Xanthe

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.

Sad to hear that she had been ill. Jennifer Marlowe was such a fantastic character and she did it perfectly.

Vicky was recast, briefly, but the recast also left before the end of the year. I have never seen another recast like it -- on the Friday we saw only a mystery person's leg as she went with Reginald to Marley and Jake's wedding. Marley threw her bouquet at the end of Friday and she and Jake immediately left. On Monday the face of the recast Victoria was revealed as she caught the bouquet. Ellen Wheeler had stopped playing Victoria in July but they didn't want to show the recast of a non-identical actress in the same episode as Ellen's Marley. The recast Vince showed up quite early in 1987 but it was late February before Philece Sampler took over the role of Donna. I'm glad Anna Stuart didn't have to put up with the storyline that Philece played out (mainly the Lust for John) even though I imagine she would have somehow improved the execution of it even though it was so intolerable.

And then of course Quinn was killed off and I think it was Marcus Smythe, the third (and ultimately final) Peter Love, who was the actor with the next longest tenure in the list. It felt remarkable at the time. Was it just as bad in 1982 when Beverly Penberthy left as Pat?

AW had so many cycles where there was an obvious big reset and suddenly everyone was a stranger. I don't know if there was one particular flashpoint where the housecleaning was so thorough that they got themselves into a pattern where too many contracts just always expired at the same time and so we just saw huge turnover every couple of years after that. Obviously that wasn't the case with the two biggest most disappointing losses of 1991, Cali Timmins and Dack Rambo, who didn't complete their contracts. But I remember by mid-1987 there had been so many characters written out that only Douglass Watson, Victoria Wyndham, Constance Ford, Linda Dano, and Brent Collins had been around for more than 18 months. Spotted Alice Barrett in this Acutrim ad.

I can't feel as strongly about Jensen as that. I thought she was perfectly capable of delivering lines and conveying emotion. I reserve "can't act" for performers who seem to have to concentrate so hard on getting the words out that they don't have any energy left for varying their emotions. I did not care for the recast Dennis at all. I thought that the progress of Felicia's story, adopting Jenna and having Lucas come back into her life with the reveal about her baby building up to finding Lorna was good. I wasn't crazy about Dean at the time but when I catch scenes with him and Jenna now I find myself liking them.

One of the Dionne quintuplets has died at age 91. Only Annette survives. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/cécile-dionne-obituary-dionne-quituplets-1.7599411 I did not lead with her name, Cécile, because reading Cécile Dionne too quickly has confused many people.

ATWT had moved into the Brooklyn studio, hadn't they?

Unfair only in the sense that the writing about the character Amanda at the time she was created was really about Rachel and Mac and Iris. And in that sense was it any more meaningful than saying that Donna Swajeski created the Red Swan? It's not a major issue or anything, just idle musing about the significance of creating a character as opposed to writing for a character.

It feels very unfair to credit Lemay with the creation of the character Amanda just because he wrote the story in which the baby was born. I suppose one could argue that he created her place in the family and anything that happened later had a dependency on that, but there was no real character in the sense of personality for a number of years. Of course I suppose that in that sense it is also impossible to give the writer *full* credit for characterization -- so much depends on the contributions from the actor and director.

Did he also change Liz?

According to the invitation he is Mark Penberthy. https://boards.soapoperanetwork.com/topic/30343-another-world-discussion-thread/page/684/#findComment-1890356

IIRC, Rauch told him that Courtney had not gone all out in rehearsal, cunningly concealing how she intended to play the scene until the taping by which time it was too late for the powerless director to correct her. How could anyone possibly blame the poor director or producer under those circumstances? Jacqueline Courtney was simply too clever for them. ETA: It took Lemay to bring her to heel! From the book --

Just saw the news that Tom Lehrer has died. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/jul/28/tom-lehrer-dies-aged-97-dead-musical-satirist I only recently learned that he had done songs for the Electric Company. Don't know why I hadn't known that.

I would agree that making the ingénue boring is weak writing, but I will point out that by this point Rachel had let her bad girl card lapse a bit. She was a heroine for having saved Mac from Janice and even the shocking fact of Matthew's conception was part of her sacrifice in that storyline. On the whole of course Steve's return from the dead didn't have many long-term implications -- after he died again Rachel remarried Mac and former bad-girl Blaine married Sandy and former bad girl Sally started on a more virtuous path despite her secret love child. Steve's Australian stepdaughter left town and Alice was gone. Maybe the introduction of Quinn was the best, longest impact of Steve's return, and it wasn't long enough.

I think this may be the wrong year. Mr Brandeis was a prospective buyer for Carl's horse Stowaway (which for some reason he had put in Sandy's name so the deal fell apart) in 1985, not 1986.

I do wonder whether the original plan was always to put Rachel and Canary-Steve together or whether they changed the storyline based on audience response or behind-the-scenes factors. Vana Tribbey's Alice grew close to Mac while he was separated from Rachel in the aftermath of Janice/Mitch/St Croix. Tribbey was on only 6 months, which seems like she was fired and replaced quickly at short notice with Linda Borgeson. And Borgeson stayed for only a year. Alice during this time period made very little impression on me so I would not have a strong sense of the character and who was better. But it seemed inappropriate to construe Rachel as Steve's True Love and also unhelpful story-wise to squeeze Alice out.