DeeVee

I did not know this about her. I am so glad that someone spoke up for him. The way Zaslow was treated was atrocious.

Oh, yes, that would have worked beautifully. What like most about it is that it would subvert the audience's expection ("He's not getting involved with Reva AGAIN!" - I'm sure I screamed just this at the time). Then it would turn out the story was going in a different direction. Plus, it would eventually get Reva out his orbit.

Soaps did not handle the issue very well back then. Almost across the board, when they did this kind of story it was always centered on a young, beautiful woman tragically facing death, usually because she had a partner who was a drug addict or slept with a prostitute. It was similar to the way 19th century literature used young woman beautifully dying from consumption. I can't think of one show that had a man sick or dying from AIDs except for General Hospital. (Anyone who knows differently, feel free to correct me). GH was the only show that had the guts to have it happen to a main character, a young woman who the audience watched grow up from a little girl. (The male character who died was her boyfriend). They showed her living with HIV, going to medical school, eventually marrying and having a baby, etc. The other shows usually imported a character only for this purpose usually while, as in the case of Lucy, a main character was going through an AIDS scare. ("Fun" fact: Ellen Wheeler portrayed this type of character on All My Children). The character would inevitably die on screen (gorgeously, of course) or eventually be yeeted out of the story, as in the case of Susan on GL. I believe Susan was still alive and healthy by the end of the show. She was living off-screen with Nick. I seem to recall Alex talking about them. Hands down the cringiest of these stories was on Y&R. I think her name was Keisha. Malcolm married her the day she died. As she faded away in his arms she declared how happy she was while wearing a white wedding gown.

Funny, I'm having deja vu, too. Of people who needlessly try to stir the pot on message boards. It is the most uncomfortable feeling. I'm sure you can imagine. Really awful. Rick was once Freddy! In the moment they want to honor some character who is old or died, but then they are like, "No, you can't have a soap hero or heroine with that name!" So they change it. I remember Douglas Marland complaining in soap mags when they changed Kelly Louise to Stacy. He had a strange fondness for double names (Lesley Ann, Kelly Louise, Alan Michael). The one name they never changed that they should have was Alan Michael. Poor character lumbered with a name that sounds like a pair of shoes being thrown down some stairs. Though I have no ideas for what they could have called him instead.

I have also mulled the possibilities of bringing back this unseen sibling. I've also heard that her name is Lana. (First thing I would do, though, is change that name. Like Chelsea, it doesn't seem like a Reardon family name, since the rest of the kids have either Irish or saint's names. Naming soap characters poorly is a pet peeve of mine.) I read somewhere that she worked on cruise ships, so she would have been out of the country for a long time. She also had a couple of sons, which would have beefed up the Reardons if they had brought her into the story. My idea for NotLana is having her be an old flame of Alan's. A lot of people (including me) complain that after Hope, Alan never had a real romance. (Reva doesn't count, IMO, that was always ridiculous). There's a big gap in his backstory where she could neatly fit in. Marland bent over backwards to portray his brief encounter with Jane Marie/Jennifer as transformative. That he did a bad thing (seduced and impregnated a minor) but felt responsible for her and wanted to do right by her, even to the point where he told Hope about it before he ever laid eyes on Jennifer. The next thing we know about him after that is he married Elizabeth and started cheating on her during their honeymoon. (In my scenario, the Maryanne Carruthers story never happens.) It would make sense that something happened in between to change him from a sensitive young man to a womanizer who regularly humiliates his wife. I would date their love affair at the time Alan was in Chicago being mentored by Henry. Of course, Brandon, and maybe even Henry, wouldn't approve. The fact that she's Tom Reardon's kid connects her to the secret from the Fishing Trip Mystery storyline, which would bother both of them, plus Brandon is just a snot-headed snob who busted up Alex's love affair because Eric wasn't good enough for the Spauldings. Maybe Brandon insisted Alan marry Elizabeth, threatening to disown him like he did with Alex. Which would give him a pretty strong reason to be resentful of Elizabeth (he owes her everything but hates that it cost him NotLana). And giving NotLana a strong reason to have a lingering resentment of Alan, for chosing wealth and power over her. NotLana could come back to town many years later with her sons. She'd be "the one that got away," maybe with the secret that one of her kids is Alan's. It would be ironic if he had a male heir out there around the same time he was busy switching someone else's kid with his dead one. I think that would have been much better than making Gus his kid with a woman who had no ties to anything or anyone on the canvas (especially since they ended up killing him off). When she comes back, she could become close to Ed and Michelle for the sake of her dead sister. Maybe Ed falls in love with her. Or a returned Mike. Add perhaps a returned Hope into the mix. There would be lots of ways to weave her into the lives of both the Bauers and the Spauldings.

It's so interesting to look at these old soap magazine columns. Thank you for posting them. Michael Logan complaining about the GL 50th anniversary show leaving out Nola's fantasies is a head-scratcher for me. I do recall soap columnists adoring those scenes and never could understand it back then, either. I LOATHED them, and I adore old movies more than most people do. On rewatch I like Nola much more now than I did back in the day, probably because very few of the episodes available now have those fantasy scenes bringing everything to a screeching halt. Obviously, there are people who liked them and that's O.K. But soapdom's creative pinnacle? I don't think so. It's wild how soap operas have been so incestuous for so long. Instead of firing people who were messing everything up and bringing in new people, just rotate the same failures over and over. Sure, soaps are a specialized field, not everyone can produce, write, or act in them, but you'd think they would have tried to train up more replacements from outside the industry, like they did with Harding Lemay. Especially when it became obvious the heyday of soaps was coming to an end.

Two things about this: Doing the math, it made me realize Heather Tom is FIFTY YEARS OLD. OMG, I feel so old. 😩 (I am old, but I didn't need the reminder, LOL.) As to the comments about why they killed off Maureen, gee, unless I missed something, I don't remember anything memorable involving Ed dealing with her death. Not like Jack on Ryan's Hope when Mary died, or Tony on GH when his daughter died. When Cassie died on Y&R it impacted the show literally for years. They screwed up bigtime and couldn't even be bothered to at least write something compelling to make her death worth it, story-wise. That would have been great! Or why not have the guts to write a real love triangle with Mo/Ed/Lillian? Or have Maureen not really die somehow but everyone thinks she's dead? She could have had amnesia (that would have been necessary, because she would never leave Michelle). Maybe Roger could have found her and kept her from Ed out of spite. There were like a million possibilities that did not have to end with her dying.

Thanks everyone for the kind words of welcome! LOL, I admit I love when soap women vanquish soap men, too. I've been watching these recently uploaded episodes and have wondered this for DECADES. It made zero sense to me that he married Jennifer and not the oh, so willing Amanda. I think one of the uploaded episodes might of answered it: Amanda told Jennifer she was leaving her stock in Spaulding to Jennifer. Maybe the plan was to kill Amanda and then Jennifer so he could get the stock? Still seems it would have made more sense to have him marry Amanda and get her to change her will in his favor. Possibly they were trying to find a way to keep Jennifer in a major story once the paternity storyline was over.

Hi, popping in to introduce myself. I have been lurking as a guest for a little while. I LOVE the discussion here! Was stunned to find out people are still talking about even the vintage era of soaps. I guess YT is keeping them alive. I started watching soaps as early as the 1960s, mainly because my mom watched them. (Except for Dark Shadows, that was totally a me thing). Over the decades I've probably watched almost every soap at one time or another, even oldies that have been gone for a while, like The Secret Storm, Somerset, and Love of Life. My mom's soap viewing was very much dictated by whichever male actor she had a crush on at any given moment. We started watching GL during the early part of the Dobsons era because she had a huge crush on Michael Zaslow. I was a fairly consistent viewer during the late 1970s and the 1980s. Somewhere during the 1990s I became a less regular viewer, but still checked in occassionally until the end of the show's run. It's been amazing rewatching episodes on YT. It's nice to confirm the good stuff is a good as I remembered (and the not so good stuff is, well, you know...) Anyway, looking forward to taking part in the conversation!