prefab1

The Inside the Light episodes are, I think, a great example of both the strengths and weaknesses of Wheeler's experimental approach. I loved a lot of those episodes, and I wasn't the only one, since reels from those episodes helped Guiding Light win a lot of Emmys in the early years of Wheeler's tenure. But they also often wreaked havoc on the show's day-to-day plotting, as character-based story arcs that might normally play out over weeks (and might keep viewers tuning in tomorrow) instead got compressed into a single episode.

For that matter, the '66 episodes online seem smart and youthful in a way that the '73 episodes do not. Even in the February 73 episode, which is considerably better than the July and August ones, the characters are extremely dour, with long pauses in their speech as though they were so depressed they could barely get the words out. Okay, Papa Bauer just died, so they have an excuse. But they have the same depressive affect in the Summer 73 episodes, only there the writing is much worse, and suddenly everyone is narrating their inner thoughts in voiceover. (By then, Soderberg and Sommer had left, and our old pal James Lipton had taken over as co-head writer, along with James Gentile and Robert Cenedella). We often talk about GL's lows in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, but these Summer 73 episodes show that the 1970s shouldn't get a free pass. Even a story that sounds good on paper, like Kit Vested's descent into madness, turns out to be dramatically inert on screen, mainly due to poor dialogue writing, directing, and acting choices. The idea that three women at once would be (literally) crazy for Anthony Call's Dr. Joe Werner, who has all the sexual charisma of a block of wood onscreen, is at least as ludicrous as Reva time-traveling through paintings.

All this talk about Dennis Cooney got me curious, and I found a great interview Lydia Hirsch did with him in 1976 in which he talks critically about some of the edgier storylines ATWT were afraid to pursue in the early 1970s.

Seeing the year's episode count leaders laid out like that, it's clear that GH has arguably the strongest lineup of 40+ actresses on daytime, and those actresses are used regularly as they should be. But it's also clear that the show has some of the least appealing male leads on daytime. The men appearing in 2 or more episodes a week are the worn-out Maurice Bernard and Steve Burton, the dour and hangdog Chad Duell and Dominic Zamprogna, and Cameron Mathison in a sleazeball role. I think there are men in that cast who are capable of being fun and sexy male leads, including Josh Kelly, Rick Hearst, and Charles Mesure. I just hope that those guys get more airtime in the upcoming year, because it would really improve the show if our strong female leads had some equally compelling actors to play against.

I can see what they're going for with Michael's moping and inaction; it's just the wrong decision. In many ways, it's in character, as Michael has often defined himself as the peacemaker of the family, in opposition to his vengeful parents, Carly and Sonny. And it makes sense that he doesn't want to put the kids through any conflict. So if GH were a character-driven drama, the kind we often say that we want, this would probably be the right creative choice. But the key thing is--GH is NOT a character-driven drama. It's trying to juggle about 50 characters on the canvas, and the scenes are like 30 seconds long. The production choices don't allow for that kind of deep realistic sustained exploration of character psychology. So I totally agree that the show should embrace its plot-driven nature and have Michael go full vengeful psycho on Willow and Drew. It would be fun to watch, which Chad Duell's scenes rarely are.

On paper, Labine would seem like such a good fit for GL, because her best headwriter stints (like on GH) were sterling examples of character-driven writing, and GL's main strength was its deep roster of complex characters. In theory, GL should be a perfect playbox for a character-driven writer, since its lead characters had clear flaws and were often driven to behave in self-destructive ways. So a lot of the conflict that leads to great drama could just emerge organically from their interactions and reactions to ordinary situations. But it seems like the Labines weren't fans of the show and didn't take enough time to really learn about the characters and their motivations; during this era, a lot of the long-running characters seem like 2-D cutouts of themselves. And conflict is often coming from external bad guys, usually affiliated with either the mob of San Cristobel. During that September 2000 episode I shared, Reva is reduced to being an unwitting victim of her new boyfriend Noah and his shady associate. Love her or hate her, Reva is normally a human cyclone of drama, but in this episode she gets nothing to do except be pulled around by the plot machinations. What a waste!

Agreed that 1986 was an awful year for GL, for all the reasons you mentioned. It's also the year that the show went through a head writer change every couple of months, starting off with Pam Long and Jeff Ryder, then Ryder writing solo, then Mary Ryan Munisteri and Ellen Barrett, then Joseph D. Manetta, and finally Manetta and Sheri Anderson. It also feels like the year when the radical decisions they made back in 1983--getting rid of many long-term characters--really came back to bite them, as many of the hot young actors they'd built up as the show's next-generation stars left in 1984 and 1985. At least they got Chris Bernau and Robert Newman back by the end of 1986, but they probably should have brought back even more of the show's early 80s cast rather than bogging us down with duds like Calla.

I had to search the Soap Central recaps, and apparently they stretched this idiotic story out over more than 2 months. The scenes with the Feds come on November 30. Sam was one of the very few memorable characters created around that period. Some of that was down to Wes Ramsey's charisma, and some of that was because Sam was more well-defined than the typical soap teen. I feel like we all knew a guy like Sam in college, the sarcastic know-it-all who's smart, but not quite as smart as he thinks. And of course, the show had little idea what to do with him, so they mostly stuck him in a storyline where he had a crush on Marah but played second fiddle to Tony.

The short-lived "teens get in trouble when Sam burns CDs" storyline starts around 33:00 in this episode. At least they dressed Wes Ramsey in a sleeveless top that shows off his nice arms. As a whole, the episode exhibits a lot of the same problems the show was having in 1986, including a focus on boring newbie characters. Aside from Kim Zimmer, Robert Newman, Jordan Clarke, and Mary Stuart, there's no one here you'd recognize if you stopped watching a couple of years earlier (say, around the time of the clone story). And around this time, they were writing Reva like she was Joan Lunden--a TV host and polished suburban mom--so they weren't exactly playing to Zimmer's strengths.

Not sure if it's lower than 1986, but most of what I've seen from Claire Labine's run in 2000-2001 was pretty darn bad. Not only did she inherit a show that was completely losing its identity with the mob and San Cristobel mess, but she actually made it worse with characters like Mae the cigarette girl and wretched social issues stories about Reva saving refugees and the teens learning why they shouldn't use Napster.

Yeah, and it might have played better in context of the whole episode. I did think the scene I saw improved as it went on, when NLG gave a monologue about holding Sam as a baby in the hospital.

I saw the Alexis scenes GH had posted to their YouTube channel, where she's asking for a blanket because Sam is "cold." And I appreciated what they were trying to do, but it just didn't work at all for me. Maybe if it were a scene from a 1920s melodrama that I was watching onstage, I could suspend my disbelief and just go with it, but as it played out on the screen, I just didn't find it believable enough to be moving, and I was mainly thinking about how this was probably going in NLG's Emmy reel.

So I caught the scenes from yesterday's episode where they're trying to revive Sam, and I understand what people are saying about Van Hansis seeming over-the-top, but I thought it worked with the only-on-soaps dramatic situation of Lucas being the attending physician desperately trying to save his sister's life. I did have a question about Portia, however. Is she supposed to be a bitch, or is Brooke Kerr just playing her that way? The returns of Jonathan Jackson and Ric Hearst brought me back to GH after many years away, so I'm not very familiar with the character. But Portia's responses in that scene seemed so cold and uncompassionate that I couldn't figure out whether it was intentional--and if so, why?

Maybe they should just put Sam in a coma and have her wake up (ideally, played by a different actress) a year from now when they run out of story for Dante and Lulu.

I know soaps regularly let go of an actor in order to free up the budget to hire another actor, but I've rarely seen it depicted onscreen in such a symbolically heavy-handed fashion as it sounds like we'll see on Friday. "Bye, KeMo, we're taking out your liver to pay for Alexa Havins' salary! Er, I mean, we're taking out Sam's liver so that Lulu can live."

Just saw some of the scenes with Holly and Sasha, and taken on their own terms they were quite enjoyable. But this is the kind of "big reveal" that works for a character who's been on the show for 6 months, not for one who's been on the show for 6 years. Knowing that Sasha has been keeping her connection to Holly a secret for all these years certainly makes the character more interesting, but doesn't really square with anything we've seen onscreen. It's like if they suddenly revealed that all these years, Willow has been a spy for the DVX sent to take down the WSB. (Actually, maybe they should go with that idea so that Willow could finally have something interesting to do).

I'll say this for Sasha: at least she's not Willow. And I do kind of like her C-story romance with Cody. But it does boggle the mind that GH has somehow kept both Sasha AND Willow on the air for 6 years, often in frontburner stories, when they're functionally the same character.

I think Lucky Gold doesn't get enough credit for cleaning up the Labines' mess. I remember tuning into my former-favorite soap GL in late 2000/early 2001 when Labine was writing, and I basically found it unwatchable. (The main story I recall involved Cassie and Reva going undercover dressed as prostitutes to uncover some kind of people-smuggling ring in San Cristobal). When I finally tuned in again in late 2001, I found Gold's GL to be compulsively watchable, even when it was frequently ridiculous (e.g. Reva time-traveling through the painting). More stories revolved around long-term characters I cared about, and they had emotional stakes again. True, anything was better than "Mae the cigarette girl" and "Reva, savior of the boat people," but I felt like Gold's run was a rare highlight in GL's very troubled early 2000s era.

Hope he sticks around for a while. Then maybe they could cast Eric Sheffer Stevens as an irascible new doctor at GH and watch the sparks fly.

Which is astonishing, because the character of TJ has been on GH for 12 straight years now! We ought to have an excellent sense of his motivations, and he ought to have deep relationships with characters from all over the canvas. GL definitely had some problems writing for its black characters, but they were never GH-level bland.

Aww... I really grew to like LSV's Remy, and I thought he had great chemistry with Karla Mosley's Christina. I also really liked how his relationship with Ava developed, culminating in the great twist where her baby was born and his skin color was a dead giveaway that the father was Remy and not Bill. But I agree that they could have spent more time on Remy's backstory. I thought the subtext was clear enough--that Mel and Remy's high-achieving intellectual parents had put immense pressure on them to be educated professionals, and Mel followed their wishes wholeheartedly while younger brother Remy rebelled, instead opting for more blue-collar work. But we only really got to see that dynamic at work when Montel Williams would put in a guest appearance as Clayton Boudreaux. When a soap isn't willing to put in the time and money to give its Black characters fully-defined family lives, it's no wonder that they often come off seeming like ciphers.

Totally agree, and I'd add Karla Mosley as another actress who makes this a must-see for me. I've loved her since her Guiding Light days, and she was the only reason I ever tuned into B&B (briefly, when her story was front-burner). I'm so glad that they're finally getting a chance to be on a show that, from the start, treats them as true leading ladies and doesn't have them playing marginal characters who can easily be removed from the narrative at a writer or producer's whim.

Given that John Driscoll is in the stills, this must be from March 2005. Driscoll joined the previous Fall, and Laura Wright left later in the year.

Nancy probably would have been quite good in the role, but I wonder if casting her as Rita would have been too hard on older viewers who remembered her as Kit Vested in the early 70s.

Great question! I think Lauren Koslow has the right combination of sensuality and smarts to be good in the role of Rita, and if they'd snatched her up after she left B&B in 1992 (and before she started Days in 1996), that could have generated good stories for Ed and the newly returned Alan.