BuckyB12

Article about Haila Stoddard's life from her local paper: http://www.thehour.com/story/499929 (don't know how long it will stay up, so read it while you can) I think it was reading this story recently in the paper (the hospital where she died is a block away from me) that got me woondering what was going on here at SON these days in the way of classic soap discussion. I was a member a long time ago but haven't been back in some years. Unfortunately I never saw "The Secret Storm" as it was cancelled about a year before I started watching soaps (except for "Dark Shadows"), but I've read whatever I could find (including the old paperback novelization) and have seen some of the old episodes. It's always sounded like my kind of show! Way past my bedtime tonight but I will be back.

The soap press was very different in the 70s - much more independent and not reliant on the shows for material, so they didn't "owe" them anything - certainly not to the extent we see today where the shows control all the access to the actors, provide the publicity stills, the synopses, etc. They were free to review the shows as they saw them and not worry that they'd be cut off. They haven't even done reviews in SOD for the last twenty years or so because the press is completely in the pocket of the shows. I think the biggest weakness in "Lovers and Friends" was the casting of the young leads, with the exception of Arrants and Jones (and Backus, who had the acting chops but wasn't a conventional leading man by any means). Who were these people? I mean, really, Patricia Estrin as the central heroine? She was adequate as Joan Barnard on AW, John Randolph's secretary, but she never had a storyline beyond a secret crush on John that never went anywhere (nearly all Lemay's minor characters had little things like this, plot points that never rose to the level of a real storyline). Lemay's contempt for the "popular" sorts of soap stars of the day (like Jacquie Courtney and George Reinholt) probably kept him from considering the sort of actor he really needed to draw in an audience for a new show. Surely there were some young, popular stars of the day that could have been cast, even with many of the competing shows looking at expansion, but you get the impression that if an actor had ever appeared on the cover of Daytime TV that Lemay wouldn't have considered him/her. By the time they were preparing "Lovers" for its launch I think they were starting to believe a little too much in their own reviews. The hour-long AW was a hit and they had lots of critical acclaim, but what they had really done with the show was renovate it from an already existing foundation. They hadn't built it from the ground up and found with the new show that it wasn't enough to do the drawing room dialogue scenes with actors from the theatre. It needed more meat, more plot (remember that his highest AW ratings were with the Sven Petersen story, which was practically radio-style melodrama at times), AND some familiar faces that an already-existing soap audience might want to follow, but Lemay didn't want to do it that way. With AW he already had an audience when he started, which he (mostly) convinced to go along with the ride, adding more viewers on the way, but he wasn't starting from zero. The new show probably got a lot of people who were relatively new to AW and liked what he was doing there, but it didn't necessarily attract the long-time viewers, who may have kept watching AW partly becuase of Lemay and Rauch, but also were still watching for other reasons that predated their tenure. And because L & R didn't really know what they needed to start out with, they didn't know how to fix it either, and "For Richer, for Poorer" seemed to suffer from too much (probably conflicting) input from outside.