Broderick

Oh yeah, I'm sure the writers strike was a component of the weirdness. But just imagine something like this happening now -- a major character becoming completely isolated, then vanishing off the canvas entirely for six weeks (according to the journalist above, or twelve weeks according to my own memory), with no explanation at all of his/her whereabouts, and no mention of the character by any of the remaining players on the canvas -- as though that character had simply never existed at all. That's what happened here! For most of the spring and early summer of 1981, it was as though Kay Chancellor had vanished and been forgotten, inspiring the article above. That's the type of climate Y&R was operating in, though. Occasionally, an episode from this period surfaces in the vault, and I'm always impressed -- "wow, that's not as bad as I remembered!" -- but it's not the episodes themselves that are so strange, but rather the big disjointed picture of missing characters, dropped storylines, false starts and abrupt stops. If you hadn't started watching yet during this period, you missed a treat 😉

That's definitely the strange period of time (1980 - 1982) when it was hard to tell what was happening on-screen, let alone OFF screen! Don't like the Stevens family? Have no fear, they'll move to New York in a single episode and never be heard from again! Think Steve Williams is fairly dull? That's ok, he'll move to DC in a few days & never be mentioned again! Worried about Stuart Brooks and his "chest pains"? Don't be scared; that'll be forgotten entirely after tomorrow's episode! My recollection (and my memory could be faulty, of course) is that Kay was actually missing off the canvas for about 12 weeks instead of "five or six". I remember seeing her sometime around March 15, 1981, returning from "Felipe's Island", and she appeared in a small handful of episodes -- checking with Victor who'd been managing Chancellor Industries during her island "vacation", dumping Colonel Austin, and dumping Derek Thurston. She said she'd learned to be "strong and independent" while she was with Filipe. Then, I swear, I don't believe we laid eyes on Kay Thurston again until JUNE when she hired Cash as a prostitute. I'm pretty sure she was gone from mid-March to mid-June, about 12 weeks. I don't know why -- could've been rehab, behind the scenes chaos, or just Bill Bell completely recalibrating her storyline, as this article suggests.

July 18, 1981 -- Memphis Press-Scimitar VETERAN PERFORMER ISN'T BEING WRITTEN OUT There probably have been more rumors about Jeanne Cooper leaving her role as Kay Chancellor Thurston on "The Young and the Restless" than about any other of daytime's femme fatales. Look what's been happening, though -- Kay is still around -- but, in the last year, all the characters involved with Mrs. Thurston were written out of the show, one after another. First it was Filipe, her wonderful Hispanic, sometimes comical accomplice, whose arguments with Mrs. Thurston in two languages delighted fans; then went her devoted son Brock; followed by her young husband Derek; and her English lover Douglas Austin. "Suddenly, there was Kay sitting in the middle of Genoa City with no one to talk to," said Jeanne Cooper with a laugh. So for about five or six weeks, she didn't appear on the show until the writers developed a new storyline for her character. That's when the rumors peaked. But the producers were not about to let this meticulous veteran performer fade away. Jeanne's been known to spend as much as six additional hours on scripts, developing new mannerisms and inflections to make her often chaotic character believable in many a bizarre situation. She's also been one of the show's staples since the days when "The Young and the Restless" first sprang on the scene and made its way to the top with innovative storylines and a magic mixture of castmates. Jeanne remembers that the show was one of the first to make so many recognizable names or stars out of unknowns: William Gray Espy (the original Snapper Foster), Jaime Lyn Bauer (Lorie Prentiss), John McCook (Lance Prentiss) and later David Hasselhoff (Snapper Foster). The show has obviously faltered from those days. However, having survived the changes, Jeanne thinks that number one may not be the best slot anyway. According to her, it is not so bad to be third, where you're still quite successful but there's room for improvement. "The Bronze Medal never hurt anybody," Jeanne said. And who should know better than this delightfully warm, funny lady who has a legion of fans. So let's squash those rumors here and now. Jeanne Cooper recently signed a new contract with the show and is not leaving. But she is quick to add with a glint in her eye --"I'm committed to die at least once a year to keep the fans hanging."

Gotta love how Draper Scott in the episode above is still introducing new evidence during his closing arguments, lol. I always found the "Edge" trials interesting, but they definitely ignored all the rules about discovery.

What made Jackie Marler interesting (to me) were the acting quirks of Cindy Pickett. Once Cindy left (in 1980?) there really wasn't much point in keeping the character around.

I was never sure how much "writing" Maria Bell actually did. I believe she came into the job with some definite ideas. "First we're going to void this Jill/Kay mother/daughter nonsense. Then we're going to undo the Cane Is Jill's Son nonsense." But after her initial ideas were executed, she probably turned things over (to a great extent) to Hogan Sheffer. Maria Bell was, first and foremost, a socialite -- not a writer. She was always appearing at first one "gala" and then another, prancing up and down red carpets in ugly shoes, giving press conferences about the LA Museum of Modern Art. She never struck me as someone who spent a lot of time in deep thought hunched over a keyboard. In fact, when she was fired, she was flitting around in Europe. Hogan Sheffer was a "writer", albeit not a very good one. I expect that he produced about 10,000 ideas a week -- a few of them good, most of them lousy -- and he typed them up for Mrs. Bell. While she was lounging by the swimming pool or jetting off to an event, she probably flipped through Sheffer's portfolio, picked out a few ideas that didn't strike her as especially bad, and the next time she thought about it, she called his cell phone and said, "Use this idea, and throw the rest of this garbage in the trash. I'll see you next month." That seems to be about the extent of her "writing" discipline. (According to her bio, she's also a novelist. If anyone's ever seen a novel this woman has written, I'd love to know about it, because I believe that's just another exaggeration of a somewhat lazy person's resume.) And I don't think there was any sexism at play -- a LOT of women are good writers -- but Maria Bell never struck me as a woman who'd done very much serious writing. I think she was more of a Bell family "figurehead" than anything else during her tenure on the show.

I believe the hesitation from Charlene Tilton and Audrey Landers stems from the way the question to them is worded. The interviewer basically says, "We've all heard the stories about Victoria Principal being difficult to work with, and the others not getting along with her." This makes it sound as though he's interviewed other actors who've admitted these allegations. (Instead, he's merely regurgitating rumors.) Tilton and Landers look around with some uncertainty, then they hesitate, and then they both say they got along fine with her. I believe they think it's a "test" of some sort. They're afraid to shrug and say, "Oh, she was fine to work with", because it might make them seem naïve, out-of-the loop, and unaware of their own workplace. That's basically what Charlene Tilton says. "No! To this day, I'm just clueless, I guess. If there was any friction, I wasn't brought into it. I don't know that there was, and I don't believe that there was." That seems like a pretty nice way of saying, "You don't know what you're talking about, buddy." Tilton obviously doesn't want to seem like a complete dimwit who didn't know what was happening on the set, but she seems pretty adamant that she never observed any "issues" with Victoria Principal. My suspicion is that Victoria Principal was a fairly "driven" performer, who wanted the part of Pam pretty badly -- even showed up for her audition dressed the way she visualized Pam -- tried to improve her craft while she was working on the show, and then simply moved on when she was finished with the part.

I'd forgotten how good the little fellow playing Young Timmy was.

I re-watched all the available episodes from 1979 to 1980 a couple of years ago, and I observed the four most featured actors were April, Draper, Logan, and Deborah Saxon. All four actors left in 1981. I was crazy about Sharon Gabet and Larkin Malloy, but I agree with you completely. It caused a certain "fragmentation" in the storylines. (Also, a lot of Sharon's best work was opposite Terry Davis, Tony Craig, Joe Lambie and Frances Fisher, who left.)

Oh, there are some DEFINITE highlights. I thoroughly enjoyed everything involving Catherine Bruno who played Nora Fulton. She was AWFUL in the most entertaining way imaginable. I also enjoyed every aspect of the (initial) Jefferson Brown storyline. When he first appeared and we thought he was Schuyler Whitney, he was charming, but he was also snotty and cold. It was fun watching him deteriorate into an outright killer. I'll always remember the chilling scene in the dance studio when "Gunther" (or the person we assumed was Gunther) pretended to be shot and mortally wounded by Gavin Wylie. Gavin jumped and ran, leaving the bloodied "Gunther" on the studio floor. "Gunther" and "Schuyler" were laughing about how successfully they'd frightened Gavin Wylie, but meanwhile "Schuyler" was putting on black gloves, wiping the fingerprints off the pistol, and it became crystal clear that he intended to murder "Gunther" in cold blood, to make Gavin appear guilty of Gunther's death. I could barely believe what I was seeing. Neither could "Gunther", lol. My understanding is that Jefferson Brown/Schuyler Whitney's reign of terror was intended to be a one-shot deal. While "Schuyler" was attempting to murder Raven during the Switzerland remote, "Schuyler" was going to fall to his death, and during his final sequence, we were supposed to see how he'd killed the REAL Schuyler with a fatal fall in order to assume Schuyler's identity. There was to be no more Larkin Malloy on the show after that scene. But because Larkin Malloy had become so popular, the death scene understandably had to be rewritten to exclude the real Schuyler's death so that he could reappear later as the character who, in Slesar's original projection, was long-since dead. Then the idea of the "real Gunther" joining the "real Schuyler" took shape, and in my opinion that was just too much. I've never known what happened to Tony Craig (Draper). Guess he just opted out. But it seemed so sudden, considering that he and Terry Davis had become the most frequently seen characters on the canvas. They'd driven the Margo Huntington story, the amnesia story, the Clown Puppet story, and then the Bryson story. Then -- poof! -- Draper suddenly took a "crime commission position" in Europe and left the show in the middle of a random episode, never to be seen again. With April following a few months later. I found their exit a little hard to take, especially with Frances Fisher, Joe Lambie, and Jayne Bentzen leaving all in the same general time period, along with Forrest Compton and Ann Flood getting somewhat diminished roles. It suddenly seemed that we had a plethora of vague, MEANDERING scenes involving the Maskers acting troupe and various waitresses at Sid's Tavern and "hijinks" involving minor characters -- none of which ever really congealed into the type of carefully plotted "Big Umbrella Storylines" that we'd gotten accustomed to during Slesar's best years. But yes, anything was better than Lee Sheldon.

I wouldn't call Bill Bell's decision to ditch the Brooks and Foster families "suicidal". He was just ready to reinvent his show with some families who hadn't been recast a zillion times and married to each other a zillion times. Once the dust settled, he found himself in a much better position than he'd been in previously. (In fact, it's a shame the same thing hasn't been done again.)

The 1981 episodes will be fun to watch again after all these years. But yeah, they're kinda sad -- no more real stories for Nancy after that, and NONE for Draper and April. Draper leaves in an abrupt hurry as soon as the Bryson story is finished. And things get sort of weird. The person we believe is Schuyler is really Jefferson Brown (a good story), and the person we believe is Gunther is really Bruno (utterly stupid), and then Valerie Bryson pops up and says she knew Jeff Brown when he was transforming into Schuyler Whitney but he told her his name is Jim Dedrickson, and there's a guy in the cast named Jim Diedrickson, but he's neither Jeff Brown NOR Schuyler Whitney but someone else entirely. And there's a guy running around who says he's Carlo Crown, but he's really Collier Wells. It all sorta became too many false names & identities. I'd like to see Henry Slesar's ORIGINAL plan for this time period, before Tony Craig left and before Larkin Malloy's popularity necessitated creating a "real" Schuyler Whitney. (I believe in the original story projection Schuyler was dead as a hammer.)

In most instances, the goal is to make the televised product more manageable, containable, and streamlined. In daytime, the goal in the 1970s seemed to be making the product completely bloated and unwieldy.

Thanks for all the info, everyone! (I'd just always assumed P&G had instituted the 1-hour format -- and then the 90 minutes -- as a method of increasing their daytime programming hours without the additional overhead of creating several new shows. I see that ain't the case.)

Did they write "Houston" across the screen for the Houston scenes, and "Bay City" for the Midwestern scenes, or was the audience able to tell (by the cowboy hats, lol) which scenes were in the South?

I understand why the sponsors (P&G specifically) thought expanding to an hour was a good idea. (Cheaper to do a single hour of one program than two unique 30-minute shows.) But the 90-minute idea -- a lousy one for sure.

Same here. If a person were infirm or a shut-in who kept the TV on 24/7, it would probably work out fine. But for most folks, nope. I wouldn't think there were millions & millions of viewers who were salivating at the thought of spending 10% of their waking hours on a single television show, five days a week, lol.

Was Another World's foray into 90 minutes originally intended to be permanent, or was it a temporary situation while the concept of "Texas" was introduced? The "brains" behind the expansion seemed to believe daytime audiences were captives, who could watch all day. I never had a problem sailing into the house to watch 30 minutes of Y&R. When the show expanded to an hour, that required a certain sacrifice on the audience's part. Not everyone had an hour to watch TV on a daily basis. I can't even imagine committing to watch TV for 90 minutes every weekday. Surely, AW considered this possibility. I do recall seeing one isolated episode of AW when it lasted 90 minutes. It was a strange sight, featuring a lot of unnecessary phone calls, people sitting at their desks clearing away the clutter, opening filing cabinets and putting away documents, just stuff that you normally wouldn't build scenes around. I suppose perhaps that particular episode had run short on dialogue, and they were just dragging out the office scenes to fill-up the 90 minutes. But wow, you could easily see it was a bad idea. (But the 1970s were an innovative time, and you gotta give credit to the people who came up with these new ideas, even when they failed.)

I don't think he was necessarily "secretive" about it; he just didn't readily discuss it until he was in his 40s and had a bunch of kids. (Maybe it began to take on a greater significance for him at that point.)

It's like they live in a post-apocalyptical Ghost Town. I'm always expecting the Howdy-Doody Dummy who hides behind the red curtain in Crimson Lights beneath the giant eyeballs to pop-out and terrorize them.

Y&R was pretty much always a "hit", being in 3rd place in the 1975/1976 season, when it was only in its third year of production. It stayed that way until 1980, when it expanded to an hour, suffered in the new format, and lost a ton of viewers. It didn't rebound until the 1983/1984 season.

Oh, the dialogue is HOWLINGLY bad; there's no sugar-coating that. The decline begins in May of 1983, and it never improves for the remainder of the show's run. In fact, the problem seems to worsen as the months pass. (And I don't understand it to this day. Lois Kibbee was scriptwriting for Henry Slesar, and while she never penned the clever dialogue that Steve Lehrman had, she was adequate. She continued writing for a while under Lee Sheldon, but it's not the same. The dialogue becomes amateurish and childlike almost overnight.) The production components start an INSTANT decline. Under Slesar's tenure, scenes typically ended with a very quick "cut-to-black", with a music cue that reverberates over the blank screen. Immediately, they start doing these "slow fades" before the commercials, which force the actors to hold terror-stricken grimaces for additional (comical) seconds. Episodes end with non-cliffhangers, such as Jody announcing that she might move in with Preacher. By late summer, Sheldon had adopted the annoying practice of cycling from one story to another within each episode, in a repetitive, predictable A-B-A-B-A-B fashion. So if you cared what was happening with Schuyler and Raven but not about Preacher and Jody (and that was about the only two stories he had for months), you could easily tell when to go to the kitchen or the bathroom. The scenes are quick and choppy, many of them completely thrown away, with no dialogue that moves the storyline forward. There's a cheesy, pseudo-comical aspect that begins immediately and worsens as the show progresses through 1984. The "humor" isn't rooted in character; it's just lousy jokes and "situation comedy" such as the Whitneys pretending there are rats in their house. As I said earlier, if that's what ABC or P&G visualized as their goal, I'm glad Slesar wasn't forced to prostitute his talent to achieve it. He was better off leaping (or being tossed) from the sinking ship. At least he landed in a lifeboat.

Another "famous" case is Y&R's Donald Feinberg (a/k/a Don Diamont) who'd spent 20+ years using a non-Jewish stage name and living a non-Jewish identity. Just as Diamont began embracing his heritage, the Y&R writer, Lynn Marie Latham, decided to retcon Brad Carlton into a Jewish guy named George Kaplan who'd been hiding out in plain sight marrying Gentile heiresses. Now suddenly he was at odds with the Evil Art Thieves, and Victoria Newman was crafting faux reliquaries out of construction paper and glitter. Nevermind, let's just forget that one, lol.

No question -- the ISIS storyline was the very best of Lee Sheldon's work. But for some unknown reason, the production staff seemed determined to sabotage the story almost before it started. The 1983-1984 timing of it was PERFECT, as it was clearly a celebration of George Orwell's old novel 1984, which, in 1983, was being heavily re-read and promoted in literary circles. Sheldon realized 1984 was about to be in the news regularly, so he had the foresight to "borrow" the concept of mass surveillance directly from the novel and incorporate it into his storyline, along with a liberal borrowing from the 1982 film Halloween III: Season of the Witch (in which children were encouraged to gather around their TV sets for the mind-controlling Silver Shamrock commercials), plus a few copped elements of Tennessee Williams's late 1970s novella and play The Red Devil Battery Sign, in which the flashing sign reminded the Woman Downtown to keep her mouth shut about the dangerous things she'd learned. All of that being said, what better logo could you choose for your show than a big city skyline? For 27 years, that's exactly what "Edge" had featured -- a cluster of lighted towers rising into the gloomy twilight sky, the perfect setting for an "ISIS-type" storyline. So what did the show do as soon as Sheldon proposed the story? They ditched the skyline entirely, replacing it with a placid beach scene that appeared to be the Long Island Sound. They completely neutered Sheldon's storyline almost before it began, sending viewers the "subliminal message" that Sheldon's urban tale of surveillance was occurring in some quiet, peaceful beach resort town instead of a large, creepy, crime-ridden Midwestern metropolis. But the producers weren't finished with sabotaging him just yet. They had one more nail to drive in his coffin. Beginning in the late 1970s, the "premiere set" on Edge had been a high-rise penthouse apartment set, with a balcony, that featured an extensive cityscape backdrop. The production staff had perfected the management of the backdrop over the years: they learned to light the backdrop with yellows and pinks to represent morning scenes, a gauzy, deep blue with flecks of pink to represent twilight scenes, and a dark murky blue to represent late night. They'd learned to create the appearance of lightning on the backdrop when scripts called for a thunderstorm. And most amazing of all, they'd learned to put little red lights on the backdrop (representing TV towers on buildings) that would brighten and dim as characters stood on the balcony. All of this was 100% conducive to the ISIS storyline, whose first and most unfortunate victim was Nichole Cavanaugh, who actually LIVED in this high-rise penthouse that theoretically overlooked the ISIS building. So what did the production staff do? They pulled the heavy drapes and almost never displayed the cityscape backdrop during the entire ISIS storyline. Miles Cavanaugh and Jody Travis could've just as easily been living in the sleepy resort town the brand new opening and closing credits subliminally represented to us. The ISIS storyline potentially could've been a timely and interesting tale to pull "Edge" out of the ratings cellar, but the headwriter's lack of experience in the medium, the show's low budget, and the production staff's determination to strip away the serial's longtime "metro image" gave Sheldon pretty insurmountable obstacles to overcome.

During Lee Sheldon's reign, there were a pair of (dull) sisters, both of whom were evidently named "Elizabeth Correll". One of the girls went by "Beth Correll" and the other by "Liz Correll". My mother called them "Big Sis Lizbeth" and "Lil Sis Lizbeth". My mother was a huge fan of Agatha Christie (and Henry Slesar). She was 100% convinced there was gonna be a gigantic bloodbath that wiped BOTH Elizabeth Corrells off the face of the earth. She thought the clue to their demise would be found in the old Mother Goose Rhyme: "Elizabeth, Elspeth, Betsy, and Bess; They all went together to seek a bird's nest. They found a bird's nest with five eggs in; they all took one, which left four in." I was like, "Momma, there ain't gonna be a bloodbath. This writer doesn't have enough sense to come up with something like that. He was simply brain-dead when he named both of these sisters Elizabeth. There's no mystery; you're just witnessing an inept writer at work." But whenever Beth & Liz would appear on the screen, Mama would start singing, "Elizabeth, Elspeth, Betsy and Bess; they all went together to seek a bird's nest." lol.