DeeVee

Did she and Crystal Chappell get along? It seemed she mostly disliked the actresses who were the third wheel in her love storylines.

I hate to say it, but Zimmer probably didn't like anyone who had the chance to steal the spotlight from her. Coleman was going to be playing a crazy character who was going to get a lot of opportunities to emote--and take time for that away from Zimmer.

Yeah, it is odd they never resolved the story about her missing child. I do remember that she was very jealous of someone Mike was involved with (maybe Jackie?) and she got her on tape saying something not flattering. At the last minute she decided not to give it to Mike, admitting to herself he was never going to love her. For a hot minute it looked like they were going to turn her into an obsessed spurned potential lover, but they chickened out, I guess. Then she just basically suffered in the background. And they did have the odd "frienemy" relationship between her and Diane. Eventually they replaced her with Lainie as Mike's assistant...who also kind of faded away.

Here is a post that sums up much of the ending of Spence Jeffers time on the show, it explains a lot of what you're asking about: https://boards.soapoperanetwork.com/topic/32166-guiding-light-discussion-thread/page/1160/#findComment-2021617 Paul has posted many summaries of GL storylines during the 1970s, you can search his posts for more.

LOL, I thought that might have been the beginning of the time travel story, but I realized just now that's much later, after all the San Christobel stuff was introduced. Here's a funny (and totally unrelated thing) that I discovered over on Wikipedia while looking for something else: In the early 70s, Hope Bauer had a close friend named Christie Rogers...played by Ariana Munker. Who would later go on to play CHRISTINE Valere. Valere of course being her married name. I know, this is probably a TOTAL coincidence, but one can't help but wonder if this was deliberate, and about the possibilities if it were. There was talk around that time that they were considering bringing back Hope. Wouldn't that have been something if Hope had returned to find out Alan was involved with her childhood best friend? That would have been WAY more interesting than all the art theft garbage. Oh, the missed opportunities...

Yes, I believe that is an accurate assessment. Amanda being Alan's child was revealed to the audience when Brandon was killed off (the first time, LOL). I think this was after Alan and Hope were rescued, so it should have been sometime around autumn 1979. It was definitely before the Dobsons left. A mysterious woman swathed in heavy black veils showed up at Brandon's funeral, and everyone wondered who she was. The obvious implication being it was Amanda's real mother. Marland picked up on that later on, doing a flashback where Jennifer was wearing the black hat and veils and arguing with her husband about going to the funeral. But as far as the rest of Jennifer's backstory that played out once he took over, I'd be VERY surprised if it wasn't all his invention. It just seems like the kind of thing he would come up with: Alan involved with the two sisters, one of them unnecessarily dying, Jennifer being consigned to a jerk husband and the humiliations of the poors because she once slipped off the straight and narrow, coming to Springfield, rather foolishly going to work for Lucille to be close to Amanda and dodging Alan for a year so she wouldn't be found out. He did like a convoluted backstory. I have no idea where the Dobsons were going to go with Amanda's mother. They might not have even worked it out yet, because the next part of Alan's story was his involvement with Hope and likely an affair with Rita, which they had foreshadowed for quite some time. Oh, yeah, the affair with Rita--that's something that Marland could have used from the Dobsons' projections. I loved Rita Lloyd but I don't how much further they could have gone with Lucille. She killed Brandon (sort of) and tried to kill Ben, at least twice. It was definitely in character for her to try to kill Jennifer.

Oh, yeah, I forgot they wrote the Dee/John story, a REALLY poor imitation of their Holly/Roger story. For some reason the women (well, men, too) they wrote on ATWT didn't have the same nuance as on GL. You can't just transplant a story to a different set of characters--a big part of why Holly and Roger's story worked so well was the long history the characters had: Holly, Roger, Ed, Rita. Brad was such a snooze that when he and Dee finally got together they flopped so hard the characters broke up for good almost instantly. They tried to make Maggie, the lawyer who defended John, into a female version of Ross. It just did not work. I agree, it would have been better if Dee had fallen in love with John the way Hope fell for Alan, because of the history. Marland did use history with Alan and Hope's story, mining Mike's resentment for Alan. I will totally give him credit for that. I'm not saying I hated what Marland did with their story, I was actually pretty into it at the time, only that the Dobsons had a different plan. Both story choices were valid, IMO. (Except for the redemption, thing, LOL, I never understood why you would neuter a character like Alan).

Yes, he mentioned in interviews that they put him on ATWT for a 13 week cycle before he did GL. From the Bridget Dobson interview, it sounds like the HW of ATWT at the time was suffering from burn-out. She also said they wrote both shows for a little while. So seems like there was some scrambling around late 1979 with ATWT.

I think the obvious answer is they did not want to leave GL. I get the impression from what she said that it was like their baby. It's different when a writer is looking to come on to a different show--they would be bringing their best stuff. I suspect some of what they planned to do on GL worked its way over to ATWT--particularly the James/Barbara story. Lots of parallels with Alan and Hope--they even fell in love on an island. Then they got married and James turned into a controlling freakazoid who made her totally miserable. You can see Alan behaving that way with both Elizabeth and Jackie (though Jackie refused to put up with it--Marland totally eviserated Jackie's character after Mowery was brought in). Whatever "#1" she was referring to--network, time slot, or P&G--the smart thing to have done at the time was to put Marland at ATWT--he had recently come from GH, which was blowing up in the ratings and popular zeitgeist--and keep the Dobsons at GL. Yanking successful writers from a show for any reason is insane to me.

The wrap-up of the Roger story, perhaps. But Marland came in and immediately made it his show. He did not like the Phillip paternity story, so he accelerated some of it (one of the first things he did was have Jackie tell Justin the truth). He also had a problem with Lezlie Dalton (Elizabeth). While he kept her on the canvas for a year, most of her storyline was leading up to writing her out of the show. It seems pretty obvious the Dobsons were heavily invested in the Mike/Elizabeth/Justin/Jackie quadrangle. They had spent a lot of time setting it up. That quickly died when Marland took over. In the end, he never dealt with with Phillip's paternity, never did the big reveal--that only happened after Long took over. By then, major players in the storyline, Jackie and Elizabeth, were gone, and Hope was in the process of being yeeted out of Alan's orbit. I believe it would have played out much differently under the Dobsons. I'm also convinced that the Alan/Hope storyline would have been vastly different if the Dobsons had stayed. There was a lot of foreshadowing that Alan was going to disillusion Hope before they left. Marland mentioned in an interview that fan mail indicated they were popular with the audience, so that's why he married them off very early on. While he didn't make Alan a model husband, he eventually gave Alan a redemption arc, which was quickly dismantled by Long after he left. The Amanda storyline also would have been different. It seemed the Dobsons were making her the spoiler in the Ben/Eve story, more on the manipulative side. He gave some of those qualities to Vanessa instead, and had Amanda just be a woman in love who made some mistakes getting and keeping Ben. Early on he brought in his own characters: Nola, Kelly, Morgan, Jennifer, the Chamberlains, Trish, Josh, etc., several who became prominant that first year. Which is understandable; new writers do that all the time, but I think it's another indication he did not keep to the Dobsons storyline projections.

I've always liked Kate Jackson, been a fan since she was on Dark Shadows, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that she would not have won the Oscar if she had been cast in the role. I saw Streep in an off-off Broadway show before she did any movies and you could already tell she was going to be a star. She co-stared with Nancy Marchand and Elizabeth Wilson and she frickin' stole the show from them. I found some interviews at a Santa Barbara blog with Bridget Dobson. In this part she talks about the shift from GL to ATWT: https://pierin26santabarbara.blogspot.com/search?q=bridget+dobson&updated-max=2012-09-27T19:50:00%2B02:00&max-results=20&start=20&by-date=false How wild that the reason why the Dobsons were yanked from GL to ATWT is because they were TOO successful with GL! It had jumped over ATWT. The network and P&G saw ATWT as their #1 show. So they moved the Dobsons over to bring ATWT back up to #1, which they did. She also describes some things they did with GL, experimenting with the form. How interesting that we were discussing a page or two back how good those 1979 scenes were...well, it wasn't an accident. What makes me want to cry is just as they were talking about moving them over, the Dobsons still wrote the bible for GL--I assume for 1980, the upcoming year. The network loved it, but still moved them to ATWT, because ATWT's bible wasn't great. What I would give to read their final storyline projections for GL! There are more parts to the interview. The site is a little challenging to navigate, but it's worth reading all of the interview. Fascinating insights into the soap world at the time.

I hadn't caught this one before! Very rare to find one with JoBeth Williams in it. One of the most interesting things about it were the credits after the episode. Charita Bauer got an isolated credit, then the rest of the actor credits were not in alphabetical order. The order did not seem to have any rhyme or reason, which is little odd. I wonder why Charita's isolated credit was changed. Maybe in a bid to "modernize" the show? I also didn't realize Hope (played by a different actress) was still on the canvas at this point of the show. They must have sent her off soon after this, because Roussel comes in as Hope either late 1978 or early 1979. The rest of the videos that were uploaded by this account around the same time seem to be from the Roger/Holly rape storyline era.

This is one of my favorite episodes that's available from 1979, for a whole bunch of reasons: Yes, the Diane/Anne relationship was so well crafted. They had many scenes of being, I guess you could say, "frienimies." It was never really chummy--they worked across the hall from each other and for men who hated each other, so proximity and circumstance dictated they be somewhat cordial. I think Anne was smart enough to suspect Diane was out to get information from her, and it was an effort for Diane to be friendly towards a woman. There's another scene I remember (I don't think it's available on YT, but it really stuck with me): Diane came over to Mike's office and insisted Anne take some chocolates someone had given her. The passive-aggressiveness from Diane, and Anne not wanting the chocolates (it's as if Diane thinks it doesn't matter if Anne gets fat or her face breaks out), the back-and-forth--it was amusing and a throwaway but also highlighted the uncomfortable nature on both sides of the relationship. One of the things that bugs me about soaps is when there are heavy exposition dumps. Diane and Anne don't reveal any specific plot points in the scene, but they DO reveal that 1) Diane is becoming disillusioned with Alan and 2) Anne is lonely (most likely because she can't shake her one-sided feelings for Mike). Both have given so much to the men they work for and don't get a whole lot in return, and that's how a lot of women were feeling then (and many still feel that way). Then Alan shows up later and emphasizes the way Diane feels by rejecting her come-on. This is before he and Hope fell in love, I don't think he even knows her that well at this point. He's already pushing Diane away, even though he and Jackie are in marital trouble because Alan lost custody of Phillip. Jackie was already thinking about leaving him when she found out she was pregnant. NOW, about that Amanda and Ben scene in the stable, here's some context: Not long before this, she had finally consumatted her marriage with a guy named Gordon. Lucille had made her so afraid of sex that she was terrified of it and couldn't go through with her wedding night. One time in the sack with Gordon and BAM...she's totally over her neuroses about sex. She immediately gives Gordon the heave ho, but then she starts picking up strange men. The one she REALLY wants is Ben, who is oblivious because of Eve, but there were plenty of other good looking and willing guys. Amanda had been studying piano for a long time. Apparently, becoming sexually free REALLY improves her piano-playing (no, I'm not making this up, that's what her teacher tells her--not about the sex thing, that the passion inside her has somehow been freed and that made her playing better) so she's getting more offers to do piano recitals. After one of these she picks up a guy who had been at the recital and sleeps with him. She disappears for a few hours and Lucille freaks and sends Ben to find her, which he does. That's what happened before Ben and Amanda end up in the barn with half their clothes off. She'd JUST had sex with this other guy, and she's already vamping Ben. The thing that really jumps out about this scene is how manipulative Amanda is, and I can't help but think they made her like that because she's Alan's daughter. (I'm not sure if that had been revealed yet at this point, but it was clearly planned for a while that she would turn out to be his child). There's a lot of nuance, though. She was messed-up because Lucille was a horrible mother, and that had a lot to do with how she acted. Sadly, once Marland took over, a lot of the nuance in characters like Diane, Amanda, and Rita mostly disappeared. I SO wish we had more of the Dobson era, sigh.

Oh, wow. How fortunate that it was detected early! Sounds like she's going to be O.K., thank goodness. Wishing her all the best!

I know they would NEVER have allowed it back in the "Just Say No" era, but I can envision a flashback of her persuading Alan to get high. And telling Alan Michael about it when he got in trouble for drugs! 😂