Xanthe

Larry and Clarice were dropped during Margaret dePriest's first HW stint, where she wanted to focus on Corys, Loves, and McKinnons. With Blaine and Sandy gone and Clarice's closeness with Ada and Mac forgotten, they were discarded. I know after the undercover drug thing Larry left the force to work as a PI with Catlin. I think but am not sure that he didn't go back, making it easy for dePriest to slot Adam Cory in as a police detective for MJ. I did like Adam, but it did feel like that was a mess.

Former Canadiens star goaltender (and later lawyer and MP) Ken Dryden has died. https://www.cbc.ca/sports/hockey/nhl/ken-dryden-obit-1.7627028

I remember Larry with the sleeves of his blazer pushed up. I didn't watch Miami Vice so would not have noticed any other similarities.

The story of the Plains Motel drug ring, Larry's investigation, and Nancy's drug addiction was somewhat lacking in execution. For one thing I am not sure they really told the story of Nancy's estrangement from her friend group, and I guess on the Love side they were too busy dealing with Marley's illness and the arrival of Victoria to spend time on grieving Perry very much. Larry was emotionally invested in the drug investigation because of his kids' baby-sitter Dale, and because he was undercover he couldn't confide in Clarice and also started to feel protective of the main drug criminal's wife, which led to his separation from Clarice. It was never clear to me whether Larry had actually been unfaithful to Clarice -- during the undercover storyline I didn't detect any adultery, but in the aftermath both Larry and Clarice seemed to behave as though he had. Catlin and Brittany also got involved in the investigation, partly because of the murder of her cousin Willa Grover but also because Catlin was concerned about Larry's behaviour. It was also never clear to me whether the "Plains Motel" name was something that was included in Willa's story and then when they decided to do the drug storyline they used the Plains Motel name for the disco to pull it all together, or if they had always intended to call the disco "Plains Motel" after misleading the audience into thinking it was an actual motel. A lot of this was during the period with no headwriter so in the absence of other evidence I am inclined to think that it might not have been that tightly-plotted.

Anna Stuart audtioned for it as well IIRC. And I think the writer who created the character supposedly had Jacqueline Susann in mind. Early Felicia was definitely much harder and colder than the character eventually grew to be. I completely understand what you're getting at, I was just trying to think through why I had never pictured her as being Alexis-like.

This is fascinating to me because I would never have thought to categorize Felicia in this way because she was dramatic and flamboyant with a creative slant. She did not control a publishing empire although she did own/manage a series of restaurants and eventually a bookstore. But those were more about her being social than being powerful. Maybe she is more aligned with Lisa on ATWT than Alexis?

There's also this [same?] story from Coster's memoir.

Donna Love on Another World can't have been very old when Vicky's son Steven was born. She should have been about 35 when Vicky showed up at 18 and it was less than 4 years later in real time. I hate to estimate characters' ages too much because although there was no SORAS in this specific timeline, adults' ages tend to be compressed so no one gets too old. The youngest grandparents will presumably be based on compound SORASing.

On the six degrees of separation front, Wesley Addy was married to Celeste Holm whose character's husband in All About Eve was played by Hugh Marlowe who definitely played Jim Matthews. On the name similarity front, Wesley Ann Pfenning did play Alice Matthews.

Thanks -- I clearly got mixed up.

I thought Judith Barcroft was still in the rôle when Walter Curtin died.

Thanks! Susan Sullivan mentions how much she enjoyed doing a scene where she got to destroy a set -- does anyone remember that scene and what it was about? I know what you mean. Lemay created Mac Cory and in 1989 even though the cast had been completely reset two or three times since Lemay had left, Mac and Rachel represented a core of stability -- which is why it made sense to build the anniversary and the return of so many characters around the retconned idea that Cory Publishing was 25 years old. I can imagine an alternate universe where they had decided instead to make the show's 25th anniversary party the 25th birthday of Marley and Victoria -- but that would not have had ties to older cast members before 1983.

Apparently Nick did have to donate bone marrow to Michael, but based on the dates it sounds like that must have happened quite early after he arrived. Really it sounds like a justification for the character to be around at all which would not have been necessary for Cory. They could have manufactured a reason for Cory to interact with Michael just as easily.

I came across this post about fur on Another World and marvelled at how many occasions Lisa was described as being dressed in fur until I looked more closely and realised that the poster had mistaken Philece Sampler as Donna for Joanna Going in most if not absolutely all cases. https://furglamor.com/2008/10/23/furs-on-tv-another-world/?amp=1

Is there anything Nick Hudson did that Cory could not have done? With Blaine as Maggie's stepmother and Larry as Cory's stepfather they were not real cousins. I hardly remember Nick interacting with Michael and Donna very much but maybe that's more about the casting than what actually happened in the storyline. I remember thinking that Justin Chambers was very good and then *poof* he was gone.

Aside the Willis issue, to some degree they were also scrambling because of Douglass Watson's death. Granted I find it a bit hard to figure out whether they really had a lot of Mac story they had to put aside because everything to do with the Janice-based grudge applied to Rachel more directly. Maybe Mac only had speeches and the Frame pieces of the story remained intact. Robert Delaney being kind to Iris was also a bizarre out-of-character moment.

Marley was also 3. Liz was 3 (not counting 1 day Sarah Cunningham). Adult-ish Maggie was 3. Matthew should go to 4 if we count Daniel Dale who was a bit more than a typical child.

Thanks! It's not completely clear to me who the HW on GL would have been when Buzz first appeared. Was it Stephen Demorest?

The wall-to-wall promotion of Freakier Friday lately put into my head the shocking idea that both Jamie Lee Curtis and Laura Moss have portrayed Lindsay Lohan's mother onscreen. I wonder whether they made Amanda a redhead in this era mainly because they wanted Lindsay as Alli. Lindsay was very good as Alli and I liked Laura but the storylines for Amanda in this period felt a bit too immature. Maybe if Amanda had not already been through her more adult phase when she was married to Grant it would not have felt like backsliding.

A mention of Anna on Days in the wedding outfit thread reminded me of a long-standing grudge I have against Margaret dePriest and I wondered whether she is the only headwriter who resorted to this over and over again: taking (or creating) a character who has never been onscreen and has always been dead when mentioned in the story, and having it suddenly turn out that that character is alive and ready to create conflict. On Another World she did this 3 times in 1986-1987: Reginald Love (previously called Brandon) -- Donna, Peter, and Nicole's father. He had faked his death and run away to Paraguay for at least 15 years. Mary McKinnon (previously called Teresa) -- MJ, Kathleen, Ben, and Cheryl's mother. Reginald had faked her death and given her or taken advantage of her amnesia to take her to Paraguay with him. John Hudson (previously never acknowledged) -- Michael Hudson's brother. Presumed dead in Vietnam. There was also the character of Brittany Reynolds Peterson on AW created in 1985 in the absence of any credited headwriter, so I guess I have to admit that Depriest is only 75% guilty here. However I believe Depriest introduced both Anna on Days and Eric Kane on AMC using the same technique. Are there any other similar back-from-the-dead characters, and if so which HW created them? I do not count cases where previously alive onscreen characters are brought back from the dead. That is a different thing driven by different backstage issues.

Do. not. get. me. started. I don't think it was necessarily wrong to bring Stacey back, but essentially trying to pretend that none of her storyline had ever happened and trying to turn her into the heroine of a bodice ripper was awful. They gave her a tragedy that they didn't seem to take seriously in order to give her a clean slate.

That is the key point and I think the issue is whether it is necessary to assume that Pat would have to feel shoehorned in rather than organic. For example I resented Mitch very much because they killed off Zane whom I liked and tried to create a lot of drama around this very low-key stoic character. I understood why they thought that having Mitch would create a connection to Mac and Rachel and Matthew (and upped the ante with Sam as his half-brother) but the way they did it did not work for me. On the other hand bringing back Sharlene and then leading up to the reveal that Russ was Josie's father worked very well. If they had been able to reintroduce Pat without forcing out another character who was serving a purpose, and if they had positioned her so that she had meaningful relationships with other characters I would have been happy to see Beverly Penberthy return. One thing that I thought Lemay did extremely well when he returned in 1988 was to define relationships between individual characters more distinctly than we had been given in the previous few years. (There had been times when it felt like everyone's main relationship was to Reginald Love and everything else was secondary, which isn't what I want from a soap.) They would not have needed Pat just to figure out that Russ could be Josie's father, but if she had had the right amount of interaction with the Corys as well as the Matthews it could have worked well.

Another big change of direction of course was due to Mac's death. I know Pat worked for Mac at Cory but what kind of relationship did they have? Could her storyline have been intended to be with Mac and Douglass Watson's death put the kibosh on that? (This is utterly unsubstantiated speculation.)

I'm not sure why they dropped the character but I do know that he showed up for the big 4th of July episode that year. AW did not normally make a big deal of the 4th as far as I recall (they were often preempted in early July for Wimbledon) but that year they definitely did, I think because of John's veteran storyline. Sid ("Sharkey") and John were both vets.

I vividly remember Stephen Yates showing up as the new Jamie. I wasn't happy about replacing Richard Bekins but I grew to appreciate Yates very much eventually. I can't claim to remember what the general public thought about these episodes at the time -- probably anything I can think of would just have been promotion in the soap press. I remember it as the introduction of Ada's past boyfriend Sharkey. And I liked Lisa being rueful about how much she had subordinated herself as Jamie's girlfriend. I haven't had a chance to rewatch all of it since you posted the link, but watching the beginning I feel a bit dissatisfied with the way Amanda and Sam are used as the framing device. When it started I thought maybe it was supposed to represent just what Amanda imagined they might say, but when Ada revealed things that Amanda had not known that were shown to have been true, I felt that Amanda and Sam's comments were intrusive and should have not been used past the beginning.