Broderick

Brenda Dickson's Jill always seemed a bit GRANDIOSE for the workplace. And her favorite line was always, "What do YOU want? Can't you sheee that I'm bisshy?" (while polishing her nails)

The man in Mississippi who had a stroke from the Johnson & Johnson vaccine also had a stressful job and SEVEN kids. I was inclined to think his stroke might be more attributable to the 7 kids than to the vaccine. But that ended the J&J shots in Mississippi.

It was difficult for Marland to pen a one-on-one scene, because so many of his characters tromped around in big herds like buffalo.

Yeah, the early version of the 1981 theme has a sort of high, metallic, harpsichord sound, which disappeared by the late 1980s.

Brock was a handsome, charismatic dude, but his sexual chemistry with his co-stars wasn't exactly sizzling, lol. He had really good chemistry with almost everyone on the show -- Jill, Snapper, Greg, Lorie, Leslie, Chris and Peggy, JoAnne Curtis, Nikki & Casey -- just to name a few! -- but it never really seemed very sexual.

That's the first outline of an episode that I've ever seen. Sure is minimalist. I would've thought it would have more scene detail and perhaps even include some phrases of dialogue that the head writer wanted to feature in the scenes.

Couldn't agree more. It was a lot like the "Jessica Blair storyline" a few years earlier. The Jessica Blair character had AIDS, and as a result, Bill Bell wrote her as nothing more than a long-suffering heroine who went around atoning her head off to everyone and making noble gestures. She was, by default, a cardboard character, and she was boring as hell. Luan did pretty much the same thing -- went around making long-suffering, noble gestures and was just dull as dishwater. Jessica Blair was cursed with a horrid, bratty daughter (Cricket), and Luan was cursed with a horrid, bratty son (Keemo). I breathed a sigh of relief when the whole thing ended (in both instances), but it's truly kind of bizarre that Keemo hasn't been recast and reintroduced to the storyline (or at least one of his kids).

Regarding the Y&R bible, Bill Bell goes into great detail about its structure during one of his interviews with the Archive of American Television. He describes it as being "about 62 pages, maybe 72 pages" with the first "third or so" of the material being backstory of the characters. The middle section contained character profiles. Roughly "twenty pages, I don't know, maybe twenty-five pages" were story projection for the two years. He had several copies (approximately 30) which he "passed around" to the network executives, and then "one by one, they finished reading and looked at me blankly, with no idea what they'd just read. They didn't understand how these few pages could provide a year's worth of storyline. They didn't understand the genre." I paraphrased, but that's basically what he said.

That actually makes a whole lot more sense than what we've heard before --- that Erica was somehow shoehorned into the premier episode to spout her infamous line.

What a CUTE old lady! She's amazing, always has been.

Yeah, I think Chancellor Industries was (originally) the parent company of a few textile factories when the show started. A successful little company that made Kay and Phillip wealthy, but not billionaires by any stretch of the imagination. Prentiss Industries was more vague, and then Newman Enterprises was even vaguer still. Jabot was the Y&R company that seemed to be the most clearly defined.

I think they write "reports", lol. They always had these clean desks with some random "report" that they were reading. And their corporate dialogue always concerned either reading or writing a "report".

I disagree about Victor Newman. I know that all over the Internet, people say that "Victor came to Genoa City to work for Kay Chancellor". I don't remember it that way at all. The first time I saw Victor Newman on-screen was in February of 1980 when his Rolls Royce had been stolen by a girl named Cathy Bruder who had gone joy-riding. Brock Reynolds was the public defender assigned to represent the girl in court. Brock assumed she would be tried as a juvenile, as she was sixteen. But the owner of the car (Victor Newman), whom neither Brock nor the audience had ever heard of or seen before, wanted the girl tried as an adult. As we got to "know" Victor, we found out that he was a self-made zillionaire who was the owner of Newman Enterprises. Months and months later, Kay Thurston asked him to temporarily take over control of Chancellor Industries, because Kay's current husband, hair stylist Derek Thurston, had made a mess of things and had fired George Packard, the man who'd been running the company since Phillip Chancellor's death in 1975. Victor obligingly ran Chancellor Industries for Kay for a few short months until she could get rid of Derek and hire a new CEO.

The writing -- and the line delivery from most of the cast -- was very stylized, back in the day. They've definitely lost sight of that trait in the past several years, and it's not an improvement.

They didn't even TRY to write for Tony Viscardi after the recast. How many times did Megan bat her eyes and say, "I can't wait to become Mrs. Tony Viscardi in every possible way?" Pure cheese. The only time the writers seemed interested in them was when Tricia kissed Tony and then kicked him and killed him. There was a lot of potential in all of that, but the show raced through it, preferring to have Megan lament about her Perpetual Virginity. And Keith --- yeah, I agree, the temporary recast (wasn't his name David Allen Brooks?) had way more charisma than Granville Van Dusen, although his performances were pretty wooden.

That nurse has so MANY of K.T. Stevens's traits that it's almost surreal. I wonder who on earth the actress is.

Brenda was a mighty pretty girl, and she exuded a certain WARMTH, like you'd find in a traditional soap opera heroine. And she ultimately did manage to develop a certain level of sophistication and sarcasm. But I just never bought her as Ashley Abbott. She was just too sweet and patient and down to earth. Nothing like the assertive, elusive "Daddy's Princess" that Eileen had created.

I guess Kate Linder is still on some sort of contract that guarantees her some (very small) number of appearances per year. Doug Davidson, on the other hand, is probably seen as an unnecessary expense, as he has to be paid per appearance. He whines about it daily on twitter, lol.

And the parking in front of the garage is tight & awkward, especially for large cars like Jock Ewing's Mark V and Sue Ellen's Mercury wagon. On TV, it looks like a pretty spacious parking area, but actually there's a very sharp turn to get to the garage. That's why we often see them drive up catty-whompus on the show, although at the opening of each episode, the cars are neatly arranged facing the little garage.

Exactly. How could it NOT be mentioned? I was in the "vault" last night watching an episode from 1981 in which Kay Chancellor (age 53) was planning to marry Jerry Cashman (age 33). She told Liz Foster, "He makes me HAPPY!" Liz said, "Don't you think you could be happy with someone a little closer to your own age, Mrs. Chancellor?!" But we're supposed to pretend not to notice that Jack Abbott is social security aged, and his little friend ain't.

With clever writing, quirky characters, and a "film noir" look about it, you just can't help but think "Edge of Night" could always be a jackpot.

I have to agree with that. It was hard to get excited about a mystery writer who named sisters "Liz" and "Beth". lol.

It's hard to talk about cue cards or teleprompters without mentioning how much soap writing has changed in the past thirty years. In the old days, soap actors were often asked to perform scenes that ran four, five, maybe six minutes, with only two actors in the scene. That amounted to pages and pages of dialogue, and as some have noted, speeches were constantly being rewritten if the episode ran long, or if the episode ran short during dress rehearsal. So if I've stayed up half the night memorizing ten pages of dialogue for a long scene, and then suddenly just before taping the entire scene is reworked, it's going to confuse me, and I'm apt to screw it up if I don't have a visual aid to glance toward that reminds me of the changes. That doesn't happen anymore. Each episode has more scenes now, and the scenes tend to be choppier and less dialogue-laden. In today's prologue on Y&R, Sharon and Nate had a scene. She had literally two lines of dialogue, and Nate had two lines. How long does it take to memorize two lines? Less than a minute for most of us. We would just glance at the script quickly five minutes before taping, go out onto the sound stage, say the two lines, then forget about it entirely, and concentrate on our next two-line scene. With the scenes being shorter, with minimal lines per scene, cue cards just ain't very necessary anymore.

The biggest "mystery" of that storyline to me was why the parents named one daughter "Liz" and another daughter "Beth". Were BOTH of them named Elizabeth?

Yeah, I think the show went into a decline when Tony Craig, Terry Davis, Jayne Bentzen, Joe Lambie, and Frances Fisher all left within such a short period of time, including a writer's strike in the midst of it all. Henry Slesar was clearly the "brains" behind keeping EON on-track, and without his daily input, the pacing suffered. Yes, we got "The Schuyler & Raven Show" for a while (and that was indeed an interesting storyline), but I never felt like it was enough to build an entire 30-minute serial around.