DRW50

The name of the show was The Image Workshop. Her full quote was "It couldn't come at a better time. Nothing personal, ABC, but I'll be making three times as much doing my new show for three months than I made doing a year of LOVING." She would have been great as Melinda! If only OLTL had actually cared about Melinda beyond bringing in ugh Kelly.

I'd seen the first shot but not the second. She looks very drag queenish in those.

What is that last clip? Is it MST3K Italian style?

Thanks for all these clips. That first opening seems to have been inspired by Charlie's Angels. I got the pilot episode a while back and am hoping I can watch it at some point soon. If I do I'll give a review (how thrilling). I was reading about Elizabeth Savage's departure from Loving. I don't remember the exact quotes, but she was fired when they brought back Christine Tudor. SOD seemed to be surprised by this (perhaps because she was popular). Savage said it worked out great because she made 3 times as much on her talk show as she did on Loving anyway.

That's beautiful. Where is that from?

I loved Barbara Baxley in Nashville. I wish her AW stint had worked out better...she should have been there for Lemay's era.

Thanks for these. I'd never seen them. The lip-licking moment is hilarious. The opening of that clip is like a Survivor premiere.

They always managed to give her a lot of soft and vulnerable moments along with the theatrics. Soaps don't know how to do that now. The only exception I can think of is Nicole on DAYS.

I think 1981 was the real killer for RH. The show was, at best, uneven, and was at times almost unwatchable. This was at a time when the ABC lineup was going great guns and RH didn't have the pieces which would have made it more compatible. RH's Erica/Heather/Tiffany/Dorian type character, Delia, was given awful material that constantly reminded viewers of what a joke she was. If Kimberly was supposed to take her place, that didn't work either, because Kimberly spent the entire year having bad things happen to her or wailing all the time. They put in a lot of mob stuff to ape GH, but this usually amounted to various old men and a petulant Joe. They never knew how to position Joe. On GH, it was all about Luke's struggles, Luke's break for freedom. It was entirely from his point of view. On RH that wasn't possible, because of Jack's strong presence. So you had a story where Joe basically destroyed Jack's life, and then, in no time at all, the focus switched to what a victim Joe was. The other problem was the show's leading ladies in general. By 1981 there was no real pop. Many of them were just unpleasant, stupid, or beaten down and stuck in changing times. It makes the writing and casting choice for Siobhan even more bewildering to me. When people could go across ABC Daytime and see so many vibrant young heroines, who is going to want to see cold-in-nose Ann Gillespie whining about Joe for months on end? By the time they tried to remake the show with the Kirklands, most of this felt dated, because the other ABC soaps had already gone through their big rich family phases, and were slumping. ABC either should have backed off entirely or gone all in, and fired Labine and Mayer in 1980.

I've seen some of this at Digital Spy - a rare break from the usual Eastenders hysteria. I'm sorry that so much of it centers on gay characters. For one thing, it's pathetic that gay characters are what drives the press against a show. For another, I have zero idea why the gay stories, which have generally been non-events, full of eunuchs who rush through plot points while managing to say the same thing every time, is controversial. I come to the conclusion it's controversial solely because it's on Corrie. That's where Collinson has failed. He doesn't bother to read the nature of the show, how the public perceives the show, or how a soap works. Instead it's just rushed stunt after rushed stunt. Who cares if Cindy Beale is fighting for her life? You barely know her. Why are she and Leanne already reconciled? People say oh well it's great they aren't doing this like Eastenders. It's great that they aren't actually bothering to tell a story at all? You can say very reasonable excuses for why ratings are down so much, and they'd all be true. But the fact that the press is even trying to push the idea of massive ratings loss is pretty damning. Clearly Corrie has done something to push their buttons. Even Collinson giving them every single detail of every story hasn't helped. That little report about Collinson's story meeting kind of tells what his vision of the show is. He was eager to get a big new story for Nick, since Nick is such an important character. Never mind that Nick could leave tomorrow and only Gail would really notice. Or that Ben Price has consistently ruined every story he's been in. Collinson always seems to champion the show's worst actors and characters. I'm also so tired of how he has destroyed Carla. He has made her the Sharon Newman of Corrie. She is beyond pathetic in every way.