DRW50

23 minutes ago, Vee said:

Trying to fight a primary that doesn't exist. Cute.

What annoys me most is I know the media will spin this and I know that it's going to be used to get a lot of hesitant voters to go for Trump or sit out in November. In Michigan that's going to hurt.

1 hour ago, Khan said:

I'm just happy that everyone working at Y&R still has a job and that the show will make it to their 55th anniversary.

That's about as far as I can go. Admittedly I never really felt the emotional connection to Y&R I did to the P&G soaps, but I still respect the show's history and grew up watching it, and I'm glad for the cast and crew. I'm also glad a daytime soap will still be on as the genre needs to stay alive to possibly be restarted. I just wish the show wasn't what it has been for the last 20 years.

Here we go:

1 minute ago, NothinButAttitude said:

I've been lurking in here as of late and reading the commentary and opinions of folks lately.

Should I dive back into EE at this time? 

I am so glad that they are FINALLY utilizing Diane Parrish (Denise) to her fullest again. I never understood why she got cast aside at times when she had delivered at all times since the character's inception. 

That aside, how many Brannings is Stacey gonna screw? She's like the Brooke Logan of Walford. Just going through the family.

As long as you don't have a problem with a very cold, plot-driven show full of men who abuse women. There is some good acting but that's about it.

51 minutes ago, I Am A Swede said:

Nate has really adapted well to being a Dingle, including acquiring their incredible hypocrisy. I'm not condoning what Tracy and Caleb did, but has Nate forgotten that he had an affair with Moira, his own father's wife??  

I was surprised that they did have a scene where Nate asked Cain if this happened to him because of what he did to Cain and Moira.

Self-awareness glimmers aside, I agree it's difficult to care about cheating stories for this reason, among many others (lack of interest in the characters, in their relationships, the rushed pacing, etc.)

16 hours ago, dc11786 said:

The show never committed to Patti having developmental issues. Taggart and Guza started the story, but Nixon and crew didn't really stick with it. Patti received birth to three services (or whatever it was called back then), but they said they would have to see if she would be behind permanently and she kept making progress. Patti had some slight gaps in her development, but they would never say whether or not Patti would be dealing with a condition for the rest of her life. There was a lot of talk about how they had to wait and see. The network might have been skittish about the issue and vetoed it or Nixon might have decided she didn't want to do that story after dealing with it with Beth Martin on "All My Children." 

Also, Nixon had initially had Shana befriend Tess Wilder in the fall of 1993. I suspect, at one point, the plan may have been for Tess to be Patti's nanny. Though, they did quickly introduce the idea of the ad agency so maybe I am wrong. 

Thanks for the extra info. The idea of Shana and Tess interacting is compelling - I could see them staying friends due to both being outsiders, although maybe not when Tess started going against people like Stacey.

Generally I think soaps aren't the best place to tell those types of stories with kids anyway, as shown with how they were handled with Ann on AMC or Holly on GL. The UK soaps, for all their many other flaws in recent years, do seem to be better at letting mothers have the kids and still have stories and lives outside of them without the kids being killed off or written out.

I've seen a number of people, often peddled on the "mainstream" channels, who insist that it doesn't matter if Trump wins or if terrible things happen following his win because the situation in Gaza is so much worse. There is now an idea commonplace among many on the left, at least online, that all roads lead back to this one issue and any sacrifice must be made. I feel like a lot of people who are struggling mentally are being preyed on to further this narrative.

This martyrdom seems to be leading to more and more toxic levels and preying on people who are struggling, like the man who self-immolated yesterday in front of the Israeli Embassy, or the man in this article. The more that these actions are cheered and validated, the more I worry about how far people are going to go:

@dc11786Thanks for the help with the date. 

You have a good point about Shana having more story in 1994, but I think the choice for the special needs baby made that much less likely, unless they killed off another of her kids.

The start of this has a brief glimpse of a UK ATWT airing - they must have been about two years behind.

Just now, Paul Raven said:

Re Ellen

Had they nurtured core families, with a little SORASING you have her 4 grandchildren ready to be the new teens/young adults.

That should have been a gift to the writers but they chose to ignore it.

Her daughter Dee never returned. She could have come back as a business woman, ready to get revenge on John, or fallen for him again etc.

Plenty of opportunities for Ellen to be strong supporting.

Yes, it was a real mistake to never do anything with Dee or Annie down the line. I suppose Marland may have thought they would make no sense with the later canvas, but I think it could have worked.

2 minutes ago, Sapounopera said:

Thank you for the 1987 episode! 

Shana could have been the show's Iris Carrington or Tracy Q. They turned her into a very boring character once she was domesticated with Father Jim. And Gwyneth became the Alden b*tch. 

That's very true. Shana in an Iris role makes sense.

The start of an episode during Loving's UK run - if Mike is mentioned this must be from 1985 or 1986 at the latest. Sadly, this channel has said before they don't care for soaps, so I don't see them sharing the rest of the episode.

10 minutes ago, Khan said:

I agree.  Even back then, as it was happening, I didn't like what Stephen Black and Henry Stern were writing for ATWT, but at the same time, I didn't think they were so destructive that the show was being damaged irreparably.  Especially when I compared it to what JER was doing with DAYS, or Megan McTavish with AMC and GL.

I think what upset me at the time was, beyond how cheap and crass the show started to feel (like infamously having a lengthy sex scene between Mark and Connor in the show's 40th anniversary episode), I missed the history and tradition, the returns of former characters, etc. Choices like dumping Ellen upset me a great deal. With hindsight, I know that wasn't their fault and the show was going to be yanked in that direction no matter what, even if it still doesn't make me see their era as much better in quality (if I tried to do a full rewatch I might have a more positive opinion, as they did at least give story to the vets, and while it was somewhat criticized at the time, I think they wrapped up Mac's Alzheimer's story decently enough, especially compared to how many soaps handle this topic).

6 hours ago, dc11786 said:

Lynda Hirsch quoted Susan Keith at the time of her departure (mid-May, 1989) that Keith and Davies had both been let go. Keith talked about how the couple had been getting less and less story once they had been married, but suggested that playing the dynamic of Shana wanting a child while Stacey was dealing with an unwanted pregnancy would have been worth exploring. In this context, I actually understand bitchy Shana circa fall 1991 much better than I ever have. 

Keith also cited the turnover in writers and producers. Joe Hardy would have been producing at this point with Tom King and Millee Taggart writing. 

 Thanks for posting that. 1987 isn't really the best year for the show, though I agree I wish more would appear. The November, 1987 episodes that popped up later were much stronger and I would be curious to see the teen set that started off the year with Kelly Conway (surrogate Alden granddaughter) and Rob Carpenter (working class punk). Overall, the April Hathaway tale seems very unappealing and a poor imitation of the Donna Beck story Nixon had told on "All My Children."

Thanks for your help. I would like to see them too.

I didn't remember Keith had been let go twice. That must sting. I suppose she was on the show long enough that I assume she might have been a more popular character with viewers than she was. I get the choice in 1994 but I think there was still more to do with her in 1989, with so many moving pieces around (why not revisit her old ties to Alex/Clay? Why not just kill off Jim around that time and play out the estrangement with the Aldens we got when she came back?).

9 minutes ago, Donna L. Bridges said:

Although there is at least some evidence of the networks meddling in the affairs of, then, soap writers! 

That's a good point. I suppose that while I do find it completely inappropriate to intervene based on some kind of morality, I'd still prefer it to what we got later on, which was just constant poking and prodding and wanting puppets in charge.

12 minutes ago, vetsoapfan said:

The soap press died a long, slow and brutal death; much like the soaps themselves.

I get sh*t for saying this from stans who insist that I must praise the soaps to the heavens at all times, to convince TPTB to keep them on the air, but honestly? With little-to-no hope of the genre ever healing, I wouldn't be too crushed if the remaining four shows were laid to rest. Put them out of their misery. 

If fawning and dishonest soap press kept soaps on the air, OLTL might still be here. I really wish life worked that way. 

Logically I know that nothing was probably going to keep the soaps on the air, and it was a miracle most of them lasted as long as they did, but I'll still always wonder if ATWT (as it's the topic, sorry to go off course) and others might still be here if they had been run with any level of care by greedy, soulless networks who never understood that the time the genre made them the most money was when they had the least involvement in the product.

I'm glad some soaps are still on and I hope there will always be soaps on but it's always a tough moment to remember that something made in 1950 through a radio so often feels more relevant to today than soap product made in 2024.

2 minutes ago, OzFrog said:

Judging from the Loving synopses I’ve read on Tumblr (https://classicsodloving.tumblr.com/), this looks to be first week of October 1987.

Thanks! I had totally forgotten those recaps were on tumblr so this is a good resource.

40 minutes ago, vetsoapfan said:

Jack Snyder's sexual abuse by Julia came across (to me) in a sniggering way, which I found offensive. It was like the audience was supposed to find some truly ugly events amusing (wink, wink), and they just weren't.

The uglier the events on screen became, the less  ATWT resembled...ATWT.

I'll never forget seeing those scenes praised in soap magazines for their great comedy element. That was when I truly knew how much the bottom had fallen out on those publications. 

1 minute ago, vetsoapfan said:

I think he showed promise at the beginning of his tenure, when he worked with Carolyn Culliton. Later, when there was nobody to pull in the reigns, he went wild. He downplayed the vets and the Hugheses far too much, and overplayed his favorites. God knows what his beef was with Eileen Fulton, who became like an irrelevant, rarely-seen under-fiver during his reign. I felt there was a mean-spiritedness to his writing, which lacked hearth, heart and family values which were the core of ATWT.

It was when we got scenes like Julia punching Jack and killing a horse, and all of Craig's sneering (which we were always meant to find hilarious and true) that I truly did feel like the canvas became repulsive in ways that were difficult to get past. There was indeed a mean-spirited, callous nature that was exalted at every turn, a sociopathic tint that was so typical of that era of pop culture and infested onto daytime by people who hated or misunderstood the genre. 

ATWT always had a steely side, and there were certainly patches of ugliness before Sheffer (like the Diego stuff or that David/Reid fiasco), but nothing to that level which seemed to consume the entire canvas. I felt dirty even trying to watch. If the James return/Margo miscarriage story had happened in that era, we would have had James pop into her room to laugh at her and call her barren, as we were invited to clap our hands in glee.

41 minutes ago, vetsoapfan said:

I've always heard they were gawd-awful at Falcon Crest, and crippled that show instantly when they took over the head writing reigns. I don't think Black and Stern were were as bad/damaging as JER, Charles Pratt, Thom Racina, Leah Laiman, and some other, notoriously-awful writers, but I have the feeling that their material would not be stellar under the best of circumstances.

Other than some truly gross choices with characters like Emily (taunting a blind woman - how hot!), I don't think anything they did was as damaging in the long-term as a number of other writers (including Hogan Sheffer) - their problem was just being so out of step with what the show should have been and coming along at a time when the show and the genre were in deep distress. This was also when such badness was still a relative surprise as Marland had only been gone a few years. By the time of the mid '00s it was just another day.

15 minutes ago, wonderwoman1951 said:

not sure where black and stern fall in the pantheon of bad headwriters. what i can tell you is that it was at les moonves’s “suggestion” that black and stern became atwt’s headwriters, which they both told me, and was confirmed by lucy johnson, head of cbs daytime. 

That doesn't surprise me. I wonder what other 'suggestions' he had - I wouldn't be surprised if he was into the sleazy, trashy, soulless stuff, especially Diego/Emily (before he raped her). And the influx of generic young people.

I would guess that Manchin always thought he'd have more support than he did, and he seemed genuinely angry that Trump tanked the immigration deal that epitomized so much of what he believes in politics (beyond $$$$).

It seems like most of the emphasis now is on getting people to stay home or vote anyone else because of Palestine (to the point of MSNBC having "Democrats" on to say that it's fine to support Trump in order to teach a lesson to the party). 

And of course, RFK Jr, who is very cynically trying to get black voters with a "why should you have to pay child support?" argument (he actually did a photo op with a man at the forefront of this movement). As soon as I saw Killer Mike hyping him, I knew the fix was in, as Mike was out there for Brian Kemp and Herschel Walker in 2022. 

6 hours ago, P.J. said:

Scott really should've had staying power, but after Joe Breen was fired, the writers seemed to regard the character as nuclear.

It is an odd episode, having so much focus on the hokey wedding. 

A part of me also wonders how many actors had been fired to waste money on all that...I don't know who the guest actors are but that must have been one hell of a day for them to get to play out a whole wedding and reception.

5 hours ago, Khan said:

For years, there were rumors that suggested then-EP John Valente had sabotaged ATWT deliberately because he was mad that P&G transferred him from AW.  I don't know whether there was any truth to those rumors, but watching that episode again, it does make me wonder.  Like, maybe Black & Stern got caught in the crossfire between Valente and P&G; and maybe - just maybe - if they had had a more supportive EP, whose only agenda was to help the show get back on its' feet after Marland's death, they might not have been such total disasters as HW's.

I used to think they were more of the problem compared to Valente as his work before they arrived wasn't as bad, but I wouldn't be shocked if this was the case. Something was just alien and rotten at the time beyond even what made sense. I guess P&G being so rudderless didn't help (and then the solution was just to try to copy ABC - their final fatal mistake).

5 hours ago, Khan said:

Whatever happened to Peter Davies anyway?  And why did they write him out of the show?

I wonder if Susan Keith wanted to leave and they wrote him out with her. I think when they approached her to return they pitched the idea of killing off Jim and their son.

Thanks @Kane for your help.

17 minutes ago, slick jones said:

iI think that's April's Aunt, Marty Edison (Isabel Glasser). She was a photographer.

That looks like Geoofrey Ewing, but I'm just not positive.

Thanks so much. The Loving casts were small enough to where sometimes I think I know most of them but there are always surprises. I appreciate your help.

I hope we might get more from this period so we might know for sure if it's Geoffrey.

These have probably already been posted, but if not: