Broderick

That was a sad day. 😉 She definitely wasn't Lilibet Stern. But In hindsight, compared with all that nonsense with the tall, demented Patty from a few years ago, Andrea Evans was just fine in the role.

What's funny is that if you go back and look at VERY EARLY 1980, before Margo was even murdered, Slesar was already previewing it to the audience. Draper, April, and Logan were playing Monopoly. April was telling Logan that she'd been dreaming about Draper, a "silver bracelet" (the handcuffs), and a train whistle. She also said she was trying to decide on a girl's name for her baby, even though it would "probably be a boy". Logan remarked that in his family, everyone's first name was the mother's surname. April asked, "So your mother's maiden name was LOGAN?" Logan Swift said, "Yep, JULIA Logan." That one scene previewed the next 6 months of storyline -- baby Julia, Draper's arrest, the train derailment, and April's relationship with Logan.

I think it's one of those "old wives' tales" that's been handed down erroneously over the years. The ratings for that week don't support viewership of "20 million" on the wedding day.

I've been wondering how they're budgeting for Miss Eileen. Her appearance fee per episode is likely fairly high. I'm not complaining; I'm always happy when she's on. But the show looks so desolate & poverty-stricken in every other respect, as though they can barely afford to pay their electric bill.

Y&R beating OLTL in three out of four weeks here.

Half-sister, I believe. My recollection is that Ben Travis had an affair with Jody's mother while he was married to Nicole's mother. It was a touchy subject when Jody first appeared, having to tell Nicole that (a) "your dad had an affair" and (b) "I'm your little sister". I agree that April Cavanaugh was a far more complex character than Jody ever was. April had that whole mysterious thing going on with the visions she sometimes suffered from, after her heart stopped beating for a few minutes; no one was ever sure whether to take her premonitions seriously or not. Also, she wasn't some spineless little jellyfish. When Raven started badgering her mercilessly, she would roll her eyes, flick her hair out of her face and tell Raven, "Get out, and don't come back." It was refreshing to see an ingenue stand up for herself, the way April often did.

lol, I honestly have no expertise. But Slesar clearly LOVED writing for April, Draper, and Raven. I expect Sharon Gabet's maternity leave was a factor, along with a "demographic mandate" to feature more of Preacher & Jody, as well as Lee Sheldon's love of Preacher Emerson, Del Emerson, and Jody.

Put your mind at ease. It was "luck". If Sharon had it in her contract, she was BREACHED in 1984, lol. Jody and Preacher got the FIRST shot and the LAST shot in this one, which ran through much of 1984. I think the placement was "pet" based. In 1980, Terry Davis & Tony Craig were Henry Slesar's "special pets", so they got the closing shot. By the time the shots were redone in 1981, Sharon Gabet had joined them as a "Slesar pet" and she got the final shot (immediately following April and Draper). April & Draper left the show in the summer of 1981, so Raven was Slesar's sole Special Pet who remained. She got the final shot through the rest of Henry Slesar's run. Lee Sheldon's special pets were Jody and Preacher for some unknown reason. So they got it for a while.

I think Raven's positioning was just "luck". Draper had the spot first. Beginning in June of 1980, when the photographs were introduced (along with the "disco" opening), they concentrated on three couples. First were Nancy & Mike Karr, followed by Miles & Nicole Cavanaugh, and then they closed it out with April & Draper Scott. Once Jayne Bentzen (Nicole) left, and they needed to update, Raven got the ending shot. (She'd been omitted from the first sequence, as she wasn't part of a "couple"). From then on, it was various shots of Raven that ended it, as far as I can remember. (I believe for the final one in 1984, with the "techno" opening, we might've had Jody & Preacher on the beach for the last shot.)

What's sad about the station clearance of The Edge of Night is to run the math on its potential. It clocked in at a 2.8 for the week of 10/12/1984, with a clearance of only 106 stations. If you take that 2.8 rating and extrapolate it to clearance of 208 stations (which General Hospital had), you'd be looking at a rating of 5.5 or 5.6 for that particular week, placing it just behind Capitol. (And this is when Edge was already in its death throes.)

My opinion only --- no sources to cite. TWO actors were cut from that storyline and replaced fairly quickly. One was the actress who played Molly Sherwood, and the other was the actor who played Kelly McGrath. Henry Slesar often plotted his storylines FAR in advance, dropping random little clues as he went. For the storyline to work correctly, the actress playing Molly Sherwood needed to be a motherly type, ditzy but loving, a lady who appeared to be kind, open & caring. The recast actress (Laurinda Barrett) seemed to imbue those qualities a little better than the original, who'd already seemed a bit brusque and sinister. The actor playing Kelly needed to be a young leading man who appeared to be all-consumed with his puppets, a friendly sort with no agenda or secrets, who'd just popped over from Europe to spend a few months with Aunt Nancy and Uncle Mike. As the story progressed, other characters would begin discovering that he had a certain secret past in Rome that didn't align with his pleasant personality (things that involved an injured person and a knife attack). The recast actor (Allen Fawcett) seemed to imbue those qualities a bit better than the original, who'd already seemed extra-fidgety, awkward, and uneasy. I've always believed Henry Slesar & Nick Nicholson recast those two roles because the original actors were "telegraphing" too much of the storyline that was still many months from being told.

When there's a "tie" in the ratings (such as 9/24/1982) when Guiding Light and The Young & the Restless both have a 7.7, I'm inclined to think the one with the higher "share" (Y&R's 31 share versus GL's 27 share) should be listed first. If both shows are tied in households and in shares, then I think they should be alphabetized. That's just my two cents, and I'm not complaining. I'm thrilled to have the weekly data, and I appreciate the work you put into these! 😉

Oh no, I don't think you're being negative or critical about him at all. I was just a little surprised to see him described as a "gay" porn actor, as based on my experiencing of his various blue movie roles, his music adventures, and his role as a police chief, I tended to think of him more as a "jack of all trades", lol.

I think it's a little inaccurate to describe Dennis Posa as an "openly gay actor who was a gay porn star". When I was growing up, he was a well-known heterosexual porn actor who'd appeared in one gay flick, along with a couple of dozen hetero flicks. I would describe him simply as a "performer", who applied himself in a variety of different genres, including hetero porn, gay porn, mainstream television, and music. As for his personal life and how "openly gay" he was --I've got no idea. I didn't know him personally. Some people have opined that he was Jacques Morali's boyfriend; some people have assumed he slept with Jacques Morali in order to get a record contract with Casablanca Records; some people have suggested he was just Jacques Morali's good friend. I'd say those of us who enjoyed his work should enjoy him for what he was -- a guy who did it all. lol.

Some interesting trends occurring in the summer of 1982. General Hospital is beginning to hemorrhage, and is now being overtaken at #1 (temporarily, at least) by All My Children. GH's loss of viewers is negatively impacting Edge of Night, which had likely benefited from having GH as a lead-in. This led to an utterly disastrous change in the writing regime of Edge in 1983, and then an unfortunate downhill spiral culminating in the show's cancellation at the end of 1984. Y&R, a contender for #1 throughout 1979, had spiraled down to #6 and #7 after its disjointed, rambling change to the hour-long format in early 1980. It's now beginning to regroup with a new, youthful core family (the Abbotts), and is currently a VERY solid #4, behind only the three ABC powerhouses.

6/18/1982 -- Y&R beginning to recapture a little bit of its 1979 momentum here.

I believe you can safely mark Donald May, Mary Stuart, AND Eileen Fulton off your list. Donald May had preferential treatment in the closing credits of Edge of Night. He was the final name -- "and Donald May as Adam Drake". That's the extent of his star billing. Nothing in the opening. Mary Stuart had preferential treatment in the closing credits of Search for Tomorrow. "With Mary Stuart as Joanne" appeared before the other cast members and even before the writer, director, and producer. she got nothing in the opening. Eileen Fulton had no preferential credit treatment on Our Private World. She was jumbled-in with the other actors in the closing crawl. No mention of her at all in the opening. Once she returned to As the World Turns, she got preferential treatment in the closing credits as the final name "and Eileen Fulton as Lisa". There are examples of opening & closing credits on You Tube for all four of those shows -- Edge, Search, Our Private World, and World Turns, from a variety of different time frames.

As far as I know, that's still the case -- the writer has the 13-week cycle to use the guarantee. It could've changed with the new "cost-cutting measures" and we haven't heard about it yet. I think a person who's serious about acting would be foolish to sign a contract with such a low guarantee, because as you noted, it stunts the actor's ability to seek other jobs. When that boy from "Bold & the Beautiful", Jacob Young, was working on "All My Children" and living in NYC in about 2006, he was offered the role of the singing lamp in the Broadway musical "Beauty & the Beast". He played the part for about four months. BUT he could never appear in the Wednesday afternoon matinee for the little kids, because "All My Children" had him under contract and expected him to be available every weekday afternoon in case he was needed to tape. His understudy had to take each Wednesday afternoon performances on Broadway. Jacob Young could do each nightly performance, and the weekend matinees, but never the Wednesday matinee. For one episode a week, I probably wouldn't make myself available to the show five days a week, all day, unless I was retirement-aged, or unless I had another paying gig at night.

Doug Davidson's contract was terminated in January of 2018. The credits continued to show him as a contract player for the next nine months. In September of 2018, he announced to the media that he'd actually been on recurring status for the entire year. ("My contract was not renewed in January. I went on recurring. My understanding was it just until new people were in place.") A couple of weeks following his public announcement that he'd been recurring for nine months, the cast list was updated to reflect he was no longer a part of the cast. Kristoff St. John was shown as a contract cast member until his death in February of 2019. A few weeks after Kristoff's death, Bryton revealed that Kristoff had been "very depressed, as he felt he no longer had a job." (Evidently Kristoff had been bumped to recurring as well, though it was never reflected in the crawl.) Christian LeBlanc, Kate Linder and Camryn Grimes haven't made any public announcements about their status, but it's pretty obvious they no longer have traditional contracts with realistic episode guarantees. [In 2022, Miss Grimes had only 53 appearances -- approximately 1 per week. Christian LeBlanc had 34 appearances --- fewer than 3 per month. Kate Linder had 6 appearances all year.]

We weren't thinking at all. I remember explaining it to a friend who had just started watching. "He raped her, so then of course she fell in love with him." "Oh, ok! She LIKED IT, huh! Cool!" We all thought this was the most normal thing in the world. 😜

The only complaint I ever heard about Barbara back then was there was too much "obvious eye-batting" during her bitchiness. Most folks seemed to think it was funny, though. I did.

I didn't want to like the pairing of Eileen & Don, but it turned out I did.

It would've likely been an anomaly, no matter where it was. When I "discovered" it around 1976, it didn't seem to exactly fit where it was (ABC), but chances are it wouldn't have fit anywhere else either. It was so different from everything else.

GH sure lured a ton of new viewers into the genre during its biggest years; sadly those viewers left about as quickly as they had arrived. What did remain, of course, was the "formula" perceived as having brought new viewers into the fold -- the "love on the run stories", the shorter, choppier scenes, the emphasis on action and adventure over character development. It wasn't a format that necessarily appealed to the longer-term viewers, but we were unfortunately treated to that style of storytelling whether we liked it or not (and to an extent, we're still getting it! After all, if that's what viewers enjoyed in 1981, we must still like it today. lol.)

By "temporary", I'm thinking of those phenomenal double-digit years for General Hospital that began around 1979 or 1980 and then hemorrhaged away around 1984 or 1985.