All My Shadows

Yep, that's it!

Possibly, but they would have had to make some major changes. In all the 50s episodes I've seen, the front door is to the right of the screen, but the staircase does still wrap around the fireplace. I'm getting into this era, and these three (Ross, O'Rourke, and Dalton) have three of the most distinctive voices I've ever heard in soaps, even the kid.

I’ve been watching 1979, and it’s definitely the same house but with some changes. It seems like there was “more” beyond the staircase in the earlier episode, and there’s a narrow window to the left of the front door that isn’t there later, but it’s the same basic set. 1973 1979

She left in 1980 after closing the disco and being attracted to model for Sensuelle. I’m not sure on the specifics of when she returned, but she moved into the Chandler mansion in 1984. While she was in NYC, other characters always ran into her or visited with her while they were in the city, so she still was able to build connections with characters like Tad and Jenny, who were also trying to become models. I think Mark also spent some extended time living with her, too, which is where his drug habits started to ramp up. I want to say Mark kept her apartment for a time after she moved back to PV. Pine Valley Bulletin has Palmer helping Erica to expose Lars Bogard’s “war criminal” past, also in 1984, which would make sense if they had become friendly shortly before her departure from PV four years earlier.

I think Erica being out of town for most of the early 80s helped her maintain cordial relationships with the Cortlandts as she had no opportunities to get under their skin, especially Nina. Keeping her mostly in her own bubble during that time, while I used to think of it as a dumb thing to do for the show's most popular character, really kept her fresh and really allowed her to avoid being hated by everyone all the time. Once they put her back in the PV circle, she had new sparring partners but also had friends. I'm not sure she had many friends left in town by 1979-1980 as much as she had people just tolerating her while rolling their eyes at her. In the episodes I'm currently watching, several months before JL's Opal appears, Erica has already reached out to Palmer for "additional capital" in creating Erica Kane Cosmetics, which would become Enchantment.

Quoting you again to say that I found it! Thank you so much!! I see what you mean now - they had to plaster an instrumental of "I've Had the Time of My Life" over it when clearly this scene predated that song by about nine years. The same montage also has a decent-length no-audio clip of Jeff proposing to Mary Kennicott that I'd never seen before. I would be satisfied if ABC didn't want to go through the trouble of streaming full episodes and chose to just do a slew of clips of this nature. Give me full episodes, but if you can't, I'll take clips.

Yes, I watched the entire thing and thought I missed it! That’s all right, I’m gonna go digging through those anniversary eps now and probably spend way more time than I should enjoying them

Oh, so Kym had some time today.

HamiltonBernique is one of the old guard AMC/OLTL channels! I'm very thankful it's been up for as long as it has been, because watching all of those 1983-1985 episodes/clips of the show really solidified my love for it. Meanwhile, I took a break from 1989 for a while to watch other things and finally came back to it, and the show is just so stale[ at this time. I'll share more thoughts as I keep going, but I'm finally seeing what the press at the time meant about the show being outdated and desperately in need of some sprucing up. It's strange, because most of the frontburner characters had been on for less than 5 years, but their stories were either a rehash of something that had already been done (Palmer's obsession with controlling Melanie) or something that just really did not fit the show (Marissa's super secret agent sht). That strong, strong sense of community from the early/mid 80s is also gone - you can tell they were trying to bring it back (all of a sudden, Natalie, Angie, and Donna are BFFs who exercise together!), but everything feels so aimless.

This thing has so many clips from the first decade that I've never seen before! I had no idea what I was sleeping on. It's so nice to see more of the Erica/Nick relationship - I'd only ever seen Mona walking in on them and then Nick giving her his final kiss-off. What a volatile match they were, especially since their mutual dislike of one another had to have been simmering for years by the time they actually got together. I say it all the time, but look, I'm just gonna say it again. I WANT MORE OF THIS SHT. Lord, they even have some Erica vs. Sara Kingsley in this. I'm outdone.

Ooooh, and it's on YouTube. Let me go get cozy and spend the evening reminiscing with my girl! There's a clip from her interview with Dick! "I mean, there's nothing wrong with our little community, you understand. The people there, they are really the salt of the Earth, you know? They're really hard-working and well-meaning. It's just that...well, they're middle class."

Yep, it's the first episode! I'm not sure it's ever been on YouTube before, but I'm so glad it is. That opening shot panning down into Henderson is like the birth of daytime TV soap opera in just one moment.

Thanks for the tag, Carl, I love it!! Dick’s smarmy style matches up against Erica’s opportunistic vitality - I bet that was a fun arc. It’s a damn shame that we don’t have even a tiny fragment of a scene at the disco anywhere. Though it was only on for a relatively short time, the experience drove so much of who she would be going forward.

Somewhere in the afterlife, Ruth Warrick is staring directly at the camera, for only a second, and saying "@ me next time, bitch," through gritted teeth.

Some might welcome the spot for another talk show, but I figure most central time zone affiliates would slot an hour newscast there. Or they could bring back AMC and OLTL as 30-minute soaps. I know, I know...but look, the buzz surrounding such a return would surely bring in higher ratings than anything they've had in that timeslot in a long, long while. I actually just did some quick reading up, and it seems the show really wasn't cancelled so much as it was reformatted to focus on pandemic news. Still, I wonder how long that lasts as it was only created in response to the pandemic. They've already widened the scope to include non-pandemic news. There's no brand being built with this at alllllll.

I think the difference between post-soap plans from ABC and CBS is that ABC/Frons was so gung ho about how viewers wanted a "new" type of daytime that was mostly free of those moldy old soaps and game shows, characterized by "fun" and "quirky" food shows and...well whatever-the-fck The Revolution was supposed to be. CBS, on the other hand, cancelled the world's oldest soap and replaced it with the second-oldest game show (but it's cheaper) and then cancelled another soap and replaced it with a talk show that ripped off a show on another network (but it's cheaper). They played it safe.

And as a feature, it can still be fixed. If those who are responsible for keeping this feature alive are digging their heels into the ground and refusing to introduce new voices telling new narratives, then the final four just need to be cancelled because they will never be anything but relics of the past that most people are surprised are still on the air. I don't think there's ever been a time when soaps have looked so different from the rest of television than now.

How long before ABC just gives up the timeslot?

I really just wanted to quote the very last tweet from Patrick Mulcahey, but the specificity thing is what I was trying to get at a few weeks ago. I don't think the race issue in the way soaps are written will ever get fixed until soaps are willing to be more specific with characters across the board, and that requires opening up the writers' room to people who have more varied experiences - though it seems as though the people have been there but have been told to keep their specificities at the door. So, any attempt at writing characters with "specificities" usually flops because they're not allowed to actually go there. Sad, because look at how super specific settings and characters are becoming in non-daytime shows. People want to see shows that spotlight segments of society that have not been put on the screen before. When you combine that with the very unique abilities afforded to daytime ("the luxury of time" and all that jazz), you could end up with some amazing, beautiful stuff. It's a shame that most of OLTL's first two years are lost because I feel like that could be a master class at how to bring all kinds of ethnic and religious differences to soaps. Instead, soaps cling to the same old sht. Another hospital, another police station, another restaurant, another business office, another upper middle class home, another apartment, etc. It's just sad. I am black, and I can tell you that the majority of my black family and friends know nothing at all of the "WP" connotation of that sign, and they've all probably thrown it up at some point. Sometimes people really just don't know.

A what?!?! I just looked it up, and I swear I've never heard that phrase before in my life I was watching here and there during this time period, and I thought KHC was hot, and I was in to the whole "just me and my horses meditating on the ranch" backstory, but then everything had to center on that damned orchid, then later, wasn't there a bunch of heavy/weird sht with gang members and a samurai sword!? It's starting to come back to me - who was that hot little number who played the main thug that had killed Damon's son?

This Paul/Christine week has been truly great all around! So many important characters showcased throughout the week, so many classic soap conventions that were destroyed or just avoided over the last 15-20 years, etc. I know Paul/Christine have a reputation for being a bore, but coming in as a very casual Y&R viewer, this wedding is one of the most beautifully shot I’ve ever seen, and their impromptu vows were pure soap romance. All of it made even better by the room full of important characters there to witness it along with the small moments like Nina/Christine and Paul/Mary leading up to it. Olivia is a classic soap heroine in every way, and it’s sickening bc she should be 30 years deep into drama on the show’s current canvas. She should be the matriarch that AMC made Angie at the end and online.

This is basically how I felt about it at the time and now. From the POV of a soap bringing back two very popular characters from a better era and doing a great job of integrating them back into the then-current canvas, it was fantastic and wonderful and all of those things. I will always be grateful that AMC ended with Jesse and Angie at its core (both on ABC and with PP). The reunion at the train station was probably AMC's last big memorable scene. On the other hand, I don't think a writer will ever feel satisfied with how he's written the resurrection of a character who had died onscreen 20 years earlier. Not only are you going through the heavy-lifting of explaining how this character really wasn't dead even as we had Angie resting on his dead body, but you also have to explain why he stayed away for 20 years when clearly this woman and his son are the loves of his life. And ultimately, as would be the case probably 99% of the time, the story they wrote to explain these things in regards to Jesse was terrible and convoluted. The ends totally justified the means in this case, but I can see why JHB would feel "ugh" towards it. IIRC, it was quite a while into the history of the genre before a character was brought back even though we'd seen them die onscreen.

I didn't hear the GC Theme but I turned in about 20 minutes into it . I did hear Lorie's Theme in one of the party scenes: I'm going to hell for this, but Doris Collins rolling across the set right in front of the camera, blocking everything else in the shot is one of my most favorite things ever.

Revenge is the poster child for "shoulda been a mini-series." There was literally no good story for those characters after the initial revenge arc. The first season was wonderful as starting with the episodic plots that slowly melted into a serialized end, but then they came back for another year and clearly had no idea wtf they were doing. Brothers and Sisters...I recall liking it in the beginning but being turned off by how unrelatable the characters were. I don't particularly care for earnest family drama about rich people.

I'm rewatching Dawson's Creek with a friend who's never watched it, and I forgot how much I missed Capeside. And because it can never be said enough - Tamara Jacobs was dumb as hell.