Chris 2

Sorry to hear this. When is it leaving? I hope Dallas isn’t going too.

They did! Susan lived there with the baby during the last season while Merle was on the road.

Nice article - thanks for posting. I always liked her. She seems grounded and happy.

I also liked Dianne Kay a lot. She was a significant upgrade from Kimberly Beck, who played Nancy in the pilot and who I thought was a limited actress based on her other work in the 1970s and 80s.

I think Van Patten was truly one of the good guys. I know he tried to help Adam Rich when he got into legal trouble after the series ended. I’m guessing you read Buckley’s tribute to him when he died. It was in Variety or perhaps the LA Times. She spoke so highly of him and his wife and how they helped her adjust to life in LA when she took the job on EIE, and they became lifelong friends.

I thought that Michele Lee did some of her best work on the show after they killed off Sid. The “Letting Go” episode was especially good.

I read the same thing. But they made peace with her. When Adam Rich died, I saw a a pictures of him from a few years earlier with his EIE cast mates attending the LA opening of Hello, Dolly, starring Betty Buckley. I also saw an interview with Willie Aames and perhaps some of the others (might have been a Today Show reunion) where he said that he used to argue with Betty Buckley that they weren’t making art; they were making product and that’s why they had to move faster. And it drove her crazy. But he sounded pretty good natured about it.

The challenge with EIE was that it started with most of the kids as older teens or young adults. So that really limited the stories after the show had been for a few years because there was no longer a differentiated range of ages to do stories on. ABC knew the show was out of gas and moved it to Saturday to kill it. The 1987 reunion movie came about because the show never had an official final episode. When Betty Buckley didn’t participate, the official reason was that she was filming the movie “Frantic.” In reality, she and her representatives were in negotiation to do the reunion. But negotiations dragged on and on over salary and billing and finally Lorimar walked away from the table and hired Mary Frann. Lorimar management had never been overly fond of Buckley, who liked to “color outside of the lines.” The 1987 reunion rated very well, so NBC ordered a follow-up. For that second movie, they didn’t even offer Buckley the job.

Yes, he did. I saw an interview where he said he regretted missing out on over 10 years of steady work. He thought KL was on its last legs when he left.

I liked Diana Hyland and thought she was warm and believable in the role. But Joan’s death did open up story possibility. I liked how they frequently referred to her and mentions came up naturally, like when Mary visited her old teacher to ask for advice, and the teacher began with how sorry she had been to hear about her mother. Tom as a single father could have been milked for longer. But ABC as you mentioned was insistent on a two-parent family. So Tom was remarried by November sweeps. Too bad.

The issue with Joan Bradford disappearing in mid-season without explanation is interesting. Season 1 consisted of nine episodes. Joan was physically in four. And then she was heard on the phone in two additional episodes (she was said to be visiting a family member who had had a baby). Diana Hyland was not well enough to appear in those two episodes, but recorded voiceovers for them. When ABC reran the series in the summer of 1977, they only showed episodes in which Hyland did not appear, in order to transition audiences to a new season without Joan. They edited her voiceovers out of those two episodes (for example, in the “Quarantine” episode, Tom’s phone call with Joan is replaced with a phone call to his friend Greg Maxwell). And those episodes got a new opening and closing that eliminated Joan/Hyland. It’s these summer of 1977 edits that are shown in syndication and streaming used in the DVDs. So it gives the impression that Joan is gone without explanation.

LOL I don’t disagree re: Perfect Strangers. I worked in the business at the time of the acquisition and the Lorimar was a big get for WB. The studios and TV networks were becoming vertically integrated and since Lorimar wasn’t going to grow into a giant, it was going to get acquired. It had a number of suitors due to its slate of hits as well as its library titles. But Warner got it and ousted its TV executive team in favor of the Lorimar folks because pre-Lorimar, Warner’s TV production had declined to the point to the lowest point since the 1950s. I really miss the days before all the consolidation, because I think there was a lot more creative freedom back then, particularly at the independent production companies. I’d argue that a Falcon Crest season 9 wouldn’t have happened at one of the major TV studios - they just would have cancelled it.

I don’t know where you got the idea that Lorimar was collapsing, but that’s just not true. Nighttime soaps were collapsing, but Lorimar had had the foresight to begin a transition to producing sitcoms, and it had a number of hits under its belt already (“Full House”, “Perfect Strangers”, “Valerie/The Hogan Family”) with more to come. Within five years, Warner Bros - whose TV division had collapsed - acquired Lorimar and turned it into Warner Bros TV, with the Lorimar executive team taking charge.

Every time I see a 1990s-era Guiding Light clip, I’m struck by what a one-note actor Mark Derwin is, with his clenched-mouth, constipated portrayal of Mallet.

Lucy the character and the actress were poor. KL didn’t need her stinking the place up. What they should have done was kill her off, cremate the remains and then send them to the moon. So she could never, ever come back.

I would like a Fallon doll with two different snap-on faces.

Ben and Blake being brothers was ridiculous. John Forsythe was old enough to be his father. And the actor who played him was British as opposed to Australian so there were multiple accent issues. I never bought Frankie and Sable as siblings either. Raised across the pond from each other? Were the writers watching The Parent Trap?

That plot twist would have been too daytime for my tastes. JR being obsessed with who was a real Ewing was interesting. The NY Times, I think, did a story on Dallas when the revival first started. And they mentioned how weird the Ewings were in the original series - so worried about those who were “outsiders” or “not our kind of people” - like anyone would want to hang out in the dark ranch house and be stuck living with the Ewings.

I prefer the term “serial.” Knots and Dallas, after the first seasons, were fully serialized. Hill St, St. Elsewhere, and LA Law were hybrids: they had serialized story elements that would continue for a limited number of episodes, but they generally had a couple of self-contained stories per episode as well.

Paulsen did a decent job and the final season was much better than the final seasons of Dallas and Falcon Crest. And it was better than the seasons that immediately preceded it. But it was still a tired show. Its two leading ladies had a reduced presence. The younger female lead was still miscast (yeah, she had improved but still wasn’t right for the role). And the main family had shrunk. I agree that Paulsen should have created a real series finale.

Sue Ellen is nuts. “Oh, JR has changed!” How many times did we hear that? I think if they had gone a different direction after Patrick Duffy left - if they had done a redemption arc for JR - that could have been interesting, and Larry Hagman was the actor who could have pulled that off. But getting Sue Ellen back should have taken years. He had a lot of trust to repair.

Katy Kurtzman has said she can’t watch he performances as Lindsay - she was at an awkward age and she said she hated the choices she made as an actor. I can’t imagine watching my fifteen year old self on film. Bo Hopkins was just miscast. Agree that someone like Gil Gerard would have been better.

Patricia Barry and Marie Cheatham played sisters on DOOL (Barry played Addie, Julie and Hope’s mother).

Amen. I’d love to see the footage of Peppard as Blake if it still exists, because I think he would have been a much more interesting Blake than the grandfatherly Forsythe. I don’t think Peppard was let go because he was wrong for the role; I think Peppard was let go because he was a pain in the ass.

The problem with this show, as I watch it on Pluto, is that most of the characters are unlikable, especially Blake. I don’t understand what Krystle or Alexis see in that crotchety, humorless, ill-tempered old goat. Krystle, after the first year or two, is as stiff as her hairstyle. Alexis is too prone to hysterics (she needs to to take a page from her fellow primetime villains and chillax). The original Steven and Fallon are good, but I’m hard pressed to think of other supporting characters I like. I guess Sammy Jo.