BuckyB12

Whew! I don't follow much soap news and haven't looked in here lately, so when I discovered no GH episodes on Hulu for Oct 1 and 2 I feared they had dropped the show.

The stables at the Cory estate were established early in Rachel and Mac's marriage, because there was a stablehand named Rocky who was interested in Louise (competing with Brooks). I believe Rocky was the first to realize that Sven was a bad guy (and not just creepy) and then he mysteriously disappeared. I definitely remember the scene where Jamie and Dennis found dead Rocky wrapped in plastic under the floor of the boathouse.

And then they got him back in 1983 to be killed again in the horrible Annabelle Sims story.

I don't think the supernatural resurrections on Dark Shadows (like vampirism, or literally changing history through time travel) really equate to the BFTD soap opera trope, which was certainly used previously in radio soaps. The one opportunity they had to do a conventional BFTD story was with Burke Devlin, lost in a plane crash, but they decided to move on, probably because they weren't able to recast Victoria Winters.

That's interesting because they were married on Valentines Day 1975. Maybe Lemay turned up the heat on their involvement because of the impending expansion to one hour in January 1975 (though he surely would have known about that for a while) since Mac/Rachel (and Iris) was to be the central storyline of the hour-long show for the next few years. My own first look at Bay City was Wednesday 2/12/75; turned it on because we were stuck indoors due to a big snowstorm. I was immediately captivated by Beverlee McKinsey's Iris - who was this woman frantically running around town looking for her father and gradually realizing that someone named Rachel was missing too? Two days later we saw the private wedding at Mac's NYC townhouse, and the week after they returned home to shock everyone in town. Liz actually attacked Rachel when she heard the news, since Iris had been encouraging the idea of a Liz/Mac romance. By then I was hooked.

The one I still remember years later was from Eplin's time at ATWT. Jake was hired by Lucinda to work at her newspaper and they had many scenes together at first. Seemed like Liz Hubbard liked having a new sparring partner, but eventually the two never had scenes together. I figured that there had to be some BTS story about that, most likely something about Eplin that she couldn't/wouldnt countenance.

I could be completely off about this (it's been more than 40 years) but as I recall it, Iris wasn't in the room when Mac blurted out that Amanda was his first child - she was in the hallway outside or perhaps the doorway, but Mac didn't know she was within earshot. I believe Dave Gilchrist was one of the gang of characters who moved to Bay City from New York when the show expanded to an hour, so he knew the Lamontes, at least some of Iris's hangers-on, and probably Mac's succession of attorneys (Scott Bradley/Keith Morrison/Brian Bancroft). He never had much to do. Lemay continued to write AW through most, if not all of the 90-minute episodes, and Olive setting the fire that killed John happened in the first week of that expansion. I also remember her eventual slide into Crazy Town as being somewhat measured and believable.

I always thought that Marlena was Don's consolation prize after Julie and Doug finally got married. Like, he wasn't ever going to be a serious rival for Doug in the future (the function he served between Julie's divorce from Bob and the eventual Doug/Julie nuptials) so why not pair him with Marlena? I don't think anyone at the time, on either side of the camera, thought that Marlena would become the central heroine of the show over the next decade and would still be around 40 years later. Or, for that matter, that a few years later, Don would just vanish from Salem without a trace -- and no one noticed.

Poor Joan thought she was going to be the star of the show, but once the character of Barnabas took off, and the mystery of Paul Stoddard was solved, she rarely had much to do. I think she generally had more fun in the other time periods, where she got to play other characters. My own favorite was Flora in 1840, the flighty lady novelist who didn't resemble Elizabeth at all. Judith was fun too, particularly when she turned on Trask and was no longer a victim.

Isn't it true that most (all?) surviving episodes from the 50s and 60s are kinescopes, which were recorded in New York for same-day transmission on the West Coast (3 hours later)? So a California or Seattle broadcast wouldn't be "live."

Carol Lamonte didn't die, she left Bay City in October 1976 after breaking up with Willis Frame, her lover after Robert Delaney dumped her. Her mother Therese was still living with Iris, and died in late November 1976. I was probably too young to really appreciate her death scene, but it was definitely a memorable one. (Thanks to the Another World Home Page for refreshing my memory on some of the details.)

Wow, I have absolutely no memory of that Blackthorn nonsense, and I too stuck it out to the end of the show. I have a very vague memory of feeling sorry for Stuart Damon having to play such a dumb character, but by that time, soap "stars" had to take what they could get. And if you had asked me yesterday what role Damon played on ATWT I would probably have thought it was a trick question. Hated Lindstrom as Craig (though not as much as I hated Block in the role). Hated McCouch as "Dusty Donovan" who shared a name but absolutely nothing else about that character. Always loved Lisa and Lucinda's rivalry, which was certainly in play with Scott's friendship with La Walsh (or Ol' Lucy, as Lisa would call her). There was a fun scene I remember where Oakdale's two grande dames bonded over a recalcitrant hospital vending machine - everyone was at Memorial after some disaster (maybe the late 90s church fire, where Barbara was injured and miscarried baby Johnny?).

Watching that I had a sudden recollection of Paul Ryan's "internet shopping" enterprise which bore no actual resemblance to anything on the internet. Can't remember exactly when that was, or whether it was John Howard or Scott Holroyd in the role.

Steve and Alice had a house in St Croix. Jim and Mary were vacationing there when Mary died. Lemay has said that he didn't think about putting Mac and Rachel together until he saw Douglass and Wyndham together on screen, but who knows? Iris was pushing for Mac and Liz to get together, and Liz, at least, believed it would happen (and practically had a breakdown when she learned that Mac and Rachel had married - actually attacking Rachel one day when they met at the hospital).

Interesting but not surprising that The Hollywood Reporter thought it was ok to mention that she wrote for Guiding Light years later, but not that she had a role on OLTL in the sixties, which might have spoiled the "she coulda been a contendah" narrative of her overlooked acting talent by the film industry.

It gets worse. The last six months or so were an endless succession of "WTF was that?"

A little pre-DAYS news from the New York Daily News - November 15, 1959.

Not sure exactly when that interview took place, but Penberthy was coming off a several-year dearth of story in late 1975. When Lemay started "in training" at AW, under Irna Phillips, Pat was being poisoned by crazy housekeeper Caroline, who wanted John for herself -- the kind of storyline Lemay absolutely hated. I think he avoided writing much for the Randolphs for quite some time after that, though of course John had more to do as the all-purpose town lawyer. When Penberthy says "the ratings go down, you write in an abortion," she's probably referring to Marianne's abortion which was in December 1975. But that storyline would eventually lead to Pat and John becoming more central as their marriage fell apart later in 1976. Over the next few years, the broader arc Lemay was writing for Pat was the story of an abandoned wife who had to learn to stand on her own, and she eventually ends up as editor-in-chief at Cory Publishing. It's not surprising that she would then be talking favorably about the show's 1970s writing when she's dumped in 1982. Now, she would have had something ground-breaking to play earlier in 1975 if Lemay had been allowed to proceed with the revelation that Michael Randolph was gay, but that angle was replaced with Marianne's ill-fated relationship with Chris Pierson. Poor Lionel Johnston, who was hired specifically for that story, had to wait nearly a year for Michael's relationship with bad girl Molly Ordway, which turned out to be his only important story in the four years he was on the show.

Given Irna's quixotic temperament, it's possible that there was a replacement that lasted only a few days until Phillips decided that she hated the new actress. However, 1961 seems early for this to have happened, as Dan was still a child at that point, and wasn't aged to become an intern at Memorial until around 1966 -67 I think, after Ellen went to prison for killing the blackmailing housekeeper (I believe that Dan and Paul were in high school at the time of the murder). None of this period is particularly well documented.

I had mixed these stories up a bit myself in my memories of 40+ years ago. Chris's rapist (1973) was George Curtis, Peggy's (1977) was Ron Becker. Peggy had an affair with her college professor, Jack Curtis (no relation to George), which upset Jack's "overweight" wife Joann. Joann went to work for Kay Chancellor and they developed a rather suggestive (for the time) relationship. Peggy and Jack were married briefly but it was annulled. I think Peggy's rape was around the same time as her relationship with Jack.

Another thing he learned from Irna! (at least he never addressed the actors by their character names - I hope)

Sadly the RobotRanger account on YouTube with uploads of Retro TV's rebroadcasts has been deleted as of this morning for copyright infringement. I had been greatly enjoying early 1968, just reaching the "seam" between the exit of John Rice, the reformation of Nathan Bunker and Danny's adoption, and moving on to the entrance of Ed Stark and the mystery of Lila Anderson. Too bad but I guess I should be surprised it lasted as long as it did.

There's a Wikipedia article about "Love in the Afternoon" that will probably tell you more than you could possibly want to know about the campaign. When it claims that the phrase came from the NBC and ABC campaigns to "refer to the stories told on soap operas," it doesn't mention the 1971 novel by the same name, a BTS look at a fictional soap, written by Ed Zimmermann (the second Joe Werner on GL). It's even likely someone had used the phrase even earlier. Back when Tom Selleck was hired on Y&R, fans probably thought they were hiring a "Joel Crothers-type," though I doubt that was on Bill Bell's mind. But actually, put either of them in tight jeans and a leather vest (with, or better, without a white T-shirt) and you have the quintessential gay look of the 70's - the Castro clone.

Yes, that's a young Tina Sloan as Kate. I'm guessing this promo is from 1974 [[EDIT - duh! it says so right on the clip]] , because Steve is still caught between Rachel and Alice and HTSAM is still aired between AW and Somerset (it moved after AW expanded in Jan 1975). I thought Lemay didn't really like Reinholt and his acting style any more than Courtney's, so wouldn't have wanted him as the endgame for Wyndham. Douglass Watson took over the role of Mac in fall 1974 I believe (IMDB is wrong to say 1975) and I think it's not until that time that Lemay gets the idea to pair Mac and Rachel. I wonder if NBC ever complained that ABC took over the "Love in the Afternoon" theme a few years later and really made a splash with it. Of course, it had been the title of a 1971 BTS soap novel by Ed Zimmermann (the second Joe Werner on GL), so the phrase was out there in the aether.

I had forgotten there was an earlier Doreen, but I remember that I loved Pamela Lincoln in the role, partly because Doreen was such a polar opposite of the character Lincoln had played on Love of Life.