DeeVee

MAYBE what possibly happened is they decided to give the story they would have given to Kyle to Alan instead. It could have just as easily been Kyle who dicked around with the DNA tests, who could have brought Sonni back and conspired with her to keep Reva and Josh apart. It saved them from a possible unsuccessful recast and they also saved money on another major character. (The irony is Bernau had to leave and they ended up with an unsuccessful recast with Pilon, but no one would have foreseen that). I don't think there was anyone in the audience who wanted Reva and Alan together, while Reva and Kyle had a fanbase. But without Malloy, that could have changed. Which could be another reason why the decided not to bring Kyle back. I never understood why they didn't do a Josh/Reva/Kyle triangle. Seemed like a no-brainer. But if Malloy wanted to leave, that explains it. My mom was the one watching the show more regularly than me at the time, so I could have been going on what she recounted to me. Memory is a funny thing!

When Maeve was on AW, she was not a star. Angie was an expendable character, while ES and KZ were the de facto stars of their respective shows. Maeve wasn't a diva or a star, but she was a popular entity on GL, so the power dynamic had changed. That may have been another reason she agreed to return.

I never doubted that Blake really loved Ross, but she sure did love living on the edge. 😂 I hope you get around to seeing the 80s version of Alan, particularly his dealings with Roger back in the day. It's not that Alan was a good guy back then, but he was far more complex and not a cartoon villain, and Bernau's portrayal was iconic, just like Zaslow's. It was amazing to watch the two of them go against each other. Ron Raines' version of Alan was not great. You have to partly blame the writing for the character, but Raines IMO wasn't up to the task. Never could understand how he lasted that long in the role.

They got SO far away from Beth in the latter part of BC's run. You can make the argument that Beth had gone through some serious trauma, which could have explained some of the things she did. It was just weird that Beth went from the ideal girl next door to an extremely neurotic woman with a very problematic love life. Hmmm... this puts an interesting light on something else she mentioned in the Locher Room. She said Elvera Roussel came up to her and said, "Don't worry, this is the NICE soap opera set." (Something like that). I wonder if she meant that she didn't need to worry about that kind of thing at GL.

After all his wailing over his son and how important it was to be a present father, he basically abandons him. They put the character in a coma to explain why he wasn't in SF questioning the paternity of Reva's baby (they had Sally take over that task). And how close he and Billy supposedly were...they could have handled it so much better. They should have just killed him off (which they did eventually off screen). !!!! That whole thing was a total abomination. Maybe she wanted to showcase her singing? (But she's not being judge as a singer... I don't get it). Interesting how she talked about the year being hard--probably a reference to the EP change/multiple writer changes. Couldn't have been easy for any of the cast and crew. Yes. We did. Honestly, though, I personally hated the time travel story a lot more. Having Alan and Olivia turn up as Nazis in the past was so gross. The big lesson she learned from that experience? "Trust your heart." 🤢 These storylines were just a way to have her suck up a lot air time. Reva was Where Is Waldoing all over the place during her first absence. They couldn't just have her wash up on the Florida coast with amnesia. NO, she had to end up as the princess of a fictional kingdom and then go Amish! (Not to be pedantic, but it was Reva's mom Sara who insisted she saw Reva in the Italian travelogue).

Oh, no--it's mere MINUTES after dumping Kyle at the wedding. She's still in her wedding get-up when she's calling out for Joshua! It had to be close because of the upcoming who's the daddy story, but the fact that she goes from being madly in love with Kyle to being madly in love with Josh in a New York minute is wild. If it had been revenge sex, or Reva had mixed up the dates of her cycle, that would have made more sense. But it's like they were saying to the audience, "Hey, we were just kidding with this Kyle/Reva thing, that was a placeholder until we could get Robert Newman back!"

So I'm watching the episode with the car crash that kills Chelsea's fiancee--and who should turn up as a nurse at Cedars but Fiona Hutchinson! I had no idea she was on the show before playing Jenna. They really tried to sell Chelsea as the "wild" Reardon, and she turned out to be pretty dull. 😂 The other funny thing about this episode was Reva and Kyle planning their wedding, with two of Reva's ex-husbands in the wedding party. Totally normal!

Even though I watched many of these episodes going all the way back to the late 1970s, it's weird now to see how many characters are in scenes compared to soaps today. They have literal crowds of non-speaking extras in scenes sometimes. There are way more minor speaking parts. I feel like saying, "Are you sure you can afford all those people?" 😁

I just watched the episode with the memorial for Beth's faux death, and now I'm SEETHING. SO much more care and thought put into it than Bert's. They used flashbacks! There was even a RESHOT scene with Bolger so they could show the prom! (Maybe that was shot for a previous episode, but even so!) A big dramatic moment when Jackson walked in uninvited! REAL memories from characters who had REAL dealings with Beth, not people who barely knew her! (The one idiotic moment--Phillip being notified his book was going to be published. That "book" that was dramatized was so awful it was funny.) So now Bert's memorial seems like an even bigger misfire. What a huge lack of respect for the lady who anchored the show for decades.

Yep. Even as a fan of their romance, I was enough of a veteran soap viewer by then to know happy couples get back-burnered and that the show needed Alan free from certain norms so he could drive story. What you're describing is very much what I thought needed to be done--they could have been GL's version of Mac and Rachel. Frequently breaking up, finding new loves, but always having a connection.

At least the Alan and Hope fans didn't send in death threats. 😂 They made her Amish for a while, which was close!

It's almost the same thing that happened when they wrote out Maureen. They gave Dolan the best storyline of her tenure in order to write her out, when if they had NOT written her out, it would have given her character a new life and direction. While the Hope exit storyline was very rushed and poorly motivated in order to get her out (by the end of her contract, I would assume) if it had been properly set up and executed, it could have been really good. In fact, I would argue that the final story they gave her was probably much closer to what the Dobsons originally planned for Alan and Hope. Watching the final two months they wrote GL again many years later, I get the impression that they were setting up Hope for a fall, that Alan was going to do to her the same as he did to every woman before her. Of course, this it total speculation, but I think what kind of backs up this opinion is what the Dobsons did with the Barbara/James and Margo/James storylines when they moved over to ATWT. There are some obvious parallels with the Alan and Hope story. Barbara and James even fall in love on a tropical island. Both women become disillusioned by James and end up much stronger because of it. Barbara changes from sweet ingenue to a formidable woman, and Margo becomes a cop. I think that was their original plan for Hope (not have her become a cop, LOL, just a stronger person). Back then (please remember I was only 19 years old) I wanted very much for Alan and Hope to be together and be a real romantic couple. I think I was far from the only audience member who felt that way. Marland said he would read viewer mail and he must have picked up on that audience wish, so he decided to treat them as a romantic story. Both were valid story choices, in my opinion, and I give Marland credit for keeping Alan as Alan (keeping secrets from Hope, cheating on her, etc.) while still writing a love story for them. But he ended up writing them into a corner, so it's not at all surprising subsequent writers decided to break them up. You can see the groundwork for that starting soon after Marland left, even before Kobe and Long took over. The big mistake was writing Hope out permanently, of course. There was another mention of her in one of the 1986 episodes. It really does seem like they were considering bringing her back, but I guess they eventually decided to bring only Alan Michael back instead.

I remember watching soaps with my mom as far back as the mid-60s. She was a big ATWT fan, but she watched many other shows: DOOL, Love of Life, Another World, and she ADORED Edge of Night. (She ALWAYS figured out the murderer and would spoil it for me--I would be SO mad!) We watched the premiere epsisode of Y&R together. I remember watching General Hospital when it was little more than a nurse's station set. It had elevator doors that would open and people would occasionally come out. That was it, that was the set. I was a little kid and thought that was hilarious. Of course it was black & white back then. Dark Shadows was the only show we didn't watch together--that was MY show. And of course GL. She got me into it during the mid-70s because she had a crush on Michael Zaslow.

GH: The Ice Princess Ryan's Hope: Merit Kara One Life to Live: The City of Eterna! OMG, you've reminded me of the reliquary story on Y&R. Every time a soap starts an art theft story, I think, "Oh, God, we're in for 6 months of torture." The 1986 GL episodes being uploaded now are the beginning of their art theft story. 😩

That story was SUCH a stinker. Really surprising considering how good a casting director they had and then they gave us Pinter and Cook. Cook apparently was a calculated move to make Morgan a more conventional beauty (Geraldine Court complained about it). But I don't get the choice to cast Pinter. If you're going to have a story about not only two women fighting over a man, he's also a grifter with a long history of fooling women, he better have some freakin' charisma. He didn't have to be drop-dead gorgeous, but he had to have SOMETHING that made you believe these women were so drawn to him, and I'm sorry, Pinter didn't have that. The story made both women look like idiots. (It could have been worse. I've heard that the original plan was for both Amanda and Jennifer to become pregnant). This, I believe, is a case where casting could have made all the difference. If they had the right actor playing Mark, it might have worked. We have to give Long credit for taking Josh and Vanessa off that track and making them much better drawn characters. I have never understood why they spent so much time portraying Alan and Jennifer's past as some kind of transformative experience and then...did nothing with it. At all. They acted like distant relations. They did so little with Hope outside of her relationship with Alan. That's why it was so easy to yeet her out of show.

I hear you, and don't totally disagree with you. We can only speculate, but it seems to me it would have been extremely difficult to continue much further with the Carrie story, even with a reintegrated personality. I mean, she killed two people (yes, it was her other personalities, but STILL), and Marland originally planned for her to kill a third (Jackie). Maybe he had some brilliant twist that would have kept her a viable character. It's possible. We'll never know now.

It was that Carrie story. I think he was too much invested in it. He had stalled Alan and Hope as a happily married couple living in a sweet little cottage. The Mark Evans storyline was a bust. So definitely not his best work. I think the most popular thing during that era was Nola and Quint and that wasn't to everyone's taste. And yes, it seemed obvious he was setting up a Rita return. Didn't someone here say that Marland's soap bibles are in a library somewhere? I wonder if his planned stories that would have been after his departure are in those. The EP definitely makes a difference. Yes, he might have had a big problem with Kobe. His EP at ATWT in that era when the ratings went up was Robert Calhoun. Many people credit him with turning GL around after a disappointing period that lasted almost a decade.

I had my issues with Marland, but it's impossible not to think about the might have been if he had not stomped off in a huff in 1982. Change was likely inevitable, regardless--Allen Potter, the EP at the time, retired because he had cancer. But I have to wonder what would have happened it Kobe "f!ck you all, I can fire who I want" had come on with Marland still head writing. Maybe he would have left anyway. OR, maybe he would have fought back against some of the changes she wanted to make, or at least handled those changes better. Look at what was happening over at ATWT by 1986 -- the ratings actually going up, while also in a creative upturn -- compared to GL. A huge turnover of characters, including the shrinking of the Bauers, some epically bad storylines, a definite downturn in the quality of much of the production. You see some really poorly made decisions and desperate attempts to correct them. Simon is the perfect example of this. They killed off Lujack and tried to fill the gap with Simon and recapture the popularity of Lujack/Beth with Simon and Jessie. I didn't mind the actor so much, but the million different ways they tried to make this character happen are just SO obvious. (The last episode I watched he was off to fight some guerillas, LOL). When I found the German channel with 1986 episodes, I was like, "Aw, man, I wish I could see these in English!" Now, I think I enjoyed them more in German. YES! Perfect way of putting it. OMG, Cain's villain laugh is right out of a cartoon!

The amount of HW changes over the year is insane. I counted five. There was also an EP change. Clearly, there was a lot of upheaval going on BTS and it probably affected everything. It is absolutely bizarre that by the end of the year many of the 1986 front burner people would be out or on the way out, and then we get a whole bunch of NEW people. Then the returns of Bernau, Newman, GA...while that was mostly a good thing, having to give them all major air time while introducing several new characters had to have caused issues all around. In the midst of some of this terribleness I did come across a really good scene between (surprise, surprise) Alan and Reva. She confronted him over her contract with him. They were SO much more interesting as adversaries. (She got in some exquisite digs at him for being like Brandon, who that week was back to being a monster again). It would have worked so much better if Alan and Reva had had the adversarial relationship and Alan and India had had a more romantic relationship. But, of course, every man in sight had to be in love with Reva...

I am certain saw an article once where he talked about his relationship with Cross. I was digging around earlier to see if I could find it, but no. However, I did come across some articles from the EON era, where he made a point of saying he had a girlfriend, but not naming her because he wanted to keep his personal life private. There were others where he said he wanted to eventually marry and have kids. Which are things MANY known gay actors have said in interviews, because they were obligated to stay closeted. (Also non-gay actors, because they said it and meant it. So it's hard to know for sure). Hey, soaps run on conflict. This would have been a great one. The Bauers, who barely tolerated Lillian, suddenly having her at the head of the family. Mike and Lillian being strong together and, after many confrontations and much sorrow, eventually winning them over. I would have watched the crap out of that.

Well, SHE didn't have to raise them, LOL. No, no, I get it. Working with kids, especially babies, can be a nightmare. Twins? Super yikes! I'm convinced the reason Cricket on Y & R never had kids is because Lauralee Bell didn't want to be upstaged by them. She made comments in interviews about what a pain it was to have them on set. I remember seeing an outake once of Steve Burton working with a baby on GH, trying to say his lines while the kid fussed. When they said cut, he started yelling that he was going to go out and get a vasectomy! (Didn't he end up having a bunch of kids? Anyway, it was really funny).

There's your stable central couple that the show lacked after Mo was killed off. Maybe have Lillian give birth to a late-in-life baby, to add to the Bauer line. (She probably was a tad too old at the time, but they had Ruth on AMC have a baby at an insane age, so why not GL, too?) Or, since Mike was off the canvas for a long time, have a secret kid show up. Why not? Better than having yet another Secret Reva Baby show up.

Woe to anyone who became ill, and it didn't necessarily have to be HIV or AIDS. I'm sure there were other sudden departures by actors that were never explained that had to do with TPTB not wanting to deal with actors who were ill. Did Breen ever sue them? I would think he would have had a case, though that probably would have totally decimated his career. I believe he went on to have a theater career after that happened. I had NO idea Gentry ever returned as Ed. Do you remember what the time period was? Didn't Mart claim that one of the reasons he was let go was because he was very active and vocal in the actors union? If that's the case, that probably soured him from coming back to CBS. He appeared on AMC for a short time. Not sure if he did any others post-GL. I was also surprised to hear this recently. Back in the day, he was supposedly in a relationship with actress Marcia Cross when she was on OLTL. He used to wear a Claddagh ring. (It's an Irish symbol with a heart held by hands and topped with a crown. The way you wear it indicates where you are in a relationship). He claimed he and Cross had exchanged rings and he always wore his on screen no matter what character he was playing. They never got married. She married eventually, but he never did. Of course, he could have been bi, OR, Cross could have been his beard. Again, it was considered career suicide for a male actor to be openly gay if he was a romantic lead on a soap.

I swear to God, these two are going to give me an aneurysm. Every time I think they're winding them down, they ramp up their storyline again. I literally pity the actors. Shakespearean actors couldn't pull this off. I just don't understand how this is so bad when there's so much that's good on the show.

I lived through the 80s and remember how strong the stigma was around both actors being gay and having AIDS, especially for soap stars. The show pretended he had some mild health issue. They claimed for a long time after he left that he was coming back. And here's Zimmer carrying on the same BS TWENTY FIVE years later? To be fair to her, I suppose there's the possibility that she felt uncomfortable talking about working so closely with an actor who had AIDS. There was a lot of hysteria when Rock Hudson appeared on Dynasty and had kissing scenes with Linda Evans. But if that was the case why talk about him being ill at all? Back then I subscribed to a newsletter by a soap magazine writer (for the LIFE of me, I can't remember his name--I'm only sure it wasn't one of the big names, like Michael Logan). He also said in the newsletter for months that Bernau would come back. After Bernau passed away, he wrote an editorial berating his readers for speculating that he had died of AIDS. It had a really angry tone, blatantly shaming people for besmirching his memory. It definitely had a whiff of "doth protest too much." If the network/P&G had just said he left because he was done with soaps, or said he was burned out (totally believable since he had been front burner for two years) without mentioning illness, there would have been a lot less speculation. Just shows what dumb decisions get made when they try to cover things up. I remember being so angry back then at how badly they had treated him and the viewers. (It must have also put Daniel Pilon in an awkward spot). Which was a preview of the atrocious way they would treat Michael Zaslow's and Joseph Breen's (Will) illnesses a few years later.