BetterForgotten

Things seemed very messy at AW in the late 90's - If I remember correctly, JFP left on her own accord and gave an exit interview where she alluded or talked about what a challenge it was to work on the show and how that there were a ton of cooks in that kitchen...

Well, look at the soap that replaced AW, and the success they had with Reilly's DAYS in the 90's...

The Carters were ruined to begin with. I will always applaud him for killing off Ronnie and Roxy with no remorse...

I remember disgruntled OLTL fans at the time saying that Lindsay was JFP projecting herself as a character on the show. The character was VERY unpopular during the JFP era with a lot of longtime fans.

I wonder if Yorke may actually stick around longer than this "temporary" basis if they can't find someone to replace SOC. Remember when Loraine Newman was supposed to be temporary as well?

Jensen absolutely ruined Marley (and Vicky, if we want to be honest).

Wait, so John Yorke is back on a temporary basis? As much as I love the early 00's, the show has tried and has never been able to recreate it. Yorke keeps coming back in some capacity...

Watros was more like Anne's Vicky in those few episodes than Jensen ever was.

Didn't Lemay actually mentor Marland at AW? Maybe Marland was just being grateful and giving him a job. Actually, would have been interesting if Lemay actually got to HW GL. I wonder how he would've fared with this type of show.

I don't know, I think Sherry was just a hard act to follow and LK, though competent, just didn't have the same appeal/charisma. I don't think I ever stopped missing Sherry's interpretation of Blake.

The scenes with Ross and David at the diner after his acquittal were also touching:

If I remember correctly, the story also had an indirect impact on quite a number of characters on the show at the time, and it felt like all of Spingfield was united behind David (even Roger!).

Yeah, that is strange. I wonder if the aversion had to do with them being a younger interracial couple. The CBS soaps tended to skew more towards Middle America and the South - a few years later, Y&R had a ton of backlash from that segment when they toyed with Victoria and Neil. The P&G soaps never got the credit when they did socially relevant storytelling right - a lot of the time they were less preachy and more soulful than the ABC soaps, which always got all the credit for socially relevant storytelling.

David also helped Bridget deliver Peter, and I don't think I've seen those episodes since they aired (were they ever on YouTube?). Bridget/David just had a really great bond that I don't think the characters ever really shared with anyone else. Patrick Mulcahey later tried to pair them as well after Curlee left and he was Co-HW with like 100 other people - he later said that was the exact reason he quit the show because CBS/P&G just wouldn't allow them do an interracial relationship.

I wonder how things would have netted out with Bridget and Kat had Curlee and team been allowed to do the Bridget/David relationship they wanted. I liked Kat/David, but always felt that David was weirdly Bridget's soulmate (even if they never became romantic). David doesn't show up for another year or so, so definitely interesting to see how he's introduced to Bridget/Kat (as I can't for the life of me remember his introduction).

Holly was always the one person that got under Mo's skin. I think that's partly why Mo had that great connection with Roger and could often see the best in him when no one else wanted to - they were both outsiders looking in on the tight (but mostly platonic) bond that Holly and Ed were always going to share.

Congrats to Laurie Metcalf on her Tony award win for Best Actress in a Leading role in a Play!

^The REAL Blair!

Didn't Marcy and JFP's relationship sour at GL? I remember when Marcy was interviewed around 1997 and was asked how she would feel if JFP came to AMC as EP (at the time, JFP was consulting at ABC, but obviously ended up at OLTL), and she didn't seem very enthused... It was the right move for her to go back to AMC (even if they later ruined Liza).

Marland likely found Agnes infuriating to work with. We know how involved he liked to be in the writing of his shows, and to have to answer or collaborate with someone like Nixon must have been hard for him. Patrick Mulcahey, who wrote for Marland at both GL and Loving, once mentioned how much he disliked Nixon's involvement in Loving's writing process: How did you start in Santa Barbara ? Thereby hangs a tale. After working with Douglas Marland on Guiding Light and then on Loving, which I hated (and where Agnes Nixon was like some psychotic schoolmarm on speed, making copious condescending red-pen "corrections" in the margins of scripts - "You used the same word on page 2 and on page 34 ! Too repetitive !") - after that, I decided I was done with writing for soaps. Douglas was the best. He'd taught me more about writing than any ten literature professors ever could have, plus I'd won an Emmy. I figured I'd never have another experience like that, so I decided go back to what I knew best : waiting on tables and writing plays at night and being a starving artist again.

Agnes at least did train Gordon Russell to take over the HW duties at OLTL when she left to focus on AMC. Loving just seemed to float in and out of different regimes every few months (Agnes herself did come back at one point). To be fair to ABC, they did give this show a lot of chances to catch on and it probably lasted way longer than it needed to given its ratings in relation to other soaps at the time. The fact that they kept it around for as long as they did was probably due to their relationship with Nixon.