Chris 2

Oh yeah - that’s a lovely scene. And then Kenny moves to take the baby from Karen when she starts crying, but Ginger stops him.

It’s frustrating that the series isn’t available. I wish I had thought about taping it but who knew. I do have one episode (aside from the two commercially released seasons): the original airing of the 1993 finale, complete with commercials. I transferred it to DVD a while back.

Lilimae also worked, singing her little ditties and playing the autoharp. No one paid her for it though.

15 hours ago, Chris B said:

You mentioned the Gary/JR scene when JR crossed over, but the real gold for me is whenever Val and Gary had a scene together. I don't think Larry Hagman had better chemistry with anyone than Joan Van Ark. I love that Joan always played the backstory and the hurt over what he did to her. She could tell so much with just a look.

I’m guessing you meant to type “whenever Val and JR had a scene together.” If so, I totally agree. I love the scene between them on the front lawn of Southfork after he’s driven Gary way again and she tells him that he’s taken everything from her, but he can’t buy her off. I also love the scene where he drops by her book signing and asks, “Do you have a kiss for your favorite brother in law?” And she hisses under her breath, “You are disgusting!”

They wrote a scene between the two of them for Dallas 2.0 where Val goes charging into his office to confront him. Hagman sadly passed before they could do it, so Sue Ellen stood in for JR in that scene and it really didn’t make a lot of sense since there wasn’t much history between Val and Sue Ellen. But I can picture him saying the lines and it would have been great.

I haven’t seen season 8 since it originally aired but I remember liking it much better than the hot mess that was Jeff Freilich’s season 7. But Dallas had greatly declined at that t point, so FC wasn’t getting the lead-in it once did. And it no longer had the clear cut setup of the Gioberti family coming to the valley, with Angela trying to drive them out.

I thought Pam was under appreciated by the producers. She was the second most important character after JR. I thought the show functioned better without Bobby than without Pam.

Charlene Tilton is an actress with limited range. I wish they had cast someone who could really play the vixen, someone more like Pamela Sue Martin.

The season following Who Shot JR was kinda dull - I agree. The show didn’t really perk up again until they started dealing with Jock’s death a season later. That season, plus the two following, are the series’ strongest years.

On 5/11/2022 at 4:35 AM, Vee said:

Apologies if this is up. I was digging around for info on Knots Landing's origins and came across this, and couldn't find it in a deep dive of this thread: https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-culture/dallas-at-40-the-inside-story-behind-the-show-that-changed-texas-forever/

It is candid to say the least.

Thanks for posting this - I never saw it! And how nice to see Victoria Principal participating. I think her comments are spot on - she discussed how Pam became more secondary in her last year of the show and why she felt they shouldn’t have been surprised that she left.

Did Knots ever do anything cheesy like a fire where the regulars were trapped or an earthquake or anything like that? I don’t think they did because it didn’t seem to be their style.

The issue with the 30 min soaps is that they often aired at noon or 12:30 or 4:00 and those were prime slots for stations to air syndicated or local programming, and not have to share revenue with the network.

Stations in larger markets aired news in the noon slots; back then it was less of an issue of ratings, and more an issue of community responsibility. There was no way any of our local affiliates were going to dump the noon news in favor of a soap opera. They were committed to news.

Our local NBC station didn’t air The Doctors in its final years, nor did it air Search for Tomorrow. It had a local talk show called “People Are Talking,” which was popular and got higher ratings than The Doctors or SFT. Our local ABC affiliate didn’t clear Edge of Night at 4:00; it showed Big Valley and The Waltons and other syndicated reruns which were more profitable for them. It did air EON on a one-day delay in the mornings for about a year, after it moved over from CBS. But then it dropped EON, never to air it again.

23 hours ago, Vee said:

Pleased to finally have unearthed the opportunity to watch the show. I will be viewing the Dallas episodes with Shackleford and JVA and then moving onto Season 1.

I hope you watched the two “Dallas” episodes with David Ackroyd as Gary, too. I think they contain some of Joan Van Ark’s finest moments as Valene.

8 hours ago, Paul Raven said:

Thanks for posting.

They were pretty awful, but what got to air wasn't much better.

They needed to incorporate the  traditional cloud visuals. With imagination, they could have been updated.

Any Search cast montage that doesn't build to Stu and Jo doesn't cut it for me.

I remember when they had the last opening theme prior to the show’s cancellation, one of the versions did not end with Jo, instead with the McCleary brothers. Which is an outrage

Wow - those look like they cost about five dollars and were created on someone’s Vic-20.

Thanks for posting them.

9 hours ago, Tonksadora said:

Lingering Questions:

DOOL/Y&R: Why does the Corday family corporation own 1% of Y&R?

 

DOOL/Y&R: Many people *guess* that it was a decision that was made between Bill Bell Sr. & Betty Corday when he left DOOL HWing to go do his own new show.

 

Mark Harding @MarkHToo

Replying to @shallotpeel

I know the first one: To allow Bill Bell to cancel his #Days contract and start #YR, (a) Cordays got a percentage of #YR, and (b) Bill agreed to co-write for a period of years. I don't think this is speculation, but I'd have to go back to sources.

 

Adding: Bell Sr. did HW both shows for a period of 2 years.

 

Mark Harding

 

@MarkHToo

·

1h

 

@shallotpeel Source is @michaeljmaloney

(2012) “The Young and Restless Life of William J. Bell”, Sourcebooks, Napierville IL, page 76

I recall reading that Corday was in the process of suing Bell which is how they wound up with a percentage of the new show.

On 5/1/2022 at 9:42 PM, victoria foxton said:

 

  

Susan was such a striking looking woman. But this shows how silly it was for Frances Reid to be playing her grandmother - way too young.

“Well, I always wanted to die in bed.”

I don’t remember her talking about how she got Towering Inferno, but she stated that after the movie came out and was a hit, she went to NY to meet with the head of NBC and tell them that she wanted a chance to get some prime time guest spots. But not much came of this and when DOOL went to 60 min, she was done. She felt that the production pace for a 60-minute daily show was not conducive to good performances. She did six weeks of the hour shows as a transition and then she left.

I think three things prevented her from going further at the time: she was known to be outspoken (and women weren’t supposed to be outspoken back then), age (she was 36 when she left, and roles start drying up for actresses at 40), and homophobia.

13 hours ago, carolineg said:

I think Susan Flannery is subdued on Days (from what very little I have seen).  

I’d call her style subtle. Flannery is another one who was disciplined and controlled. She had a career that most working actors would envy, but she should have been a bigger star than she was. She probably stayed on DOOL too long if she wanted to do primetime or features - it becomes more difficult to jump the longer you stay, because you get pegged as a daytime actor.

LOL. As Caroline says, I guess it was the style. And Susan Hayes isn’t alone.

The one who I always thought gave controlled performances back then was Victoria Wyndham - Rachel on AW. She seemed more disciplined than her peers. Rachel fought a lot with Mac, but I don’t remember her getting hysterical. Even in the older clips where she’s torturing poor Alice, she’s angry but not over the top.

Patty Weaver (Trish Clayton) had - and presumably still has - an amazing voice.

I watched the clip of the fire, and it’s a little upsetting to see Julie sitting there hurt and crying. I didn’t like the storyline that followed it, although Lee made me laugh.

I was pretty young when these episodes aired. Was Susan Seaforth Hayes hammy back then? Or is that a more recent development? I’ve seen some daytime leading ladies like Robin Strasser and Jess Walton chew the scenery more as they get older.

Jeff Freilich, the season 6 and 7 showrunner, actually bragged in an interview that he didn’t watch any of the previous episodes when he took over. I’m guessing that’s the same interview you’re talking about.

Angie Dickinson, really? She was a little old to play Jane Wyman’s daughter.

The network getting rid of Ken Olin was a good example of too much network interference with this show (same thing with Nazi treasure). Chris should have been a long term character and member of the family. And I thought his character worked - a nice contrast to Lance. If only they could have done something about his Chicago accent lol.

But the ratings started slipping with the 1984-85 season, so CBS felt emboldened to interfere.

I have to agree with the pretty much all of the focus group feedback from season 7.

Interesting - thanks for posting that. Any of the actors you mentioned would have been better than Billy Moses, who I thought was awfully dull as Cole; he just didn’t have a great range. I can understand why Jamie Rose got the nod if Earl Hamner was doing the picking. She’s his “type,” similar to Mary McDonough from “The Waltons” - red headed and low-key.

Michael Zaslow wound up on Lorimar’s “Kings’ Crossing”, which premiered a few months after FC, in 1982. It was also produced by Michael Filerman, which is presumably why he departed FC midseason. What’s striking in retrospect is how similar that show’s premise is to FC: troubled family returns a parent’s hometown (mother’s hometown this time) where a wealthy aunt resents their return. Oh, and the wealthy aunt has an emotionally troubled daughter she tries to keep in an attic room.

And of course, Susan Flannery wound up on “Dallas,” where she didn’t really fit.

Christine Jones certainly got around. I remember her as Viki on OLTL but didn’t know she filled in for Jane Elliot too.

The ratings for season 6 were virtually identical to the season before it (as were the ratings for its lead-in, Dallas, that year). The big difference is that Dallas maintained its rating despite being up against Miami Vice that year, and Falcon Crest got the same rating even though it was no longer up against Miami Vice.

I’m watching the first few episodes and they haven’t yet gotten to Chase leaving Maggie yet. I’ll probably tune out then because I think it’s out of character for him and I find it very difficult to watch. I’m guessing they knew even then it was Foxworth’s last season, so they were writing him in a way so the audience wouldn’t miss him when he was gone. They wound up killing him off anyway, so I don’t understand why it was necessary to tear down Chase and Maggie’s marriage before he left.

I wonder if they were going to say that Jeff raped Maggie had the previous writing/production had stayed. There was no rape mentioned or implied during season 5.

I’m guessing the previous regime was planning to bring Julia back full time, too, but that changed with the new showrunner. I don’t know why they had to make her blind - this isn’t “Little House on the Prairie.”

I miss Terry. She was a fun, shades-of-gray character and I don’t know what they were thinking when they got rid of her. Greg, too. The morally ambiguous characters make the show fun.

i also liked Chase’s old coot of a lawyer, Riley Wicker, who has disappeared.

I hated the plot of Angela being Richard’s mother. It doesn’t make sense given how Douglas and Jacqueline acted or spoke in the early seasons. Very cheezy, like a daytime soap opera.

Jeff Frielich was a dreadful hack.

Barbara Bel Geddes and Howard Keel were each offered a 4-episode deal for what turned out to be Dallas’ final season. Keel accepted, but Bel Geddes declined.

And I totally believe that Susan Sullivan was let go - that promo is the smoking gun. Nice find.