Jdee43

I thought Jerry Lanning was awful on Texas; waaay too much scene chewing. His attempts to come off as intense were laughable and so artificial.

With the way the producers feel about Elizabeth, I'm surprised they didn't use this opportunity today to kill her off.

Lucky has been relegated to B level. Is that because the show doesn't really value him; or is it because he wants to work with Liz, and the show doesn't really value her; or maybe is it a little bit of both?

Wasn't feeling the Brennan recast today. They should have just had Brennan disappear or get killed off off screen, and brought Chris McKenna in as an entirely new character. Now he has to carry around the Brennan baggage. Agreed that recasting has probably accelerated the inevitability of writing off the Brennan character. Unless the producers get stubborn and dig in their heels that is..

All My Children should still be on the air. Frons the most incompetent head of daytime of them all. And the arrogance. His legacy is only negative.

As the backstory of Cody, Sasha, and now Gio shows, the writers could care less about faithfully following the history of the show. Maybe the audience should just consider the last 13- 24 years to be set in an alternate universe or something.

The football story plays like an old after school special. So embarrassing. Equally embarrassing is the shoe polish they put in Maurice's hair. Shocked that hair people would let him go on camera looking like that; it looks so unnatural.

Traditionally, it seemed like any soap that aired on NBC before Days of our Lives and after Another World was probably not going to do too well. I wonder why they didn't try to put more soaps between DAYS and AW. Also NBC was too enamored of the 60 minute format. That format only seemed to work for established shows, not new ones. In the late 80s, the schedule was 1pm Days of our Lives / 2pm Another World / 3pm Santa Barbara If instead it was 1pm DAYS / 2pm Santa Barbara / 2:30pm The Doctors / 3pm AW or 1pm DAYS / 2pm Santa Barbara / 2:30pm Search for Tomorrow / 3pm AW or 1pm DAYS / 2pm Santa Barbara / 2:30pm Generations / 3pm AW might this schedule have done a little better and lasted longer, into the mid to late 90s? Santa Barbara would have done much better as a half hour show, especially creatively. It never really had enough strong characters to fill an hour show successfully.

The 1968 Christmas episode (12/25/68) was very entertaining! It featured only the "fearsome foursome" of Matt, Maggie, Nick, and Althea. Nick's and Matt's imitations of each other were really funny and spot on! Towards the end of the episode, Nick tries to make small talk by chatting about a football game. He refers to an actual game between the Giants and the Rams, tied at 21-21 with Gossett coming out at the very end to try and make a field goal. The game was played a month before the airdate, November 24, 1968. It gives a little insight into how far ahead they were taping.

If they are not going to kill him off, they should at least do a "who shot Drew" story. It's all right there, but with these writers.. I was surprised that these plot driven writers actually took a little time to try and do some character work with Willow, trying to explain her behavior and give her a POV. The actress did step up as much as she could, but she's still a bit limited. I just wish her and all the actors at GH would stay away from the crying!!! Being teary-eyed does not mean good acting!!!

I always thought Eplin was let go from ATWT for bad behavior. That's what it seemed like at the time. The finality of his exit; being killed off in an abrupt, rather silly way; killing him off after going through all the trouble to bring him on to ATWT; the lack of press about it, after his playing the character for 17 years; and then his disappearance from the industry -- all this seemed to imply that stuff went down BTS. Was this impression all wrong? Did he really just walk away by choice?

Jane Elliot is the best. She's the only one on this show that can make you feel real emotion. We're all fortunate she's still on.

Interesting seeing Tom Eplin. In hindsight, he retired after leaving ATWT in 2002. Was his retirement hs choice or was he blacklisted from the industry? He's never done any AW retrospectives or interviews about his career. Again, his choice or was he blacklisted? Whatever happened, it looks like he saved his money or invested wisely. He really should have been playing a new, different character when he went to ATWT.

I've seen Leslie Charleson's 3 guest appearances on the 1971-76 TV show Cannon. She's great in each one! Probably the best of the 3 is her first appearance, from 1972, "Sky Above, Death Below" (Cannon Season 2, episode 2). It's the best written of the 3. She's so spunky and full of life!

The lame attempt at a Guza era edgy montage was so campy.. Michael on fire while Willow's in heat. The only acceptable way for the Drew /Willow story to end is her putting two bullets in his chest, Sonny style. Maurice was awful today; no depth, no emotion, just auto-pilot. You'd think it was one of his flunkies who got hurt, not his son. Of all the returns, Lois is the worst. Other than lame character assassination, no one has any idea of what to do with her. Only Lucy gets worse writing. Rena's Lois returns after 25 years and all she does is hang out at the Q mansion. She needed to take a 25 year break for that?

Also, it's interesting how they never reran Perry Mason in the 60s. I guess the hour format, and it being in black and white. Many execs thought it would make an ideal soap opera, and it did inspire Edge of Night, so maybe having Edge on is another reason CBS didn't show it? Also interesting how they never reran the 30 minute Gunsmoke. That could have opened the door to a western soap opera or something. They also never reran the 30 minute Twilight Zone, which could have opened the door to more sci fi in daytime.

I Love Lucy was a staple of CBS daytime from 1958-1966, typically running at either 10am or 10:30am. But it was all in black and white, so from 1968-1972 they reran The Lucy Show at 10am, which at least had some color seasons. The Dick Van Dyke Show was also on CBS daytime starting in 1965 and lasting to 1969 in the 11:30am time slot. I'm surprised they aired it from 1967 to 1969, considering it was in black and white and everything was switching to color. Was Dick Van Dyke the last show that CBS daytime aired that had all black and white episodes? CBS didn't air any primetime reruns in daytime from 1972-1976, an incredible era of original programming. When reruns returned from 1976-1979, it was Lucy's latest show, All in the Family, and MASH. Here's Lucy was kept out of syndication after it ended in 1974 out of fear that it would harm the rerun potential of I Love Lucy and the Lucy Show. When CBS put it on in the air for 6 months in 1977, it was the first time it had been seen since it ended production. In 1979-1982, it was The Jeffersons, Alice, and One Day at a Time. These were the top rated sitcoms on CBS at the time, other than MASH. From 1982 on, no more primetime reruns in daytime, with the sole exception of Designing Women for a few months in 1991. Maybe CBS wanted to get more eyeballs on that show; it was it in the top 10. Newhart had ended its run in 1990. CBS daytime to 1972, and then from 1976-1982, when they showed prime-time shows, seemed to be about certain classics (Lucy, Andy Griffith) as well as reruns of the highest rated sitcoms still on the network. It is interesting how The Mary Tyler Moore Show never made it. Maybe if CBS had shown reruns from 1972-1976, it would have, paired with Lucy.

No meaty scenes for Michael, where he got to put anyone in their place. Instead he got to sleep walk through his final episodes. We've seen the crap with Sidwell a million times. It felt like they were just re-doing Lucy's scenes with Victor from 2022, only with a different actor reading the same lines to Lucy.

I guess a traditional problematic time slot for NBC was 1:30pm, the time CBS was showing As the World Turns. In 1968, Let's Make a Deal was making headway, but NBC foolishly lost that show to ABC. From 1969-1974, nothing they put on at 1:30pm stuck: Hidden Faces/ You're Putting Me On/ Life with Linkletter/ Words and Music/ Memory Game/ Three on a Match/ Jeopardy!/ How to Survive a Marriage. They finally just expanded DAYS to an hour in 1975, from 1:30-2:30pm, and that seemed to finally take care of things. Another problematic slot for NBC was whatever was following Another World, from 3:30pm-4:30pm. Having a half hour between Another World and its spin-off Somerset probably wasn't a good idea. When AW expanded to 60 minutes in 1975, it was finally followed by Somerset. By that time though, Somerset didn't feel much like a spin-off of AW.

What time slots would you say were traditionally problematic for CBS? 4pm seemed to always be tough. They tried a bunch of different shows from the late 70s to the mid 80s, Match Game/ Love of Life/ One Day at a Time reruns/ Tattletales/ Body Language/ Press Your Luck. They just finally threw in the towel and gave that slot back to the affiliates in fall 1986. CBS was the last network to give the 4pm slot up; ABC did it in winter 1985; NBC in winter 1978!

The 2 episodes of The Doctors from 1963 that were streamed by Retro were the first episode and one from April 1963, "The Helping Hand." Both are available to view in the Paley Center Collection. Make of that what you will. We've never seen stuff from 1963-1967 outside of those 2 episodes. You'd think they'd try to stream Matt's or Althea's or Nick's first episode or something, if they really had access to all that stuff.

What happened to Michael Knight? It's like he forgot how to act or something. Why is he even on this show? Lucky looked really domestic. Kind of goes against the last couple of months of him saying every 10 minutes that he needs to leave town..

Could be Retro's deal was just for the episodes owned by Colgate Palmolive; anything owned by NBC would cost extra money to license, and they aren't interested? Maybe that's why we haven't seen the early episodes either, since they may be owned by NBC? Just theories.

I don't like how they are implying that Felicia could be Cyrus's next victim 😠 If they want to kill off a vet for shock value, they should kill off Olivia. It would give Ned and Lois story, and push Dante more to the dark side 😈

The show keeps repeating itself. Now they're doing a new version of the Hook killer, and bringing back the "shock" of the victim being perfectly fine one moment, dead the next 🙄 They are tanking Lulu's return by having it be all about Valentin. And she's not even playing that big a role in it; other characters are taking the lead. If only Charlotte could just show up on Lulu's doorstep and Valentin never be heard of ever again.. The Drew/Willow/Michael stuff fell so flat. The writers never tried to make it make sense by diving into any of the characters. They just had the characters do whatever to manufacture drama. Their mistake is to do it with really weak actors, who can't sell what they're doing either. Now these three have become shady, weak losers. They're ruined and should all be written off.