Kane

Days - the Salem Slasher. Roman ending up on the run with Anna, Alice helping Bo and it causing friction between her and Tom because she's constantly having to lie to him, Roman's "death," Bo keeping Roman hidden and later Marlena, Eugene, Abe, and Alice finding out that he's alive, Marlena finding out that she's pregnant and Eugene stepping in to explain how that could be so when Roman has been "dead" for months, Anna getting swept off her feet by Tony then discovering the real Tony imprisoned and learning that Andre has taken Tony's place and  then getting locked up with Tony, Bo trying to stay away from Hope and Larry moving in on her. And, of course, Stefano turning out to be alive.

Also, the Maison Blanche-Possession-Aremid cycle and all the side stories that sprung out of them.

All My Children - the introduction of Wildwind with Angelique being revealed as Dimitri's proverbial woman in the attic, Edmund coming onto the scene and trying to be recognized as Hugo's son, Dimitri and Erica's affair, Edmund kidnapping Erica in Budapest and then her deciding to work with him against Dimitri, and Helga falling to her death.

On 4/11/2022 at 10:18 PM, BetterForgotten said:

So they weren't even trying to hide biting off Thelma & Louise? 

 

It became a running gag after the storyline that they would refer to themselves as Thelma and Louise, but disagree about which of them was which.

17 minutes ago, FrenchBug82 said:

That's not how I remember it. She was left wealthy after he died.
Alex wanting to rewrite his will after finding out about Jeremy and Natalie but dying before he got to do it was a plot point. And so she was rich.

From my quick research her money problems stemmed from part of the estate being given in trust to Timmy after it was found out he was Alex's instead of Jeremy's. 

I stand corrected.  My recollection was that she didn't come into significant money of her own until later.

Natalie knew all along that Timmy was Alex's, right? Or did she really think there was a possibility that Jeremy was his father?

15 hours ago, j swift said:

Wasn't Alex married to Natalie at the time of his death? 

She was, but she either got cut out of the will or was only left a small amount. Her being in need of money was why she became Palmer's nurse.

14 hours ago, Khan said:

Ted Orsini's backstory was so damn confusing.  Were they trying to say he was Ray Gardner's son/Tad's twin brother, whom Ray abandoned in the same way he'd abandoned Tad as a child?

I don't recall Ray being part of it - but it's been a while, so my memory is a bit hazy. My recollection is that they just happened to look alike.

19 hours ago, j swift said:

Given that Alex didn't know that Tim was his son when he died, so he wouldn't have been in the will.  And, he didn't seem to acknowledge that Jeremy had a twin (which is an amusing coincidence since Natalie also had an identical twin).  And, Jeremy was murdered in Corinth.  Do you think boring ol' David Rampal got the cash? Or did Tim get an inheritance through the death of Natalie?

I'm pretty sure that Jeremy inherited it all and then split it with Tim, putting his portion in a trust. It wouldn't have been very like Jeremy to keep all the money and not share it with his brother, particularly the brother he originally thought was his son.

Speaking of twins, the great pitch/poor execution thread had me thinking about the Tad/Ted story, which I've always thought could have been an interesting story if the show hadn't been so timid about what happened to Ted when he was abducted and had actually explored his trauma and fleshed the character out instead of just sacrificing him at the altar of Tad and Dixie.

20 hours ago, Joseph said:

Many people say that Tara's Return was totally wasted I agree, first They didn't seem to care about her appearance she was a contemporary of Erica yet she looked a dozen years older, second they could have used the chance to reignite the Original feud between Tara and Erica, I understand that Erica was Sleeping with Tara's son?

It didn't help that Karen Lynn Gorney was bad during that '95 return. I rewatched that period a year, maybe 18 months ago, and I was shocked by how unpleasant that performance was to watch. There would have been no point in reviving the Tara/Erica feud because KLG wouldn't have been able to hold her own.

17 hours ago, DemetriKane said:

Frankie Hubbard (ALL MY CHILDREN) This legacy character deserve better. They never had a clear focus on what to do with him. One moment he's into film making, then a doctor, then making films again, then a war hero, and than a doc again! I wasn't a fan of making another person of color a doctor LOL. I wanted him to have more edge than his parents did, I wish they pushed him into more business storylines with The Chandlers and Enchantment and Fusion. I was all game for Frankie and Colby, but i also wanted him with Kendall and Amanda. I didn't hate Randi, i expected more from that role and the actress just let me down.

Frankie is interesting because the problems with giving him an identity weren't just contained to AMC; Loving and The City had the same problem trying to figure out who he was, what made him tick, and giving him meaningful things to do.

I'd also add Charlie Brent as a character who didn't live up to his potential. His existence drove so much story in the show's early run, but by the time he was an adolescent/grown up, the show could never seem to settle on who it wanted him to be. He was an earnest kid who wanted to become a doctor, then he came back as a caddish player (taking over for the absent Tad, I suppose), then came back again and became a PI (taking over for Tad, again). By the time he left for good, he didn't even really get a send off. He and Cecily walked out of their wedding reception and then just... went away.

59 minutes ago, slick jones said:

 

@Kane Your blog is great!      I was able to fill in a few missing years from my Loving cast on page 108 of this thread!  

 

Thanks! Your cast list has been a godsend for completing the episode cast lists.

44 minutes ago, dc11786 said:

I think the show should have played out Curtis / Clay / Dinahlee longer.

Agreed. If either Patrick Johnson or Michael Lord had worked out, I imagine the story would have been extended - circa the end of Lord's tenure the story is pulling so hard in the direction of a Clay/Dinah Lee affair that them just going their separate ways after Curtis leaves town doesn't make much sense in terms of where the characters are at emotionally at that point. 

I've been wondering lately whether the Deborah/Clay/Steffi/Cooper story borrows from the original outline for Clay/Dinah Lee/Curtis, perhaps with Tess slotting into the role Deborah plays in the later story, Curtis playing the Clay role as the person with the secret he's desperate to keep, and Clay/Dinah Lee playing the Cooper/Steffi part as they team up to try to figure out what Tess has on Curtis only to end up getting closer to each other in the process.

4 hours ago, John said:

Was Celeste Holm Fired or did she quit? Pat Barry was such a miscast

I think she was let go. I think Barry was fine given how the character was used during her tenure; the problem is that Isabelle was written completely out of character because the show tried to turn her into Cabot.

Hindsight is 20/20 of course, and I doubt the show knew when they let go of Wesley Addy that James Horan would be gone 6 months later, but I think the show would have been better served by having Clay go to prison for the cover up about the plane crash/the frame up of Trucker rather than have Cabot take the fall on his deathbed (or "deathbed," as it turned out). Have Curtis leave town afterwards, since the show never knew what to do with Albers' Curtis anyway, and then have Cabot bring him back to town in 1992 for the purpose of keeping Dinah Lee "occupied" as Trisha and Trucker deal with the fallout from his affair. He then falls in love with her in earnest, but then she finds out about the original set up and breaks up with him. Then bring Clay back, have him and Dinah Lee play out the "falling for each other without knowing each other's real identity" plot, and then launch the Curtis/Dinah Lee/Clay triangle.

19 hours ago, dc11786 said:

@Kane Very cool blog. It was very interesting to look over. I was glad to see you had Det. Graham's original name (I don't remember if I recalled the other first name being used, but I remember Pat Hingle playing another detective character). 

Thanks.

The naming of his characters is very weird to me. He comes on in February '93 as Fred Graham, the FBI agent investigating Ava and Dinah Lee for murder. Months later he turns up playing a cop named Charlie Martin and then about a month after that he's renamed Pat Graham, the name change made necessary by Geoffrey Ewing's debut as Charles Harrison in between those two appearances. I'm curious about the thought process that went into having him play a whole new character, presumably unrelated to the first, but with the same last name.

Thanks!

Jeremy is so high on the list largely because of the amount of story he had with Ava, though you could also argue that he's the show's leading man from January-September, when Alex comes back (fun fact: Jeremy and Ava finally get together and are a couple for exactly 1 week in real time before Alex returns). He's involved in a lot of stories that year - he steps in to resolve the gaslighting plot then he and Stacey have a long will they/won't they type thing, he's teaching the college cohort, Hannah develops a thing for him which results in him being investigated by the university and having conflict with both Clay and Dinah Lee, he's a little bit involved in the Trucker/Tess story (he recognizes Tess as someone he crossed paths with once in Monte Carlo), he gets involved in the Ava/Leo/Shana triangle, and then he and Ava end up on the run in Florida. I'm pretty sure he had more story in those nine months of '93 than he did in all the rest of his time on the show.

For anyone interested, I recently finished a complete watch of 1993 and did episode counts as I went. Top 5 are Lisa Peluso (168 episodes), Laura Wright (141), Jessica Collins (139), Jean LeClerc (133), and Dennis Parlato (132). Full results are posted here.

15 hours ago, Manny said:

Bianca's coming out storyline? 

Bianca's coming out isn't really pre-social media. Facebook and Twitter might not have been around yet, but message boards were and I remember a fan campaign that was organized on the old Television Without Pity board to bring attention to the Bianca/Lena pairing.

I'm not really sure social media would have changed much, if only because soaps had a sort of proto-social media even before the internet. Fans found each other through fan clubs and other means and organized letter writing campaigns and call in campaigns and organized efforts to send a specific item en masse to a show to demonstrate displeasure with something. If anything, I think that was probably more effective than social media as we know it now because you can cherry pick which segments of online fandom you want to pay attention to/cater to, but it's a lot more difficult to ignore receiving hundreds of cans of whatever at the office. The fact that it's easier to write an online comment is why it has less weight - someone had to feel really strongly about something to go to the trouble of writing a letter and mailing it, whereas a casual or sporadic viewer with little actual investment in a show might write a negative comment online because it's so easy.

I would like to think that a lot of the redeemed rapist storylines would not have happened if social media existed then, but as @titan1978 pointed out, society's understanding of things like consent has evolved since those storylines originally played out. I mean, women were screaming "Rape me Luke!" at Anthony Geary in the 70s and "Rape me Todd!" at Roger Howarth in the 90s.

The Gwyneth/Jeff sex tape was made in October, 1988 and didn't come to light until February, 1990. Only two of the Curtises (Marcantel and Albers) lasted longer on the show than that tape did.

AMC: Edmund and Maria. For the years between her "death" and return it seemed like the show's main reason for keeping him was the possibility of luring Eva LaRue back, and by the time they both left for good in 2005 he was murdered while plotting against her and Zack and then she packed up the kids and moved away.

AMC: Noah and Julia. As much as I like Sydney Penny, she was wasted in her return and it would have been better to just let Noah and Julia live happily ever after in witness protection.

Even though it still had good (even great) years/storylines afterwards, if All My Children had ended with its 25th anniversary episodes, where current and former characters came together to welcome Joe and Ruth home to the rebuilt Martin house, I would have considered that a good ending. I've long considered those episodes the gold standard for how to commemorate a soap properly and I think it would have been special to end the show with Joe and Ruth sitting together and reflecting on the past, particularly since Mary Fickett retired so soon after.

15 minutes ago, Khan said:

The gown she wore to her nuptials with Trucker wasn't TOO bad, but the dress she wore to her wedding with Jeff reminds me of Celia Weston in the opening credits of "Alice."

If I'm remembering correctly, the outfits Trisha & Jeff are wearing are meant to be recreations of costumes from the Garbo movie Camille.

Her dress from her wedding to Trucker (the first wedding) isn't bad from the front. From the back? That's a lot of folded up fabric just hanging off of her.

In general, though, Trisha kind of always had the worst clothes.

From the wedding to Steve, does anyone know who the bridesmaids are other than Stacey?

The way Casey's shooting is staged is very odd to me. Graham is about to shoot Casey and then Alex bursts in so Graham turns to him. Graham then turns away from Alex, even though Alex is pointing a gun at him, in order to shoot Casey for no real reason (unless he thinks he's going to be able to shoot Casey and then spin around and shoot Alex before Alex can fire a shot of his own).

21 hours ago, Gray Bunny said:

Side Note: I remember the early years of my viewing so vividly, yet everything from the last 15 years is a blur, lol. 

I haven't seen it since it originally aired, but I still remember the prison shower transition from Mark Valley to Steve Wilder, lol.

I have a special affection for Reilly era Days. When I was in middle school and high school a Canadian station aired Days at 4 and then Y&R at 5, so they were the shows everyone at school was watching (there was also a Seattle based talked show that aired at 3 which had a soap recap section, so even though I wasn't able to watch other shows consistently throughout the year, I was at least able to follow them and be up to date come summer).

I've been revisiting the era via Jarlena edits recently and I'm enjoying it just as much now as I remember enjoying it then - this was an easy version of the show to get hooked on.

Vanessa Marcil had chemistry (romantic and non) with pretty much every person she had scenes with except for Ricky Martin.

I've always thought Rick Hearst was good at generating chemistry with whomever he was paired with (though I didn't see him on Y&R and only saw a bit of his first B&B run).

I always thought Cole would one day resurface on Y&R. It's been over twenty years, but he does still have ties to the canvas through Victoria and Ashley.

Peter on Days, though I understand that there's behind the scenes issues there.

Loving had two storylines dealing with separate Noelle Beck pregnancies in 1991. She gave birth to her first at the beginning of 1991 and was temporarily replaced by Jessica Steen after threatening to walk (her contract was up for renewal) when she learned that the show wanted her to play out the death of Trisha's baby.

By mid-91 she was pregnant again and that pregnancy was also written in, so in early '92 Trisha was written out for a couple of months after having her second baby.

In between the two pregnancy stories, Trisha and Trucker adopted a baby and then saw the adoption reversed, so they had three different baby stories in 1991, which is ridiculous.

The Ava/Shana rivalry was so great. Even if the writers lost interest in Leo/Shana, I think it would have been worth their while to find a way to keep Ava/Shana going - it wouldn't have been difficult, either, since they could have just gone from being romantic rivals to being business rivals since Shana became the owner of Burnell's. They could have had Ava come out of her coma in '94 and learn that Shana had installed a new manager in her absence and had that spark a new round of the rivalry. They could also have roped Leo in by having him side with Ava and have his pride wounded by Shana flexing her authority and use that to create tension between Leo and Shana.

All this talk about Leo and Shana reminded me that the baby plot has its roots in this scene, where Ava and Shana argue about Ally after Shana suggests that rather than feeling like she has to choose between Casey and Cooper, Ally instead decide to raise the baby as a single woman:

Although it's never explicitly stated as one of the reasons Shana chose Leo, there probably was an element of "Yeah, well guess what bitch?" to Shana's decision to pursue Ava's boyfriend as her donor after Ava threw her dead baby in her face.

12 hours ago, amybrickwallace said:

That's an interesting selling point! How did the fans receive Shana/Leo?

I'm not sure how they were received at the time, but given how quickly and thoroughly they start to fade into the background once Ava is removed from their orbit, I'm guessing they were considered pretty expendable.

Personally, I wasn't a fan of Leo but I'm a fan of the pairing because it gave Shana/Susan Keith more airtime.

16 minutes ago, John said:

This was Dec 1989, Marianne was subbing for Christine

When did Elizabeth Savage take over as Gwyn

Elizabeth Savage is playing Gwyn by the December 20, 1989 episode posted above.

3 minutes ago, FrenchBug82 said:

See. I have rewatched some of these episodes since they have been recently posted and maybe my brain farted at the exact same time it did on the first watch thirty years ago but I once again found myself confused why Shana wanted LEO's sperm specifically, especially since she didn't like him at that time.

That's why she wanted it to be him, because she didn't like him so she thought there was no risk of emotional involvement. She also liked his ambition and his intelligence (and his hair) and wanted those qualities for her child, but the fact that she hated Leo was was his primary selling point.

A late 1989 episode featuring Marianne Tatum as Gwyneth: