DeeVee

When Robert Newman (Josh) and Chris Bernau (the OG Alan) left the show, they filled in the gap by hiring Larkin Malloy as rich businessman Kyle Sampson. He had been very popular as Sky Whitney on Edge of Night. They attached him to the Lewis family. My theory for why the audience accepted Reva and Kyle was that Newman left not that long after they had established Reva and Josh as a star-crossed romantic couple. If he had stayed another year it might have been different. When both Newman and Bernau came back in 1986, the story goes that they wanted to keep Malloy and have a love triangle with Josh/Reva/Kyle, but Kyle was going to be the odd man out. Malloy didn't want to play the losing side of the love triangle, so he left. They had Reva become involved with Alan instead.

Whaaaaaattttt? I rarely ever watched B&B, but I do remember when they revealed Eric was really Bridget's father, and she was like 5 or 6 year old? Ridge thought he was her father for all that time! That beats AM and Marina by about a billion miles. The only male Spaulding Blake missed was Gus. Olivia slept with Alan and Phillip. Cassie slept with brothers Richard and Edmund (and didn't she almost sleep with her b-in-law Josh?). Didn't Vanessa sleep with Justin early on? Or am I hallucinating that one? (It seems like a safe assumption, LOL).

Right. He wanted to leave school because everyone was certain he had knocked the girl up and was responsible for her suicide. I think that's the excuse they came up with for him to transfer to SF. Definitely during Marland's tenure. He seemed to really like stories about male characters being blamed for the deaths of their girlfriends. 😁

He had already done Animal House before GL--he was never going to stay. I guess he did a soap so he had work while trying to get his movie career going. It's just funny that they didn't seem to know what they had. It's also bizarre that of all the teen/YA characters of that era, he was the only one with a real connection to the canvas and he was treated almost like an afterthought.

Can you imagine having Kevin FREAKING Bacon on your show and thinking--nah. TJ/Tim/whatever was never going to be anything but one of the roadblocks for Kelly and Morgan. That was basically his only function. They kept him on longer after they got married, but never really did anything with him. Partly the recast was not great, but the character's usefulness had faded.

No, TJ was not killed off. He left SF to be with his girlfriend who was going to an out-of-state school. Sara might have mentioned him once in a while afterwards, but that was it. I find it hard to believe that Anthony Call was the problem--he went on to OLTL and became very popular even though the viewers hated him at first because he was the attorney who harangued Karen Wolek in the famous trial scene. He and Robin Strasser were a great pair. Maybe they wanted to leave Sara free for the Justin/Jackie story, but she didn't stay in that storyline for that long. It's funny--I think one of the very first scenes I ever watched on GL was Joe, Sara, and TJ celebrating Christmas. They were so happy. And then of course soon after Joe had a heart attack and died.

I can't help but wonder if that was the original plan for Amanda's mother. We'll never know!

I often thought not putting them together for real was a mistake. In the beginning, Alan wasn't interested in her, not so much because he was in love with Hope, but because he didn't like to be chased. Diane would practically drop her panties in front of him and he'd be like, no thank you. In the beginning Hope was forbidden, then later when she forgave him and Mike kind of accepted them being together, he got bored. Rita was forbidden because they were both married; then both spouses left them and he was back to chasing Hope again. Both times he was after Vanessa she wasn't really that into him, so he was again the one doing the pursuing. The first time it was going to go nowhere long term because Chris would be exiting the show soon. The second time it was Maeve who left. So, yeah, third time might have been the charm (YES, with a different actor). Vanessa was no longer chasing men for the hell of it. I think it could have been very interesting.

I can imagine Vanessa saying this, and at the same time conveniently forgetting that other than Ross, men weren't quite as susceptible to her charms as she made herself out to be. Alan was not at all interested in her at the time. (If he was daydreaming about another woman at this point, it probably would have been Rita). But he knew Hope was young and jealous, so that's why he came up with the telephone ruse. Ben was also oblivious to her. Chaos agent is a really good way to describe Vanessa 1.0. She liked causing trouble and watching the outcome.

Ah, yes, back in the day when Vanessa was the town vamp. 😂 Glad you got to see the REAL Alan and the REAL Amanda. You also got to see the infamous Rita (Lenore Kasdorf) . This was right after Lenore came back from maternity leave. The character left because Roger caused her to lose her baby so lots of sympathy for her at this time. But she had her notorious moments. Most definitely, MG has a portrait in the attic. As does Maeve. Even though she looks her age now, she's still SO beautiful. Both blessed with amazing bone structure.

Bert was such an unusual soap character back in the day. Most soap wives who wouldn't let go of their husbands were rich, imperious types, like Phoebe on AMC or Katherine on Y&R. They were clearly meant to be antagonistic characters, making life miserable for the lower or middle class heroines who truly loved the husbands. Yet Bert was the central female character. She was so complex. I wish we could see more of that on soaps today.

Yes,, all of that, too. It was like a perfect storm.

Take into consideration why they were doing things like focus groups. For a long time, soaps had been the networks' cash cow. They literally paid for primetime shows. When they burst into the mainstream during the last 70s - mid 80s, networks started paying the big stars really high salaries, and soaps doing foreign location shoots became routine. It wasn't just big ticket stuff like star salaries. When you watch the episodes from the 80s, it's STUNNING how many extras and "under fives" (people who speak less than 5 lines of dialogue) are in the scenes! Company, The Blue Orchid, and the country club were routinely packed with people (this was also true of other soaps). Not to mention there was a period when it seemed like they had a huge party with everyone dressed like they were going to the Met Gala at least once a month. By the end of the 80s, more and more people had cable TV, more women than ever were working full-time, by the early 90s having a home computer became more prevalent, and many people who started watching soaps while they were in college because it was "in" during the 80s didn't keep up with them. So before OJ ever happened, networks were already panicking. It's not odd that they started doing things like focus groups, or bringing back actors who had been popular during the days when they had high ratings. There was always stunt casting, but by the 90s it became almost an art form--some soap stars were bouncing around different soaps like crazy. So of course they wanted Zimmer back--she was a big deal during the 80s. I would even suggest that the reason the show got hammier (and that was not isolated to GL) is because they were, again, panicking. It was thought younger people liked that. There was this belief that the way to save soaps was to appeal to young people who would then become life-long viewers. While soaps always were high melodrama, they were a lot quieter, and that was seen as old-fashioned. (Remember Passions? Boy-howdy, that show was over-the-top. Though it still doesn't beat Brazilian telenovelas, LOL).

TBH, I would have found a priest/ex-stripper match-up a lot more interesting than the San Christobel crap. 😂

I'm not so sure that was the problem. I get that actors hate being typecast, but playing a put-upon heroine (even one with an evil alternate personality) didn't work for her. Like Pickett, she has a unique quirkiness that demands she play a larger than life character like...Tracy Quatermain. What was her name on AMC? Cynthia, I think? A woman plotting to marry into money, willing to do anything to make that happen--she was perfect for that. Mowery would have been a much better Elizabeth recast. Replacing Pickett had to be a major challenge, but since Marland wasn't that interested in the Phillip story, choosing Mowery comes across as them going, "Whatever, we need someone to play this part, she'll do."

There are just some types of stories that don't work well on a soap. The only time a split personality storyline worked, IMO, was the Serena Faraday story on Edge of Night. And the reason it worked is it was a murder mystery written by someone who really understood how to write a murder mystery. Marland was not good at that type of story. (To be fair, very few soap opera writers were good at it, certainly not as good as Henry Slesar). Marland painted Carrie into a corner when he had her kill two people--and he was planning to have her kill another one! I don't care if it was the "bad" Carrie who carried out those murders, I don't care if Diane and Joe were horrible people or that Mowery never caught on as Jackie--there's no coming back from that for a character. He also turned one of the most popular characters (Ross) into a gullible idiot. This is a case where the writer and actress were virtually the only people who liked the story. I saw an interview with Elliot years and years after she left GL where she said Carrie was her favorite character she ever played The only surprising thing about Potter firing Elliot is that he didn't do it sooner..

Maybe some people will disagree, but I thought Pickett was a lovely actress. When she did over her look (I believe that was done for her movie role) she looked less conventional, but that kind of went with Jackie's boho-hippie vibe, which she always had. I believe Mowery's casting was meant to erase Jackie's quirkiness/uniqueness. Same as with Cooke replacing Vigard. If we're making a list of Rea's rare casting blunders, I going to put Mark Pinter on it. No way could they convince me that women would fight over that man (especially a mother and daughter). If she was there in 1996, I suppose she was involved with Ron Raines' casting. Which is suprising, since she cast Bernau. (Just as an aside, it's possible Rea had little to nothing to do with these castings. Sometimes producers, or even the headwriters, bring in people they want, i.e. Jane Elliot's casting as Carrie. IIRC, Marland wrote that role specifically for her).

Discussing Bill and Bert's early history just shows that whoever took their places as patriarch/matriarch didn't have to be perfect people. Even after Bert became the sterling matriarch, you still got the feeling that when she was giving advice she had learned life lessons the hard way. I'm pretty sure Ed could have been nursed into the patriarchal figure. Maybe with a different actor, maybe if they had let him remarry.

One of my pet peeves! Phillip produced the only Spaulding grandchildren (until the Gus retcon, as you said). Not having AM or Amanda have children (or for that matter, Nick) was crazy. Since they had Alan so consistent over the years about favoring Phillip over AM and Amanda, I don't think bloodlines mattered to him. But flip it--AM and/or Amanda angry that Alan favored Phillip's children over theirs--now there's a character-driven story. I don't like that simply because there were few enough Bauers as it is. Bad enough they had Mike and Hope disappear never having had anymore children, and made Ed uninterested in having more children. If they had kept AM around, probably he would have eventually had a kid--and like most male soap characters obsessed with having children, he would immediately have forgotten he had one. (Sorry, another one of my pet peeves).

I looked him up. He had co-headwriter(s) at every one of his soap jobs. Having a co-headwriter is not unusual, but I think it's unusual that they were different at each job. I also see that he wasn't a screenwriter--he did script analysis at film companies. Which is a fancy way of saying he read scripts and wrote coverage--summarizing the scripts and deciding if it was worth the company's time to develop them. I did that for a while. Gosh, if I'd known that qualified you to write soaps...

Correct me if I'm wrong, please, but wasn't Sheffer brought into soap writing from screenwriting and heralded as someone who was going to save the genre? And then proceeded to completely suck at it?

I was SO impressed by Melissa Hayden back when she first aired. As awful as the later years of GL were, they did find some incredible young talent: Matt Bomer, Aubrey Dollar, Laura Bell Bundy, Bethany Joy Lenz, Tom Pelphrey (I'm sure I'm missing some) who went on to have very substantial post-soap careers. It's always been a mystery to me why Melissa wasn't among them.

Oh, so true--showing up and Ross's wearing only her fur coat, wearing black to Ross and Carrie's wedding. Her big hats made her the focus of attention everywhere. It was a fantastic character trait.

I was looking at it on my phone, I probably should have checked it out on my monitor. Sob, I was so sure. This is where we once again slam up against the problem with SORASing kids on soaps. Vanessa was there when he was a BABY. This is why Blake sleeping with Alan was so gross to me; I remember him being around when she was a LITTLE GIRL. I know that's not even the worst thing--that has to be AM being interested in Marina when for a good amount time he thought she was HIS kid. But long-time viewers I think would have had a problem with an AM/Vanessa hook up.

@vetsoapfan I had this video in my YouTube feed. I watched more of it and discovered there is another quick clip of Alan and Hope's wedding. I could be wrong, but there is a man in the back on the right-hand side who looks like he could be Bill Bauer! It's at around 2:49.