DRW50

From what I can tell I would agree. Not sure if you've seen these, but there are four more videos afterward on the channel.

Yes as I've been watching through it I don't recognize most of it either. I think those early scenes with Betsy and Steve at their cabin fooled me, as they had the same scenes about 500 times. I would have remembered the delightful scene where Ellen asks if Nancy could believe Lisa reunited them with their grandson, and Nancy deadpans that she absolutely can believe it. Feels like a line @Mitch64 would write here... This old nanny of Stewart's (I'm guessing she is a baddie at heart) and her cod English accent is amusing. The return of Nancy and Chris truly does add so much warmth to the canvas. So much of this episode is devoid of plot and is just people chilling at the Hughes home and it is wonderful. Sad that it took so long for this to happen but I'm really glad the usual spiteful figures at P&G or at the show let it happen.

Yes. Any criticisms I have of Marland (and I am pretty happy with his ATWT run - most of mine would extend toward his GL work, if I had any) are with awareness that he was an incredibly talented writer whose work generally holds up extremely well. I know that these threads can easily come off as people being bitchy and catty and cliquey, but I don't believe that is the case here. By many accounts Marland was not a shrinking violet...I think he'd be fine with the discussions.

@victoria foxton @DramatistDreamer @soapfan770 @Mitch64 @Vee @Soapsuds @Paul Raven I believe some or all of this may have been on Youtube before, but I don't know if it has ever been fully complete, or in such pristine quality. Nice to see some of Chris and Nancy, Chris and Tom, and Nancy still blurring the line between her harder earlier self and softer later self. Lovely scene with Nancy and Ellen too, and Betsy and Kim. You get a lot of heart that early '80s ATWT can lack. I always forget Scott Defrietas had started by this point.

When I talk about him wanting out it isn't a criticism of him as much as various articles and pieces I've read here over the years as he did, IIRC, have another soap in the works he had been trying to sell (wasn't it based in Detroit or centered on a blue-collar family or something).

That's a fascinating insight. Reminds me of (and of course these are younger people and a different situation entirely) Tina Fey, who joined SNL as a writer in 1997 and rose to headwriter before leaving in 2006, giving interviews upbraiding newer writers when she would come back to host in the late '10s. She was critical because they no longer followed the format of staying at the offices all week, day and night, instead going home at night and returning the next day. Never mind that this was instituted partially because one of the longtime writers had started having anxiety attacks and was told by doctors that his lifestyle and diet at the show was going to kill him...

I suppose with the Snyders and Hughes part was down to many of those actors leaving or being in the process of leaving, but that's why bringing in Hutch as a big Snyder clone just draws attention to the decline. If Marland had lived I do wonder if he would have just had the Kasnoffs replace them, as Valente also tried, but if he would have been much more nuanced in the transition. I do think, as shown with Lemay as well, being headwriter that long will sap you. Slesar is something of an exception. Yes, the whole show permeates with a very solemn atmosphere - it's almost inescapable. I have a feeling Marland would have retired from daytime in the mid '90s, maybe with an attempted comeback around '97 somewhere like AW, culminating in a tell-all interview with Michael Logan. The idea of him being one of the "plan to save DAYS' writers makes me smile though.

Thanks for keeping up with all the hearings @Vee I haven't had the heart.

I think Marland was going through health problems, and I sometimes wonder how much was his testing the boundaries, after his first few years at ATWT had been more traditional soap opera. Some stories he'd wanted had probably not been as fully realized as he would have wanted (like the Hank Elliot story), and after that the show starts to do more things that would have been verboten for many years. Add in a producer he worked more successfully with leaving and being replaced by seemingly more of a company man, and Marland's plans to sell a soap elsewhere (didn't he stay on as long as he did because the soap hadn't been sold elsewhere as of yet - I can't remember), and I think there's a lot to bleed over into a more downbeat atmosphere. I feel like you can most chart the changes in atmosphere through his run by watching how Iva and Lucinda change - more and more suffering, introspection, and an air of sorrow, just expressed in two very distinct ways. And both tied to increasingly hangdog John. A part of me truly prefers the bleaker run to the earlier years as the attempts at levity never feel entirely natural to me in that time period, but I do think there are two stories in '92 that are just too much of obvious retreads (Tess as Meg/Emily, Rosanna as Lily, Hutch as Holden) and too obviously written on the fly and unnecessary (having Frannie get involved with yet another psycho dreamboat, and rewriting the story to save Darryl when he was clearly NOT a long-term character). Those two stories are a bit like leaks springing. 1993 would have been a fresh start, of course, with so much tied up and winding down at the end of '92, but realistically Marland's time with ATWT was on the way out no matter what. It's just the way he ended up departing the show was so heartbreaking and badly timed (through no fault of his own!) that they never got the proper transition period they would have if he'd been able to leave alive. I think another added sorrow in watching those last few years is knowing now they are the dying breaths of most of what made ATWT special, with the final breath coming in 1995. And I do wonder if Marland knew, on some level, that the soap genre he was so integral to and had shaped so much of his life and career, was dying, and dying quickly. On paper, you could look at Angel's story, with incest, abortion, and being with each Snyder brother, and say it was lurid - indeed that is how it would be if a hack like Ron Carlivati was at the helm. But as you say, we saw Angel slowly grow, we felt that maturation in her, through every beat. I think that's one of the reasons the material holds up much better than so many grimy stories of the last few decades.

Thanks. That makes a lot of sense. I did like Draper, and April, but he was very overused.

More consequences of the hate and bigotry being whipped up by the right and their media allies.

I know Angel was more of a conduit for talk about abuse and therapy than a proper character, but I always liked her back then and I thought Alice Haining was wonderful in the role - believable as a frail figure slowly finding strength. She's still more compelling to me than a lot of the new characters of that timeframe.

What reason was given for Tony going? He didn't seem to do much post-Edge.

I was going to say he probably wouldn't have, but then he did write Liz out of The Doctors...

I think Liz may have felt the same way, which might be why there are moments of her on the up, like Worldwide being such a success. I do agree that it was missing something for Lucinda to never really get a proper romance again post-John - Scott was never anything real, and then Marland passed. To be honest even if he had lived I think Lucinda probably would have remained alone, as he seemed to work hard to phase out that more passionate side of her.

They seemed to start down this path when she went back to work and was feuding with Vicky, but that quickly just turned into her being shamed and Beth throwing herself at Matt.

@Soapsuds@Broderick@DramatistDreamer@soapfan770@victoria foxton@Vee@Mitch64 @j swift @Joseph A January 1991 episode, only incomplete due to a press conference on Desert Storm. Early 1991 episodes seem hard to come by, and this one turned out to be momentous, as a huge showdown between Angel and Henry Lange is packed into the same timeframe as a deeply sad divorce proceeding with John and Lucinda (who only very reluctantly lets go after John makes it clear why nothing, including a final night of passion, will lead him to stay with her). Liz Hubbard is often accused of OTT performances, but this is all very tender work from her, heartbreak dangling from the sleeve. Wonderful performances from Michael David Morrison (reminding yet again why he was the only one who could inhabit Caleb), Alice Haining and James Rehborn in extremely difficult to watch material. The general view of how staid the P&G soaps were, lacking the social issues tag of Agnes Nixon or Bill Bell works, along with this story not involving any "big" characters (due to Martha's Lily being gone at the time) tends to obscure just how daring the story was, as this episode alone shows. A numb and helpless Lily and Holden, Caleb being haunted by Angel aborting "his" child (a child actually conceived by her rapist father), a terrified Angel being pursued and gaslit by said father as her self-loathing brother Barclay is passed out drunk, unable to hear her pleas - incredibly harrowing material, even more now than at the time. For some slim comic relief in Marland's very dark final years, you have a fun bitchfest with Lisa and Susan (Lisa clearly happy to fill in for Lucinda during her sojourn from Oakdale). https://archive.org/details/l-1-t-2-v-8-9-soap-operas-guiding-light-as-the-world-turns-jan.-1991

https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/Natasha-Lyonne-movie-shot-in-SF-All-About-Evil-17235472.php

I think he was on FC's last season.