All My Shadows

100% this. I had no problem accepting her as Liza just because she was that good/fun to have, but you really just had to let go of any notion that she would be at all similar to Marcy Walker's Liza. Thankfully, JL played really well into what was written, so it was easy to mostly look the other way. Re: the 1982 cast photo. I can definitely name maybe 90% of the cast, but I do notice that Eileen Herlie, Hugh Franklin, and Kay Campbell aren't present. HF and KC wouldn't be around for much longer after this period, but they were both still regularly appearing at the time, so I wonder where they were. EH, for sure.

Oh, absolutely. I didn't realize it's only been a year and a half since he passed. I love that thing with the dead leaves, and as much as Bridget hated it, I think it tied their show together perfectly. A new era for an old show, but it's still afternoon soap.

I feel like it’s been a while since we’ve had a TPTB loss of this magnitude in daytime. I’ve never watched a full episode of Santa Barbara, but any and all that I’ve seen of their GL is great soap. It really was the perfect mix of old and new - character-wise but also in style, story content, dialogue, etc. I wish their ATWT could have gelled as well. It hurts my heart to watch our legends leave without ever getting the widespread respect they deserve. I hope BD knew that her work was/is still remembered, discussed, and enjoyed to this day.

Oh, Megan lol that one delusional aunt that the family only begrudgingly claims

Probably not! Of course, their highest-rated episode ever was Christmas 1986 with Den serving Angie with divorce papers. At least no one died LOL I'm okay with that being the show's thing, I just know I'll never go head-first into enjoying it unless they really blow me away (no bombs necessary).

I found myself losing interest pretty quickly in the week or so leading up to Christmas. I've never been a fan of the UK soap mentality of death and destruction for the holidays, so nothing at all about the "body on the floor" has filled me with excitement or anticipation. I knew it was coming, but I just didn't care. I'll be more interested in the aftermath and how everyone moves on past this, since the day-by-day won't be "all roads lead to the body on the floor" anymore (hopefully). Like others have said, knowing that everything was being set up for this made it hard to take many things seriously. Stacey and Jack, for example. It would have been easier to take Jack sleeping with a random slappa from the Vic than Stacey, who knows Denise and is a regular character and has to "regret" it afterward. Just let him get off with a random thot! I'll catch up this weekend, probably, but I'm really just looking forward to seeing Jay. That's the kind of Christmas drama I like - reflecting on a crappy year but having hope for the future. I don't need sht on fire as "Bodies" by Drowning Pool plays in the background.

Was coming here to ask the same question. On the occasion of the show's 44th anniversary, we needs to know.

Popping in to say, as I do from time to time, that Josh should have been Mark’s son from a drug-fueled one-night stand. Would have given us a reason to see Mark more regularly at the time and made Josh loads more interesting.

This is so unexpected and heartbreaking! So many of the soap names that still register as “young” in mind are leaving us, and it’s such an unfortunate reminder of how precious and fleeting life really is. I wasn’t the hugest Antonio fan when I first started watching OLTL, but I def came to appreciate both KDLR and David Fumero - not just as incredibly sexy men but as solid soap performers. This is truly a loss for Llanview.

That was beautiful, and I think the thing I appreciate the most is that no one is singled out as being "more" or "most" important.

Without going down the entire list, I can say that David Jacobs, Piper Laurie, and Ryan O'Neal aren't omissions as they never regularly worked in daytime. Having connections to primetime soaps doesn't make one part of the daytime community.

Was it really, though? Asking as a serious question. In honor of Ellen Holly's passing, I went back and watched those 1975/1977 episodes on YT, and they left the same impression on me as they had when I first watched, that the show was truly a big ensemble through the 70s, with the Woleks and Craigs more at the center of everything. Maybe it just happens to be that those particular episodes show that.

That guy is an idiot. I'm not sure why it was considered important to include Olivia and Suzanne. It's not like having their faces on screen for two seconds a piece would bring in extra viewers. It really just reeks of desperation to be seen as mainstream, and it's pathetic that this is still what TPTB associated with daytime choose to do. As this genre withers away, we need people to protect its legacy and legends, but we just keep getting stone-steppers working really really hard at pretending to give a damn so that they can get to the job they really want.

Pardon me, what?

Y'all fighting over people who don't know or care about y'all is wild lol Also - how yall can compare the last ten years, with only four real soaps, to anything before that is beyond me. I don't think anything from the last decade is supposed to make any sense

I watched the In Memoriam and Susan's Lifetime Achievement segments on YouTube, and that's it lolol Susan's segment was fantastic outside of Shemar thinking we're in 2012. The In Memoriam...ugh. What exactly is the rationale for focusing so much attention on the live singer during the segment? Why is there a live singer? And did I see correctly - when we see the bits with the live singer, there's literally a random logo on the screen in the venue? No one has any business claiming that there's "only so much time" for the segment when so much of that time is wasted. I also don't understand how they could put "& The Bay" for people who were on real daytime soaps and also on The Bay but couldn't be bothered to say that Elizabeth Hubbard was on The Doctors "& As the World Turns" or that Quinn Redeker was on Days "& Y&R" or the fact that they just called John Aniston a Lifetime Achievement honoree but couldn't be bothered to say that he was popular on three long-running soaps. And as a fan of both Olivia Newton-John and Suzanne Somers, neither one had any business being included in this. Daytime is its own community and lost so many of its own people, there's nothing gained from trying to co-opt stars who belong to other areas of entertainment, especially when there were plenty of true daytimers who were left out. Olivia Newton-John as "songwriter, As the World Turns" but not a peep for Nancy Frangione, who played two of daytime's most pivotal roles, is a joke, and whomever made those decisions should be ashamed of themselves.

As much work he did after - and as many small scandals he created - I will always only see Ryan O’Neal as clean-cut Rodney Harrington, and I almost think that’s for the best.

Flash forward to Spring 2022, when a smear campaign was launched in my community by a bunch of bored, unhappy, miserable fraus because I'd been showing the first part of the 2016 edition of Roots to facilitate discussion for my unit on the Atlantic slave trade. Thankfully, the entire community of people who actually know me showed up and showed out in my support, but SHEESH. It never bothered me that there were fictionalized parts. Maybe it's because I grew up 20 years after it originally aired, but I always considered it historical fiction - the characters and their stories weren't real, but they just as well could have been because the circumstances were painfully real. My big three when it comes to the trashy/fun mini-series are Hollywood Wives, Bare Essence, and Scruples. I became entranced with them when the WE network would regularly air "Monday Minis" in the early 2000s. IIRC, they'd show a part each Monday with a repeat on Saturday or Sunday mornings. Truly divine!! I also enjoyed Sins and Deceptions but haven't watched them in years. Never was TOO big on Lace, but you can't not love the "btches" line, especially with Phoebe Cates's hideous French accent. There are some others I vaguely remember watching on one of the various Encore channels. Celebrity, Rage of Angels, etc.

It just so happened that when reunion movies/specials were a big deal circa 2001-2005, I was regularly watching Kate & Allie on Oxygen and was a huge fan. I wanted so badly for a follow-up to the show, but even then it seemed to be more or less "forgotten" in the canon of 80s family sitcoms. I didn't realize SSJ was retired.

Rosalynn Carter, Henry Kissinger, and Sandra Day O'Connor - if "it comes in 3's" was ever a thing, it was now.

This is the type of rabbit hole I've missed going down lol Susan Saint James, where you at, girl? Steffy Powers, are you free?

Part of me thinks Michele Lee has been blowing Donna's phone up like, "DONNA, you KNOW I would have loved to have been in on this. NO ONE can purposely chew scenery like ME, and we could have done an EXCELLENT update to the Pollyanna speech." "Absolutely, Michele, we'll call you for the sequel." I'm glad they've given us this to indulge over. I wouldn't be mad if it became a yearly series of movies where they really did add more people into the fold, uncovering more and more of their co-stars from "Great Lakes" in a Love Boat-type way of just throwing in all of our faves from the era. Hallmark would have been more likely to go down that route.

Morgan's been on an interesting path the last few years. I follow her closely on Instagram, and she's been wearing several unflattering wigs lately (particularly, there's a short one that she seems to like a lot). She's still active and always up to something, and that's all that matters in the long run. Who knows how to stream this lol Also - I'm surprised we haven't brought this up yet, but I wonder if SuLu might've been considered for this, since she did Army Wives and Devious Maids on Lifetime post-AMC. She obviously stands out because she was more than just an "80s lady" in soaps, but she would've still fit the mold of being larger-than-life in that decade. I think my daytime version would star Susan Lucci, Kim Zimmer, Jane Elliot, Linda Dano, and Erika Slezak.

Has anyone taken the time to build a list of the show’s longest-serving cast members? Like a Top 50 or Top 100? I’m curious as to look at one, but if it hasn’t been done, I might be interested in taking on the project.

My view of the Generations opening titles has always been that it came out in an era where baby boomers were ready to be retrospective about literally anything/everything from the previous 40 years. The Wonder Years, Quantum Leap, Platoon, a resurgence of the Monkees and the Beach Boys, etc. Couple that with the era also being about very safe/wholesome depictions of black people in the US (The Cosby Show, the push for MLK Day, etc.), and you end up with a history of America from Jim Crow to Debbi Morgan in just under a minute. Loving should have focused more on the college and less on the families (with a more interesting title).