Broderick

The cast is listed in "order of appearance". Lorie Brooks lived in a penthouse. Aaron was her doorman. (Except Jaime Lyn Bauer, who played Lorie Brooks, always pronounced Aaron's name as Erin, so I thought for months that "Erin" was a girl doorman, lol.) The episode undoubtedly opened with Lorie Brooks moping around in her penthouse. Close shot of her jiggling breasts. The house phone rings. Lorie sighs and saunters over to the phone, picks up. Lorie Brooks: Yes, Erin? Aaron: Good morning, Miss Brooks. Lucas Prentiss is here to see you. Lorie Brooks: My God. Are you sure, Erin? Aaron: Yes, Miss Brooks. He's standing right here. Lorie Brooks: Well. Send him up. Lorie hangs up the phone. She walks over to the balcony, swivels her hips, jiggles her breasts, and breathes, "My God. What could Luke possibly be doing here? He must have something really heavy to lay on me this morning." More breast jiggling. Music swells. So do breasts. The next scene will be Jack and Patty, discussing Patty's moving into the Abbott house. Lots of smiling and pouting from Lilibet Stern. Opening credits. Back to Jack and Patty. Now Jerry Douglas's John Abbott comes in to throw some water on Patty's good mood. Back to the penthouse. Lucas comes in through the elevator doors. Lorie Brooks: Luke. This is a surprise. What brings you by? Lucas: I've got something heavy to lay on you, Lorie. Something really heavy. Fade out. (Haven't seen this episode in 39 years, but Bill Bell's writing followed a certain "formula", that rarely surprised regular viewers.)

She said her mandate at Y&R was to "bring the show into the 21st century". Then she started babbling about how she was never a fan of "wall-to-wall background music". For many of us, that was the uniqueness and beauty of Y&R -- the wall to wall background music, and the stylized acting that accompanied it. She definitely managed to rid Y&R of everything that separated it from the other shows.

Showing a character having breakfast with a box of Cheerios nearby seems life-like and completely "normal". Having a character suddenly deliver a soliloquy about "whole grain goodness with no sugar added!" is just utterly cringeworthy.

I watched the premiere. (I was a young teenager.) The title "Number 96" seemed to be a play on "Number 69", indicating there would be some fairly explicit sex, but there wasn't. It followed the basic format of "Soap", indicating that it would be funny, but it wasn't. At the very least, you'd think it might feature some well-written and well-acted serialized storylines, but it didn't. It featured some downright ludicrous scenes, such as a woman carrying on a long conversation with a liquor bottle as a cliffhanger. It was just really bad, really poorly written, and awfully stupid.

While the Adam storyline was fairly wretched, Dr. Lang was definitely one of the "highlights" of the show. Even when he wasn't sabotaging his own tape recorder, he managed to bluster through the entire ordeal with the most awkward, unintentionally comic presence of any actor who ever appeared on the show. There were times when he even appeared to be attempting to out-vamp Grayson Hall.

I sometimes forget how beautiful Finn Carter really was.

Yep. Even when Victor TROUNCED Terry Lester's Jack, it was always a hollow victory, because Terry Lester shrugged and said, "Aw shucks", went back to chasing women, badgering Jill, giving John Abbott and Ashley fits, and didn't seem to give Victor much thought at all until their next confrontation. Peter Bergman's Jack always appears to be stewing and pouting about Victor.

It's a lot of fun reading these summaries! It's interesting how sporadic Ansel Scott, Mrs. Nadine Alexander, and Raven Alexander are on "The Edge of Night". They pretty much dominated the October recap, were missing entirely in November, and they're dominating again in December. Were these actors on contract, or did they just appear whenever Henry Slesar wanted to give the Karrs and the Drakes a break?

I always felt that the most defining characteristic of Terry Lester's Jack was his "devil-may-care" attitude. Never made any difference to me how handsome he was or how charming he was. That all went out the window with Peter Bergman, who always seemed too methodical, poised, practiced & meticulous to be Jack Abbott.

His talent was definitely behind Y&R's success, and so was his vision. As long as he was around, the show was a unique product -- from the stylized acting, to the moody lighting and music, to the sometimes repetitious and awkward dialogue. That was all part of the appeal of the show. Some of us loved his show; other viewers found it stilted and unnatural, preferring the more "real world"-based look and sound of the P&G shows or the ABC shows. But Bill Bell didn't waver. Y&R was exactly what Bell wanted it to be, and once he was gone, so was the unique identity of his show.

I'm no authority on Agnes Nixon or Irna Phillips, but Bill Bell had a habit of dropping characters without much explanation and then, out of necessity later on, "back-pedaling" to explain where they'd been. He ALWAYS did that. Sometimes his "back-pedaling" was logical, and other times it wasn't, but normally you could visualize his thought process. In the mid-1980's, he dropped Julianna McCarthy (Liz Brooks) to recurring, as Liz wasn't receiving much storyline material and was interacting solely with her daughter Jill. Eventually she just vanished without a trace. About a year later, he needed Liz to reappear for Jill's shooting, and you could see that he was mentally thinking, "Ok, where has Liz been? I can say she's still in Genoa City, or I can say that she reconciled with Stuart Brooks, or I can say that she's living with Snapper and Chris in London. That's it! I'll pretend she's in London, so that she can pick-up Phillip III from boarding school and escort him back to Genoa City!" That made pretty good sense. The situation with Carl Williams disappearing made far less sense, and Carl's absence was pretty glaring, since Mary was still appearing on the show. I'd been wondering how it would ultimately be explained. What we eventually got (the Norfolk storyline) was disappointing and didn't make much sense to longtime viewers, but some folks seemed to enjoy it. With Patty Williams, Bill Bell seemed VERY FOND of Lilibet Stern and very UNIMPRESSED with Andrea Evans. Bell seemed to take the position later that Andrea Evans had never played the role. (All of Cricket's interaction with Patty involved Andrea Evans, rather than Lilibet Stern, so that was just swept under the rug, as Andrea Evans had made such an unfortunate and forgettable Patty.)

I think his name was "Brent".

Whether "Dallas" was too male-oriented is probably debatable, but I don't think there's ANY question that David Jacobs's original idea for the show was a rivalry between J.R. Ewing & Pamela. In the original story projection, didn't Bobby Ewing DIE, and Pam took over his place as JR's chief adversary? And the show nailed this aspect on so many different occasions (such as the reading of Bobby's will, when Pam is named as the trustee of Christopher's shares of Ewing Oil). Without Victoria Principal's Pam character, there was just no show left anymore, because from Day One, she was the character who got under JR's skin. I really like Soap Dope's idea that the series shoulda ended with Bobby & Pam remarrying, and JR realizing that he's gotta deal with her yet again.

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.

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.