s until it went primetime at the end of the decade (I want to say 1978?).

When looking at structural and institutional strength, I think a more apt comparison would be between UK soaps and something like The Simpsons, SNL, or Law and Order SVU. Those shows are chugging along on their past glory, and I think everyone involved (cast, crew, fans - everyone) knows that the best days are behind them, but they're doing well enough to keep going. You can do that in primetime, where a hit show can be a mainstream press item for years and years and years. Daytime soaps were mainstream for what, 10-15 years? The popularity soaps had in the 90s is long gone, and they have absolutely nothing to rest on anymore - nothing that will push them to be better and call them out when they are not.

I've said it for years, but literally no one cares about daytime. It sucks because daytime once thrived on its own success with its own canon of hit shows, stars, and customs. It didn't try to be primetime because it had its own identity, and being daytime was not a bad thing. Mainstream popularity and approval was not needed because daytime people approved of daytime. I guess when everything blew up in the 80s, the thirst for being "mainstream" drowned out the satisfaction with being its own entity, and now we've just had to deal with crappy attempt after crappy attempt to win back that mainstream attention that really seemed to initially come along by chance rather than by design.

I almost want to compare soaps to anime. I don't watch anime, never have, really know nothing about it, etc. But people who know and watch anime, really know and watch anime, despite it being a completely foreign world to someone who's never watched. That's basically the position soaps are in - except anime's popularity is way way wayyyyy more widespread.

I agree with y'all, and I guess that's why I'm easier on soaps and other shows if they don't necessarily get it right. I'm not easy on them enough to still watch or support something I don't like, but I do think that "trying" is worth something. After being excited for a short while, I ended up absolutely HATING Luke/Noah on ATWT and thought they were embarrassing. But other gay men, especially the older ones who'd been watching the show for years and years, loved them. So while they just made me roll my eyes, I understood that they meant more to others. Still wanted that relationship blown to smithereens for something more fun, but y'know.

GLEE. I hated it. But what it did for many gay youth can't be denied. I know that someone will reply that there were other majorly problematic things with the show, but my point is that it served tons of gay kids who otherwise would not have gotten that confidence boost or feeling of community.

I plan to spend my afternoons and some weekends rewatching all of Nickelodeon's Big Time Rush, and I fully intend to write tons of filthy, messy, bitchy fan fiction about it this summer. I'm ready, boys.

40 minutes ago, Faulkner said:

Gay men are stereotypical soap viewers, and there is certainly a preponderance of gay men on this board, but has there ever been a reliable study on how much of the daytime soap audience is LGBTQ or specifically gay men? Google is turning up nada...

 

Speaking of which, the LGBTQ community has a lot of shared experiences and cultural spaces, yet there are a lot of different communities represented in that acronym. Sort of like “Asian-American” has a connotation, yet could mean everything from Chinese- and Korean-American to Indian-, Pakistani-, Filipino-, Malay-, or Vietnamese-American. There are so many different experiences within LGBTQIA+, that it’s hard to imagine a daytime soap having the scope to truly represent all of it with more than mere lip service. That’s not to say they couldn’t have done a much better job...after all, they’ve have years to do it (in reality about 40 since portrayals of LGBTQ have been reasonably mainstream).

Would such a study really be reliable/accurate, though? Isn't it a thing that any studies on how many LGBTQ people there are (followed by any qualifier) can automatically be assumed to be lowballing numbers due to how many LGBTQ people are still in the closet? I'm interested in seeing what the numbers would be, then wondering what the numbers really are.

I agree with your second paragraph. That's always been the thing with minority representation, period, IMO. You will never be able to represent everyone who fits into a community if that community is the one main thing those people all have in common. The Cosby Show didn't represent all black Americans, and Queer as Folk didn't represent all gay men. Sh!t, it's been a very, very long time (if ever) since daytime attempted to represent straight, white Americans outside of basic archetypes.

I think, as viewers, we need to have that basic understanding before watching anything targeted at "our community." Just because the show/story is about gay men doesn't mean it's going to be entirely relatable to me...but it could be completely relatable to someone else. It's frustrating because if a soap insists on having one "gay storyline" running, each one of us will want it to be what we, individually, want it to be, and one storyline can't be all of those things.

I think I still have a subscription to the website, at least I think they're still charging me for one. It was frustrating trying to navigate it from day one, so I never bothered trying to get into it via the site, but I was fine with continuing to pay for it just to show support. I'm ready to go looking for those early episodes, though.

A new story every day - 250 or a year...did they ever really think that they could sustain that? Thankfully they ended up going full-on soap, but if not, it might've been interesting to see it as a weekly Saturday afternoon anthology (along the lines of something like Death Valley Days or INSIGHT) or even the week-long stories done alongside the regular TV season with summer reruns so that they only had to do 25-30 stories a year. I'm super curious as to how many stories they'd had planned out as they worked their way through those early months.

On 4/3/2021 at 5:26 PM, DramatistDreamer said:

Because P&G is pettier than Irna Phillips was. Phillips likely would sold a bigger rotation of box sets and collections.

I would pay top dollar for box sets of surviving episodes from across the show's run featuring Irna's commentary from the grave. Pure comedy!

The Decades channel airs a nightly program called "Through the Decades" that highlights a lot of "this day in history" type of stuff, and there was a feature on ATWT on its anniversary. I think the only real clip they showed was from the early 60s episode where Lisa comes down the stairs to discover her male friend has been invited to have dinner with the Hughes family. There were some nice clips of interviews with Don, Kathryn, Helen, and Eileen from when they were taping Chris and Nancy's anniversary party in 1986. I wish they'd thrown a bone at EON.

2 minutes ago, Forever8 said:

I still remember when ATWT was heading for a Luke/Maddie/Noah triangle. I thought Jake Silbermann and Alexandra Chando had chemistry as Noah and Maddie. But we all know what eventually happened there. 

Yep. One of ATWT's biggest WTF moments for me was them bypassing what could have been a good, juicy bi-triangle in order to rush Luke/Noah together in the span of a handful of episodes. Pitiful.

I'm still annoyed all these years later.

I feel like there might have been some gentle comedy between "Berta" and Papa Bauer in the 50s and 60s, especially playing on her neurotic, meddlesome nature vs. his curmudgeonly voice of reason role.

On 3/24/2021 at 11:07 PM, Dylan said:

I could see a passions reboot, I didn't watch but im catching up on YouTube and its crazy lol wasn't it popular with the young viewers?

Yes, it was, and the crazy thing is, I didn't really realize it at the time it was on the air, but I'm starting to see it now. I follow two or three millennial-targeted Instagram accounts, and there have been a couple Passions posts, mostly with Tabitha and Timmy, and the comments blow up with memories of watching it after school. I never watched regularly, but my routine from junior high until graduation was to get home, fix a bowl of cereal, and switch back and forth between the second halves of Passions and GL (with the occasional GH thrown in).

And honestly, a reimagining/reboot/re-whatever of it wouldn't be a bad idea. It was only on the air for eight years, debuted only 22 years ago, and was always targeted at a young audience. So there's not a whole big decades-long canon to pay attention to, it would be easy and not very jarring to produce it as a primetime/streaming series (as opposed to the time it would take us to get used to watching Erica Kane on single-camera film rather than multi-camera video), and the audience who mostly watched the original show would likely be receptive to any major or minor changes in the new show.

But take something like ATWT. 54 years of source material. Would you just retell the story of the original Hughes family? But then some fans would be wondering where Carly and Jack or Lily and Holden were. Well, let's still include them in the series - so Lily and Holden would be teenagers...alongside Penny and Bob Hughes? And what teenagers today are named Penny and Bob? Okay, well, let's make just make it a continuation of the original series. Do we acknowledge that ten years have passed? Or do we just pick up from where the last episode left off? Who will you still have from the original series? How many new characters will you create? You can't have too many newbies but you also can't just put the show's success in the hands of the small audience who was watching in its waning days.

It's like a reboot of one of the classic long-runners really can't be a full reboot. There's just too much there that can't be ignored. Whereas with a Passions, you can basically start all over from scratch and no one would be upset about it.

I just want to chime in to add to the chorus of people establishing that Zach did indeed kill Kendall as a character. I wasn't even against them in the beginning - the courtship was good soap, and IIRC, they took their time with it. Once they were together and then became a foursome with Ryan and Greenlee, it was all over...despite the 15 years of pleas here on SON that Ryan and Greenlee alone were the problem and that Zach and Kendall were being dragged down by them. Lol. No. It was a four-way (ew!) all the way down to rock bottom, and it's why I ditched it in favor of other soaps that were better at the time.

It's just really, really hard for me to forget the days when Ryan and Greenlee got all the hate for being "airhogs" yet every. damn. month. we had the FOUR of them on the very top, USUALLY with Kendall at #1...INCLUDING WHEN SHE WAS IN A COMA. And as has already been said - she was no longer interesting by this point.

The last year, with the creepy minister, was better, but by then it was too late.

13 minutes ago, Pine Charles said:

Did you like Gillian??

I did, but she was killed off maybe a month into my watching, so I mostly saw her interactions in heaven with Jesse before she accepted her own death.

Bianca/Laura would have made so much sense! I actually started watching a few months shy of twenty years ago when the big storyline was Leo harassing Ryan to get Gillian's heart for Laura. I could not care less what people will think of me for this, but I LOVED Laura/Leo, their hospital room wedding, etc. I mean, I know better now, but I was 11 lol

All of the "They should have..." stories/ideas that we come up with only would have worked with a slower-paced show than what AMC was in its last decade and a half. I feel like even if they did some of the things we wanted them to, it still would have been hollow compared to how the ideas exist in our heads. Still, it's fun to think about how some false notes could have been improved. I will forever want Asher Pike to be the jock who regularly schtupped the Daniel Kennedy version of Petey Cortlandt instead of a weak and useless extension of the Cortlandt family.

18 hours ago, Forever8 said:

I think the new soap(s) might fall in the line of Casualty, Holby City, and perhaps Red Rock; more than a daily series i.e. Corrie, Emmerdale, EastEnders. 

That's what I'm thinking, too. It's just really too hard to believe that either America or the UK would debut any new soaps that fall in line with either country's traditional soaps. For better or for worse, the days of new multi-episode/week soaps are far behind us.

I say it all the time, but this is the first time I say it in 2021 - Josh should have been Mark's long-lost son from a short-lived relationship just prior to his arrival in PV in 1976. No unabortion, and Mark (and maybe Ellen) back on the show with some solid purpose. Then go full-steam ahead with Josh as the male version of young Erica.

I wasn't a regular watcher during his heyday on the show, but any time I did tune in, he was one of the brighter spots and always so full of life. Definitely heir to the JT Yorke throne.

16 hours ago, Paul Raven said:

Marsha Mason "Sibs" ABC 1991 

Ryan O'Neal 'Good Sports' (with Farrah Fawcett) CBS 1991

Would Ryan O'Neal's success on Peyton Place count as him "conquering" TV?

I need to binge all of this season so far except for the first episode, and I'm getting itchy to do it because I keep seeing the previews/reviews on the official Instagram account, and I love love love any type of closed-environment episodes, so that cabin ep has me excited.

I want a spin-off centered on Mo. She cleans her act up and moves to be closer to family in another state (maybe...Louisiana?!). I need it.

5 hours ago, Vee said:

Who can forget Tom and Erica's "disco deceit!"

Truly one of AMC’s most iconic and daytime’s most underrated scenes. “Because it SEEMS to be the ONLY WAY to get the TROOF OTTA YOU!!!”

Cliff and Nina - I can take or leave them. But give me the complete Tom/Erica journey, and my heart is yours. I would be so satisfied with a streaming service starting with the first hour episode from 4/25/77 and just going in order.

2 hours ago, gimmetoo said:

So much of Cliff and Nina's original popularity was because of the rich characters and talented actors in their orbit:  the disapproving and scheming Palmer; the mysterious mother-figure Monique née Daisy: the gothic grandmotherly housekeeper Myra; and the wicked other woman Sybil.  And I do think Taylor Miller was perfectly cast as the fairy-tale heroine.  The start of Cliff and Nina's romance was some of Agnes Nixon's best work IMO.  

It's funny, because when I say I want to see more of early Cliff/Nina, I guess what I really mean is I want to see more of Sybil. The stuff with her in the C/N wedding ep is great, IMO, to the point of being way more interesting than the actual wedding. AMC was great at humanizing those supercouple spoilers.

As much as I love classic Corrie, I've never spent a whole lot of time on Mike, but of course, I know how huge of a part he is of the show's history and success. RIP to him.

I want to rewatch Flamingo Road from beginning to end so so so so bad. I watched it when I was 13, for goodness sake. It makes no sense why there isn't a one-and-done DVD set of both seasons with Morgan and Mark's faces plastered all over it.

Paper Dolls is on YouTube. I feared during my whole time watching it that I'd go to it one day and it'd all be gone, but it's still up. I think there's a clip of the original movie, but not the full thing.

Cliff and Nina were absolutely played tf out by 1986-1987 for SURE. They're a great example of overdoing the make up/break up storylines for a supercouple and having no idea what to do with them as happily married.

I'd kill to see their beginnings to see how the magic began, because based solely on all I've seen from 1983-1989, I've never been crazy about them.