DRW50

This is from the May 11, 1982 Digest.

From a May 1980 Digest.

I didn't get to see much of Luna until I started watching clips on Youtube, but I do like most of her stories (especially her first two years or so - they seemed to lose track of her once she got married). I think her death was an example of a writer loving his creation more than the story. Only a year before Luna and Max had split so it would have made sense for her to leave Llanview, as it had never truly been her home anyway, since she'd only moved there a few years earlier. I thought Maggie just came in at a very bad time, in terms of writing. So much of 1996 seemed to be Carlo and to a lesser degree Dorian as the Scooby Doo villains to Llanview's couples.

That's interesting, about Rauch. I thought it was the new ABC Daytime head who had pushed her away; she seemed OK with Rauch when he started at GL. It's hard to keep track of all that. I remember when they used her as an excuse to get Al off the show - she had been released from prison, offcamera, and Al went to live with her. Then 4 or 5 years later Al returned and we learned Max was a deadbeat dad...again. I think they should have just had Luna leave town alive and Al and the twins would go with her, with Max visiting offcamera.

I keep forgetting Julia left once in the early 80's then returned. I meant her first exit as the one where she was gone for 15 or more years until that cameo in 2002. You may be right about Eric being the father. I can never remember who is Eric and who is Marc in that story.

Later on Marlena just had an offhand mention of Fiona crying every day as Gabrielle. I don't want to say "it's snobbery", since I've done the same thing with other characters, but I think maybe these characters like Gabrielle and Tina were tough for some longtime fans to take or perhaps some in the soap press who wanted Lemay-type drama. For instance, SOD had a surprising amount of putdowns of Andrea Evans in the late 80's, with Michael Logan even devoting part of a column to his dinner party friends trashing her and her walk and so on. Fiona did seem popular with most fans, and I've loved most of her work in the clips I've seen - I think her peak was the baby switch story. Derivative or not, she gave some beautiful performances, especially when she was on trial and when she was pleading for Michael to bring the baby back. In a lot of ways I think Gabrielle and Tina were two of the best examples of how soaps as a woman's medium managed to continue on no matter what trends changed daytime. I love her last scene (you can't embed):

Marlena de Lacroix takes a hard look at OLTL as 1990 draws to a close... The Tragedy of One Life to Live 1990 has not been a good year for One Life to Live. If I just want to write about a bad soap, I have many choices. But OLTL must be cited now because, as it enters 1991, it's a needless tragedy. OLTL paradoxically takes soap's best onscreen and backstage talents, mixes them together, and then manages to waste them all. Take diamonds, throw them into a Cuisinart, and out comes shoe leather. ABC's mighty and profitable battleship will probably continue to sail on after the rest of us are well into our new lives. But as OLTL stands now, it's an ever-swirling, pounding headache. It's a hurricane of energy - but it has no heart. This year, OLTL has played more like a bunch of empty story manipulations than as a drama about the feelings of human beings. I suspect the fault somehow lies with Paul Rauch, the most gifted producer on soaps. Going back to his Another World days, I've often proclaimed his brilliance and I still believe in it. Soaps are such a rigidly formatted medium that hardly anyone dares to try something new. Rauch alone has had both the imagination and the clout to be daytime's master innovator. He was the first to try an hour soap (AW), an hour-and-a-half soap (AW) and location shoots that were so lavishly budgeted they looked like feature movies (AW and OLTL). His 1987 Viki-Goes-to-Heaven sequence was a triumph. However, when you risk big things, you risk failing big. Too many of Rauch's recent innovative sequences have bombed big time - Buchanan City, Eterna, the stiff Austrian remote that aired in February. Rauch does have sophisticated taste in actors. He picks the best of New York theater actors - gems like Patricia Elliott (Renee), Thom Christopher (Carlo) and Brian Tarantina (Lucky). However, his younger talent choices tend to be either big hits (Jessica Tuck as Megan, John Loprieno as Cord, Michael Palance as Dan), or big misses (Audrey Landers as Charlotte, John Viscardi as Tony, the grating Fiona Hutchinson as Gabrielle). Yes, Karen Witter (Tina) was the best replacement actor pick of the 20th century. And flawless Erika Slezak (Viki), who was with the show long before the current regime, is exempt from any of the negativity of this review. Her talents have made Viki's storylines the only ones really worth watching this year. However, even Slezak's best storyline - the physical handicaps resulting from Viki's stroke - was marred by OLTL's habit of repeatedly coming up with plots that insult the viewer's intelligence. Now, every soap asks us to suspend belief in reality once in a while. But OLTL always pushes it one step too far. Viki once murdered Harry O'Neill (played by Frank Converse) while in her schizophrenic identity, Niki. OK. But last (sweeps) month, Niki came out and murdered Johnny (Anthony Crivello)! Over the last year, OLTL has committed a series of stupid plot twists. Car-crash victim Max (originally played by James DePaiva) coming back to life, first as the Elephant Man, then as (the albeit divine) Nicholas Walker; Gabrielle sleeping with him again and not realizing that he has the same body as her dead lover, Max? And another of Cord's weddings getting interrupted at the altar! I believe OLTL comes up with these doozies, not because co-head writers Craig Carlson (formerly of Capitol) and Leah Laiman (Days of Our Lives and the late, bravura, Tribes) lack talent. Their writing gifts on OLTL appear to be both oversupervised and overrestricted. They had to devote almost all of 1990 to devising plots to explain away the departures of characters, after the original actors who played them left. (Editor's note: Carlson and Laiman are now associate head writers; Maggie De Priest is the head writer; see page 2) The writers also met with OLTL's major problem - it has too many human set pieces; ongoing, unchanging characters like the five Buchanan men. Tina and Gabrielle must be constantly provided with the same old plots, leaving little room for character development and creativity. What's really wrong with OLTL, is that no going character is ever allowed to grow or change. The best examples are Tina and Gabrielle. They are never allowed to grow up after their habitual bad, sometimes criminal, acts. Both are always nonsensically forgiven by "loving" relatives, no doubt so that we can be given the opportunity to sit through yet another set of their lies. The Buchanan men are supposed to be such tough, unyielding guys that there aren't a hell of a lot of plots that can be used to show their vulnerabilities. So, whenever nothing else is happening, illegitimate sons, or sons they never knew they had, or both, are thrown at them - to an almost comic effect. I wouldn't be surprised if young Joey already has an illegitimate son waiting for him somewhere. It's not easy to slash an old favorite like OLTL. But every day I tune into the show and I never make it all the way through the full hour. My attention (and remote control) always drift elsewhere. However, probably because I've watched OLTL half my life and i know the show has so much talent behind it, I always zap back to it in hopes that it's gotten better. But throughout a1990, all OLTL gave me was a headache.

I also wish I could see: The relationship between Ellen and her mother Claire - and scenes between Claire and Paul or Dan in those last years, to see how they tried to pass poor Barbara Berjer off as the grandmother of someone like Dean Santoro Tom as the Vietnam vet hooked on drugs The Amy Lin story and the recast Penny Liz falling up the stairs Oh, and Alma Miller.

I think part of it was also that she wanted Kim to raise the baby on her own and not be punished. Some of the later stories of the decade start to sound confusing and like they were struggling with ideas, but I'd love to see any of it...I think I'd especially like to see Irna's return, just to know if it was what people have said, and also I'd love to see all the dramatics with Susan/Dan/Kim/John in their prime.

I'd love to see any of Irna's material for Kim. It's one of those cases where I wonder how modern soap audiences would react, if people would say Bob was ruined because of "propping" Kim, et al. Kathryn Hays talked in that Paley thing about how so much of her own thoughts and feelings she didn't share seemed to be in the scripts; it must have been a true experience for her, for viewers, and I guess for Irna too.

This is from a late December 1993 Weekly. Andrea talks a bit about LIAMST and Berrengers.

From a November 1981 Digest.

From a November 1981 Digest.

It seems like until recent years the show didn't have a lot of psycho female characters. There were women who calculated and schemed, and caused chaos, like Suzanne (or Katharine, or Jill, or Phyllis), but for a long time the only crazy women were Eve and then Sheila. Generally Bell seemed to put men in that role (Shawn, Derek, Michael, David).

That's interesting - I can see Brenda Dickson Jill replacing Lorie, but Deborah Adair's Jill seems so different, at least in acting styles. When was Julia's first exit? Was this long after she'd had Marc's child?

Thanks. I was watching those clips a few days ago of Julia helping Victor fake his death and Eve/Nikki/Julia having all these screamouts. What did you think of that stuff? I like Meg Bennett's work as Julia. She conveys a real intelligence. I'd go as far as to say she was the start of a certain type of Y&R lady that hadn't been shown before, one who flourished through the 80's - I guess that's not entirely true, as she also reminds me a little of Janice Lynde, but Leslie was never in the corporate world, the way Julia, or later, Ashley were. I was also watching a little of the Vanessa murder clips and Jaime Lyn Bauer was so OTT in some of that. It was kind of jarring. Yet it also reminds me of Melody Thomas Scott, for some reason. Maybe that's why some said Nikki essentially replaced Lorie.

I've asked some of this before, but I am still very interested in the Victor/Julia relationship of the early 80's. She had seen the worst of Victor, but within a few years she seemed to be one of his strongest defenders. There's a very good scene after Eve almost stabs Victor with a butcher knife, and Julia collapses into Victor's shoulder. How long did it take them to go from the low point of her miscarriage/her boyfriend being in a dungeon to becoming so close? This was never written as Julia still pining for Victor, right? Wasn't that just that somewhat nauseating parade of his old loves that Alden or Smith wrote in 2002?

I wonder why Natalie and Joyce never worked together (or did they?). They both had issues with Lisa, didn't they?

This has some more of the Viki DID 1995 story I don't think has been on Youtube yet - this is after Tori burnt down Llanfair. As "Viki," she launches into an increasingly unhinged monologue about how their family was built on a degenerate and how they need to move on with their lives and go their separate ways. It's very good work from Erika, very strong writing. The saddest part of this for me is that Tori was right. We were supposed to see this as Tori being insane, but that truly is what the Lord family was built on and what they have become - to see Jessica, so innocent and so traumatized in this clip, and knowing that she has become nothing more than a soulless poster child for trivializing sexual abuse...for a while now I wanted the show to end with Viki realizing the family needs to split apart for their own sake, with Jessica dead and Natalie moving away with Liam for a new life, and Kevin and Joey away, as usual. It won't happen, but if it ever did, this clip would be a good one to use. You can also see some of Alex/Renee/Asa/Nigel, and some of the Angel Square story. Manzo was much more interesting than any of the later Andie stuff where Carlo pretended to be a priest and Andie was (literally!) clinging to Antonio's legs begging him not to leave her. Matt Servito and Wendie Pratt have some good chemistry in the part when he says you see, I'm a good cop. And Javier and Linda were also great characters. Angel Square lost something without them.

ATWT would have been a very different show if Jennifer had stayed. She was a very popular character - she was supposed to die of a terminal illness but fan outcry made them keep the character longer, until I guess she wanted to leave or they wanted to write the character out. I guess in the long run Kim benefited from Jennifer's absence but I really wish we had more time with the two of them together. I'd also like to see how Jennifer/Bob were as a couple. In time I can see some complex roundelay where Kim married Dan, but still had feelings for Bob, Susan loved Dan but also started to fall for Bob, Bob had a troubled marriage to Jennifer, etc.

That doesn't seem like very much story at all. A "mild breakdown" indeed! Some soap characters were in mental torment for years over less. Perhaps they thought she was burdened by having a young son, but they could have just sent him away to school. Was it in character for Jennifer to have had an illegitimate child? I wish they'd had Gillian Spencer return for some flashbacks at least.

From the July 24, 1979 Digest.

A late July 1979 Digest as Y&R has a sixth birthday.

Patty Weaver's performance of "Have I Stayed Too Long at the Fair" is just exquisite. I'm sorry she never had more success as a singer. It's about 3 minutes into the clip. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-j7wu0g9iU&lc=U5JtN29I1m0-8Rpm5e_h40SEMOwMmIfuxMWNUs9MnXE&feature=inbox