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They abandoned the season long arcs in season 5, and that was a shame. So we got flavor-of-the-week Apollonia for a few episodes here; Cesar Romero for a few episodes there; the failed Father Christopher addition; etc. Morgan Fairchild was a terrible fit for the show - it was an icky story for an escapist show like FC, and we had no investment in her character at all. She was just off to the side having a story, and with virtually no ties to the rest of the show. Bizarre.

Having Chase pushed out of Falcon Crest was also a dumb move (though I can’t remember if it happened in season 4 or 5, but season 5 had the fallout from that decision).

Lorimar wasn’t a mess at all. It successfully pivoted from the waning hourlong primetime soaps to producing very profitable half hour sitcoms (“Full House,” “Family Matters”, “Perfect Strangers”, etc). These shows had much more value in syndication than “Dallas” and “Knots Landing”. Further, when Warner Bros acquired Lorimar, it essentially turned Lorimar into the TV division of WB and named Lorimar’s president, Les Moonves, as its new leader. When the leader of an acquired company becomes the leader of the acquiring company, that’s success. Say what you will about Les Moonves personally, he was a very successful TV executive.

I thought Ken Olin was a good addition and thought they could have done more with Christopher. But I know Olin hated being on the show and removed it from his resume.

Sue Ellen’s movie was about embarrassing JR. But JR was beyond embarrassment, so it really didn’t make sense.

I’m sure you’ve heard the saying that hate isn’t the opposite of love; indifference is. Sue Ellen’s farewell shouldn’t have been about hating JR or getting revenge on him. It should have been about her finding happiness without the Ewings and walking away from JR, simply not caring about him anymore. That would have been a satisfying exit for her.

Chao Li got added to the opening credits starting in season 6. But the size of his part remained the same.

In the case of Frank, it was a combination of miscasting (Michael Hawkins, Andrew Robinson) and the later casting of ambitious actors who went on to prime time and movies (Daniel Hugh Kelly, Geoff Pierson).

With Mary: there was really only one, and that’s Kate Mulgrew. And it was clear early on that she’d be going on to bigger and better things. The other Mary actors were forced onto the creators by ABC, who initially refused to let them kill off Mary. Mary #2 could have grown into the role but was forced out by ABC (not glamorous enough); Mary #3 was possibly the most incompetent soap opera actor I’ve ever seen; and Mary #4 was just dull.

The first Siobhan, Sarah Felder, was great and unique. ABC forced the creators to get rid of her (the glamor thing again). Marg Helgenberger, Siobhan III, was good but went on to primetime. The second and fourth actors in the role didn’t work.

The first Patrick, Malcolm Groome, left after three years (there was a lot of turnover as the original cast’s three-year contracts expired). None of the three recasts worked, and eventually he came back.

The reality is, Ryan’s Hope was about the Ryan family. And if they were going to keep the show about the Ryan family, then recasting the parts of the family became necessary. And the recasts were hit and miss - perhaps more so than is normal.

The problem with Andrew Robinson as Frank is that Frank was meant to be the leading man of the show, and Andrew Robinson is not a leading man type. He didn’t have the looks or screen presence to pull off Frank - he is a character actor. Daniel Hugh Kelly, the third Frank, fit the role much better.

Would you get the damned spotlight out of my eyes!

Paul Burke’s CC was probably the unsexiest man I ever saw on the soaps. At least out of anyone who was supposed to be a leading man.

Season 10 looks different from the earlier seasons because that was the season they started editing the show on lower resolution videotape (it was still shot on film) to save money. The current remaster uses software for seasons 10-14 to upscale them to HD, as opposed to the earlier seasons, where they could just rescan the negatives of the completed episodes. To properly do seasons 10-14, they’d have to reassemble the shows from the original film (if they even still have it). This would be expensive. The later seasons do look better than they’ve ever been.

Tyler Banks played John Ross in “Ewing Inferno,” the cliffhanger for season 6. By the time he was rescued from the fire in the season 7 premiere, he was played by Omri Katz. No “severe burns necessitating plastic surgery” explanation, though.

Ridiculous. No one ever stays dead on this show. And I thought Kristian Alfonso said two years ago that she was never coming back.

Thanks for posting those articles.

I think the show did the mid scene switch to be cute/edgy as opposed to Terry not finishing the scene. In our region, we didn’t get the version where someone punched Mason and he fell down as Lester and got up as Thomson.

I’d love to know what happened behind the scenes. Terry Lester was very good and miles ahead of one-note Gordon Thomson (I never cared for his breathy line delivery). But there must have been a reason they didn’t rush to renew him.

3 hours ago, DeliaIrisFan said:

Catherine Hicks was always my favorite Faith by a mile, and I don't know that she's spoken about RH in decades.

She appeared on Soaptalk back in the 2000s and discussed it. Definitely worth a watch, because she states that she loved doing the show. 

He really got an amazing number of people to contribute. Obviously, Kate Mulgrew is noticeably absent, and Karen Morris Gowdy would have been a nice get (though I always preferred Catherine Hicks).

On 8/2/2022 at 7:55 PM, Vee said:

Moonves' purge of female shows from CBS was well documented several years ago when the allegations about him first came out. Linda Bloodworth-Thomason and a variety of other people came forward and discussed how he blackballed female creators, stars and female-driven shows. It was across the board, it was not a question of one show. He remade the entire network in the image of what came not long after: NCIS, CSI. We discussed the sea change at CBS and these women's public comments at length in the Hollywood Sexual Harassment thread at that time.

You posted earlier that this purge happened not long after Knots Landing ended. If it’s well documented, then which shows were purged? CBS’ hits during the 1990s included included “The Nanny”, “Touched By an Angel”, and “Dr Quinn”. All of them had female creators and all had healthy runs.

It wasn’t until CSI became a huge hit in 2001 that CBS became a crime-oriented network. That’s when we saw the CSI spinoffs and later the NCIS spinoffs dominate the network. Same thing has happened on NBC with Dick Wolf’s crime shows, BTW. It’s also worth pointing out that the three CSI spinoffs each have two female co-creators, Ann Donohue and Carol Mendelsohn. 

As for Linda Bloodworth Thomason: her claims of being blackballed are questionable at best. All of her shows were off CBS prior to Les Moonves joining the network. And look at her track record. She had one successful show (“Designing Women”) that she badly mishandled during its last two seasons; one modest time slot hit success (“Evening Shade”) that has rarely been rerun; a John Ritter/Markie Post star vehicle (“Hearts Afire”) that CBS desperately tried to make into a hit but couldn’t; and a “Designing Women spinoff (“Women of the House”) that was a creative and commercial flop. Later on, her “Emeril” NBC sitcom also flopped, and her HBO show, “12 Miles of Bad Road,” was apparently so bad that the network stopped production after six episodes and never aired them. I can’t blame any network executive for being reluctant to green light any more of her shows, given her track record.

I’m not defending Moonves as a person; it sounds like he’s reprehensible. But as a network exec, looks to me like he was just chasing the best ratings possible. I don’t see evidence that there was some massive purge of female shows.

Count me among the skeptics doubting that Peacock will feature the entire DOOL library. It’s hard to see Sony or NBC going to expense of digitizing all those old episodes. I read elsewhere that Peacock will feature the the last five years of episodes. That sounds more realistic since they’re already in digital format. And then they could put up a few special episodes from before that era to pacify fans: the first episode, Doug and Julie’s wedding, Bo and Hope’s wedding, Marlena seemingly getting killed by the Salem Strangler, etc.

I also think that if the show is renewed past the 2022-23 season, it will be for these little five episode limited series a la Beyond Salem. Maybe once a month or even just once per quarter. No way will they show five episodes per week. Broadcast soaps were designed for viewers who tuned in 2-3 times per week. That’s why there’s so much repetition. With streaming, viewers can catch every episode if they want, so they simply won’t need as much content.

Didn’t she play Kimberly Brady on DOOL for a while too?

I can’t fault Moonves too much for Murder, She Wrote’s death. It was an aging, expensive show with an older audience in the plum, post-60 Minutes timeslot. Smart programmers don’t wait until top shows completely tank before shaking things up. He put Cybill in that slot, and when that didn’t work, he put Touched By An Angel in there, which became a top 10 hit and thrived in that slot for years. Note that both of these were female-centric shows, btw. I do think MSW deserved a softer landing than the death slot against Friends.

I think there’s a strong case to be made for Moonves and his management team not valuing the female cast members as much as the males in the declining days of the 80s Lorimar soaps. Victoria Principal said she was disrespected going out the door as she left Dallas - they took away her parking space and tried to claim that she was let go (which she forced them to retract it. Every time Dallas had to cut the budget, it was generally the longtime women cast members - Susan Howard, Linda Gray, Barbara Bel Geddes - who departed, while the men stuck around.

I’ve seen Cybill Shepherd make that claim before, and I call BS (and I do think Les Moonves is a dirtbag). Her TV series declined from 30th place in the ratings in its third season to 50th place in its fourth season, after which it was cancelled. I saw the claim on wiki that “at the time it was cancelled that its ratings were higher than Chicago Hope and Nash Bridges” on the wiki page. Chicago Hope was actually higher rated than Cybil at the time. And you can always find examples like that anyway. Renewals and cancellations are based not just on absolute ratings but ratings trajectory, cost, and difficulty of time slot. 48 Hours was lower rated but renewed because it was cheaper.

George and Leo, the Bob Newhart show which aired after Cybill, was also cancelled with similar ratings. Did Bob Newhart decline a romantic relationship with Les Moonves, too? LOL.

Everybody Loves Raymond replaced Cybill in that Monday night time slot the following season, and it ranked 11th. It’s hard to argue that was a bad decision.

I’m curious to understand what else was considered part of the female-centric purge during the 1990s, because I’d never heard of this before.

On 7/30/2022 at 2:03 AM, Vee said:

I imagine the only way it could've is if they'd kept a much larger and stronger younger ensemble vs. a few young players. It would've meant a substantial shift. I also very much doubt it would've survived the Les Moonves purge of female-centric sitcoms and dramas that came not long after.

What did he purge?

The Helmut of Malkuth (David Gray) storyline on GH was stupefyingly dull, and went on forever. They knew Genie was leaving, so you’d think they could have come up with more compelling storylines that would have helped mitigate her departure.

I think the challenge with the spinoff was that they came up with it at a time when nighttime serials as a whole were declining. And they did not repeat well. CBS wanted to focus on coming up with hit sitcoms to compete with NBC, which was on top of the ratings at that point.

Not me. I never much liked Reckell or Kristian Alfonso in most of what they did outside DOOL. The exception is Alfonso on Melrose Place as a madam. She played against type very very well and they should have found a way to keep her around longer.

Knots Jr! I wish they had done that.

Dallas 2.0 was a huge missed opportunity. It was poorly conceived and poorly cast. And it’s sad because it could have been great. But they cast a bunch of eye candy as the next generation instead of capable actors, and they gave them lousy material. It should have been about the family, and it really wasn’t.

David Jacobs offered his services as a consultant. But TPTB would only agree to it if he signed away his rights to the show. He basically told them to stuff it. And Warner wanted to credit Cynthia Cidre as the creator (“based upon the original series by David Jacobs”). Jacobs went to arbitration and won, so he was listed as the creator, with Cidre getting a Developed By credit.