Chris 2

I believe Bochner’s Dynasty co-star Peter Mark Richman (Andrew Laird) was Bochner’s immediate on-air replacement, and Richman himself was replaced by Burke after a short time.

Yeah - I wonder how her kids felt about her approach to parenting. But I’m the product of people who took parenting very seriously. I didn’t just fit “loosely” into their lives. EDIT: She and Hickman were divorced in 1982 and the younger son committed suicide a few years later. How sad.

“Beyond Salem” is a good example of how the future of the format can evolve. It’s essentially a limited series as opposed to an open-ended one. And they could do future “seasons” if they economics make sense.

The problem with the PP soaps, beyond content, is that I don’t believe there’s a market on streaming for the volume of content they were producing. They initially started out with four episodes per week and realized people were falling behind, so they cut it to two. I think the same fate will befall Judge Judy’s new show on imdbTV. Streaming TV is about close-ended seasons or self-contained chunks of content. I can’t see shows that are stripped (run 5 days a week, continuously) working on streaming. Streaming isn’t like broadcast where viewers aren’t worried if they miss a day. Since it’s on demand, they have the ability to watch every episode. And if they get the sense that they’re “too far behind” and it feels like a chore to catch up, they will abandon it rather than skip ahead. If one of the daytime soaps adopted a seasonal format on a streaming service, I could maybe see that working. Maybe a 65-episode season or something like that once per year. People could watch at their leisure and not worry about falling hopelessly behind. But to do X number of episodes per week continuously? I don’t see that happening.

Amen. Ray was already on the show and in the Ewing inner circle already - what was the point. Plus, he was sort of a boring character so his introduction to the family didn’t really add any conflict. It would have been much more interesting to bring in a true outsider as Jock’s fourth son.

One of the reasons that Daniel Hugh Kelly seemed so strong as Frank Ryan on RH is because his two immediate predecessors were miscast. Michael Hawkins was a block of wood (not to mention too old for the role), and Andrew Robinson - a fine character actor - did not have the leading man looks or presence the role required. Robinson was certainly a better actor at the time than DHK, who was a bit stiff early on. But DHK grew in the role and his Frank was eventually the charismatic, center-of-attention politician-type that the character was always meant to be.

He did but I’m talking more about a primetime, high-profile series. Police Surgeon was a low budget, poorly-reviewed syndicated show, and co-star Jack Albertson quit after a single season (later publicly disparaging it). Sam Groom got a chance at a real primetime show in the 80s with Otherworld, but that didn’t last long (though it’s a bit of a cult favorite).

Sam Groom was a charismatic, appealing actor. He should have had a successful career in primetime, but he was never in the right place at the right time, I guess. I’ve read that he came back for the final episodes of AW as a minister. If this is true, I wonder why they didn’t have him come back as Russ.

Labine and Mayer didn’t want to get rid of Mary Carney. That was ABC’s decision.

Just remember: the “P” in Pfenning is not silent.

Dana also had a walk-on on Ryan’s Hope in the late 70s. Definitely a “blink and you missed her” situation. Too bad - she might have been a good Mary recast. Certainly better than the ones we got.

LOL @ that Steve and Alice scene. I’ve never seen that Alice before and David Canary has an awful dye job. It’s as if they brought Luke and Laura back, but now they were portrayed by Monte Markham (with a perm of course) and Karen Morris Gowdy. “Guess what, fans? Luke and Laura are back!”

I love St E and am rewatching it on Hulu for the first time in years. It looks pretty good but it’s probably not HD. I would love to see Family on one of the streamers. It is on Decades, I believe, but I don’t get that any more. I did get to see some episodes when Decades still had a local affiliate. On my wish for a DVD release: the scenes with “second Nancy” Jane Actman, who shot a handful of episodes of season 2 before being replaced with Meredith Baxter Birney, who reshot all of Actman’s scenes before the season premiere.

I’m actually surprised that Warner Bros went to such lengths for China Beach, which was not a major ratings success in its original run and has only been seen intermittently since. I’m guessing that the creators, who own a piece of it, had a lot to do with the effort to have it properly released on DVD with not only the music mostly intact but lots and lots of extras too. Clearly a labor of love.

Yep, in the US. The CBS Drama channel in the UK has broadcast it within the last 10 years, I believe.

James Douglas didn’t do the MIPP movie in 1977 (his role was recast with David Hedison) but did agree to PP: TNG in 1985. Perhaps he was worried about typecasting in the 70s, and then he realized in the 80s that it was too late.

Yeah, I’ve never bought the music excuse for the lack of KL on DVD or streaming. Warner just hasn’t done a great job with the old Lorimar titles, particularly the hour-long shows. The Waltons and Dallas both got DVD releases but they weren’t remastered and looked pretty bad relatively speaking. The Waltons has since gotten remastered, but Dallas is on imdbTV and looks worse than ever. Eight is Enough finally got a DVD release after many years, but most of it was manufactured on demand (burned) rather than pressed, and that show has been absent from broadcast/cable for 20 years and isn’t streaming. There are other shorter-lived Lorimar shows - Flamingo Road, Our House - that have sat in the vaults for years. And the longer they are unseen, the less demand there is for them. Whoever is in charge of the Warner Bros library just doesn’t care about these shows.

Yeah - I agree about Terry Lester. He had the same twinkle in his eye that Larry Hagman’s JR did. I never put Victor and JR together, because Larry Hagman can act and Eric Braeden…can’t.

When Jacqueline Courtney returned as Alice in the 1980s, didn’t they have a story where Alice was now Rachel’s doctor? RIDICULOUS. The writers clearly didn’t care about history. Given what those two characters went through, there is no way that would happen. Rachel extends a Christmas invitation to Alice in another scene from the 80s. Also crazy. They should have been stiffly cordial at best, which is how they played it during the 25 anniversary episodes.

Slezak is a good performer but sometimes she needed a good director to tell her to rein it in. She could be hammy, in the same way that some of her peers (Lucci, Strasser, Walton, Seaforth Hayes et al) could be at times.

The blonde at the end of that commercial was superfluous. “Here’s a young lady because these two can’t possibly be gay!” They should have just ended it with Geoffroy and John making out.

Another World 1967-75 so we could see the Alice/Steve/Rachel triangle in its entirety, plus Rachel’s redemption. Would make a great companion for The Doctors on RetroTV. But I know most of those episodes don’t exist anymore. However the whole run of Days of Our Lives supposedly exists, so a more realistic ask would be for the 30 min episodes of that show. And they’re all in color, back to 1965.

I think I saw a few of those from March 82 - I know that Soapnet stopped a few months short of Ilene’s return in its regular rotation but they ran a few post-1981 episodes during some St Patrick’s Day marathon. It was odd seeing Ilene Kristen’s Delia running the Crystal Palace but I don’t think that lasted long. I would have liked to have seen more, plus her final stint on the show.

I think the real issue for Delia is that true character progression would have led her away from her dependency on the Ryans, and ultimately out of the show. So they had to regress her a bit to keep her involved with the main characters, Agreed that Ilene Kristen’s Delia was a more desperate character. It would have been challenging for another actress to succeed IK with the same type of characterization. So the writers wisely pivoted Dee into the type of character you might have found in a screwball comedy from the 30s. She was still an antagonist but less of a emotionally damaged one. I didn’t see the episodes after IK returned in 1982, so I’m curious if they pivoted back to Dee’s original characterization.

I loved Catherine Hicks as Faith. She was more the typical ingenue. Faith Catlin’s Faith was interesting because you really didn’t see those kind of awkward people you actually run into in real life as major soap opera characters. But she was a little tiring, and frankly, I watch TV to get away from those people. Nancy Barrett was simply too old - she was older than NAA - and it was too jarring to have her pop in after Faith Catlin’s completely different portrayal. Her first appearance as Faith was like an alien landing from another planet. I know Karen Morris played Faith the longest but I never liked her. Her Faith was cold and judgmental. If Catherine Hick’s Faith was the girl from English class you’d like to date, then Karen Morris’ Faith was the aloof girl who would never give you the time of day.