Chris 2

As they say, God doesn’t give with both hands.

LOL. I’m glad I missed that. Paul Burke’s CC was the very definition of unsexy.

Lee Patterson as Joe Riley’s twin, Tom Dennison?

The chemistry between Damon, Elliott, Leslie Charleson, David Lewis, and Anna Lee was amazing. GH was always worth catching just for the scenes between that talented crew.

My mom watched SFT for 20 years. Once it went to NBC and it was up against Young and Restless, it was over for her. It didn’t help that our local affiliate didn’t carry it and she could only get it from a fuzzy out-of-market station. Soaps viewing is built on habit, even more so than other shows. And once you break that habit via a network switch and timeslot changes, it’s a death sentence.

Alice being Rachel’s doctor, given their history, is patently ridiculous.

It was the time period. Homes using television traditionally increase as the afternoon wears on. It’s generally more lucrative to air syndicated programs in the late afternoon, because local stations can keep more or all of the commercial time, depending on the shows they run. So EON had an uphill battle just to gain clearances. And of the clearances they did have, many stations were tape-delaying and running in the morning, which also hurt ratings.

Our local ABC affiliate never carried EON. Only one of two smaller adjacent markets did, and that one finally started tape delaying it to 9:30 am the next morning during EON’s last year. That’s when I knew it was over.

Those cheap-looking, made-for-daytime episodes of Love, American Style didn’t qualify as “comedy.” And it’s funny that they improved their 11:00 numbers with Angie, a short-lived series that ABC completely mishandled years earlier.

Rachel (Robin Strasser) is in there too. Boy, Jacqueline Courtney (Alice) was a striking woman.

GH may have been down about 10% since the Luke and Laura days, but it was still very healthy in 1984. As was GL. The bigger problem at that time was that viewers were slowly leaving the three network world with the advent of cable. And there wasn’t necessarily the audience available for three soaps airing at the same time anymore. The only way that SB was going to grow was at the expense of its timeslot competitors. And there wasn’t much leftover soap audience for them. I do think there could have been an audience for a soap that aired at 4:00 pm rather than 3:00. But the affiliates weren’t going to give back that hour because it was so lucrative for them with syndicated shows. And to launch a show like SB in syndication wouldn’t have worked because local stations were simply not patient enough to give a soap time to grow without the network’s muscle behind it, and also didn’t want to risk the lead in for their local news shows.

AW was declining, and its audience was older. WBZ - the NBC affiliate at the time - was always preempting network programming for local or syndicated shows, or for local sports (they carried Celtics games back then). At one point, DOOL and Today were the only daytime network shows they carried. When the affiliation moved to WHDH in the mid 90s, NBC insisted as a part of the affiliation agreement that WHDH carry all the NBC daytime shows in pattern. So AW was back in Boston for the last few years of its run.

Ah - WQTV in Boston. They picked up SFT - and Another World - in the 1980s because the local NBC affiliate only carried Days of Our Lives.

Melissa Reeves would have been better. A potted plant would have been better. Also, what the hell kind of a name is “Laken”?

I think Denise Alexander needs to come back to reality a bit. If anyone was the Luke and Laura of the 70s, it was Doug and Julie on DOOL. She also mentioned in the same interview about “Another World” hired her for “star power” (her words).

Here’s a link to the full interview Ava Lazar interview What were they thinking? She was the best of all the Santanas.

Wearing lots of lip gloss, no doubt.

Robin Wright brought that elusive star quality to the show, something that none of her successors had. Even early on, I knew she was going to go on to have a higher profile career. Carrington Garland was OK. Eileen Davidson was a complete miscast. Kimberly McArthur was alike a bad carbon copy of Robin.

I couldn’t have believed a “Lucy outsmarts JR” story, not the way the role was written and not with Charlene Tilton in the role. It would have been about as believable as Michelle Stevens running Ewing Oil. Agreed on the missed opportunities with Donna. Why they needed to saddle her with a baby and have Ray suddenly want her to become a homemaker is beyond me. Ray and Donna should have been the most stable, normal people on the show. I don’t like what they turned Ray into, with his trophy wife and his unhealthy obsession with controlling his stepdaughter. Katherine was another missed opportunity. They shouldn’t have turned her into an attempted murderer. You really couldn’t do much with the character after that.

Well, as most of us know, the 1980s were a very different time in terms of attitudes towards gay people. Many people, not just conservatives, thought it was a “lifestyle choice” and sick and/or immoral. One of my friends told me that he’s ashamed now of how he used the word fag back then. But it was common during the time and acceptable in many circles. The important thing to me is that he knows now. My guess is that Barbara and Larry at least would have had a different point of view had they been born 30 years later. Hagman made no secret about his desire to earn a lot of money from Dallas. His previous series, I Dream of Jeannie, played in syndication forever, but he was paid modestly for the job - as was the norm in the 60s - and his residuals ran out relatively early in the syndication run. So he was determined that would not happen again. But his big paycheck was a component in the decision to let his costars go. What they did with Susan Howard was crazy. Donna was a strong character, and came across an an authentic Texan. They needed her with Pam leaving. And I think, had they truly known in advance that Victoria was leaving, they wouldn’t have eased her out of the show the way they did.

That sure as hell would have been better than what we got.

Again, I agree 100% with you. I think her attitude was “I’m OK to leave, so if they want me to stay, it will be on my terms.” And she said the producers got petty when she wouldn’t back down, taking away her parking space on the lot, and planning to announce that they had let her go. I’m sure it left a sour taste in her mouth. A few years later, when they showed clips from previous episodes as part of Sue Ellen’s movie storyline, there were no clips of Pamela. And when Bobby ran into the lookalike Jeanne and showed her a picture of Pam, it was at an odd angle and obviously not Victoria. She didn’t give them permission to use her image. You don’t do that unless you’re pissed.

Victoria has not been terribly consistent in her quotes over the years. When the producers of TNT Dallas were hinting at Pam’s return, she said she considered Pam dead as soon as she left the show, and that she couldn’t help what the writers did after. But in contrast, when the show ended in 1991, she said she was willing to come back to put “a coda” on her time on the show, but didn’t want to be part of a fantasy/cliffhanger. By multiple accounts, she was in negotiations to return for another season after 1986-87. But she wanted salary parity with Patrick Duffy, and a one-year deal. The producers wanted her for two, and didn’t want to pay her what she wanted. So she left, and that’s why Pam’s exit from the show is so abrupt. I just don’t buy the “advanced notice” explanation she’s been giving in recent years.

How many times have we seen a short term, unsuccessful recast that follows a popular actor leaving a role, before an ultimately successful recast? I’m thinking of Margie Impert as Rachel, Bond Gideon as Jill on Y&R, Joanne Dorian as Viki on OLTL, Hope Busby as Liza on “Search for Tomorrow”, etc. You never want to replace a popular actor. You want to replace the person who replaced the popular actor.

Great post. I agree with pretty much everything you wrote. I viewed Dallas not as the story of the Ewings, but of the Ewing and the Barnes families. And J.R. and Pam were the most important members of their respective families. And Bobby was caught in the middle. Great setup. It was a three legged stool that would not function as well without one of the legs. That said, if you had to lose one of them, then Bobby more expendable than J.R. or Pam. As much as I dislike the direction of the dream season, the show functioned better without Bobby than it did without Pam. And there was so much potential in that setup, but the writers blew it. The producers didn’t recognize Pamela’s importance to the show and were short sighted in letting Victoria Principal walk away. I think there was some sexism involved there, because they believed that Dallas was about the men. And despite what Victoria says now, they could have kept her. She was in negotiations and she wanted salary parity with Patrick Duffy (as well as a one-year deal).