Kane

Abby becomes a speaking character and stays on the show until about 2000. She's one of my favorite characters of this era and I find her evolution over her first couple of years very compelling. Quite a bit of that will happen in 1996. I'm currently in July '97 and can report that Holly/Fletcher will remain MIA, that Nola will be criminally underused (although I know that she has a story coming up), and that Bridget gets quite a bit of story in 1996 but it's terrible and leaves you wondering who had it out for Melissa Hayden behind the scenes because of how insultingly Bridget is treated.

She and Ava were friends. Cecelia lived in the Rescott house for a while after her father died and before she and Steve got married, and Ava was her confidante when she was scheming to hold on to Steve, which put Ava in an awkward position since she knew Clay (Alex) would be angry if he knew she was helping Trisha's rival.

Love it! Hope people keep 'em coming. This sounds about right. DTJB only ended up appearing in 3 episodes from January-March, 1993, so they must have decided a replacement wasn't necessary. Realistically, even Maggie herself became less necessary once Hannah came to the show and Dinah Lee's friendship with Ava was established. Dinah Lee didn't really need a recurring character as a talk to at that point. Albers is my second favorite Curtis, as I felt like he came the closest to Marcantel's version and I thought he had really good sibling chemistry with Noelle Beck. I think that the Curtis/Rocky/Todd triangle was okay (although I'm mostly basing that on reading it through SOD recaps and the clips that Albers posted ages ago), as it seems like it was at least a little bit balanced, but following it up with Curtis/Rocky/Rio, where there doesn't seem to have been a sense that Rocky was in any way torn, was a mistake. If they had to move Curtis and Rocky into another triangle together, it should have been with Jeff. The show had the set up for him being redeemed during his time in Dunellen and establishing a bond with Rocky while she worked there, which could have transitioned to her trying to help him reestablish himself outside the institution and developing feelings for him, but feeling guilty about it because of everything he did to Trucker and Trisha and sticking with Curtis (for a while) as a result.

That's Hamp, played by Vince Williams. He was introduced as an old friend of Billy's and was married to Gilly for a while. I believe he was still contract at this point, though he didn't appear often after he and Gilly divorced and his daughter, Kat, left town. Williams passed away in 1997.

It's funny that there's all this talk of Ceara's demise, as I actually just wrote the recap for that episode of Loving. I totally agree with this. I'm 42, started watching soaps in '93 (although I have some memories of seeing soaps before that, thanks to my mom watching Days and GH and grandma watching Y&R) and watched pretty religiously through the rest of my teens and the '90s is always what I gravitate to first when I'm looking to pick up a new soap playlist. I know that it's because Collins and Kiberd had chemistry, but I've always found it kind of strange that after building the Jeremy & Natalie pairing for years, on and off, they finally made it official and then split them up with no question of ever returning to it.

Brace yourself because 5th Street becomes a whole story in 1996. Raines was the only Alan I ever saw and I thought he was okay, though I never really felt like he sparked with any of the love interests he had during the time that I watched.

I really like those scenes. It feels very authentic that Lucy, inexperienced and still struggling to process what happened and reconcile what she thought she knew about Brent with what he did to her, would second guess herself as she talked it out. Really nice supporting work by Melissa Hayden as Bridget tries to guide her towards seeing it for what it was. There's a similar discussion a month or two later between Lucy and Nadine as Lucy continues to come to terms with it. I'm watching the Blake Marler channel.

My thoughts exactly about bringing them back after Jack's death. As you say, the cast was full then, however, I think room could have been made to play out a short story arc. I mean, there's a stretch of time in the summer of '92 where it feels like the only two stories are the Giff saga and the haunting of 35 Maple.

Just wanted to say that I'm really enjoying reading your thoughts on 1995. I recently did a watch of that year myself, having not seen it since it originally aired. The Brent Lawrence story was the one that got me watching GL, having previously been a total loyalist to the ABC shows. I've been steadily making my way through '90s GL and am currently in March '97 myself, which is just about the time I stopped regularly watching the show in real time. I often refer to this timeline: https://www.anybrowser.org/soaps/gl/timeline.shtml, though it only goes as far as the summer of 1998, as I understand the clone story was a bridge too far for the writer.

So nice to see so many clips turning up lately. I was glad to see some of Mike's PTSD story, although I agree with @DRW50 about the music choices, which are more distracting than they are enhancing. I've always lowkey thought that Ann and Mike were the real loves of each other's lives and that continuing Ann's story post-Harry should have involved bringing Mike back (as a recast, obviously, since Kiberd was in the thick of things at AMC). If they'd brought Ann and Mike back in 1992, they could have done a Shana/Mike/Ann triangle instead of having Shana... do nothing for the many months in between the short, go-nowhere Larry Lamont story and the Stacey gaslighting story. I gather from the second part of the Leslie Denniston video that she was playing Gwyneth when she slept with Jeff and videotaped it, which means Denniston's Gwyneth did it, Tudor's Gwyneth spent months being blackmailed over it, and Savage's Gwyneth is the one got punished for it.

I'm not sure I'll ever look at Shana the same way again. It says a lot about McT that she thinks Tad torturing a man until he died merely makes him "complicated" because he didn't actually intend for him to die. Intent is just the difference between manslaughter and murder. Of course this is also the era where Babe was presented as a heroine when she knowingly kept Bianca's baby.

Jolie was pretty chummy with Curtis, so maybe that was the original plan. I could see things playing out with him recruiting her to help break up Rocky and Todd, only for them to fall for each other, at which point maybe events from her past would have come into play to come between them. The episode with Jolie's death was on youtube at one point (it may still be). It's from November 1989.

What a treat, thanks for sharing! That's Dale and Jolie, of Trisha's first "death" fame (and thanks for the tag).

I'm currently working on recaps for episodes about a month into Jeremy's return and I feel like they're testing Jeremy with Dinah Lee, possibly with the intention of going into a Clay/Dinah Lee/Jeremy/Stacey quad. If that was being planned, it got scrapped with the HW change, as Taggart and Guza burned through the gaslighting story in order to end it as quickly as possible and move everyone on. I don't blame them for that, even though things ended up getting pretty cartoonish, with Isabelle taking the blame for Clay's actions and then faking a brain tumor in order to evade being held accountable herself. The story basically ended with a throwaway line of dialogue about Isabelle's medical records being lost in a suspicious offscreen fire so that it couldn't be proved one way or another whether she actually had a brain tumor. The show was pretty much all in on Trisha and Trucker from the summer of '92 until Beck left in April '93. I recall a short interview from around the time Taggart and Guza came on where she gave hints about their intentions for the characters and she said that their plan was to keep Trisha and Trucker together and have them be involved in every storyline (which sounds a lot like them having no story of their own). I always wonder how LeClerc felt about his time on Loving because so many things seemed to just fizzle out where Jeremy was concerned. They tried him with Stacey only for it to peter out after he was cleared of having an inappropriate relationship with Hannah; he and Tess had a bit of a build up during the Dante story only for her to suddenly drop him the minute she thought Dante was dead; he and Ava had a long build up and then finally got together only for Alex to return literally a week later; and he and Gwyneth always felt like a bit of an afterthought.

I can't say I'm surprised at ABC's upside down priorities in casting, but they really lost sight of the forest for the trees where Marcantel was concerned. He was so charismatic in the role and had such a great vulnerable quality that I always find myself rooting for his version of Curtis, even when he's doing something terrible. It was a huge mistake to have him cause a plane crash and write him into a corner instead of going the route of a Curtis/Stacey/Buck/Tess quad.

Thanks for sharing these! Nice to see some clips of the Edy Lester storyline, which is one I've always been curious about. Always nice to see more of Marcantel's original run as Curtis. It's fun to imagine the direction the character might have taken if he hadn't left in 1985 - particularly if he had been in the role when Curtis got together with Ava. Instead of him shifting into a hero, he and Ava could have joined forces as schemers.

This might be the interview you're looking for: https://marcywalkeronline.tripod.com/pages/press022.htm It's an interview with Marcy Walker, but she references Liz Keifer commenting about how GL was wasting her.

The musical episode of Loving.

Scott was gone. My recollection is that shortly before Karen and Jagger's wedding, Rhonda made a call to him to tell him that he was Karen's father and then at the reception she took Karen aside and gave her a letter from Scott (I think there was a check from him in there, too). Karen wanted to go back inside and tell Lee and Gail the news, but Rhonda was like "No, it should be up to Scott whether or not they ever find out about it." So not only did Karen not get any kind of family moment with Scott, she didn't get it with Lee and Gail, either. When the reception ended, she and Jagger rode off on his motorcycle and out of Port Charles, so it was a very weird detail to tack on in the final hours of their time on the show.

My favorite Gwyneth pairing was Christine Tudor's Gwyneth with Dennis Parlato's Clay. They had great chemistry and even though they were only on the show together for a relatively short amount of time, they managed to convey a sense of the characters' lengthy history together and complicated feelings for each other. Conversely, my least favorite Gwyneth pairing was Christine Tudor's Gwyneth with Larkin Malloy's Clay. Not really Malloy's fault, but the writing was so weighted in favor of Clay/Dinah Lee that the triangle played out as Gwyneth just being rejected and humiliated over and over. Both Tudor and Elizabeth Savage played well with Anthony Herrera, although the Gwyneth of the '90s was softened considerably from Gwyneth and Dane's first go round in the '80s. If Gwyneth had maintained the sharp edges from Tudor's original run, I do wonder if Dane's second run could have been extended by having Gwyneth and Dane be a scheming power couple.

IIRC, Stefan jumped into the bog to rescue him and then Luke came along (having possibly been brought there by Foster, as I recall that Lucky brought the dog along on the adventure) at the end of the rescue to pull them both out. I think the video game was part of some elaborate spying plot of Stefan's against the Spencers. I remember a scene where the Spencers find bugs in their living room and have a fake fight for Stefan's benefit - but that may have been part of a completely different plot, as a lot of the Spencer v. Cassadine stuff blends together in my mind.

Yes. Brad Collins was Dan Hollister's boss when he first came to Corinth and was around in early 88 for the double agent storyline.

Thanks for the tag! Hope this trend of '80s episodes seeing the light of day continues.

Roya was around until the fall of 88. Off the top of my head, I believe the transition happened around the time when Ava gave birth to Sandy and was involved in a weird kidnapping plot by a Middle Eastern prince. I'm not sure if Rick interacted with Burke Moses' Curtis, but he had a storyline with Chip Albers' Curtis. When Curtis and Todd were creating TJ's, Rick was the contractor doing the renos and Curtis thought Rick might be up to no good. I remember seeing a scene where Rick got all pissy and jealous about the fact that Curtis had a trust fund, so I think they were more rivals than friends.

Thanks for the tag! It's always a treat to get to see an episode from the 80s.