Xanthe

After the child Cathy Green and before Jennifer Runyon we had the juvenile delinquent iteration played by Julie Philips. I occasionally wonder what Sally's storyline would have been like if they hadn't whitewashed both her and Catlin's pasts for the Brittany storyline and gone back earlier than Peter when looking for a spoiler in their marriage. Chris Holder's Peter was quite a different guy from the more decent John Hutton version. Regarding Pat and Brian, I don't recall how far it went, and without context his apparently sudden declaration of love and her resistance felt awkward. Then in the Xmas day episode when Brian steps out of the room briefly Pat, who has been trying to sidestep talking about personal matters, is somehow willing to open up to Liz, who wants to push them together, about how great it is that he can be both level-headed and whimsical. I can understand that they wanted to show Pat's feelings but it felt like the wrong place and time for that conversation as written. That's probably a lower-level decision than HW so it may not be Jacker's fault, but a lot of the scenes feel inorganic to me with sudden changes of mood.

How dare you! Emma was famously plain and drab, unlike glamorous socialite Iris. 😀 Thanks @Tisy-Lish for the added details. Thinking about 1989 Iris and Evan, did Steve have any point of view about what had happened to Janice or was all of that ignored when he came back from the dead?

I just had a sudden flashback to reading a scene where Jamie told Dennis that Steve and Rachel were getting married. And I know Rachel tried to get in with Iris very early, so I think maybe she met Mac through Iris. Maybe Iris newly arrived in town would have required some architecture.

What kind of relationship if any did Steve and Iris have back in the 1970s? I know from the novelizations that Iris was not happy with Eliot's interest in Alice, but did Steve and Iris cross paths much?

It was the yelling that made Pete unattractive to me -- he was yelling at Diana before Steve showed up. Maybe there are other scenes where he is sweet to her that would let me see his appeal but without a context that shows that he's only yelling because he cares about her it's offputting to me. And her reaction didn't give me any sense of their relationship that could have won me over. Diana's conversation with Sally about sex felt very expository and unnatural and I desperately wanted to rewrite it to make it a more interesting dynamic between them.

It's hard to say especially if the actor didn't want to stay. If Jacqui Courtney had been in the rôle of Alice and if they had kept Steve and Alice together it would probably have been more successful but it's hard to say with the writing at the time which seems rather jumbled. I haven't watched all of these episodes all of the way through yet (thanks @Maxim for sharing) but it feels like an odd mixture of attempts at crime and adventure mixed with people talking about their love lives rather than doing much about them. Bringing Steve back from the dead required a lot of explanation. He wasn't supposed to have faked his death, was he? I thought I remembered they explained his staying away as convenient amnesia but the AWHP character guide mentions partial amnesia in 1970 and simply presumed dead without further details between George Reinholt and David Canary. I'm not sure why Sandy is talking with the police about drug addiction and crime -- is it because of Jamie or is it supposed to be journalism or both? Diana's accent sounds more English than Australian to me. Maybe she's supposed to be too posh to be colonial? And I don't really know what she sees in Pete.

I've seen that clip over and over and marveled at how much the actor resembled Peter Bergman without actually thinking it was him.

It wasn't that long (3 months) before the character was recast with Brian Lane Green, whixh suggests to me that they were replacing the actor rather than resting the character. Brian Lane Green's Sam seemed less intense than previous versions and they chose to emphasize his singing talent which I'm not sure did much for the character really. I guess it gave him a reason to interact with his nephew Matt the music producer a lot? I haven't found any news items from the time to suggest any reasons behind the recast.

I have no idea what technique this illustrator might have used, but the question reminded me of the documentary Tim's Vermeer and the tools Tim figures Vermeer used hundreds of years ago.

Adored her in Fawlty Towers. And she was a very good Miss Bates in the Kate Beckinsale Emma.

Thank you. Always happy to see Richard Bekins. I don't remember much about the Hardy Boys series other than (1) I had a crush on Parker Stephenson who got the part of Frank and (2) the reception we got for ABC was terrible. I don't know how I would have handled "Jamie" as Frank.

The misogyny charge was not so much about objectification of women as some of the choices she made about character. There were certainly salacious storylines under her watch, although they were perhaps a bit confusing. Serial killer the Sin Stalker was obsessed with prostitutes and then any woman who was not a virgin but never sexually assaulted any of his murder victims because he was obsessed with Lisa and intended to "marry" her until she revealed that she had been raped as a teenager and did not meet his standards for purity. MJ was changed from a college-educated police detective to a uniformed officer (who basically continued to do a detective's job) with no college degree and a secret past as a prostitute. She was devastated when her upright fiancé Adam jilted her at the altar but also still had a strong emotional attachment to her hunky former boyfriend and pimp, Chad. Donna remembered that before she had had sex with her boyfriend Michael as a teenager actually she had been hanging out with his brother John who had raped her, so there might have been a possibility that he was the biological father of her twins Marley and Victoria. When John came back from the dead he insisted that it had not been rape, she had been attracted to him because he was a badder boy than Michael. And then they spent the summer lusting after each other and setting up situations that allowed Reginald and Peter to persuade their dupe Victoria that John and Donna were having an affair. Reginald terrorized and drugged Donna and had her institutionalized, and what had been her story about how Reginald had kept her from Michael and forced her to hide in a secret room until she gave birth to the twins, given Victoria up for adoption and raised Marley as Donna's sister, became Michael's story of how Reginald had wronged him and culminated in a fight to Reginald's death where they blamed each other for Donna's miscarriage of a son without any noticeable regard for the pain and suffering of Donna and her daughters.

John Randolph also had an affair with Bernice, didn't he? It makes me wonder about his taste in women since he later married villainous Olive and of course he married Pat after defending her for murder. Did Lee's mother have any dark secrets or criminal tendencies? She must have been -- the trial ended and Wally was born in March 1971.

Do you remember why the jury acquitted Lenore? I was looking at the AWHP synopses and there isn't really a reason described, just her relief at the verdict. And I think I had assumed that the reason Lenore wasn't convicted was because Walter eventually took the blame, which clearly wasn't the case.

So today I was surprised to learn that Coldplay used a segment from Linda Dano's talk show Attitudes in their video for one of their songs and so Linda appears and speaks at the beginning and the end.

I don't think I have seen the cliffhanger comment before. Maybe it was slightly warranted because the pacing of the show had been a bit off for at least a year, but it's not as if it had always limited cliffhangers and big moments to Fridays. But it feels like De Priest is making a lot of ridiculously grand claims.

Oh, true -- just that Michael and Felicia were the farthest apart within that grouping and had less interaction with each other than they did with John and Sharlene.

Thank you, that was fun. Even though Felicia was friendly with Philece Sampler's Donna and later had an affair with John Hudson I don't think of Linda Dano together with Kale Brown much.

Lily was around somewhat regularly until the summer of 1985 when there started to be references to her being out of town a lot. The AWHP daily synopses for 1985 mention her winning a trip to Canada and I think there are also points where they say she is touring for her singing career. She drops in occasionally -- I think she came by for Felicia's wedding to Zane -- but not often. And when 227 was a hit she never came back. Lily was introduced as Thomasina's biological Aunt and Quinn needed to contact her in order to adopt Thomasina. Lily was working as a prostitute but she got out of that life and made a respectable living. I remember her working at Leo Mars' club and I think she worked on Felicia's TV show. She was friends with Henrietta as well as Felicia's set. She dated Carter's father Grant briefly but he broke up with her after she admitted her Past as a prostitute to him. She didn't really have a main story of her own, she was mostly supporting. I wonder whether the Matthews were not recognized as a core family after a certain point not just because so many characters had been written out but also because so many of the characters had taken their husbands' surnames. Susan and Julia used Shearer. Pat and her children were Randolphs. I don't recall whether Alice went by Frame in her 1984 return but Sally certainly was Frame and was using Ewing when she died.

Absolutely agree that they decide to make sweeping changes because they want to fix the show. I think there are two main reasons why they don't go back to what was successful in the past: one, they look at other shows that are currently successful because they know that the external environment (more women working outside the home, VCRs, etc) has changed; and two, they have their own ideas and I daresay limitations as to what inspires them. I don't know enough about AMC to know whether Le Soleil as a glamorous spa was something that Gillian Spencer might have conceived of because it fit with Pine Valley so that when she came to work on AW she used that basis. There has been a fair amount of discussion in here about how Michael Malone pulled things from his 13 Bourbon Street bible, and Margaret de Priest's penchant for international supervillains and serial killers, and the similarities between Agnes Nixon's early Rachel and Erica Kane. AW also tried the route of hiring a playwright to replicate the Lemay magic with Corinne Jacker. ETA: Even though I was using the present tense I was thinking about the 1980s when I mentioned VCRs etc.

Spencer absolutely crammed Le Soleil with retconned and new links to Bay City. Their headquarters were the Chapin Estate where new doctor Chris Chapin's family had lived. Chris Chapin's father had been connected to Carl Hutchins and Donna's father in something to do with an Egyptian treasure. Chapin Sr had had an affair with Daphne Grimaldi who was searching the estate for something to do with the Egyptian treasure. Her current lover, Michaud Christophe, had brought Le Soleil to Bay City in order to reunite Felicia with her old lover (and his father) Edward Gérard, a famous movie star who had been out of the public eye for years. He hired Cass in some sort of executive position and started a search for an American spokesmodel for the company. Kathleen had a makeover (as part of what Le Soleil called a "visualization"). Michaud was instantly smitten with Sally (because she was glowing with love for Catlin) and hired her as the Le Soleil Woman. Daphne took Nancy to Egypt which then led to Chris, Nancy, Marley, and Jake in Arizona in pursuit of the treasure, tormented by Carl. Carl murdered Daphne and Cass was wanted for the crime. Carl also caused Kathleen's paralysis. Catlin was jealous of Michaud's interest (and then when Michaud was written out, Le Soleil's architect Daniel's interest) in Sally. Rachel and Mac were tangentially affected because of Nancy's involvement (not to mention Mac's near death encounter with a jar of Egyptian tomb dust) but also because Mac's nephew Neal was an undercover FBI (?) agent working the Egyptian theft case. Donna felt entitled to some benefit from the Egyptian treasure because Carl had stolen her family's money and Victoria actually stole some jewels from the hoard. It may have been intended to be long term, but it was dispensed with pretty quickly in the end and wasn't really missed.

No, I am not familiar with those boards. What did they think? Was Taylor Miller's Sally similar to Nina? I didn't think she was a bad actress but the story didn't do Sally any favours. They didn't address any issues with regard to Kevin -- and I am sure that it would have been too soon for him to find out she was his real mother, they needed Kevin to be older to make the most impact with those repercussions, but that element should have been there waiting to go off. And it felt like they wanted to make Sally seem unreasonable for breaking up with Catlin after he cheated on her with Brittany and then insisting on marriage counselling before they reconciled. I mean I don't think either of them learned anything from the marriage counselling, in the end I think their problems were resolved by giving in to passion followed quickly by her death.

Huh. My first thought was "roguish" sounded more like Charles Grant as Evan, which reminded me that a few months ago I had found that clipping from late 1985 that mentioned that AW had been talking to him then. They didn't have anyone playing Jamie then but I thought they intended to create a new character for him rather than recast Jamie.

I wonder what that might have been like. Larry Lau was not was I was looking for in Jamie. Would DePaiva's Jamie have been more sensitive?

I'd be very surprised if Facebook was any help in this situation. I used to try to report accounts on Facebook where the account was set up to appear to be a celebrity and would add replies as if they were personally interested in other commenters. But of course there was no way to report someone for impersonating a celebrity unless you could link it to the celebrity's real account, and even if you reported it as fraud or spam Facebook would eventually shrug and say it wasn't against their TOS. I wanted to read the Sarah Wynn-Williams book that Facebook tried to suppress but after a few chapters of her floundering around incompetently I couldn't bear any more and returned it to the library.