Broderick

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.

I think it was the uncertainty of where Y&R was going at the time -- which was visible in the storylines that seemed thrown randomly at the wall to see what would stick -- that was the ultimate problem in 1980 and 1981. It was a show that had seemed clearly defined and unique, and suddenly with the expansion to an hour, there was so much murkiness in motivation, so much stopping and starting, the indecision of which characters deserved focus and which were merely peripheral. (Characters like Wayne & Dorothy Stevens and the ex-wife of Andy Richards would've never been given storylines during the crisp half-hour days, nor once the hour-long program refocused on its more appealing characters.) That, combined with the temporary runaway success of the ABC line-up, took a definite toll on the show.

I honestly kept thinking Coming of Age would be snagged by CBS, once "B&B" established itself as a potential winner in the CBS line-up. While Edge of Night was obviously doomed by the expansion of World Turns to an hour, I often wondered how it would've fared if CBS had held onto it. Ideally, EON should've flourished on ABC in the early 1980s, as its lead-in was the most successful soap in ABC's entire line-up. But it didn't flourish. The show's low clearance was obviously problematic, but also its "film noir intelligence" seemed out of place in ABC's "love on the run" heyday. The rapid ratings rise of the ABC line-up turned out to be a flash in the pan, and by the time viewers (quickly) tired of the ABC formula, Edge was left to flounder with low clearance and a lead-in that was bleeding viewers. If the show had still been included in the line-up with the newly-rejuvenated Y&R, Douglas Marland's crisper and more historically-based World Turns and the still-popular Guiding Light, I expect we would've seen it last far longer than its unfortunate 1984 demise, especially if it had remained under the craftsmanship of Henry Slesar.

The "tanking" of Y&R's ratings is really more attributable to the ripple effect of ABC's rise (propelling "Ryan's Hope" temporarily upward) than anything storyline-wise on Y&R, in my opinion. However, the storylines cresting on Y&R in 1981 weren't anything spectacular. If they were seen on television nowadays, we'd probably say, "Oh, that's not TOO terrible", but at the time they seemed fairly dismal. A huge chunk of the show dealt with Lorie and Leslie's custody battle over Brooks Prentiss. There was much "psycho-babble" from the judge and the attorneys about the rights of a "psychological mother" (Lorie) versus a "biological mother" (Leslie), which wasn't exactly enthralling drama. And ALL of this was predicated on the misconception that Lucas Prentiss (rather than Lance) was the kid's father. So at the conclusion of all this long harangue, Brooks was calling Lorie "mommy" and Lucas "dad", while referring to his mother as "Aunt Leslie" and his father as "Uncle Lance". It was silly and seemed to move the entire storyline further (rather than closer) to its endgame. Eric Braeden was turning in some chilling performances as Victor, but he was a relatively new character, and his imprisonment of Michael Scott seemed more tawdry and morbid than realistic. Everything in the storyline depended upon whether or not Paul Williams (another fairly new character) would check Randy's claims of being Michael Scott with Jill Foster (a recent recast) at Jabot. Again, nothing terribly interesting there. April Stevens' parents, Wayne and Dorothy, were VERY lower-class, poverty-stricken characters who didn't have air conditioning in their hovel. So Wayne sat around in a wife-beater tee-shirt watching TV and guzzling beer where Dorothy Stevens pushed an iron back and forth across a blouse, and both of them sweated like mules, looked frazzled, sticky, and overheated. April would pop in, sweat like a racehorse, and ask them nosy questions about her twin sister. Not anything terribly interesting there, and the set looked as though it SMELLED terrible. Roberta Leighton's Casey had one foot out the door -- the actress was leaving -- and was suddenly embroiled in a predictably dull "stalker storyline", in which her protector was Jonas, another character most viewers didn't care much about. Casey soon snapped, nearly killed an old codger at the hospital on a treadmill, and disappeared from the show the next day. The stalker then moved his attentions to Nikki, who "inherited" Jonas, also had Jerry Cashman on hand (as she was a stripper in his club), also had Andy Richards (who was a bartender), also had Paul Williams (who was divorcing the sweating April), also had ex-husband Greg Foster's concern (and he suddenly began having mysterious migraines), and there was also Edward from next door (who was obviously the stalker all along.) Wasn't a lot of suspense there. Chris Brooks was frantically popping Valium, which alarmed Snapper, but it turned out she was "anxious" because her furniture wasn't nice enough to suit her. Snapper didn't want her to have anything nice, as he was running a free clinic, and evidently it would look terrible to Dr. Young, who was funding the free clinic, if Chris had a sofa that wasn't ripped to shreds. So a new doctor (Jane) decided to bed Snapper. Guess Jane could purchase her OWN sofa if she wanted one. Again, dull as hell. About the only things percolating that were truly interesting and realistic (to me) were teenage rocker Danny's little crush on Patty Williams, who was smitten with the older, more mature playboy, Jack Abbott, who often took advantage of Patty's naïve nature and made Deborah Adair's Jill roll her eyes sarcastically and Carolyn Conwell's Mary Williams clutch her pearls and belt out a Hail Mary. Also, once that nonsense with Michael Scott and the cellar came mercifully to a screeching close, Victor Newman began buying-up shares of Prentiss Industries, which cemented Victor Newman as the ruthless, cutthroat, but vulnerable character who later would "define" the show during the 1980s. We would see him begin a cat-&-mouse game with Lorie Brooks of acquiring her Prentiss shares, which she freely handed over to him, because Vanessa Prentiss led her to believe that Lance didn't love her anymore. This was our more realistic "payoff" for suffering through all that nonsense about Brooks Prentiss's custody hearing. You'll likely see the show begin to slowly increase in the ratings as it eventually found its footings again, by retooling Victor Newman into a formidable business-type character, by taking advantage of Kay Chancellor's cutting sarcasm, by highlighting Nikki Reed's dingbat flightiness, by better defining Jack Abbott's devil-may-care spoiled playboy mannerisms, and then a few months later, the introduction of Eileen Davidson, Beth Maitland, and Jerry Douglas to round out the main cast. Those characters (along with Paul and Andy) were destined to be the "new" Y&R, but in the summer of 1981, they were all stuck in a morass of storylines that really weren't working, surrounding by characters who desperately needed to be written off.