Daytime70s

I have a few snippets of Marland's first few months on GH on my blog (I have to find them) However, it was very slow-going. He inherited a nightmare with the Lisa/Lana storyline ---so confusing, that took some time to wrap up. The Mark/Katie/Lamont Corbin stuff was not working either, despite our dear Gerald Gordon---viewers not invested in that story. The money was not flowing, the sets weren't rebuilt until after the May 78 (David Hamilton murder) storyline which finally --whew-- brought them to number 3 in the ratings. I don't even think the good Charles Paul background music scoring began until late April. So, from Jan to May 78 they still had the bad music and boring sets. What did happen early on was the dramatic intensity. Characters began shouting more, conflicts were heightened, and more scene cutting, so it did feel like the pace and plotting was moving quicker, somewhat. I'm looking for an Afternoon TV article that came out sometime in 79? 80? where Marland talks in detail exactly how he revamped GH. In 77, before he got to abc, he was assigned to watch the show for a few weeks and fell asleep !!! It was all scenes of 2 people sitting and talking. So, he created more meeting places, restaurants, the cafeteria etc, where characters would interact, and not just sit in chairs in a closed room. Lots of movement was incorporated.

There's a lot of head writers of cancelled soaps that go on with their careers. Wasn't Ann Marcus writing Love of Life when it was cancelled? She was hired by other shows after that. I think cancellation affects salary, but not ability to get future jobs. GH may have found a home on another network, had abc pulled the plug. Nbc had been looking to expand, and eventually bought Search.