Xanthe

I am more peeved about Cory and Elizabeth than I am about Michelle and Bridget. I understand the HEA (romance-speak for Happily Ever After) symbolism for the end of the show where Victoria and Jake were presented as destined soulmates (even though we have to ignore a lot of his betrayals to get there). And in a way they were trying to do the same with Carl and Rachel but since it was during the show it was worse in my opinion because it didn't do a good job of creating story or linking characters. At least Bridget and Michelle provided an excuse for a tiny bit of Donna and Marley in Jake's life.

I suppose they could have had a mandate to reduce the budget overall though. Sometimes it is obvious when one character slots into the place of another but it depends on why the previous character was written out. Otherwise maybe they paid for raises for the existing cast. 1982 was the year of the movie people, wasn't it? I don't really remember how it played out onscreen but reading about it always reminds me of Lesoleil in 1985 -- large crowd of unrelated strangers who create a bunch of temporary drama and then move on. Thinking about Lesoleil, I always wonder why they cast John Saxon in the part of a character who seemed like he was always intended to be French. Victoria had nearly caught up to her by the end -- Steven with Jamie, Kirkland with Grant, and then last-minute spillover twins with Jake on ATWT. I tend to take a very broad view of actors playing different roles in the same universe -- if they give a good enough performance it doesn’t really matter. I do think it's a problem that they brought back an actor whose on set behaviour was apparently significantly bad but I would argue that regardless of who played Shane it was weak writing to force him onto Victoria with Ryan's eyes and then twist him into Bobby Reno. But maybe I am biased because I never thought Sam and Amanda were that interesting so there was no emotional Sam resonance affecting the Shane story for me. (ETA: Maybe I have reversed the order -- Bobby first, then Shane?)

I have such fond memories of the Bob Newhart Show and although I had some issues with the series Newhart they were completely washed away by its ending.

According to this summary, Felice Camargo (Victoria Wyndham's sister) played Ford's daughter in the series. I don't recall having heard of that connection. https://nostalgiacentral.com/television/tv-by-decade/tv-shows-1950s/woman-with-a-past/

Maybe some of Ariana Muenker's videos will include him. Marianne definitely interacts with him according to the 1976 synopses.

There was 99 44/100% dead from 1974. https://youtu.be/byyQSmf9wqU?si=iiTQc7lwQyPHzdZM

I can't think of any callback to A Summer Place and of course Ada was a significantly different type from Helen Jorgenson. I would say that Ada's temper, when aroused, was hot, while Helen's was cold. I do remember Ada shouting at Nancy for making a mess of her life (and listing losing her virginity to Chris Chapin as possibly a worse crime than running up credit card debt and getting addicted to whatever Muffy was pushing) but no Xmas trees were harmed. By the time I was watching Rachel had mellowed a great deal so I don't recall Ada taking her to task but Rachel at her worst was so far beyond anything Nancy ever imagined that if there were a daughter to berate it would have been early Rachel.

This was all 1976, largely January and February. The havoc of 1977-79 is Olive. Greg Barnard is the guy Pat tried to protect Marianne from.

It was a little odd because first Pat goes AWOL after Marianne's abortion so John (casually and innocently?) invites Barbara to dinner at Alice's. Liz is suspicious. Then John finds out that Barbara knew about the abortion and then that Pat and Michael knew. John up and leaves Pat. He starts seeing Barbara and complaining that Pat has never really loved him. Pat goes out with Dave Gilchrist. Barbara leaves town and Olive swoops in before Pat and John have divorced.

Constance Ford coming on strong to Warren Beatty in All Fall Down.

Richard Simmons has died. https://nypost.com/2024/07/13/us-news/richard-simmons-legendary-fitness-guru-dead-at-76/

Dr Ruth Westheimer has died. https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/ruth-westheimer-obituary-1.7262991

I'm pretty sure he wasn't *quite* that old. I found something that gave his year of birth as 1948 which would make him 12 years older than Ariana Muenker and only 3 years younger than Victoria Wyndham when he played Jamie in the 1980s. I found this yearbook photo dated 1966: And physical space! I don't know what format she would have had them in, but video cassettes are huge compared to DVD which is huge compared to a hard drive and so on.

How old are Chris and Marianne supposed to be? I thought she was just finishing high school and deciding whether to go to college and Chris was still a college student. So not a huge age gap and not necessarily anything one would raise eyebrows over.

I had just read the section in Eight Years in Another World where Lemay is sad to tune in and see what kind of storylines his successors are inflicting upon the show, including making Sylvie a suspect in a murder mystery. Checking the HW credits on the AWHP I see Lemay left in May and the blackmail started in September when King was indeed HW. Lemay also did not approve of Mac taking up with Janice.

Oh, of course. A scene with Carmen Duncan and Cali Timmins had floated into my head and I had forgotten about Dennis. By the way, when I was skimming the AWHP synopses for 1979 (trying to confirm when the info about Sylvie's stint in prison came out) I noticed that apparently she bought Olive's house (at least it mentions Dennis preferring Olive's house over John's for her and the next thing we know she's having a housewarming party). I know we were discussing Olive's house here recently so I found that interesting. And then of course Sylvie was gone by the end of the year.

That's the problem with retcons on top of retcons. There was no implication that Mac had rejected Sophie if Iris' father was supposed to have been someone else, which was the first retcon when Amanda was born. It was only later when they introduced the additional layer that Mac was in fact Iris' biological father that it calls into question why he walked away from Sylvie. (Although I guess to be fair she was apparently in prison for murder (Kirk Laverty blackmail retcon) and he didn't know about the baby.) Mac's timeline is very hard to trace and I am not sure how old Iris was when her adoptive mother died. Who was raising Iris while Mac was running around fathering Sandy and Paulina?

Thanks for posting the one with Vic here. The scene at the beginning with Rachel refusing to come back to Mac is of course very difficult to reconcile with the later retcon that Mac believes Iris is not his biological daughter. He very freely announces that he is done with Iris after she went too far to break him and Rachel up and when Rachel kind of excuses Iris' behaviour on the grounds that she loves Mac, he asserts that Iris is like her mother and loves no one but herself. With their relationship at rock bottom it feels a bit unlikely that he wouldn't have brought up the paternity/maternity situation as a factor. But of course in those days no one expected viewers to be able to refer back to such details, certainly not easily.

This must be right before one of the scenes in the Paley clips I just watched since here Marianne is seeking advice about concealing from John the time she persuaded Chris to take her for a drive instead of attending a dance with his friends, and there John and Pat are arguing about how to react to it. Alice and Marianne have such masses of golden hair I can't stop staring.

Finally got around to watching Vic convene his office meeting. His affect was certainly more natural than Reginald's stiff pomposity. Reading the synopses, Carol is definitely a conniving double-dealing hussy, but there are also hints that maybe Robert is not that competent. Is Carol pushed out to make room for villainous Olive?

Maybe I am misremembering, but I thought Malone sued and won and that she publicly discussed her claim that her firing was because of her weight. And that her version of the falling out was that she didn't know why Rich and Frangione had become cold to her. Which sounded like we were expected to infer that Chris Rich thought it reflected badly on him for Sandy to have a fat wife so he wanted Malone pushed out. I have not been able to find any references to the lawsuit other than mentions in this and other forums. Maybe they settled out of court?

Thanks!

That looks like Thomas Ian Griffith (Catlin, AW) being arrested. Do I take it that Terry Silver is not in this season?

Yes, I think that's right. I wasn't trying to suggest that there was a window where they wedged in a slightly older Nancy, just that if they had aged her up so that Ada was letting her go away for a ski trip that it was probably some length of time since Danielle had appeared in the part, but time in soaps is so elastic that that could mean only weeks. When Jane Cameron did appear as a 17-or 18-year-old, was Nancy supposed to have been away at boarding school or had she just been around in Bay City offscreen? I know Thomasina and Marley and Carter and Ben were all attending the local high school in the fall of 1984 and I assumed Nancy was as well (even though she was dating Perry who had failed to graduate from college before he came to live with Donna) but then I see that the AWHP synopses for June 1984 refer to Mac paying Nancy's college tuition so now I am not sure.

This doesn't really help much but I will note that in the episode from December 23, 1983 during the Xmas preparations, Rachel and Ada discuss the fact that Ada intends to stay at her own home overnight because Nancy is returning from her ski trip early the following morning. Jane Cameron didn't show up until about 6 months later but the ski trip suggests that SORAS is in progress and Nancy is at least 3 or 4 years older. I was looking to see if Danielle Burns had other credits that might somehow allow us to make inferences about when she was on AW. I see that the IMDB has her in 84 Charing Cross Road which was released in 1987. I don't know when it was filmed but if it is her she looks very young for 13; I don't know whether they filmed any of the English scenes in the US but she is with the English part of the story; the little boy who plays her brother is called Lee Burns so perhaps he is her real-life brother? She mentions an older sister in this interview.