alwaysAMC

Yep, just checked and it was McTavish. She was HW from 1992-1995, so that's gotta be correct as I think the Santos family came around in 1993. You know, as much crap as McTavish gets by fans (and some rightly so), her AMC from 92-95 was some of my favorite stuff so I have to give her credit there.

I actually really enjoyed 1995 - Brent/Marion's reign of terror, Alan-Michael/Lucy's relationship, Annie/Josh, Dinah's return to town and her pairing with Roger, Reva in Goshen (that dragged out too long, but it was fun to see a big name back). 1996 for sure wasn't as good. I'd say from March to November, it was borderline terrible as the biggest stories were disgusting (Griffin/Gilly/Vivian), boring (5th Street and A. Spaulding), or cruel in a bad way (Lonatrat). I'm halfway through December 1996 and I can already tell a huge difference, it's back to good soap opera. Yep, I checked the end credits and McTavish's last credited episode was 10/16/96. Immediately after, her 5th Street, A. Spaulding and Lonatrat storylines wrapped very quickly, thankfully. And barely any Griffin/Vivian scenes now.

Thank you - what a great site full of interviews! Ugh, that's a bummer, but I guess I'll just take what I can get.

That's the biggest fail for me too with Reva's 1995 back from the dead return. No Sarah, no Rusty, no Dylan other than a throwaway line a year later where she said she calls him every week. When someone returns from the dead, you need a family reunion to celebrate, or at the very least acknowledge it. This makes me sad... I've seen him in a handful of episodes now and he's actually a pretty good flirt with Nola whereas Tylo before that was more stiff. I haven't had the opportunity yet to watch much of Nola/Quint in the 80s, but I have to imagine their chemistry was really good back then. You're welcome! I have more coming tomorrow, which are interesting chapters haha. Kim is quite a character. I've spent the night watching interviews of her on YT because I want to really know her personality on screen as Kim, while I'm reading her book. I know many women like Kim, so I get her; she's quite the firecracker. I've just come across the Locher Room that many have talked about. I'm curious about it, because I love the opportunity to hear from our favorite soap actors today, but the short clips I've seen so far are right when Covid quarantine started and I just can't watch that. People talking over each other, awkward silence, talking about how they're doing in Covid.. it's just an awful trigger that I don't want to go back to. Does he continue this beyond 2021 where things are less Covid talk and more natural? He's also not that great of a host, he's a bit awkward... I don't know, I love that we have these interviews, but curious if they get better.

I’m up to December 10, 1996. They finally added Phillip to the opening, it was about time! He’s been on for almost a year now, it was weird he didn’t get added with everyone else when they revamped it. He was in the closing credits that entire time as a contract character. There is a temporary actor playing Quint now and it’s Roman Brady from DAYS haha. Meta Bauer just showed up and seems like she’ll be fun. I guess she was brought on as a replacement for Ed as the older Bauer family member? I’ve read about this character and in my head, always pronounced it like Facebook’s parent company Meta and not the way I just heard it May-Ta. Oops haha. Actually I’ve heard various characters call her Meh-ta, May-ta and Me-ta LOL, they can’t get it right. Anyway, she finally meets Michelle and immediately calls her Mary, which goes back to Zachary when he called her Mary a couple months ago! Meta goes to the lighthouse and recognizes him from the past and asks about Mary. She had a Zachary when she was younger that worked on the lighthouse and then left town… Now we’re getting black and white old timey flashbacks of Zachary, Mary (played by Budig/Michelle) and a little Meta. LOL, what is going on… Annie is trying to get artificially inseminated through a sperm donor just so she can trap Josh. Annie swapped her pill addiction with a baby addiction and it’s pretty amusing haha. Almost as equally crazy, we now have Bridget looking into plastic surgery options so Hart will find her more attractive and pick her over Dinah. It’s sad to see Bridget get this desperate. Reva, Buzz, Josh and Hawk are in Italy now to see Sarah, who is sick. Is this the same actress that would have been on years ago? Rusty also has joined. I’m curious how this southern Oklahoma family has ties to Italy, why is Sarah living there? On Sarah’s deathbed, she just told Reva in confidence that she had a secret child with another man when Hawk was out. She never saw the infant when born, didn’t even confirm the gender but thinks it might be a boy, and she gave it away (wow!). Now she wants Reva to find the baby. She also had a 1:1 with Josh and told him she’ll always believe Reva/Josh are meant to me. She then dies, and Josh is consoling Reva when Annie shows up LOL. Rick just told Phillip one of the twins is his and Phillip is pushing Rick to tell Ross given they’re related and he’s concerned. I’m just worried about poor, innocent Abby when she finds out the truth, I think it’ll overwhelm her. Nov 27 and Vanessa is back again in Switzerland with the nuns and Zachary. She’s mostly blind now, sadly, and Zachary is giving her an update on everyone. Oh wow, she writes a letter to Nola that Zachary delivers during Thanksgiving, asking her to take care of Matt and let him move on. How sad, but unfortunately Nola believes the letter was written before Vanessa’s accident, so she still doesn’t know the truth. Nola then shares the letter with Quint and the two of them try and set Matt up on a date, which is way too soon. Dec 5 is the debut of Lizzie! Lillian and Rick surprised Phillip by bringing her to SF. It’s wild seeing a very young Hayden Panettiere! Dec 6 (Friday) is Laibson’s last day as EP and Dec 9 (Monday) is Rauch’s first day as EP, per the ending credits.

Oh good, love to hear it! Noah/Julia were so great. Honestly the Santos family was such a great addition to the show and every sibling had an iconic supercouple attached to the show - Maria/Edmund, Mateo/Hayley, Julia/Noah and then Anita/Bobby (even though I preferred Bobby/Kelsey but what a great trio). I need to go look up what EP and writer combo came up with the Santos family.

I can't either 😕 Glad it's not just me haha.

Here is the October 9, 1996 episode where they debut the new Company (see 1:38 mark where it starts). This has the chandelier falling, and towards the end, Matt gets into a fight. Here is the next episode on October 10, 1996, which continues the fight and opening party. Great Tracy Chapman music playing during the last full scene as a bonus! And then October 11, 1996 where Reva joins the opening night party and spends time with J.

So was this a hit and run? And just two years ago? I hope there is more to this...

I've missed Leslie and Eva this week Anita! Good to see her, wasn't expecting that for a while.

Hayley was so great, and I loved the Hayley/Brian relationship and watching him scale the house to save Haley when Janet was holding her captive. So true, the Dimitri/Wildwind stuff was so good and such a great new storyline. 95 was such a great time too - and I loved Liza's return, with WRCW and all that stuff. If you ever have time, you should go back and watch 1994 with the tornado and the beginning of Noah/Julia.

😲 Wow! This just made my day, because I had no idea... and I'm not disappointed!

Oh the memories - I was actually at that Super Bowl when that happened, front and center. In the moment, no one knew how big that story would become...

Heading out for dinner/drinks, but posting the next chapter summary from Kim's book since some folks asked about her thoughts on her Emmy history: Chapter 13 - Kim talks about her Emmy nominations/wins and episode choices to submit. She said for her first nomination in 1985, she originally thought she would submit the “Slut of Springfield” episode, but unfortunately the infamous fountain scene came at the end of the episode, so all the meat was at the end whereas the majority of the episode was full cast party scenes, and she thought the Emmy voters would get bored and say no before they got to the end of the episode, so she found 3 other episodes to submit. She said she had only been at GL for less than two seasons at the time, so she was clearly the dark horse against Lucci, Hall, Strasser and Spencer and didn’t expect to win. She figured she would go have fun, bring her entire family and enjoy the party. She got a hair company to do her hair with all the extensions put in, making her look like the white Patti LaBelle. She thought she looked amazing. But, when they called her name as winner, her first thought was “what did I do to my hair”, and extensions kept falling out as she walked to the stage. Her one shoe fell off so she threw the other out (I think she was probably really enjoying her free wine at the table haha). She said she didn’t prepare a speech, so she ad-libbed and rambled. She said being recognized by her peers at that level was amazing, considering she was just fired from OLTL 1.5 years beforehand. After the awards show, the VP of ABC Daytime hugged her and said they were so happy to have “discovered” her. Kim was shocked because she said hello, she was on The Doctors for 4 years before that, but what she said to the exec was “Sure you discovered me and then you fired me. I went to another show and won an Emmy!”. She ends with ‘as the old saying goes “Success is the best revenge”’. She said her first scene to shoot after winning was another full-cast party and she had to sit at a table with Beverlee, Maeve (again spells her last name wrong), and May Kay Adams. She couldn’t get her line out because she was so excited, so after the 8th take, Beverlee says “You give the girl an Emmy and she can’t remember a [!@#$%^&*] line!”. Her second win in 1987 - just gave birth to her son and was still nursing, so wore no bra, but needed room to breathe, so she felt more conservative yet slightly trashy still. She said she felt really good about her material that year and assumed she was the one to beat, if the voters truly voted on performance and not popularity. She said one episode was in black & white when Reva was being written in a 20s cabaret and singing. Next win was 1990 which was bittersweet because she was leaving GL and didn’t know if she’ll ever be back in daytime. She thanked the Academy for giving her three awards, one for each of her children. After 11 nominations in total, her 4th win was in 2006 which was most special to her because she could have it for herself and be buried with it (since her others were going to her children). However, she didn’t feel like her storyline was strong that year (Reva going through menopause, which “went nowhere”), so she felt like that win was more for the show than herself. Towards the end of the chapter, she says she got 10 nominations (so 6 losses), which contradicts the 11 nom number she says previously. She said she didn’t think it was gracious for the press to always focus on Susan Lucci’s loss while interviewing her about her win. In 1998, she got her husband/son to choose her episode reels and they cried over how sad the episode was when Dolly the Clone died, so they submitted that, but she lost to Susan Lucci (“oh well”). She said she was sure she would win because the material was good (even if the fans supposedly hated it so much). She splurged and bought $600 tickets for her family to attend, including her kids for the first time. When Susan’s name was called, her kids jumped up and said “You’ve got to be kidding me! My mom was robbed!”, and Kim was so happy the deafening sound of Susan’s applause drowned out her kids. Kim said she was very happy for Susan and Susan has always been gracious, kind and lovely to Kim. She said Susan’s husband Helmut was a doll.

AMC: My first big storyline I remember was Janet coming to town and throwing Natalie down the well in 1991. I have flash memories of characters and things that happened in 1990. GH: Flash memories of really being into brothers AJ and Jason in the early to mid-90s (Kanan in the role). Robin and Stone too. OLTL: Tina/Cain and their relationship; Luna/Max; Alex. I was really into those characters back then in the early to mid-90s. DAYS: Marlena's possession haha. ATWT: Luke/Noah, which I purposefully watched given where I was in life at the time ~2007. GL: Faint memories of Alan-Michael/Frank/Eleni, which intrigued me, but I really didn't have an opportunity to follow the storyline. I mostly remember loving the early 90s intro for GL. Otherwise, I just started watching full episodes of 1995-1996 GL this year, and I'm loving it!

Thank you! When did you start watching / what's your story to get into AMC? Honestly I was probably too young to know that answer. The first time I remember heavy promo through soap mags and commercials was the Who Shot Will? storyline, which involved Janet just a year later in 1992. So my guess is they probably had some good advertising for Janet/Natalie, but just not sure. I remember my mom had an All My Children jigsaw puzzle when I was a kid, which had a picture of Erica, Jack, Adam and Ceara, which tells me that came out sometime between 1990-1992 since it featured Ceara surprisingly... which would have been around that same time with Kelly Ripa and Natalie/Janet. Maybe there was other merchandise out there that got people's attention.

Ahh so the cops were just revealed to be part of Martin's flashbacks! And a crowbar, I noticed.

I tried to do a quick search, but there aren't many Oprah episodes out there sadly. The only one I could find is when she had all of Erica Kane's husbands on the show to reunite with Susan Lucci, which of course included Larkin Malloy. I agree, Oprah should have given equal attention, and I've seen other talk shows be biased which always annoyed me. But also agree Kim could have been more professional about it, which she ultimately admits in the book (although part of me wonders if really true since she wanted to gossip about the story to fans anyway haha). No problem at all, happy to do it and glad y'all enjoy them. In my own head, I'm totally opposite Although I haven't seen Billy in action that much from back in the day, but I envision him to just lay there while Josh knows what to do and is passionate. Haha, hopefully that's not too R-rated for the boards

LOL what a dumba$$. It's actually kind of funny now.

More chapter summaries from Kim's book: Chapter 11 - all about her leading men and husbands on the show. She mentions that Jordan Clarke had big soft lips, but would always eat a hamburger with onions for lunch, which didn’t bother Kim when kissing him but Maeve (Vanessa) wasn’t appreciative of it. Btw, Kim here spells Maeve’s last name wrong: Kincaid (yikes!). She said Justin Deas (Buzz) acted with so much passion in his kissing that it felt like being TKO’ed by Muhammad Ali (yikes). She talks about Reva’s romance with Kyle and how Larkin Malloy would always lock eyes with her before kisses that would send shivers up and down her spine. They filmed a bubble bath scene and the bubbles kept popping and exposing her body stocking, so in the interest of time and reshoots, she just took it off and went bare chested in the bath with Larkin. She said he never would have done anything inappropriate, so she felt comfortable doing it. She goes into the whole Josh thing, where he was and will always be the love of Reva’s life. She talks about the history of the Lewis/Shayne families. She did say Billy was by far much better in bed and their relationship was all about having hot, steamy sex (from her perspective), which I thought was interesting. She said they likened the HB/Josh/Reva triangle as their Cat on a Hot Tin Roof storyline. She said any time you had a scene with Larry Gates (HB), if was gold. She talks about Larry’s Emmy win after the story of a drugged Vanessa hit a pregnant Reva with her car and Reva suffered a miscarriage (with HB’s baby). This was during the time Josh left for Venezuela (Lewis oil fields) and met/married “a beautiful woman named Sonni”. She then talks about Ron Raines (Alan), saying he’s one of the nicest people she’s met and he always tried hard to play the ideal Alan Spaulding, but because he was so kind in real life, he found it difficult to play such a villainous character. He was so kind and remembered everyone’s birthday, and she really loved working with him. She said he was the only person she was nervous about slapping in a scene because she respected Ron that much, but when the time came to slap him, her nerves got the best of her and she accidentally hit him in the ear, and his ear was ringing for the next few days. Ok, in this chapter she talks about how baffling the transition was, going from the princess of San Cristobel to Amish Rebecca in Goshen. I’m glad she acknowledged that here! She talks about her marriage to Jeffrey, which fans really enjoyed, but she thought it was over the top to have a post-menopausal woman get pregnant while having breast cancer. She talks about the great benefits Bradley Cole held with the Red Cross and what a great musician he is. Then Mark Dobies (Noah) who was a fantastic kisser with zero percent body fat. He made Kim work out with him for an hour every morning for awhile, which she needed but would have rather been gossiping in the makeup chairs instead. She wouldn’t say who the best kisser is, because they were all unique and good in their own way, but she said the worst kisser was a man she auditioned with many years ago who shoved his tongue down her throat, which is so unprofessional. She wouldn’t say his name. Love scenes were always so awkward to film, but the two best directors for these scenes were women: Irene Pace and JoAnne Sedwick. Bruce Barry shot them like he was working for the Playboy Channel and Kim was always surprised they were allowed on air. She then talks about Tom Pelphrey (Jonathan Randall). They were a super couple that never swapped spit (because she’s his mom), but they were so dynamic together. Kim was getting bored with her role at the time, and they brought in Jonathan to spice things up. They auditioned 7 different guys for the role, but Tom was the one she didn’t like because she couldn’t get a rise or reaction out of him - no sign of softness or vulnerability. She told producers he was the only one she didn’t want to work with, but then the next day he was cast. She then learned the producers told him to freak her out during the audition, and that he did. He ended up being one of her best scene partners, and she felt so exciting and exhilarating onscreen with him - he was her perfect foil. Chapter 12 - discusses being on talk shows, with Rosie being one of her favorites because Rosie loves Kim Zimmer. Kim and her daughter were selected for a basketball game during halftime of a WNBA game, but Kim was wearing a short skirt and thong that night and apparently flashed her butt to everyone at the Garden. When she did Rosie’s show the next time, the first thing Rosie said to her was “I saw your heinie”. Then we get to Oprah and wow… Kim starts by saying being on the Oprah show would be a dream for anyone, but not particularly for her. She’s done Oprah twice, the first being on a panel with Robert Newman about power couples in daytime. It was uneventful and went off without a hitch. The second time was in the late 80s and featured the leading ladies of soaps from all three networks - Jeanne Cooper and Kim from CBS, Deidre Hall from NBC, and Susan Lucci, Robin Strasser, Jill Larson and Marcy Walker from ABC. Two segments went by and all the questions were getting directed to the ABC girls, with Jeanne piping in here and there (“because that’s who she is”). Kim got so upset that she wasn’t getting a question or attention that she finally walked off the stage and left the show. She said she felt more like an audience member so why be there. She was with her publicist backstage gearing up to leave when Oprah walked in and encouraged her to stay. Kim said no, she had no reason to be there and Oprah admitted to her that All My Children was her favorite soap and she couldn’t help but ask a lot of questions to them, but promised to ask Kim a question if she would come back. She apologized and owned her mistake. Apparently Kim said she saw Oprah in a new light at that moment, one where her lack of ego trumped Kim’s own ego. So, Kim went back and finished out the show and decided from there forward, she wouldn’t let her ego drive her judgment. She still said she doesn’t regret walking off the stage, but said “You catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar”. Oy vey!

It is night and day, but I don't hate it because it seems to be true to life from my perspective. Living in Texas, I have a wide variety of friends/circles... not to stereotype or paint broad strokes, but for example, I've seen a handful of my gay friends go through something similar: meet for coffee/drink, hit it off immediately and have sex, and then introduce their new person as their boy/girlfriend a few days later. Granted, maybe not to family members (that's a bit extreme), but definitely friend groups. On the other hand, some of my college friends that are more conservative or religious took a long time to court their partner and wouldn't have sex until after they married. So I think it makes sense to show both extremes, whether they truly thought it out/planned it that way or not. Seems real to life for me. Although maybe as a viewer, we do want to see faster progress generally on the Kat/Thomas thing haha.

Diego was whiny this week, agreed. BUT, this episode was so good, especially the ending! The Mina vs. Helena stuff was so good and then the surprise reveal/cliffhanger at the end. Wow! This is good soap. I'm nervous though because they didn't have a 'Next time on Montecito...' at the end, and my podcast app is calling this Season 1 now. I guess we have to wait for Season 2 to start? I just hope that isn't too long, I can barely handle waiting a week for each new episode haha.

That is interesting, because that's when I first started watching. My story is probably different though. My mother watched AMC throughout the 80s, so when I finally came of age to comprehend and enjoy watching the show, it was around that time when Kelly Ripa first started, in late 1990 (~6-7 years old). So it was just by coincidence for me. My mother particularly loved Erica Kane and then Jenny/Tad/Jesse/Angie/Greg. So, she watched every single day after work and I eventually did with her and then we literally watched together every day until I went to college haha. The first big storyline that really got me hooked that I'll never forget was when Janet threw Natalie down the well in 1991. I think that was super popular with many fans in the early 90s, and with AMC being on during the lunch hour, so many people would tune in during lunch to see what happened next.

Love this - thanks for posting

From your lips to God's ears...